The Compound and Friends - Tadas Viskanta and Josh Brown on Voice and Mini-pods

Episode Date: February 19, 2019

Tadas Viskanta and Josh Brown discuss the future of communications within the investment business, and how the home speaker phenomenon is sure to change the game as it proliferates. If investors are using the voice-enabled internet more and more, it stands to reason that their financial advisors and asset managers will want a way to communicate with them there. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Okay, I'm on with Tadas Visconta from Abnormal Returns. Tadas, say hi. Hey, how's it going? Good. So I wanted to talk a little bit about what we're doing with this particular, I guess we're calling it a mini pod. that we want to take these bite-sized chunks out of important topics and give people some sense of either something that we've recently read or something that we wrote or we'll grab someone who's an expert on a topic just to make sure that we're reaching the audience that primarily wants to hear things in voice as opposed to reading. Do you think that's like the best way

to explain it? No, I think's like the best way to explain it? No, I think that's a great way to explain it. And I think, you know, the more modes we have to reach people, I think the better. I was reading that by 2020, there will be 120 million households that have either an Alexa Echo or Echo Dot or have the Apple HomePod or have the Google Speaker. But like between those three, almost every household is going to have some version of the web that they interface with on voice. And that, you know, the early adopters are probably going to be wealth management clients. They'll be the type of people that we communicate with. So I don't know if it was 2020 or 2022, but whatever, it's coming. And I think that you're starting to see that be undeniable. You're probably seeing this stuff out there in the wild also, right? No, that's the direction it's going. And anyone who puts one of these speakers in their homes gets pretty quickly gets used to making it

kind of an integral part of their process, whether it's listening to the news or cooking or whatever it might be. You know, there's a reason why these speakers are becoming ubiquitous. Right. So we're going to have the compound skill as an Alexa skill. And the idea is to start just a few times a week, putting up something about investing on something that we're working on or thinking about. And ultimately we'd like to have these be searchable so that people that have enabled the compound skill can say, um, you know, once they open up the skill, you say, Alexa, open the compound, they can then say, Alexa, or tell me about interest rates or tell me about the stock market. And they will get whatever the most recent thing we had to say on the topic would be. And people can kind of play them on a continuous loop if they want, which I think is really cool.

Well, you know, we are you know, we are watching the markets. We are writing and reading about the markets all the time. And I think having this kind of outlet, this kind of dynamic outlet for to be able to be able to produce, you know, the audio for people, I think is going to be valuable. I think, you know, everybody likes to consume information in different ways. And I think, you know, being able to listen to things, whether it's on your way home or whether you're working out, I think is a really valuable addition. Yeah, my big idea with this is that I was reading investment blogs relatively early. I was reading thestreet.com in the late 90s, which I guess were the first mainstream investment blogs.

And you've been reading them as long as I have. And I've just seen this arc where articles became blogging, blogging became tweeting. And not everything is worthy of a full-blown article. Not everything is worthy of even being a blog post. Sometimes people just have a thought. It's worth putting out as a tweet. I think audio will ultimately head in that direction the investment industry has probably a hundred different one hour long

podcasts and most of them don't need to be an hour it's just convention so what if instead you could spend that hour and listen to 10 six minute mini pods and get you know 10 people that you like what they think uh on a given topic all in that same period of time. So I think that's where we're headed. And that's why I'm so excited about doing this. Yeah, I think podcasting is great. I mean, I think, you know, you and I both listen to podcasts. And like you said, there is kind of a convention that, you know, I think if you're if you're if you're going through the the bother of trying to get a guest on, you know, you want to kind of milk them for whatever you can get out of them. And sometimes that's great.

And sometimes it's like you said, a bit too much. And so I think being able to just narrow things down to a single topic and be really focused, I think will be, you know, I think will be really interesting for people. That's a great point. You know, when you have a guest come on your podcast and you're going to interview them, it's not like you're going to interview them for five minutes and just be like, all right, bye. Although we are, because we're going to be very specific, you know, not tell me about your whole life. Start with college. We're going to be really specific about, Hey, I wanted to ask you about blank and that'll be the show. So, um, hopefully it works. Hopefully people are into it. Todd, thanks, thanks for joining me. And if you've not yet enabled our skill, if you're just checking it out for the

first time, please go ahead and do so. We'll be back soon. Thanks. We'll talk to you. All right.