Episode 176

Transforming Local News: The Story of Taproot, Tech, and Community with Mack Male

In Episode 176 of The Business Development Podcast, Kelly Kennedy interviews Mack Male, Co-Founder and CEO of Taproot Publishing, about his journey from software development to pioneering local journalism in Edmonton. They explore how Mack’s tech background and dedication to community engagement have shaped Taproot’s mission to deliver high-quality, relevant local news that fills gaps left by traditional media. Mack shares insights into the unique challenges and rewards of running an independent news outlet, detailing how Taproot’s consistent, community-driven reporting has earned it a loyal following and transformed how local stories are told.

Throughout their discussion, Kelly and Mack dive into the role of technology in modern journalism, including AI’s potential to support content curation while maintaining a human touch. They also discuss Edmonton’s vibrant tech scene, the importance of adaptability in business, and Mack’s vision for the future of media. With reflections on transparency, community trust, and the power of consistent effort, this episode offers valuable lessons for anyone interested in media, technology, or the evolution of local journalism.

Key Takeaways:

1. Consistency in delivering high-quality content or services builds trust and loyalty—essential for any growing business.

2. Meeting specific, underserved needs can differentiate your business and create a niche where you can excel.

3. Use technology to streamline and enhance operations, but ensure that the final product always meets your standards.

4. Independent ventures face unique challenges, especially in funding and competing with larger players—adaptability is crucial.

5. Early adoption of technology or innovation can give you a competitive edge and prepare you for future growth.

6. Transparency with your audience or clients fosters trust; don’t shy away from being open about your unique perspectives or biases.

7. Building a strong relationship with your community can drive brand loyalty and long-term success.

8. Blend technology with a human touch to maintain authenticity and create more meaningful customer connections.

9. Staying flexible and responsive to industry changes can help your business thrive in an evolving market.

10. Filling gaps in your market that larger competitors overlook can position your business as essential and valued by your target audience.

Transcript
Kelly Kennedy:

Welcome to episode 176 of the Business Development podcast.

Kelly Kennedy:

And today we're talking with the co founder of Taproot publishing right here in Edmonton, Mac Mail.

Kelly Kennedy:

Stick with us, you're not going to want to miss this episode.

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The great Mark Cuban once said, business happens over years and years.

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Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal.

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And we couldn't agree more.

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This is the business development podcast, based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and broadcasting to the world.

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You'll get expert business development advice, tips and experiences, and you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEO's and business development reps.

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You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business brought to you by Capital Business Development Capitalbd CA.

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Let's do it.

older since B is a narrator):

Welcome to the Business Development podcast.

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And now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly Kennedy:

Hello.

Kelly Kennedy:

Welcome to episode 176 of the Business Development podcast.

Kelly Kennedy:

My gosh, 176 episodes.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's an absolute pleasure and honor today to bring on for you Matt mail.

Kelly Kennedy:

Mac is the co founder and CEO of Taproot Publishing where he leverages his extensive background in software development to revolutionize local journalism.

Kelly Kennedy:

With over a decade of experience in the tech industry, including a significant role as product development manager at question mark computing, Mac has built robust, scalable software solutions for diverse sectors.

Kelly Kennedy:

In:

Kelly Kennedy:

His dual passions for code and prose fuel his mission to change the world through innovative storytelling and technology.

Kelly Kennedy:

A dedicated community builder, Mack has contributed thousands of volunteer hours to numerous organizations in Edmonton.

Kelly Kennedy:

His efforts in advocating for open data and supporting local startups highlight his commitment to civic engagement and technological advancement.

Kelly Kennedy:

Recognized as one of Edmonton's top 40 under 41 of Alberta's next ten most influential people, Mac's impact is widely acknowledged as he continues to bridge the gap between tech and journalism.

Kelly Kennedy:

Mac Mayle is not just telling Edmonton stories, he's transforming how they are told.

Kelly Kennedy:

Mack, it's an honor to have you on the show.

Mac Mail:

Thank you so much for having me.

Mac Mail:

And what an introduction.

Mac Mail:

I'm going to replay that on repeat.

Mac Mail:

That's a real confidence boost right there.

Mac Mail:

Thank you.

Kelly Kennedy:

Oh my gosh, it's so funny because I don't post the introductions live because my gosh, I struggle to read them.

Kelly Kennedy:

And it's not that I don't struggle to read them, it's that they're so awesome and usually they have things in there that I just can't say properly.

Kelly Kennedy:

I have to repeat it a couple times because they're a bit of tongue twisters.

Kelly Kennedy:

So it's super fun.

Kelly Kennedy:

The final version always sounds a thousand percent better.

Kelly Kennedy:

I'm very thankful that my guests stick with me through it.

Mac Mail:

That's how podcasting is, a bit of magic, right?

Mac Mail:

Magic of podcasting.

Mac Mail:

We can sound better than it goes in the recording.

Mac Mail:

I do a podcast every week, and so I know firsthand that the editor makes us sound better than we actually do.

Kelly Kennedy:

Oh, my gosh, dude.

Kelly Kennedy:

And, you know, like, I don't know about you, but before I launched the business development podcast, I had like Zero, and I mean zero experience in audio production, man, the, like, learning curve to get that right.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, if you go back to the beginning, you know, episode one through like eight or ten of the business development podcast, to today, it is a completely different show.

Kelly Kennedy:

And what's super funny, Mac, is that I've actually had to learn a few different music editors along the way as well, because what I realized was the one I started with, even though it was really great, you're probably familiar with it.

Kelly Kennedy:

Hindenburg journalist pro.

Kelly Kennedy:

I started there.

Kelly Kennedy:

It wasn't going to carry us to the next level.

Kelly Kennedy:

There were just things that I needed that it couldn't do.

Kelly Kennedy:

And so recently, I actually learned Adobe audition, and, man, I felt like an idiot for about a week trying to figure out the whole new music editor.

Mac Mail:

It's powerful software.

Mac Mail:

You can do so much with it, and it's come so far.

Mac Mail:

I mean, when I was in high school, my friends and I really wanted to make movies and stuff, but we were computer kids, right?

Mac Mail:

And so it was a real challenge at that time to record a video and get it on the computer so you could edit it.

Mac Mail:

And once you solved that problem, which wasn't as simple as plugging in a cord or uploading to the cloud or whatever.

Mac Mail:

Now, then there was the software you had to learn and remember using and Adobe Premiere and some of their, you know, really fancy tools at the beginning and, yeah, quite a learning curve to get to extract the power of those things.

Kelly Kennedy:

Totally.

Kelly Kennedy:

But I guess, like, the moral of the story here is that, my gosh, if I can figure it out, anyone can.

Kelly Kennedy:

So don't let, like, your fear of audio production slow you down.

Mac Mail:

That's right.

Kelly Kennedy:

It is totally doable.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yes.

Kelly Kennedy:

I'm still learning.

Kelly Kennedy:

You know, I mean, we're like a year and a half into this show.

Kelly Kennedy:

I'm still learning all the time.

Kelly Kennedy:

And you will continue to learn, but don't let, like, the fact that you're not completely sure how to do it because you will learn a lot along the way and your show will improve along the way.

Kelly Kennedy:

And that's how it's supposed to happen anyway.

Mac Mail:

I mean, also, I can't imagine we're far from being able to say, hey, Mister AI chatbot or misses AI chatbot or whatever.

Mac Mail:

I guess they shouldn't be gendered.

Mac Mail:

Here's my recording.

Mac Mail:

Turn this into an amazing podcast for me, you know?

Kelly Kennedy:

Oh, boy.

Kelly Kennedy:

And, you know, I don't know anybody more in tune with the tech industry than you, which is why I'm super excited to have this conversation with you today.

Kelly Kennedy:

My gosh, dude.

Kelly Kennedy:

I got introduced to Taproot.

Kelly Kennedy:

Honestly, when I started this show, I had, I had very little insight into the Edmonton tech industry and not just like the tech industry, like the tech leaders that Edmonton is.

Kelly Kennedy:

It blows my mind every time I learn something a little bit more about what's happening right here in Edmonton.

Kelly Kennedy:

But I got introduced to Taproot Publishing.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah, I want to say, like, maybe three months into this show, it's basically the only thing that I read now, which is like, it says a lot.

Kelly Kennedy:

It says a lot for what you guys are doing and what you guys have been able to accomplish.

Kelly Kennedy:

And I want to get into that, but, dude, take me back.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, who is MacMail?

Kelly Kennedy:

How did you end up on this path?

Mac Mail:

Well, I didn't set out to be a journalist, that's for sure.

Mac Mail:

I don't know that I thought much about journalism at a young age or anything like that.

Mac Mail:

I did find out early on, I sort of discovered that I really liked technology and I really liked software.

Mac Mail:

And I was fortunate because my parents had computers, like back at the time when not everyone had a computer.

Mac Mail:

We had two, actually.

Mac Mail:

And so I got to play with those and experiment with them.

Mac Mail:

And I learned really early on that I thought I had bricked the thing and it wasn't, it was fine.

Mac Mail:

It all turned out okay.

Mac Mail:

And my dad encouraged me to continue experimenting and learning.

Mac Mail:

And so I always knew from an early age that I got a lot of love out of working with technology.

Mac Mail:

Software was a thing I learned about programming and I was self taught.

Mac Mail:

I did study that in university eventually because I knew that's what I wanted to be, you know, doing.

Mac Mail:

But I learned a lot on my own.

Mac Mail:

And technology is great because it's one of those things where you can, especially software, you can learn a lot on your own.

Mac Mail:

You don't have to go through med school or something like that.

Mac Mail:

And I just kind of ran with that and that led me to a career in software development and working with developers and QA testers and designers and building software both.

Mac Mail:

I started a company.

Mac Mail:

I was in high school.

Mac Mail:

We built kind of little utility software, and then I worked for a big multinational company, and we had giant customers around the world and sort of building at scale.

Mac Mail:

And that was really fun and educational.

Mac Mail:

And it was just because I was in software that I was, I think, in the right place at the right time when social media took off and blogging took off, and podcasting, actually, too.

Mac Mail:

I was a really, really early adopter, like, almost day one of podcasting, and that was my entry point into journalism, was from the digital side of things.

Kelly Kennedy:

Well, I found it kind of funny when I was just doing my initial rundown.

Kelly Kennedy:

I love to just learn more about my guests ahead of the show.

Kelly Kennedy:

And the fact that you went to school for mathematics and economics.

Kelly Kennedy:

I just find it really funny that you've ended up in journalism.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, you should be, like, inventing the next rocket somewhere.

Mac Mail:

Well, that's my degree.

Mac Mail:

I don't know how good at math I am, actually.

Mac Mail:

But, you know, I find that now a lot, right.

Mac Mail:

Folks who have a degree in one thing are doing something totally different.

Mac Mail:

And I think it's always fascinating.

Mac Mail:

People's career trajectories change and they follow things that they're passionate about or that they, you know, they learn more about.

Mac Mail:

You just don't know what you don't know at the beginning, right?

Mac Mail:

You're on the path because you think you know, and it's interesting and you're learning, but then you discover other things along the way.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah, well, one of the things that I found really interesting when I was kind of getting into, who is Mac?

Kelly Kennedy:

You're like a serial entrepreneur.

Kelly Kennedy:

You've been an entrepreneur for the last 25 years, and you're not even that old.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, that's crazy.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, take us back to Paramagnus developments.

Mac Mail:

You know, I feel a little older these days than I used to, having little kids and stuff.

Mac Mail:

But, no, you're right.

Mac Mail:

I mean, I've been trying to build companies for a long time, and I remember, actually, my parents telling me when I was a real little kid, like, you know, kids play, you know, they'll play house or they'll play cooking or whatever.

Mac Mail:

Like, I was, like, making my own little credit cards and stuff like that on paper, right?

Mac Mail:

Like, I was interested in business at an early age.

Mac Mail:

But Paramagnus, I started when I was in high school with a couple of friends who were older than I was and brought some of that business idea to it.

Mac Mail:

And I was bringing the software to it, and we just identified there was an opportunity.

Mac Mail:

It was kind of right at the height of the boom in the late nineties, early two thousands, Internet was taken off.

Mac Mail:

People were talking about the web, and at the time, computers were a little more limited, and the way that you configured them actually made a difference for how fast your Internet was.

Mac Mail:

And so we recognized and we wrote a little utility called Speednet, and you would tweak a bunch of settings on your Windows computer that would help make your Internet go faster.

Mac Mail:

And then we added other features later on.

Mac Mail:

But it was crazy at that time because you could put something up on the Internet, which was, or the web, which was pretty new still for a lot of people, and folks would just fork over $25, like they'd buy it right away, like this was a thing.

Mac Mail:

People would just go on there and buy software.

Mac Mail:

Like it was this really, really heady time, right?

Mac Mail:

And so we built a good tool, I think, but it was still pretty incredible to me that we could just put something up and people would give us money.

Mac Mail:

Like that was a really novel thing.

Mac Mail:

Amazon was only a few years old by that time, right?

Mac Mail:

And then we built a few other utility software applications, and that worked out for a couple of years.

Mac Mail:

And then my friends, my co founders, who are a bit older, went on to careers and other things.

Mac Mail:

And so that was the first iteration of the company.

Mac Mail:

And then it kind of shut down.

Mac Mail:

And then another business partner and I resurrected it again a few years later when podcasting took off.

Mac Mail:

And we saw this opportunity to do something in the podcasting space to really make it easier.

Mac Mail:

So, like I said, my friends and I were always keen to make our own shows, videos or audio or whatever radio shows.

Mac Mail:

We wanted to be like radio disc jockeys, I guess, or hosts.

Mac Mail:

And, you know, we were doing this, but it was really hard to turn that into something that other people could download and subscribe to.

Mac Mail:

And, you know, we were able to use our knowledge of software programming to build an early podcast hosting service.

Mac Mail:

We were, you know, alongside Libsyn and some of the other foundational or initial podcast hosting services, you know, one of the ones there.

Mac Mail:

And that was a good learning experience for us because we did business plan competitions and learned a lot more about, you know, the business side of things, not just like build software and then something.

Mac Mail:

And so it was a really educational experience.

Mac Mail:

And at some point we hit an inflection point and we felt like either we needed to, you know, kind of pivot and try to go big, because YouTube had had, by that point, come on.

Mac Mail:

And video seemed like the way things were going and Apple had taken over in the iPod podcasting world.

Mac Mail:

And we decided we're going to shut this down and we're going to go work in the real world for a while.

Mac Mail:

And that's what we did.

Mac Mail:

We went and got jobs and learned about, you know, business from another point of view.

Kelly Kennedy:

Sure.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's still really cool that, you know, you were right there in the beginning of that time, right?

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, dude, I'm so late.

Kelly Kennedy:

I'm so late.

Kelly Kennedy:

opment podcast in February of:

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, honestly, it's been unreal.

Kelly Kennedy:

But, like, in the grand scheme of podcasting, like, we're babies.

Kelly Kennedy:

he's been around since like,:

Kelly Kennedy:

He's got the paranormal podcast.

Kelly Kennedy:

I'm a bit of a nerd.

Kelly Kennedy:

I love that stuff.

Mac Mail:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

onestly, I found that show in:

Kelly Kennedy:

I think before:

Mac Mail:

Yeah, this was, this was like:

Mac Mail:

Like, just to help paint the picture a little bit, one of the things that was really critical about our podcast hosting service is that it would transcode your audio or your video, which we supported video as well, to the specific format for your device, because it was a time where, like, if you had a zoom or an Xbox or a Yemenite or an iPod or, you know, any of the creative labs device or any of these things, like, you kind of needed a specific format in order for it to work on that device.

Mac Mail:

And so we would transcode all this for people.

Kelly Kennedy:

Wow.

Mac Mail:

Automatically, because it was time where you would sync a device to your computer, and that's how you got the podcast.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

Like, very different than now.

Mac Mail:

Like, I don't know about you.

Mac Mail:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, you essentially had to download it.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, we used to steal music.

Mac Mail:

Yeah, yeah.

Mac Mail:

It was like Napster, right?

Mac Mail:

It was like that.

Mac Mail:

It was like that kind of stuff.

Mac Mail:

And now, like, it just streams everywhere you are.

Mac Mail:

You're always connected.

Mac Mail:

It's very, very different.

Mac Mail:

But it was a good, it was fun to be involved in podcasting at that time.

Mac Mail:

Like, all the stuff was so new, and this idea of updating the RSS feeds to support mp3 files, and there was this debate about what audio format should people standardize on and all that kind of stuff.

Mac Mail:

As a nerd, as a geek, it was pretty fun.

Mac Mail:

To be involved in.

Mac Mail:

And then it was really gratifying when people actually used what we built.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

I mean, that was pretty cool.

Kelly Kennedy:

Super cool.

Kelly Kennedy:

And it's honestly, I'm.

Kelly Kennedy:

I'm honestly honored to have this conversation with you, because it's like, I feel like I'm talking to somebody who's really just been there through it all, and I don't know who else I would talk to.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, take me back.

Kelly Kennedy:

What were, what was a podcast originally like?

Kelly Kennedy:

What was the idea of it?

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, did it.

Kelly Kennedy:

Is a podcast today what you guys hoped it would be?

Mac Mail:

Oh, I think it's gone so much beyond what we thought and, and has really taken off.

Mac Mail:

And in some ways, I guess it's kind of followed the trajectory of blogs.

Mac Mail:

Right?

Mac Mail:

So.

Mac Mail:

So I think it's kind of a good analogy to make when blogs started.

Mac Mail:

The word blog comes from Weblog.

Mac Mail:

Like, people would post reverse chronological updates on a webpage, and that was kind of like a journal.

Mac Mail:

And it was the separate thing that you would do.

Mac Mail:

It wasn't like a normal website, but at some point, the technology started to coalesce, and all the news sites and all the other places you would publish stuff adopted the same features that blogs had this ability to subscribe, usually comments, that kind of thing.

Mac Mail:

And after a while, we stopped talking about blogs because they just became websites.

Mac Mail:

They're kind of the same thing.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

Podcasts were sort of similar.

Mac Mail:

It was really, in the early days, like, people wanting to take radio and bring it onto the Internet.

Mac Mail:

And podcasting was a mechanism to let us do that.

Mac Mail:

I remember when we were building our business and doing these business line competitions, we came up with this one chart that was pretty important, and it was sort of like quadrants, right?

Mac Mail:

And it was real time versus time shifted, and, you know, text versus audio.

Mac Mail:

And podcasts was the first time that you could get time shifted audio or video, which means that, like, you didn't have to be connected at the same time.

Mac Mail:

Before that, we thought about radio.

Mac Mail:

You had to be have your radio turned on the same time you were broadcasting.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

Pretty close with, you know, television and other things.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

So.

Mac Mail:

Or you were at the mercy of someone else's schedule, at least.

Mac Mail:

And podcast was empowering because it let you do this time shifted thing.

Mac Mail:

And that was really novel, that was really new.

Mac Mail:

And so, you know, I think at the beginning, it was like people wanting to take radio shows, put them on the Internet, make it so that you could listen whenever you wanted to.

Mac Mail:

You know, Steve Jobs would talk about how it was a possible way to fill up this giant device that you have in your pocket.

Mac Mail:

It has all this space.

Mac Mail:

What are you going to put on there?

Mac Mail:

You know, podcasts are one of the things you're going to put on there.

Mac Mail:

And I think over time it's evolved and changed where now it's kind of like blogs.

Mac Mail:

We don't, we still kind of talk about podcasts as a separate thing because you can, you know, have subscriptions.

Mac Mail:

But Spotify is a good example.

Mac Mail:

It's just part of this app that you use to access audio, right?

Mac Mail:

It's less of a separate thing.

Mac Mail:

You go and you're like, oh, I'm going to podcast now.

Mac Mail:

Like, I'll listen to music and then podcast and I'll flip between them and it's all just audio that comes to me now, right.

Kelly Kennedy:

So I think.

Kelly Kennedy:

And you look at, you look at, like, audio platforms, like, you know, whether you listen to audible or whether you listen to, like you said, Spotify.

Mac Mail:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

Every single one of them has now incorporated podcasts.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's like if your audio software does not have the ability to listen to podcasts, you are not going to make it like that.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's become that important.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's crazy.

Mac Mail:

And I think the best sort of underlining all of this is the recent news, right, that Google is shutting down Google podcasts, which isn't particularly surprising.

Mac Mail:

Google shuts stuff down all the time, but more that the replacement is just YouTube.

Mac Mail:

Podcasts to Google are just another thing that's available on YouTube.

Mac Mail:

That's pretty incredible.

Mac Mail:

I don't think anybody would have foreseen that.

Mac Mail:

In:

Mac Mail:

Now, the fact that podcasts are just part of the YouTube experience, I think illustrates how normal it's become.

Mac Mail:

You know, the stats about how many people listen to a podcast in any given month, they're a lot less interesting than they used to be because lots of people do.

Mac Mail:

Even if it's a radio show, like a traditional radio show that's in podcast form, right?

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

I think I would be more surprised now if somebody told me they didn't listen to podcasts.

Mac Mail:

Yeah, yeah, I think so, too, which is.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's wild, right?

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, I look at, like, my entry into the podcasting space, and when I launched this show, you know, I think I remember just talking to my wall Mac and thinking like, man, who in the world is going to listen to this?

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, it's just Kelly Kennedy talking about business development, right?

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, at that time, that was the plan.

Kelly Kennedy:

I'm going to educate the world.

Kelly Kennedy:

I'm going to inspire them and pump some people up to do some business development.

Kelly Kennedy:

That's the goal here.

Kelly Kennedy:

And it's obviously changed into something considerably bigger than that now.

Kelly Kennedy:

We educate and inspire the world.

Kelly Kennedy:

We shine big, bright spotlights and entrepreneurs, and specifically canadian entrepreneurs, because we love to spend some time with them.

Kelly Kennedy:

But, you know, we're worldwide.

Kelly Kennedy:

We bring in people from all around the world, and.

Kelly Kennedy:

And it's just this amazing connection device.

Kelly Kennedy:

That's really what podcasts are.

Kelly Kennedy:

They're just this amazing tool to connect the world together, to share ideas.

Kelly Kennedy:

In a lot of ways, they're just like the Internet.

Mac Mail:

Yeah.

Mac Mail:

And we don't get all the headlines, you and I, but we are in the majority.

Mac Mail:

Right?

Mac Mail:

So the Joe Rogans of the world, with millions and millions and millions of listeners and hundreds of millions of dollars and, you know, contractor deals and stuff like that, like, they're not the majority in podcasting.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

There's far more impactful connecting podcasts that have their communities that, you know, build connections with other communities and do that on a regular basis, because maybe it's just a passion thing or maybe, you know, like, you've been able to.

Mac Mail:

It sort of supports your business goals, and that's a part of it, too.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

So that's what I think about when I think about podcasting.

Mac Mail:

I think about all the people that are using this amazing tool to, as you say, sort of form people, connect people, meet people, all of that.

Mac Mail:

Not the sort of big name celebrities that get a lot of the headlines for podcasts.

Mac Mail:

I mean, that's another thing nobody would have predicted, I think, when it started that somebody would get $250 million or whatever for a podcast show.

Kelly Kennedy:

Crazy.

Mac Mail:

Like unreal.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

And I think Joe Rogan just signed another agreement for a number of years for even more than his first deal.

Mac Mail:

Yeah, probably right.

Mac Mail:

I mean, the numbers that finally came out about Spotify's downloads, kind of reinforcement force y.

Kelly Kennedy:

Right.

Mac Mail:

I mean, he's kind of in a class of his own in terms of audience, but.

Kelly Kennedy:

Well, and, you know, when you were talking about Google, it's like, I don't know about you, but, like, I think the Google listens that we have on our show versus the Spotify listens, it's like 5% of the Spotify listens.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, they just weren't winning that fight.

Mac Mail:

Yeah, no, for sure.

Mac Mail:

It's Apple and then Spotify.

Mac Mail:

Right?

Mac Mail:

That's where all the listenership comes from.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah, it's.

Kelly Kennedy:

It is I'll be honest, for me, it's Spotify and then Apple.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's kind of been that way on my show.

Kelly Kennedy:

Not really sure why it ended up that way, but we definitely have, like, probably, I would say at least 75% to 80% of our listings are straight through Spotify, with the remaining being.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah, through Apple.

Mac Mail:

Yeah.

Mac Mail:

Cool.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah, it is.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's weird, though, but, yeah, it's like trying to figure out and, you know, we can talk about this later, but trying to figure out how to advertise your show and grow your show, too, is a bit of a nightmare, especially with the amount of stuff going on.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, we finally just thought we're, like, we're just going to spend on Spotify.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, we know it's authentic, real people.

Kelly Kennedy:

We know we're not going to get scammed on Spotify.

Kelly Kennedy:

Right.

Kelly Kennedy:

But it's crazy.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, the amount of, like, service industries trying to, like, pump your show or reaching out to you on a weekly basis if you have a show is absolutely bonkers.

Mac Mail:

Yeah, no, there's a huge cottage industry of that kind of stuff because people have this idea, I'm gonna do a show and I'm gonna grow it or whatever, and then they find out it's hard.

Mac Mail:

It's actually a lot of work.

Mac Mail:

It takes a lot of, you know, focus and consistent effort and, you know, people like a quick win or a magic bullet or whatever the analogy is.

Mac Mail:

And so these places offer that, but, yeah, I don't think you're gonna get, get a lot of mileage out of those.

Kelly Kennedy:

Well, I don't know about you, but nothing in business podcasting, anything I've ever done has happened in as short a time as I'd hoped for.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, it's almost always at least 50% more time.

Kelly Kennedy:

So, you know, nothing's gonna happen without consistency and effort.

Mac Mail:

That's right.

Mac Mail:

And I feel like my background in software really prepared me for this reality of business.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

Because in software, this is the thing.

Mac Mail:

It's always, you know, it always takes longer than you think.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

Developers are notorious for having really optimistic estimates for how long something going to take, and project managers and higher ups will intelligently budget.

Mac Mail:

Well, it's going to take 30% longer.

Mac Mail:

I'm just guaranteed there's no way.

Mac Mail:

So, yeah, then you get into the business world, and you're right, things take longer than you hope they will.

Mac Mail:

It's also one of those things where, like, on the longer scale, you do more than you think, and on the shorter scale, you do less than you think, right.

Mac Mail:

It's one of those things.

Kelly Kennedy:

I would agree.

Kelly Kennedy:

I would agree.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's like if I look at where I was at, even a year ago to today, I could not have imagined the things that would have happened.

Kelly Kennedy:

But I think when I got started, I was very, very like, why is this not happening faster?

Kelly Kennedy:

Why is this not growing quicker?

Kelly Kennedy:

Why don't we have more downloads?

Kelly Kennedy:

Why don't we have more offers or orders or whatever?

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, you know, I mean, in the short, you're always like, why is this not happening fast enough?

Kelly Kennedy:

But in reflection, and you look back a year and you're like, holy crap, we've come a long way in a year, right?

Mac Mail:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

And I totally think you're right.

Kelly Kennedy:

I think we're really crappy at estimating time in the short term and we underestimate our power in the long term.

Mac Mail:

Yeah.

Mac Mail:

Lots of way smarter people than me have made this case, and I've just considered myself fortunate to learn it repeatedly, I guess, along the way.

Mac Mail:

But, you know, you hear it in families and parenting a lot.

Mac Mail:

The days are long, but the years are short.

Mac Mail:

I think that's really super true.

Mac Mail:

And it's kind of similar to what we're talking about on business.

Mac Mail:

And then, you know, I don't know if you've read the book atomic habits, it's pretty popular.

Mac Mail:

Now, James clear, like his book, is kind of all of a all about that.

Mac Mail:

Right?

Mac Mail:

That it's the systems and the processes and the habits that you build, the things you do over time that lead to those incredible results.

Mac Mail:

And it might seem slow at first, but they sort of accelerate in its exponential.

Mac Mail:

And that's just really been my experience.

Mac Mail:

That's what we found at Taproot, too.

Mac Mail:

If we do things consistently over time, usually, not always, but usually it pays off.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Kelly Kennedy:

My entire business has been based upon viewing the same things that people don't want to do repeatedly.

Kelly Kennedy:

But if you do them repeatedly and consistently, you get results.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's almost inevitable.

Kelly Kennedy:

If you do, like, effective process over time consistently, it's almost impossible to fail.

Kelly Kennedy:

But most people are not consistent.

Kelly Kennedy:

That's the problem.

Kelly Kennedy:

Right?

Mac Mail:

That's right, yeah.

Mac Mail:

Or it's, they don't have systems to be consistent or, you know, it's difficult to figure out how to make that happen.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

But you're right.

Mac Mail:

If you find a way to be consistent, you can find a way to stick with it, find a way to muster the energy to come and do that thing again.

Mac Mail:

It can pay off for sure.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

And, you know, we talked about you know, the power of a community, of a podcast.

Kelly Kennedy:

But let's talk about the power of taproot, about that community.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, dude, like, you have basically taken over tech reporting in Alberta, period.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, how the hell did you do that?

Mac Mail:

Consistently doing things every week repeatedly and trying to focus on good quality product.

Mac Mail:

You know, as you know, I've been involved in Edmonton's tech community for a really long time.

Mac Mail:

And, you know, I'm fortunate.

Mac Mail:

I've got to learn and meet, learn from and meet a lot of really great people in that community.

Mac Mail:

And demo camp is a pretty amazing event that has been part of our community for a long time.

Mac Mail:

And it was at demo camp where, you know, I was writing about demo camp on my blog.

Mac Mail:

I was a blogger still, and I'd after everyone, I'd say, here are the demos we had.

Mac Mail:

Here's what I think about them.

Mac Mail:

Here's what else was announced.

Mac Mail:

And it became this thing where demo camp was a pretty important event for the tech community.

Mac Mail:

And my blog is kind of the only record of a lot of those events, actually.

Mac Mail:

And people would look forward to the write up of it after I was doing that.

Mac Mail:

And a few folks at demo camp were like, you know what?

Mac Mail:

You should do a newsletter.

Mac Mail:

Why don't you do a tech newsletter?

Mac Mail:

And we had started Taproot by that point, but we had this idea to do what we call roundups.

Mac Mail:

These are our weekly newsletters where we round up everything that's happening on a particular topic or a particular beat.

Mac Mail:

And tech was one of the first ones we did just because of the knowledge I had there and the connections I had there.

Mac Mail:

And it's totally one of those things.

Mac Mail:

If you do it every week for what are we at five years now or six years of the tech roundup, it really does accumulate.

Mac Mail:

It becomes known as the place where you can go reliably go and find this information.

Mac Mail:

It's really important to us to be trustworthy, so we put a lot of effort into being accurate and high quality and all of that.

Mac Mail:

But that's part of it.

Mac Mail:

It's the consistency that is a really significant part of it as well.

Mac Mail:

And so over time, the tech roundup has become like a must read publication for the tech community in Edmonton.

Mac Mail:

And it's happened alongside the continued decline in traditional media or mainstream media.

Mac Mail:

Right?

Mac Mail:

So they've continued to be, there's continued to be layoffs and closures, and there's just fewer people at those organizations than there once was.

Mac Mail:

And so one of the big gaps that my co founder, Karen Unlun and I identified early on was that people weren't talking about tech in Edmonton or innovation really in Edmonton, even though this is this growing thing and we talk a lot about economic development and how can we diversify the economy and all of that?

Mac Mail:

Like, it was undercover and underreported, and so it was an opportunity for us to try to do something about that.

Mac Mail:

And Tech Roundup was our entry point into that.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

And now what do you got?

Kelly Kennedy:

You got the regional roundup.

Kelly Kennedy:

You have the tech roundup.

Kelly Kennedy:

You have the business roundup.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, dude, I checked them all.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, I'm a huge advocate for what you're doing.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, honestly, and, like, it's weird because you would think that most people would default to checking CBC or CTV or something like that.

Kelly Kennedy:

I don't check those, dude, I checked taproot.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, if I want to know what's going on in Edmonton, all I got to do is check taproot because you guys do a better job at it.

Mac Mail:

Well, thank you very much.

Mac Mail:

I appreciate that.

Mac Mail:

And we're gratified by those kinds of comments.

Mac Mail:

People who say, like, our weekday newsletter, the one that comes out every weekday, is called the pulse.

Mac Mail:

You know, lots of folks will tell us, well, the pulse is how I start my day, or I get, you know, five or six or seven or ten newsletters, but I only read really two of them consistently and reliably, and the pulse is one of them.

Mac Mail:

And that's just really, you know, gratifying for our team to hear.

Mac Mail:

It reinforces why we're trying to do all the work that we're doing.

Mac Mail:

We started the pulse, for example, that newsletter because we wanted it for ourselves.

Mac Mail:

I wanted a newsletter.

Mac Mail:

I could wake up every morning and see, like, what's going on in Edmonton and it didn't exist.

Mac Mail:

There wasn't a place where I could find that.

Mac Mail:

And so we set out to build it.

Mac Mail:

And again, you do that repeatedly.

Mac Mail:

And, you know, it builds an audience.

Mac Mail:

It builds a community.

Mac Mail:

People like it.

Mac Mail:

They tell their friends.

Mac Mail:

They tell other people.

Mac Mail:

You know, I think a lot of people still do default to mainstream news.

Mac Mail:

You know, there's a generation of folks who for sure just leave the tv on all the time and whatever's on global or CTV is what they see for local news.

Mac Mail:

But news habits are so diverse now, right?

Mac Mail:

People consume news in a whole bunch of different ways.

Mac Mail:

You know, I have family who just, the way they watch local news is they go to YouTube, and then there's some clips on YouTube about local news.

Mac Mail:

And for other folks at social media and for our audience, a big chunk of our community, it's email.

Mac Mail:

They spend all their time in their email anyway.

Mac Mail:

This is a great way for them to access news.

Mac Mail:

I think probably the most interesting thing recently is that big competition for us is actually news avoidance.

Mac Mail:

I think the number of people that just try to avoid news altogether and don't want to read it is growing.

Mac Mail:

That's a bit concerning.

Mac Mail:

But for folks who do want to know what's happening in the community, I think Taproot has become a pretty effective way for them to do that.

Kelly Kennedy:

I would argue that, but if you're going to do news avoidance, it's mainstream news you need to avoid.

Kelly Kennedy:

It is not independent news media like Taproot at all.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, the stuff you guys are reporting on is typically the amazing things happening in our community.

Kelly Kennedy:

You're like the opposite of mainstream news.

Kelly Kennedy:

You're like the positivity bringers instead of the negativity bringers.

Mac Mail:

Well, some of that's intentional and some of that's accidental.

Mac Mail:

Right?

Mac Mail:

So the intentional bits are we don't like this idea of it bleeds, it leads.

Mac Mail:

Like, we don't do crime coverage or anything like that.

Mac Mail:

We do crime.

Mac Mail:

It's at an aggregate level.

Mac Mail:

It's like, what can we as a community learn about this trend?

Mac Mail:

But not here's the latest murder, here's the latest court case or anything like that.

Mac Mail:

And those are important still.

Mac Mail:

Like, you know, there is a need for that kind of reporting to happen for, over time, the community to learn and understand, you know, that aspect of it better.

Mac Mail:

But there's people who are already doing that.

Mac Mail:

And so that's the sort of unintentional aspect of it, which is that we kind of tried to find the gaps, like, what is not getting covered anymore?

Mac Mail:

What is not getting covered as well.

Mac Mail:

And let's lean into that rather than trying to duplicate what post media or CBC or somebody else is doing, where can we add value?

Mac Mail:

That's a bit different as we've grown and as they've shrunk, I think there's more overlap now.

Mac Mail:

I would put our city council coverage up against any other coverage in the city.

Mac Mail:

I think it's phenomenal.

Mac Mail:

And that's an area where we do things that other people do as well.

Mac Mail:

But even there, like, there's so much that we could be saying or reporting on and helping people understand better that, like, I feel like we're still only sort of scratching the surface of what we could do for the community if we were, you know, if we had the resources, essentially.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

Well, and that was kind of one of the questions that I was going to have for you because the reporting that you guys do is extremely well researched, extremely well done, extremely diverse.

Kelly Kennedy:

And you're like, in my mind, like, how are you able to do that without all that government funding that the big news outlets are getting?

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, I would argue that your research, your articles, the amount of stories that you guys do, man, it's actually unbelievable that you're able to do it as an independent agency.

Kelly Kennedy:

What is it like to operate as an independent agency?

Kelly Kennedy:

Let's talk about that.

Mac Mail:

It's challenging, as you would expect.

Mac Mail:

I mean, getting anything off the ground, any kind of business up and running and trying to find a customer base is challenging.

Mac Mail:

And in news, it's just even more challenging because, as you say, we're not funded in the same way that lots of other organizations are.

Mac Mail:

We do get a very, very small amount of government grants from mainly the federal government, actually.

Mac Mail:

But the local government, for example, in Edmonton, has $100,000 contracts or more with all the other news outlets and we haven't been able to break into that yet.

Mac Mail:

We're not opposed to government funding, but it's, you know, in media, it's a challenging topic.

Mac Mail:

Some organizations feel like there's just no way you can take any money from the folks you're meant to cover.

Mac Mail:

We've always had a more nuanced view on that.

Mac Mail:

It's similar to, you know, we cover business, but some of those businesses are our customers.

Mac Mail:

And you know what all of that comes back to?

Mac Mail:

How are we able to do all of that?

Mac Mail:

How are we able to do the quality?

Mac Mail:

Is that commitment to trust.

Mac Mail:

And we know that if we don't get it right, if it's not good quality, if it's not new, true and interesting, people aren't going to trust us.

Mac Mail:

And all of the things we want to do really rely on building that trustworthy relationship.

Mac Mail:

And we've tried to set our business up so that it reinforces that we don't sell ads on our website, which means we're not trying to drive tons of page views, which means we're not led down the sort of listicle story idea or the thing that drives traffic but doesn't really inform people.

Mac Mail:

We're all about informing and connecting people and we've tried to build the business in such a way that the incentives are aligned with that.

Mac Mail:

You know, the journalism that we do is really about informing our audience, being responsive to the curiosity that they have.

Mac Mail:

You know, maybe connecting them to each other or to other things in the community and to find another way to fund that, to find another way to bring in revenue to help us do that so we can kind of have that, that impact.

Kelly Kennedy:

Well, it's no secret that, you know, all the major news agencies are taking massive, massive payouts from the government in order to function.

Kelly Kennedy:

Right?

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, I don't know, like, I don't know if it's, I don't know if it's possible anymore to function without somebody paying some of those bills.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, unless the government is essentially bankrolling the entire news and then saying we're gonna, you guys still be completely impartial, but we're gonna pay for this whole thing.

Kelly Kennedy:

And you and me both know that that's not what's happening or like that.

Kelly Kennedy:

That's not how that's going to go, right.

Kelly Kennedy:

They're going to want their back scratched for whatever funds they're willing to give to the major news outlets.

Kelly Kennedy:

So I don't think it's like reason.

Kelly Kennedy:

If anybody thinks that news is completely impartial anymore or that there isn't some money influence happening, they're just, they're putting their head in the sand.

Mac Mail:

Yeah.

Mac Mail:

We've always said that we don't believe in objectivity for taproot.

Mac Mail:

That's pretty central to our worldview.

Mac Mail:

We believe everybody has a bias and we think it's better to be upfront and transparent about the bias rather than pretend to be objective or try to do your journalism as Jay Rosen says.

Mac Mail:

You know, using the view from nowhere, that's not a thing that we do.

Mac Mail:

So we don't try to do this both sides ism, where we give equal time to two sides under the false assumption that there's always two sides to every story.

Mac Mail:

That's just not true all the time.

Mac Mail:

And so we don't try to be perfectly objective, we try to be factual, we try to be trustworthy.

Mac Mail:

We try to be upfront and transparent with readers so they can decide for themselves if this is information that they can trust or not.

Mac Mail:

Just quickly back to the government funding thing.

Mac Mail:

I'm actually not opposed to the government completely funding the publication, the production of news in a country like Canada.

Mac Mail:

So, for example, if you completely funded CBC but said, you guys no longer sell ads, you're not a business, you're funded by the government, you're going to do news gathering and reporting all across this really vast territory that so few other countries have to deal with.

Mac Mail:

And then that content is Creative Commons, it's available other news publications can republish it freely.

Mac Mail:

I think that would be actually a really good use of our tax dollars and it would allow organizations like Taproot and others to continue to do additional journalism beyond that and try to build a business around it.

Mac Mail:

But we would sort of have that baseline bit of reporting that happens everywhere and that is publicly funded and it kind of removes some of the need to do that back scratching that you talked about.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

So, I mean, I know that in the next federal election, there's going to be a lot of talk about CBC and what happens depending on who wins.

Mac Mail:

And so that'll be very interesting to see, but I could see that a change to the model could actually be a good thing for journalism in this country.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah, and I actually agree with you completely.

Kelly Kennedy:

News is a public, a mandatory public service, period.

Kelly Kennedy:

And on some level, and even though, like, yeah, like I grew up in capitalism, I believe in free market, but I also believe that there are certain things that probably shouldn't be capitalist or shouldn't be free market.

Kelly Kennedy:

There are things that as humans we need.

Kelly Kennedy:

We need food, we need shelter.

Kelly Kennedy:

We definitely need to know what the hell is going on.

Kelly Kennedy:

And so I think on a certain level, there are some things that governments handling it, as long as they handled it well, would be welcomed.

Mac Mail:

That shared set of facts that we can all operate from is really, really critical, really important.

Mac Mail:

And south of the border in the United States, they have, have a much more developed nonprofit and philanthropic funding model, I guess you'd say, or system in Canada, we don't really have that.

Mac Mail:

We're way behind what they're doing down in the United States.

Mac Mail:

So Taproot started as a for profit.

Mac Mail:

We're a for profit company.

Mac Mail:

And that was intentional.

Mac Mail:

We decided if we could do a good job at this, if we can achieve our mission of informing and connecting people, we should be able to make some money to do that.

Mac Mail:

Not thinking we're going to get rich off this.

Mac Mail:

I don't think journalism is an industry you should go into if you want to be rich, but just enough to be able to pay people well to make sure that there are people who continue to have a job in journalism who can do this important work.

Mac Mail:

We didn't want to be limited by the nonprofit or charitable approach that some other independent news sites have taken, and it'll work for some of them.

Mac Mail:

And that's great.

Mac Mail:

And I think we need this mixed of things.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

But for taproot, you know, we felt like there was an opportunity to go about it in a slightly different way.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah, yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

No, I agree.

Kelly Kennedy:

And I think more is better.

Kelly Kennedy:

I really think that the more news outlets that we have to work from and get that information from, the better, because at least then there's a little bit of competition, there's a little bit of diversity.

Kelly Kennedy:

You get more than one opinion and perspective, and I think perspective is everything, especially in news.

Kelly Kennedy:

Usually, if I'm reading something that's important to me, I'd like to hear a couple different views on it, not just CTV or CBCs.

Mac Mail:

Yeah.

Mac Mail:

That triangulation of the facts and of the information, and everybody sees it from a slightly different point of view, and they bring, as we talked about, different biases to it.

Mac Mail:

I think that's important, and I'm hopeful that that'll actually be a thing that helps the AI overlords in the future.

Kelly Kennedy:

Right.

Mac Mail:

Instead of just regurgitating one single answer, they can, and bring together a diverse range of reporting or views on it and then synthesize that together, I think would be pretty helpful.

Mac Mail:

That would possibly be a net good for humanity if we went along those lines.

Mac Mail:

We'll see if it plays out that way.

Mac Mail:

I don't know.

Kelly Kennedy:

Well, as long as it doesn't play out like Terminator two, I'll feel better about it.

Kelly Kennedy:

But honestly, I'm a huge advocate for AIh at this point.

Kelly Kennedy:

The genie's out of the bottle.

Kelly Kennedy:

It doesn't matter what you thought about it.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's like.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's like nuclear weapons.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah, we don't like nuclear weapons.

Kelly Kennedy:

Nuclear energy has been all right, but once it's out of the bottle, it's out of the bottle.

Kelly Kennedy:

You can't put it back.

Kelly Kennedy:

You can't pretend that AI isn't going to be a thing.

Kelly Kennedy:

So we need to figure out how to embrace it and use it for good.

Kelly Kennedy:

Use it for ethical, good for business, good for however good we can use it for.

Kelly Kennedy:

You're not going to put that invention back in the minds of the people that invented it.

Mac Mail:

Yeah, I think that's right.

Mac Mail:

I.

Mac Mail:

We've started using it at Taproot, you know, more in a behind the scenes kind of way or in the back room, how the sausage is made kind of way.

Mac Mail:

So, as you know from our publications, we do a lot of aggregation and curation.

Mac Mail:

We pull together stuff from other sources, and we use AI to help us do that work and to help filter it and to summarize it for our team.

Mac Mail:

And then everything we publish is written by humans and has a human set of eyes edited, and that's really important.

Mac Mail:

To us, back to that trust and everything.

Mac Mail:

But in the process of getting to that point, you know, utilizing technology has been foundational to what we decided to do at Taproot using, you know, leaning on my background in technology and the ability to build things in software.

Mac Mail:

And AI is just another tool that we can help, that can help us do that work more efficiently or more accurately.

Mac Mail:

And, you know, we're, it's early days, right?

Mac Mail:

We're sort of exploring how that can have a real impact for us.

Kelly Kennedy:

Well, and me and you both know, producing a show, right?

Kelly Kennedy:

Like there's a lot of AI that goes into the show production.

Kelly Kennedy:

And thank God, because otherwise it would take like 8 hours every single time we to produce a show.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like it just wouldn't happen.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, not.

Kelly Kennedy:

We would have to either pay out, pay a fortune for someone to do all the transcription and summaries and everything, or we can use this amazing new technology to help us with those things.

Kelly Kennedy:

Cut that time down to, you know, one and a half, 2 hours, and frankly, just give me and you a weekend.

Kelly Kennedy:

Thank God.

Mac Mail:

Absolutely.

Mac Mail:

Or our teams.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

I remember, you know, back to the early days of podcasting.

Mac Mail:

I remember very distinctly when this piece of software was released.

Mac Mail:

I think it was called levelator.

Mac Mail:

It was that all it did was a tool that took your audio and would normalize the sound of two people.

Mac Mail:

So if you were recording an interview, which at that time was again, complicated, and one was quiet and one was loud, the software used this algorithm to make it sound equal so that it sounded better in the final cut.

Mac Mail:

I mean, these are fundamental things that are easy to do now in the software, and it's far beyond that.

Mac Mail:

But I remember that being, that's an example of, is kind of AI, right?

Mac Mail:

There's an algorithm there.

Mac Mail:

It's probably way more sophisticated now, but that was sort of like an eye opening thing too, for, oh, wow.

Mac Mail:

This technology can really help us solve some of these problems that go into, or the challenges of making this thing happen.

Mac Mail:

f this is what we're doing in:

Mac Mail:

And that's how I feel today, too.

Mac Mail:

Right?

Mac Mail:

, this is what we're doing in:

Mac Mail:

Imagine what it'll be, you know, in five years, ten years.

Kelly Kennedy:

Oh, dude.

Kelly Kennedy:

And it's so funny that you talked on normalization, because when I started this show, I was manually normalizing the audio to try to get it where I wanted it to be.

Kelly Kennedy:

And now it's like two clicks yeah, I have perfectly normalized audio to the exact level that I want.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, technology is amazing and we have to embrace it.

Kelly Kennedy:

We have to, like, and, you know, you're talking about, you're talking about AI and how we're in the infancy.

Kelly Kennedy:

And I think, like, we could have never known when we watched, you know, and I remember watching, you know, the, the press conference for iPhone.

Mac Mail:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

Online and just thinking like, wow, like, he put a frigging computer in the phone.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, that's gonna be so cool.

Kelly Kennedy:

But, like, not knowing what that means, not knowing the impact that that would have on the world and, like, we could have never seen those supercomputers we carry in our pockets every day, everywhere we go.

Kelly Kennedy:

AI is the same.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, we have no idea.

Kelly Kennedy:

The little tilly tally things that we're doing right now with AI is nothing compared to what we are going to have eight to ten years from now.

Mac Mail:

I just hope as we get to those eight to ten years that more people think about how do we do this responsibly?

Mac Mail:

How do we really try to come at this from a point of view where it's going to assist people, assist humans and be a useful and empowering thing?

Mac Mail:

As we're recording this, the thing I've been reading about, the story I've been reading about is this glue thing.

Mac Mail:

I don't know if you've seen this, but Google has recently launched their AI summary.

Mac Mail:

So when you search on Google, it'll try to summarize an answer for you at the top using AI.

Mac Mail:

And somebody asked, well, I make pizza and the cheese falls off, what should I do?

Mac Mail:

And the AI said, you should mix in an 8th of a cup of glue.

Mac Mail:

And it's based on some Reddit post that somebody made in jest years and years and years ago that has found its way into the Aih.

Mac Mail:

You know, people have, it's the Internet, people are having fun with it.

Mac Mail:

They're making pizza with glue, they're tasting it all this kind of shouldn't do that, but it's kind of ridiculous.

Mac Mail:

But, you know, that's a simple thing.

Mac Mail:

It's a funny example.

Mac Mail:

But what if it was something more serious, right?

Mac Mail:

What if it's a kid who searched for something and they got this and.

Kelly Kennedy:

Takes it and takes it literally, takes.

Mac Mail:

It literal, kind of like tide pods is a trend a few years ago or whatever, in kids eating tide pods, whatever.

Mac Mail:

People are going to do that with or without AI, I guess.

Mac Mail:

But, you know, as we build the AI and as we use it and as companies find ways to use it, just really thinking about those ethics and how to do it in a safe way and how to have other things around it that help prevent those bad outcomes.

Mac Mail:

And so for Tappert, it's that idea that we always have a human set of eyes that look at this.

Mac Mail:

We'll never publish an article that is completely written by AI and doesn't have somebody look at it for accuracy, let alone what, what you see happening in the world now, which is these sites spring up that are fake, they don't have real reporters, there's no bylines or they're made up sometimes, and they're just producing news.

Mac Mail:

That sounds plausible because these things are really good at parroting human language, but is actually not true or is not based on any sort of facts.

Mac Mail:

And that's pretty concerning.

Mac Mail:

And as we head into an election year here in the United States, it's going to be even more of a challenge.

Mac Mail:

And so it's a big thing to consider in our industry, but I think that's probably the case in every industry.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

As you embrace this new technology, you really got to think about what are the, what are the potential downsides to this as well, and what can we do to mitigate them.

Mac Mail:

I agree with you not say we should throw the baby out with the bathwater, but how do we adopt this in a responsible way?

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah, well, I really like what you were saying about putting humanity back into it, and I talk to that all the time on the business development podcast because obviously we're using AI to help us with copy to help us all sorts of stuff.

Kelly Kennedy:

Right.

Kelly Kennedy:

But if you just copy and paste that, you sound like a robot.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, I'm sorry, AI does not sound human.

Kelly Kennedy:

It does not speak the way that you do.

Kelly Kennedy:

And so.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah, are there things that you can take from that, that are effective, that maybe give you a better value proposition or whatever else?

Kelly Kennedy:

Absolutely.

Kelly Kennedy:

But make sure that you're putting some of you back in now that you're writing some of your own copy, because otherwise, you know, I mean, you're not going to stand out.

Kelly Kennedy:

You're just going to sound like a robot like everybody else.

Kelly Kennedy:

Copy and copy.

Mac Mail:

Yeah.

Mac Mail:

Yeah.

Mac Mail:

And in some contexts, maybe that's okay.

Mac Mail:

Like, there's probably a few use cases where that's appropriate, but in other times, yeah, you've got to stand out.

Mac Mail:

You've got to have some uniqueness.

Mac Mail:

You've got to have some personality.

Mac Mail:

I think that's what allows us to connect with another human, right, is a little bit of personality, and we get to get a little window into their world.

Mac Mail:

And if you take all that out because you run it through the AI, then you miss out on that opportunity for connection.

Kelly Kennedy:

And I think that that's something about taproot that I really like, is that I feel like I'm connected to something.

Kelly Kennedy:

I don't feel like I'm just reading the mainstream news tagline that I'm meant to read.

Kelly Kennedy:

I feel the connection to the community through Taproot.

Kelly Kennedy:

That's something you guys have done really well.

Mac Mail:

Thank you.

Mac Mail:

We think it's important to highlight our community and to point to other people and to recognize the work that they're doing.

Mac Mail:

And so we do a lot of that.

Mac Mail:

A lot of our stories and a lot of our headlines and things we write are just pointing to what other people are doing and trying to bring some context to it and trying to help people make sense of it a little bit better.

Mac Mail:

But ultimately, like promoting and maybe not promoting, but, you know, again, trying to highlight what other folks are doing because we feel like our community is so rich and so vibrant and there's so many amazing things happening.

Mac Mail:

And if only folks knew a little bit more about all of those amazing things, like what would that turn into?

Mac Mail:

Right?

Mac Mail:

And so we try to bring a little bit of that.

Mac Mail:

We ask hard questions, too, and we follow up and we try to make sure we follow threads, and that's part of helping people understand the community better.

Mac Mail:

But our starting point is not we want to tear something down.

Mac Mail:

It is, how can we build?

Mac Mail:

Right?

Mac Mail:

How can we help and contribute to this community?

Kelly Kennedy:

Well, and I think it's because of resources like taproot that we have the fastest growing tech sector in the world.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's because we like Edmonton.

Kelly Kennedy:

Business community is amazing.

Kelly Kennedy:

I am so grateful to be here and to be able to meet so many entrepreneurs.

Kelly Kennedy:

And I've had a lot of them on the show, and I've had people reach out and say, kelly, you know, you could have people from all around the world on this show.

Kelly Kennedy:

And I do.

Kelly Kennedy:

But I focus a lot on Edmonton.

Kelly Kennedy:

But it's not just because I live here.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's because the people in Edmonton, the work we're doing here is world changing.

Kelly Kennedy:

They are going to change the world.

Kelly Kennedy:

And it's going to happen right here in our backyard.

Mac Mail:

And it's been happening for a long time, right?

Mac Mail:

Longer than people think.

Mac Mail:

I mean, nowadays we talk a lot about our artificial intelligence and Amy and the amazing researchers we have there, and that's all true.

Mac Mail:

But we've had AI researchers doing incredible things in that space for a couple of decades now, if not longer.

Mac Mail:

The games group at the University of Alberta is renowned for its work and chess and checkers and poker and all kinds of things that were sort of foundational to this current wave of AI, but health, innovation and some of the advances that have been made in islet cell transplants and all those kinds of things that came from Edmonton.

Mac Mail:

And then there's the more obvious sectors that people associate us with, energy and things like that.

Mac Mail:

And again, Edmonton is an early leader in the hydrogen space and maybe remains to be seen how that's going to play out.

Mac Mail:

But we do have a lot of the ingredients here that are needed to help take a lead on these things.

Mac Mail:

We cover city hall a lot.

Mac Mail:

I think even there, we've been a leader in lots of different ways and have been recognized and both in the tech side of things with open data, which you mentioned, and some of the adoption of Wifi and it systems and things for people.

Mac Mail:

That's common now.

Mac Mail:

But Edmonton was a leader in a lot of those things and really took the lead in Canada for sure anyway, and said, here's how we could use this to help improve our community.

Mac Mail:

And when you do that, you earn the accolades from elsewhere.

Mac Mail:

So instead of starting from we want to go out and win this national or global award, it's like, let's do really great things for the people that are here, and if we do a good job of that, others will recognize that and then those accolades will come, right?

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah, that's right.

Kelly Kennedy:

That's right.

Kelly Kennedy:

I'm incredibly proud to be not just canadian, but from here, from Edmonton.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's an amazing place and I know you are, too.

Kelly Kennedy:

And that's why I know the first time we chat, I was like, I can't wait to have this interview with you, Mac.

Kelly Kennedy:

I can't wait.

Kelly Kennedy:

You know, dude, you have your ear to the pulse of canadian tech.

Kelly Kennedy:

You really do.

Kelly Kennedy:

You have a better eyes and ears than probably anybody else I've had on this show.

Kelly Kennedy:

And I would love to know what are some of, like, the amazing technologies that you've seen or that you've heard about that are coming out of Edmonton that have completely blown your mind?

Kelly Kennedy:

Like you were just at a seminar or a conference for Amy.

Mac Mail:

Amy has this annual AI conference called Upper Bound.

Mac Mail:

It's just wrapping up this week, actually, as we're recording.

Mac Mail:

And we did an event for Taproot, actually, we hosted an event where we talked about pink slime journalism and how generative AI is contributing to these news sites that are fake and make stuff up, and that's bad for lots of reasons.

Mac Mail:

But I also was fortunate to moderate a panel on investment in Alberta and how AI is impacting that or not impacting that.

Mac Mail:

I guess the takeaway from that panel, a couple of takeaways, were that it's pretty early days still and we think that AI will continue to have a real impact on investment in Alberta.

Mac Mail:

But also that AI doesn't dramatically change the equation.

Mac Mail:

If you're a founder, if you're an entrepreneur, you still got to have a good business, you still have to be investable, you still have to talk to your customers and really understand the problem you're solving.

Mac Mail:

And AI is a way to maybe accelerate some of those things.

Mac Mail:

But just because you say you do AI doesn't mean the investors are going to find you any more appealing.

Mac Mail:

And the other takeaway they mentioned is anybody can get a company started and you should think about that.

Mac Mail:

It's a lot easier now than it used to be and you don't always have to be CEO.

Mac Mail:

You can be a researcher, have a good idea, start something and then build a business.

Mac Mail:

And with support, somebody else can take the lead on the business side of things and help you grow that thing.

Mac Mail:

And also to think a little bit bigger, I think one of the things Edmonton still struggles with is being a bit too humble and not tooting our own horn quite as much as we should.

Mac Mail:

And AI is maybe a good example of how this started to change.

Mac Mail:

But how remains an issue.

Mac Mail:

Right?

Mac Mail:

When the rankings were out a number of years ago and Edmonton was number three in the world, that was the thing I heard people talk about a lot, like Edmonton is in the top three for research centers anywhere in the world when it comes to artificial intelligence.

Mac Mail:

Like people were proud of that.

Mac Mail:

I don't know that we still are.

Mac Mail:

It almost doesn't matter because folks still talk about how much of a hub for research and AI we are and that's part of that pride that we have in our community that I think we need to see more of.

Mac Mail:

So it started to shift a little bit, but that's an example of how things are changing, but maybe slower than we'd like them to.

Mac Mail:

I think we'd all like to be forefront in all the conversations and what I heard from the investors is we're not always, but that's not the way it'll always be.

Mac Mail:

Right?

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

No, I think you actually are very, very right.

Kelly Kennedy:

I think in the grand scheme of, of humble, we're right at the top.

Kelly Kennedy:

And, you know, we're very reluctant to talk about our wins or what we're doing or how amazing this is.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, we're not like the US who would have a breakthrough and be all about that.

Kelly Kennedy:

They'd be screaming about it, right?

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, we're incredibly humble with it.

Kelly Kennedy:

And I think it does take organizations like Taproot, like what we're doing here at the business development podcast to be able to say, no, no, no, what you're doing is fricking amazing and we need the world to know about it.

Kelly Kennedy:

And, you know, we have a worldwide show here, which is super cool, super amazing.

Kelly Kennedy:

And I try to shine a big, bright light on Edmonton every chance I get because I think there's a lot of people not getting the recognition they deserve.

Mac Mail:

Yeah, absolutely.

Mac Mail:

So let me answer your question a little more directly.

Mac Mail:

Some of the stuff that's pretty incredible to me, everybody probably knows who's listening to this podcast.

Mac Mail:

That jobber is from Edmonton.

Mac Mail:

I think it's so incredible that those guys, Sam and Forrest have built and the team have built that company to where it is, and it probably will be Edmonton's first unicorn, if that's still a term we care about.

Mac Mail:

The impact that it can have on small businesses all around the world, but especially in North America, is just incredible.

Mac Mail:

And I remember sitting with those guys in the coffee shop in Edmonton talking about it in the early days, and they've just done such a great job of building an amazing business there.

Mac Mail:

And so it's also an example of it doesn't need to be super sexy in order for it to be a good business and successful and to have an impact.

Mac Mail:

I mean, software for folks who do window cleaning and lawn care and painting and all of that doesn't sound super exciting, but it's really, really impactful.

Mac Mail:

And so I'm pretty proud, obviously, that jobber is an Edmonton grown company.

Mac Mail:

Coming from here, we get to write about a lot of these companies at Taproot.

Mac Mail:

You know, there's some that really blow my mind.

Mac Mail:

Like, zero point cryogenics is one.

Mac Mail:

And the work they're doing around quantum computing or sort of the inputs into what could help make quantum computing a thing are pretty impressive and way beyond my level of understanding, but so cool that there's folks in Edmonton who are doing that kind of thing.

Mac Mail:

And in a similar way, you know, future fields is starting to become more well known with their approach to, you know, using fruit flies to produce the ingredients for, you know, some of these, you know, bioproducts.

Mac Mail:

And they started in cellular AG and now they're moving more into pharmaceuticals and things like that.

Mac Mail:

And it's such an important part of that process, that creation of drugs and things like that, and that's only going to accelerate in the future.

Mac Mail:

And so for an Edmonton company to be producing things that are so foundational to that and to really have an impact in that space I think is really cool.

Mac Mail:

I mean, those are the kinds of things I think about all the time, right?

Mac Mail:

It's like, I can't believe this company is from Edmonton and these folks just started here and I get to interview some of them from time to time and I do less of that now than I used to.

Mac Mail:

And I'm always wondering, what is it about Edmonton that either made it hard or easy for you to do this?

Mac Mail:

And I always think they're going to say Edmonton is hard because it's so far away from everything and we're just not as well connected as other places.

Mac Mail:

And I always hear the opposite.

Mac Mail:

I think that's really great.

Mac Mail:

That's a total change from 25 years ago where Edmonton really was treated as pretty far and disconnected from everything.

Mac Mail:

And maybe that's acceleration of the pandemic and everything moving online and cloud computing and all of that.

Mac Mail:

We are much more connected.

Mac Mail:

Barrier like being in Edmonton is not a barrier.

Mac Mail:

And so then you look at the strengths and the community that we have, the number of support organizations we have, the fact that there's folks like us who are curious and want to support other people in our community.

Mac Mail:

All that kind of stuff, I think really contributes to making it easier to get started here.

Mac Mail:

All businesses run into challenges and I don't want to take away from that.

Mac Mail:

But there's a really good foundation here for entrepreneurs.

Kelly Kennedy:

I think one of the things I tried to do with the business development podcast and still continue to try to do is shine a big, bright light on organizations helping entrepreneurs here.

Kelly Kennedy:

Obviously, this is one of those shows.

Kelly Kennedy:

Taproot helps, helps organizations across Alberta for sure, if not Canada, but not just this.

Kelly Kennedy:

Right?

Kelly Kennedy:

We've had Alberta innovates.

Kelly Kennedy:

We've had Edmonton Unlimited.

Kelly Kennedy:

We've kind of tried to shine a big bright light on the business ecosystem and try to better understand the business ecosystem because there are so many support here that it's hard to understand sometimes which ones are relevant and which ones aren't.

Kelly Kennedy:

So one of the goals was to try to do that.

Kelly Kennedy:

I know you guys try to do the same thing, but you're right, it is amazing.

Kelly Kennedy:

I would say that starting a business in Edmonton does give you a leg up because of all of the supports we have right here in Alberta and.

Mac Mail:

That sort of culture of support.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

I think compared to some other cities where maybe the natural culture is a little bit more competitive, a little bit more.

Mac Mail:

I'm going to keep in secret until I get my thing going, like here, I feel like folks are much more willing to be.

Mac Mail:

How can I help?

Mac Mail:

And tell me more about your building.

Mac Mail:

I don't want to steal your thing.

Mac Mail:

I want to figure out how I can help you do it faster or better or whatever.

Mac Mail:

And that goes a long way.

Mac Mail:

And to have that supportive community here and for it to continue to evolve.

Mac Mail:

I think we talked about demo camp earlier.

Mac Mail:

That was a big part of it.

Mac Mail:

Lots of things started at demo camp and it was because people were curious and wanted support them came out to learn more, you know, maybe met someone as a result at the beers afterward that some of those companies took off and several of them are quite successful.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

And it comes from that community of support.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

No, it's.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's amazing.

Kelly Kennedy:

Edmonton is great.

Kelly Kennedy:

If you guys are looking to do something cool, Evanston's the place to come and do it.

Kelly Kennedy:

Mack, I wanted to talk a little bit about your podcast.

Kelly Kennedy:

Speaking municipally, how did you, how did you end up doing that?

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, I want to know the story behind that because I think a lot of people are like, oh, Mandy, like, it must be kind of hard to interview politicians all the time.

Mac Mail:

Well, it's kind of fun, too.

Mac Mail:

And also knowing that, like, we focus just on Edmonton, like, local politics, keeps us out of the fray a little bit of what happens at the province, which is a whole other kettle of fish.

Mac Mail:

But, you know, it started with my, my co host, Troy Pavlich.

Mac Mail:

He and I knew each other online.

Mac Mail:

At some point, we got invited to do, like, a community, like, charity trivia thing about Edmonton.

Mac Mail:

And I can't remember if that was before the show or after.

Mac Mail:

But anyway, we didn't know each other super well, but I knew that he paid a lot of attention to city council and seemed to be pretty interested in politics.

Mac Mail:

And I'd been doing that for a long time again on my blog and then starting to do a little bit of that with taproot.

Mac Mail:

And, and one day he just pitched me and he wrote me an email, and it was really funny because Troy is a pretty funny guy and it was well written and he's like, this is a crazy idea, but I think we should do this.

Mac Mail:

What do you think?

Mac Mail:

I.

Mac Mail:

And he was much more hilarious than that.

Mac Mail:

And I said, yeah, that sounds like a good idea.

Mac Mail:

We should try it.

Mac Mail:

And at the time, as lots of podcasters, we thought, what do we do here?

Mac Mail:

Do we launch one, see how it goes?

Mac Mail:

Do we prepare six episodes and then evaluate?

Mac Mail:

Do we want to commit to a whole year?

Mac Mail:

What is the commitment at the beginning?

Mac Mail:

What if nobody listens?

Mac Mail:

What if we run out of things to talk about all the same questions that podcasters think about?

Mac Mail:

But we got started, and we adopted some of the things that Taproot had already figured out, which is that if you do something every week over time, consistently, it'll pay off.

Mac Mail:

And so we started doing the podcast that way.

Mac Mail:

We started in the summer of:

Mac Mail:

We are mostly weekly.

Mac Mail:

We take time off when council's off, and so when they're off, we're off.

Mac Mail:

And that gives us a little bit of a breather, at least to some extent.

Mac Mail:

And, you know, around holidays and things like that.

Mac Mail:

But, yeah, it's a lot of.

Mac Mail:

Of.

Mac Mail:

A lot of episodes all about a pretty niche topic.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

Municipal politics is not a thing that a lot of folks, I think, care about or will get engaged on, certainly not enough to listen to a 30 to 45 minutes show every week.

Mac Mail:

But for folks who do want to understand what's happening and who really are interested, I think we're the primary place where they go for that kind of analysis.

Mac Mail:

And it is a place where we do more analysis than just reporting.

Mac Mail:

We do interview folks.

Mac Mail:

But a lot of the time, it's Troy and I sort of bringing our years of experience paying attention to what happens at city hall and at city council to the current issue of the day to help people understand a little bit.

Mac Mail:

Like, how could they possibly have made that decision or what led to this decision?

Mac Mail:

Like, how did we even get here?

Mac Mail:

And so it's been fun.

Kelly Kennedy:

I bet it has.

Kelly Kennedy:

And, you know, it's one of those things that I don't follow very closely, but I recognize affects my life every single day, being an adventure.

Kelly Kennedy:

Right.

Kelly Kennedy:

But it's like, most of the time, if I'm trying to figure out what's going on in politics, I do take it a step further, and I'm looking at provincial politics, which, like you said, is like a back and forth mess.

Kelly Kennedy:

Most of the time.

Mac Mail:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

Um, do you find it's the same way locally, or do you, or most of the time, are people on the same page trying to make Edmonton a better place?

Mac Mail:

I think that's our default starting assumption.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

Is that if you're a city councilor, you only do that because you want to help make this a better place.

Mac Mail:

And we might disagree about the best way to do that or how to go about it, but that's the starting point.

Mac Mail:

Right?

Mac Mail:

So it's really concerning what's happening in Alberta lately with potential changes to municipal elections and bringing parties into that system.

Mac Mail:

If that happens, I think that would be pretty negative overall for municipal politics.

Mac Mail:

But yeah, throughout the history of our show, it's been that idea that if you're a city councilor, you did that because you want to be a part of this community and you want to help it in some way.

Mac Mail:

And the podcast is a way where we can highlight those examples of when folks are doing that, and we can also hold people to account and ask questions about when they're doing something that doesn't seem aligned.

Mac Mail:

Or even what often happens is a council will decide something and then a follow up decision later on seems totally out of line with that previous decision.

Mac Mail:

It's like, but you guys agreed to do this.

Mac Mail:

Why are you now doing that over there?

Mac Mail:

And the show has been a really good place for us to bring some of that accountability and some of that context to people who are interested in this.

Mac Mail:

It's hard.

Mac Mail:

It's a lot of work to follow those threads over time.

Mac Mail:

We're also fortunate that we've had, had lots of great guests over the years.

Mac Mail:

Every counselor, basically everyone on this current council did come on our show to do a little introduction.

Mac Mail:

Not all of them will come on the show now that we've talked about them for a couple of years.

Mac Mail:

You know, lots of officials, city managers, like all those kinds of folks who can bring their expertise and help people understand things better has been really great and we've been fortunate to have those folks.

Mac Mail:

And then I'm just grateful to have Troy on the show because he brings this creative and approachable, funny takes often.

Mac Mail:

Sometimes people don't like it could be off putting, but I think he helps make a pretty dry, boring topic a little bit more approachable for people.

Mac Mail:

And he, and he knows his stuff, right.

Mac Mail:

He just, he's got such a wealth of experience and knowledge.

Kelly Kennedy:

Well, first off, thank you for doing that.

Kelly Kennedy:

You know, that's, and I'll be straight, like, there's a lot of podcasts you could have done.

Mac Mail:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

Which you probably would have gotten more recognition for more personal good feelings about, but you chose something that is so needed it.

Kelly Kennedy:

And I do wonder, like, why did like, and I'm, and I mean this from me to you.

Kelly Kennedy:

You have a great personality.

Kelly Kennedy:

You've been in podcasting a long time.

Kelly Kennedy:

You understand the whole setup.

Kelly Kennedy:

You could have easily done what I've done at the business development podcast on a tech level or something along those lines.

Kelly Kennedy:

No problem.

Kelly Kennedy:

Without even question, why municipal politics?

Kelly Kennedy:

I do just have to ask because I'm thankful that you do it, and I think you guys do do a great job, and I think it is really required.

Kelly Kennedy:

But is it just because of that, that, uh, journal, the journalist in you, that needed to go down that path, or, like, was it truly a passion for you?

Mac Mail:

Yeah, I mean, I think I've always just super.

Mac Mail:

I think maybe actually it comes down to what's a core value of tapper, which is curiosity.

Mac Mail:

And I'm curious about a lot of things.

Mac Mail:

I'm curious about business, but I'm especially curious about what goes on at city hall.

Mac Mail:

And as you said, the sort of decisions that impact our day to day.

Mac Mail:

And, you know, I was involved, got myself involved in the news, which you're not supposed to do as a reporter, I guess, like when I was a blogger still with, you know, the city center airport and these really big discussions about the future of our city.

Mac Mail:

And I just saw firsthand how anybody can get involved in those conversations and have an impact or help people understand something better or share their perspectives.

Mac Mail:

And so when Troy pitched the idea for the podcast, it was like, yeah, I think that is needed.

Mac Mail:

That's part of it.

Mac Mail:

Like, there wasn't anybody else doing that.

Mac Mail:

There wasn't another show about local politics.

Mac Mail:

So that's a big, big w in that column because it's just less competition initially.

Mac Mail:

It's also potentially a sign that nobody wants to listen to that.

Mac Mail:

So that's the risk.

Mac Mail:

But it really came down to, like, if we're going to do a show and we're going to do it for a while, it's got to be about something that we care about and that we're curious about.

Mac Mail:

Otherwise, it's really hard to do.

Mac Mail:

You know, I love local business, and I'm sure I could, you know, not get tired of interviewing local entrepreneurs, but other folks are doing that, too, and doing a great job of it, like you.

Mac Mail:

And, you know, there's a gap here, and it is a thing that I'm really interested in.

Mac Mail:

And I think the number of folks who are that curious about city council are far fewer than the folks who are curious about business.

Mac Mail:

And so to have an opportunity to do that with somebody else who's as curious as I am, like Troy was just like, we have to not pass up that opportunity.

Mac Mail:

And, you know, now we've done it for as many years as we've done six years or something, we've tried to build in some resiliency, and we've had one of our new team members at Taproot, relatively new team members, Stephanie come and co host a few episodes.

Mac Mail:

And so we're trying.

Mac Mail:

We recognize the show is beyond just our passion at the beginning.

Mac Mail:

And we want to try and make sure that it is resilient and that it can grow because we do think it could reach more people in Edmonton who might be a little bit curious about this kind of stuff.

Mac Mail:

But that's where it started, right?

Mac Mail:

Was really, there is a gap.

Mac Mail:

We are curious about it.

Mac Mail:

It seems like a pretty unique set of circumstances.

Mac Mail:

Let's not pass up that opportunity.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah, I love that.

Kelly Kennedy:

I love that because that's how the business development podcast came from, too.

Kelly Kennedy:

Right?

Kelly Kennedy:

I knew I needed to do something outward facing.

Kelly Kennedy:

I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do.

Kelly Kennedy:

I knew that I love podcasts.

Kelly Kennedy:

I listened to them all the time.

Kelly Kennedy:

So it seemed like, okay, like, this is an avenue, but, like, kelly, you've never done anything like this.

Kelly Kennedy:

I remember multiple, like, back and forths, but I remember thinking the business development world doesn't have a big voice.

Kelly Kennedy:

It doesn't have somebody advocating teaching, helping the next generation realize how important relationship building is, how, how important being a human still is in business development.

Kelly Kennedy:

And, dude, I remember looking at domains, and I remember the moment that I saw that the business development podcast as a name was available level.

Kelly Kennedy:

The rest is it was just had to happen.

Kelly Kennedy:

It was like, okay, there it is.

Kelly Kennedy:

That's.

Kelly Kennedy:

That's the universe saying this has to happen.

Mac Mail:

You sometimes.

Mac Mail:

You sometimes need those little signs that you should go ahead with the idea.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

And if it comes, then, you know, you can run with it.

Mac Mail:

Yeah, I listen to a lot of podcasts, too.

Mac Mail:

Maybe not as many as you, but I tend to listen to, like, really highly produced stuff.

Mac Mail:

Like, I love the daily from the New York Times.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah.

Mac Mail:

And probably my least kind of podcast is the two hour long gabfest between a couple of folks.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

Just not my gem.

Mac Mail:

And that informed a little bit how we did the show.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

We wanted to keep it short.

Mac Mail:

We wanted to keep it around half an hour.

Mac Mail:

Most of our episodes now probably are a little bit closer to 40, 45 minutes.

Mac Mail:

And when we have a guest, if it's really good stuff, then we'll go longer because people want to hear more from that person or whatever.

Mac Mail:

But I was really worried that if it was Troy and I talking for 2 hours about city council, who would want to listen to that?

Mac Mail:

That's got to be so boring.

Mac Mail:

And so sometimes those constraints can be really helpful.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

Because we know we're aiming for 30 minutes, and so if we get close, that's good.

Mac Mail:

And it forces us to really think about how we're going to use that time effectively with somebody.

Mac Mail:

And so that's been a positive thing.

Mac Mail:

And in other contexts, it's totally fine to have a long conversation when it's something like municipal politics.

Mac Mail:

I think there's some value in keeping it brief.

Kelly Kennedy:

No, I agree.

Kelly Kennedy:

I remember kind of thinking about how long are these shows going to end up being?

Kelly Kennedy:

And you know, what I came to, to, I didn't care.

Mac Mail:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

My rule was, as long as I'm delivering value, I'm educating and inspiring with every episode, I don't really give a shit.

Kelly Kennedy:

It can be ten minutes, it can be 30 minutes, it can be 45 minutes, or it can be an hour and 20 minutes.

Kelly Kennedy:

We don't typically run much longer than an hour and 20 minutes just because I know I'm not going to listen that long, probably so.

Kelly Kennedy:

But as long as we're able to deliver value, that's the secret.

Mac Mail:

I think that's the right starting point.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

Looking for analytics about.

Mac Mail:

About how long do people typically listen?

Mac Mail:

Or how long is the average commute or any of that kind of stuff.

Mac Mail:

Like, it can be a signal, it can help inform your decision, but at the end of the day, if you do something for you, I think it ends up with a better product for other folks, too.

Mac Mail:

Right?

Mac Mail:

Like, if it's solving a problem that you have is a thing that you would actually listen to, a thing that you actually get value out of, then chances are good that other people are going to get value out of that, too.

Kelly Kennedy:

What's been super cool, and I didn't see coming, is that most of our episodes get listened to twice.

Mac Mail:

Interesting.

Kelly Kennedy:

So most people listen once and then go back and take notes.

Kelly Kennedy:

And I can't tell you how many messages I've gotten that says, I take notes from every single of your.

Kelly Kennedy:

Of your educational episodes for the business development podcast.

Kelly Kennedy:

And it's true, it reflects, it shows that they've listened to the thing twice.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's crazy.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's.

Kelly Kennedy:

I didn't see that coming.

Kelly Kennedy:

I mean, I wasn't sure what I was going to look for, but I didn't expect people to listen twice.

Mac Mail:

We've noticed a similar thing, which is that.

Mac Mail:

even our early episodes from:

Mac Mail:

And occasionally we'll have somebody mention that maybe they didn't start at the beginning, but they went back and listened to a bunch of our back catalog to get caught up.

Mac Mail:

And that just blows my mind because a lot of the things we talked about six years ago are not relevant anymore, at least not directly.

Mac Mail:

There's maybe a tenuous connection or something so interesting that folks find value in that long tail, I guess, of coverage.

Mac Mail:

Right?

Kelly Kennedy:

It's crazy.

Kelly Kennedy:

Probably 80% of our downloads are not the most recent episode.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah, it's people going back and listening to the whole back catalog.

Kelly Kennedy:

And, you know, I guess that that's what you get when people can look up the guests they want to listen to.

Kelly Kennedy:

Right.

Kelly Kennedy:

Like, but it is.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's really cool.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's like.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's like we're learning all the time.

Kelly Kennedy:

Analytics on podcasts are getting better all the time.

Kelly Kennedy:

I'm sure one day we'll be able to look and know exactly who's listening, where they're listening, why they're listening.

Kelly Kennedy:

But, yeah, as you and me both know, they suck at the moment.

Mac Mail:

Yeah.

Mac Mail:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

They're.

Mac Mail:

They leave much to be desired.

Mac Mail:

But on the other hand, it creates this opportunity for us.

Mac Mail:

Do like you're saying something you want to listen to, something you want to create.

Mac Mail:

You don't care about what other people think.

Mac Mail:

That's, you know, easier to do when you don't have the analytics staring at you.

Kelly Kennedy:

True.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

There is something about that.

Kelly Kennedy:

For sure.

Kelly Kennedy:

For sure.

Kelly Kennedy:

Mac, this has been absolutely amazing.

Kelly Kennedy:

I do want to spend some time before we wrap up today just chatting about, you know, what services do you guys offer through Taproot?

Kelly Kennedy:

You did mention that you are for profit, which means that you sell services of some type.

Kelly Kennedy:

How can people support what you guys are doing?

Mac Mail:

Well, thank you for the opportunity to share a little bit more about that.

Mac Mail:

I think first and foremost, if you're not already a subscriber to the Pulse, which is our weekday newsletter, we'd love for you to sign up.

Mac Mail:

It's free, it comes to your inbox every day, and it's really good overview of what's going on in Edmonton, original reporting from our team, as well as curated stuff from elsewhere.

Mac Mail:

It's a really great way to orient yourself, I think, in our community.

Mac Mail:

So I'd say that's number one.

Mac Mail:

Taproot has multiple revenue streams, and that's been pretty intentional from the beginning, too, because we could see what was happening in local news across North America.

Mac Mail:

And, you know, it tended to be either they have a subscription or they rely on ads.

Mac Mail:

And, you know, you could do the math and just figure out that that just isn't going to be enough to make up for the loss that we all have in our communities.

Mac Mail:

The amount of money that used to be invested into journalism membership is really important.

Mac Mail:

So we started with membership.

Mac Mail:

Actually, individuals can support Taproot by becoming a member.

Mac Mail:

Slight difference between membership and subscription.

Mac Mail:

Subscription usually means you're paying for access.

Mac Mail:

Membership is you're supporting the mission.

Mac Mail:

All of our stuff is free to read, available for anybody.

Mac Mail:

If we do something, we want it to have as wide an impact as possible.

Mac Mail:

But if you're able and you're inclined, we'd love for you to become a member of taproots.

Mac Mail:

Hundred dollars a year to support the work that we do.

Mac Mail:

And then for organizations currently there's kind of two mainstream, so sponsorship and advertising, which we do.

Mac Mail:

As I said earlier, we don't do ads on our website.

Mac Mail:

So we're not trying to sell page views or whatever.

Mac Mail:

But organizations can sponsor our newsletters so it can be associated with making those things possible.

Mac Mail:

And they can also run ads in our newsletters, have a specific call to action for something.

Mac Mail:

An ad is a great way to do that.

Mac Mail:

And, you know, we don't plaster them with ads.

Mac Mail:

There's at most two in any edition.

Mac Mail:

Like, it's high, high quality, you know, targeted, relatively targeted audience that you're going to reach.

Mac Mail:

Right.

Mac Mail:

People who read Tapgrid are pretty engaged in Edmonton.

Mac Mail:

And then the third thing that we do that I don't know as many people know about is a b, two b offering.

Mac Mail:

So lots of organizations have a need for media monitoring or tracking information about their community or that kind of thing.

Mac Mail:

And we offer a service that does that.

Mac Mail:

So if you wanted to get like a daily or weekly or bi weekly or monthly briefing, here's all the things you care about, or here's what's new about your community of organizations or people.

Mac Mail:

Taproot can help produce that, and that's called spotlight.

Mac Mail:

And that's been an effective way for us to grow our business, you know, using the tools of journalism to solve problems that businesses have and offer a return on investment for that.

Mac Mail:

So that's been pretty cool.

Mac Mail:

And we've got some other new stuff we're working on.

Mac Mail:

r back at the end of December:

Mac Mail:

And so we're really trying to become that primary place where people go to find out what's happening in our community and the calendar is off to a really great start.

Mac Mail:

More than:

Mac Mail:

So we're really trying to solve that problem.

Mac Mail:

And we'd love organizations to support that mission as well through sponsorship or even partnership, where if you've got a calendar on your website, chances are nobody's keeping it up to date.

Mac Mail:

Why don't you embed our calendar and we'll do that on your behalf.

Mac Mail:

So some of those kinds of services that again, hopefully help contribute to the community, that's what we're trying to try to do.

Mac Mail:

And all the ads and sponsors and stuff we have, they're local or alberta, we're not selling Pepsi ads or anything like that.

Mac Mail:

So there's still a value to readers, right?

Kelly Kennedy:

Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy:

No, that's amazing.

Kelly Kennedy:

And if people want to, want to get in touch with you, want to discuss sponsorship or advertising with you, what is the best way for them to do that?

Mac Mail:

You can email us, probably hellopaproutepublishing CA or if you've got an editorial suggestion or something for our team, it's helloedmonton CA.

Mac Mail:

You can also just look up me Mac mail or my co founder Karen Unlind.

Mac Mail:

We're pretty easily findable on the Internet these days.

Mac Mail:

I think LinkedIn is probably the primary way that people reach out to us now and we'd love to about how we might be able to help other local organizations do what they do in the community and support the journalism that our amazing team is doing on a daily basis.

Mac Mail:

Because I think it's really important that it exists in the community.

Mac Mail:

Lots of organizations in Edmonton, I think, are starting to realize that if they want someone to talk about their thing, there needs to be a place where it can be talked about and supporting local journalism so that we continue to have a place for that I think is really important.

Kelly Kennedy:

Yes, no, I agree.

Kelly Kennedy:

The work that you guys are doing are, is very important.

Kelly Kennedy:

Do not stop doing it.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's much needed.

Kelly Kennedy:

It's excellent.

Kelly Kennedy:

I love your roundups.

Kelly Kennedy:

I love the pulse.

Kelly Kennedy:

You know, keep it up.

Kelly Kennedy:

You guys are killing it.

Kelly Kennedy:

And the Edmonton business community owes you a big round of applause.

Kelly Kennedy:

I think there's a lot of companies that just would have never gotten spotlight without the work you guys are doing.

Kelly Kennedy:

And it's great.

Kelly Kennedy:

And I'm a huge advocate.

Mac Mail:

Well, thank you so much.

Mac Mail:

And also thank you for doing your show because we've been able to point to a lot of great episodes of local folks in our roundup of people you've interviewed and stories you've highlighted.

Mac Mail:

So you know, that's one of the things that our roundups rely on, is people putting stuff out into the world that's interesting and new and local.

Mac Mail:

And the opportunity to draw attention to that work is one of the things we love best about what we get to do.

Kelly Kennedy:

Amazing.

Kelly Kennedy:

Amazing.

Kelly Kennedy:

Well, thank you for joining me, Mac.

Kelly Kennedy:

This has been episode 176 of the Business Development podcast.

Kelly Kennedy:

We've been joined by Mac mail of Taproot Publishing.

Kelly Kennedy:

Until next time, we'll catch you on the flip side, this has been the.

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Business development podcast with Kelly Kennedy.

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His passion and his specialization is in custom customer relationship generation and business development.

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The Business Development Podcast
The Business Development Podcast is an award-winning show dedicated to entrepreneurs, executives, sales, and business development specialists.

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Kelly Kennedy