Kolter Bouchard: Building a Career You Actually Own.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The Sound Off podcast starts now. 

Matt Cundill  0:10  
The last time we had Kolter Bouchard on the show, he was working afternoons at 102.1 The Edge in Toronto alongside Meredith Geddys. They got the job by offering a proposal to management, and in the years since we last had Colter on the show, he's gotten cancer. Left radio, started a content creation business, did a podcast with his wife, and subsequently wrote a book on that same subject. He's had his Facebook content stolen from someone in some wacky country, and best of all, he's cleared the cancer hurdle. This is a conversation that would normally be done over something like dinner, but we're separated by time zones. And now Colter Bouchard joins me from Toronto.

Kolter Bouchard  0:53  
Yeah, 2018,

Matt Cundill  0:54  
September 2019,

Kolter Bouchard  0:57  
which feels like a lifetime ago for a number of reasons. Today is actually a big day for me. I had my stem cell transplant exactly five years ago today, and as of this moment, unless there's something going on that I don't know about, I'm officially cured of cancer. If you have blood cancer and it's been five years of remission, you're officially cured. I'd love to be cured of like the the you know mental issues I've got going on, but those only seem to be compounding with age, Matt.

Matt Cundill  1:24  
Oh, that's great! And I saw the social media post about it, and and you know, you also put a picture of you know your very first day when you were entering into the journey, and it, you know, it's just so nice to have that in the rearview mirror.

Kolter Bouchard  1:37  
Yeah, well, it feels like a zillion years ago on the one hand, and then I remember that, without fail, at some point every day, I cry about it a little bit. And I think, understandably, you're staring into the abyss, you're faced with your own mortality, and it it sticks with you. And I mean, my wife and I co-founded a creative agency a couple of years ago. We've got four employees now, and we I feel very honored and very blessed to be able to do this. And we work with a lot of healthcare organizations, not for profits, cancer foundations, pharmaceutical companies, and so at least once a week, I'm behind the camera interviewing somebody who's either a cancer survivor or living with chronic illness, and I think what really sets us apart in that space is the empathy that I can bring to this, because like I've been through it, and everybody's different. We're all special snowflakes, not to sound glib about it, but to be able to approach something, and you know this, you've interviewed 1000s of people over your career, right? People from all walks of life, different industries, whether it was on radio or whether it was on this podcast, television, and there's certainly a skill to be able to have a conversation with anybody. But the best interviews are always when it doesn't feel performative. It doesn't feel like you know you're doing it for an audience. It genuinely feels like a connection, and so I feel really lucky to be able to do that. On the other hand, if you gave me a choice between being really good at interviewing people with cancer or never having had cancer. I'd probably take never having had cancer. Gun to my head, you know.

Matt Cundill  3:09  
As you're saying this, I'm thinking back to the conversations of people who told you know part of their cancer story on this podcast, and you know we've done 515 of these episodes, and I can think of three off the top of my head because I think they involve tears. I think Bob Harris was one. He was a program director I worked under for a little bit. Maureen Holloway was another. Genevieve Born, noted TV star was on Musique Plus and had breast cancer and asked her about you know removing all her hair and what that was like and

Kolter Bouchard  3:49  
you know

Matt Cundill  3:49  
how she embraced it, walked into it, and then you know lived to tell the story later.

Kolter Bouchard  3:54  
Maureen Holloway in particular reached out to me when I was diagnosed and I posted a video about it, and she said, "Here's some unsolicited advice. And the biggest thing she said was, "Don't become capital C, capital B cancer boy. People are going to want to reach out to you immediately and ask you to help all of their foundations and do this and do that. You are more than just this. Don't become this. And then, in true maybe me fashion or maybe radio announcer fashion, you make a joke about it to try to diffuse it and to try to just oh emotions I want to push those away I don't want to feel those those are gross and I had Hodgkin's lymphoma which is like the hot girl cancer that's the quote unquote easy one and so I said oh it's no big deal I've got the easy one and I think she brought me down to earth pretty quickly. She's like, "There's no such thing. That's ridiculous. It's okay. You're going to be sad sometimes. It's going to be very difficult. Take care of yourself first and foremost. And then I asked her a bunch of questions because she, if memory serves, she was working during part of her treatment. And I'm like, "I want to be the best, you know, cancer radio person. I want to make sure that I'm." Increasing shareholder value, and I'm really happy in retrospect that I did still work throughout cancer treatment, with the exception of the recovery from my stem cell transplant, which that's rough. Zero out of 10 would not recommend, but I would do chemotherapy for five hours in the morning every two weeks, so I get the first reservation they had at like 730 or eight a.m. and then I'd be on the air at 2o'clock or 3o'clock in the afternoon. I forget we switched from two to three at some point during COVID, and that's another thing. It's also the pandemic. I've also got a brand new baby, and I think on the one hand I wish I would have taken it a lot easier on myself and taken more of Maureen's advice, and on the other hand, I'm really glad that I stuck with it because it was therapeutic for me. It was cathartic for me. I was able to talk. I mean, I I had people that would call in. One person actually got screened because I announced my cancer diagnosis, and that person actually had cancer. And so the person's still with us today. They caught it early, and that I think, despite having worked in the industry for five or six years at that point, really drove home for me the fact that your words do have an impact, and we're letting people into our lives, and and we're really grateful and lucky to have a place in listeners' lives, viewers' lives, or whatever medium it is, readers, and I think in order to honor that, if you're asking people to stick with you and you're asking people to give you the most precious resource of all, which is time, and I almost died a couple of years ago, I can attest to that. You need to be honest. You need to have integrity. You need to be vulnerable, right? You need to be open. It's okay to be silly, and I think it's good to be silly, but it's also not but and it's good to be silly, and I think it's equally as important to have real, open, vulnerable moments. Sometimes, you know, you mentioned earlier crying. It's okay to cry sometimes.

Matt Cundill  6:50  
You just told me a little bit that you're crying now. When you, you know, when you're thinking back and looking back on all that stuff, I sort of look at that as being, you know, something that you suppressed in the moment. But you know, during the pandemic, you know, you said you wanted to get, you know, your chemo out of the way early in the morning, and then you can look forward to doing your show and working hard throughout that process is a way to sort of you know keep the ball matriculating down the field to get to the next thing where you need to go, and it turns out that that moment is now.

Kolter Bouchard  7:21  
Yeah, it's not like I said. Today's the the actual day, august 18, 2021, was the stem cell transplant. I had it at Princess Margaret, and I remember the day for two reasons. Obviously, my life was saved, and number two, you're never supposed to eat something you really like on a chemo day, and especially on your stem cell transplant day because it's like it's the harshest chemo. It's enough chemo to kill you, and then they freeze your stem cells. They give them back to you, and essentially it's like rebooting your immune system that all the high dose chemotherapy is killed. And I, one of my favorite restaurants is Mother's Dumplings. It's in China down in Toronto, and I'm like, that's all I want, and I know I'm never going to be able to eat it again, but I deserve it. I want it today, and I feel so bad because I have not been able to eat there in the last five years, and I crave it so bad. But still, immediately I I start. This is going to be terrible. Don't clip this. I I can't ever eat there again, and it's tragic and it's awful. But it was worth. It was definitely worth it the day off, I got the biggest wonton soup they had. I got a bunch of dumplings. It was awesome, and I remember that day. My wife and I are are you know we're happy, and I also smell like tomato soup because of the enzymes and the stem cells. But I can't smell it, but everybody else can. And we're talking about like what's life going to look like a year from now? What's life going to look like five years from now? And I had to crack open one of my journals earlier today to just get back into the headspace of that time five years ago, and what I thought. And I always thought that radio would continue to be a part of my future, and I wanted to do television, but I could not have predicted that my life would be for better or for worse, and mostly better, a little bit worse, would not be what it is today. And I'm so grateful, super grateful. And when I emailed you, Matt, full disclosure, a couple days ago, and said, you know, I'd love to come on and talk again. It's been a minute, and then you and I started talking about how, and I've said this for years since leaving the industry, radio announcers are uniquely predisposed to have success online, and there are a ton of people who currently work in the industry or have recently left the industry. Josie Balca, who's a really good friend of mine, millions of followers. She's got two New York Times best-selling poetry books. Did radio for years and years and years. Also, Shannon Burns with Virgin Bell Media does does great numbers online and has a great career in radio still, and I I hope that especially with the way that the industry seems to be going, and not that I'm banging the death knell because that's boring and that's hack and people have been doing that forever, and I am not doing that, and I believe fervently in the power of radio. I wish that more people would embrace this, not necessarily as a career change, but as as having maybe a fuller, more richer profile. Take me back. Why did you leave radio? I had two panic attacks. I had so one day. This is like summer of 2023. Maybe it was 2022. Anyway, I thought I was having a heart attack on the air. Like I was so stressed out, and I've always loved what I did. I always loved radio. By the end, I didn't love where I was doing it, and that's no shade to anybody. It's just you know the industry changes, companies change. It is what it is. And I was so afraid of I was so afraid of getting in trouble for leaving the studio that day. I thought I was having a heart attack that we voice tracked the last hour of the show. And even still, I'm like, we're gonna get in trouble for this, and we voice tracked it, and I took a cab to St.

Kolter Bouchard  11:06  
Mike's, and then you're still waiting there for a couple of hours, and I'm like, I think I'm having a heart attack, and then they run. There's a special test to test for an enzyme, and I didn't have it, so they said it's probably not a heart attack. Well, it's definitely not a heart attack. It's probably a panic attack, and they said you should try to you should try to have a less stressful life, and I said okay, cool. Can you put that? Can I get like a prescription for that, please? And then I tried to make like a conscious effort to to to be less stressed out. And then the following summer, my wife and I, her family is from Grenada, and it was our first time going to Grenada. And about a day after we landed, I just felt like I could breathe again. I don't know if you've ever done mushrooms, but it's that feeling when it just like the anxiety melts away and the TV static turns off, and you just feel present. And I finally felt present for the first time in years and years and years. And the day that we're leaving and we're getting to the airport, I feel like that tightness in my chest again, and I said to my wife, "I think, I think it's my job. And she goes, "Yeah, I think I could have told you that. And then a couple more months go by, and it was Valentine's Day, 2024, and I'm in the parking lot after my show, and I have, and I know it's a panic attack this time because it's happened before, and I'm just sitting in my car for a couple of hours, just kind of like rocking back and forth. And I texted my wife and I said, "I'm having a panic attack. I can't move. I like I'll keep you updated, and you know, I'll see you soon, I guess. And then a couple of weeks later, I gave my notice, and I had a six month out of my contract, and management was very understanding, and I had said, "I'm not leaving for another company. I'm not trying to pursue another show somewhere. Like no hard feelings. I just, I physically, mentally, and emotionally, and spiritually, cannot do this for another six months. So I can give you a month. I can give you a really good month, but that's all I got in me. And it was my daughter's fourth birthday. The day that I coincidentally, the day that I quit, and a month later I walked out of the doors for the last time, and I was really, I was dreading listening in, like tuning in to the Edge afterwards, because I'm like I worked there for six years, like, and I became an adult there, and for posterity, I have so many great memories from that time in my life, and I'm so glad I took that and took that role. And I had like I got diagnosed with and beat cancer, and then went into remission and beat cancer again on the air. The birth of my child, like all these amazing things, I got to live in real time on the air, and it was amazing. And I feel like I've won the lottery of lotteries, being able to do that. And it's such a cool station. I love the station, and I remember tuning in. It was Easter weekend that I left the Thursday, and I tuned in on the Monday. And for the first time in six years, my name wasn't on the imaging. I didn't have any responsibility whatsoever, and I could consume the station once again as a listener, and I think oftentimes we don't choose when we get to leave the industry. Oftentimes, the industry chooses to leave us, and so it can be understandably traumatic listening afterwards. You know, I got fired from my job in Dubai, and it was stressful. And that's a that's a completely different country. We got to like sell our stuff and hop on a plane and go home, and it just felt like like that peace again. Of I can enjoy this, I can be a listener, and I was proud of myself.

Kolter Bouchard  14:30  
It sounds like such a stupid thing, but I was I was proud of myself for tuning in because maybe maybe it would have been triggering for me. I don't know, but I'm I'm happy and I think luckier than most announcers that I got to leave mostly on my own terms, but I'm happy that I got to make the. If a decision was going to be made, I'm happy that I was the one to make it.

Matt Cundill  14:51  
Crazy question because I kind of know where you are now, but would you be able to go back to radio in a basement

Kolter Bouchard  14:56  
in South Oshawa?

Matt Cundill  14:57  
Yeah. Well, could you go back to radio for? For a limited time period, and not you know have that overwhelming feeling.

Kolter Bouchard  15:06  
I think so. Like I said, it wasn't radio; it was the environment that I was in. But

Matt Cundill  15:10  
the idea is that is radio today. You're overwhelmed.

Kolter Bouchard  15:14  
I mean, listen, I got a six year old, and I'm managing a business and being a content creator, and just like life and emotions and friends and all that's like everything's a lot, right? I'm overwhelmed by everything. I would absolutely love to go and do radio again. I don't want to do it every day necessarily, but I would love. And I've said this for years and years now. I'd love to do a weekly call-in show. That was my favorite part of radio, and we had a segment on the edge every day. I'm acting like we invented this. We invented something called open phones, where you could call in and talk about whatever you wanted. But we did that every day at 5o'clock for years. Yeah, it was it was it was great. It was I appreciate that. It was my favorite part of the show. It was amazing, and we jammed so many calls in there. And I estimate that we probably took didn't air them all, obviously, but we probably took about 20,000 calls over the course of my six years there, and again, it was just my favorite part. Like I would love to do that once a week for an hour or two, and I think it would be really cool. I always wanted to have a national show, and I think with the way that the industry has gone, again for better or worse, that environment or that scenario, I think, has never been more possible for me. And the reality is, I think I could bring some people to radio show because of my presence online and the fact that you can integrate so easily. I mean, that's essentially what we're doing now, right? You have a video element to it. You've got you've got people that are live texting. You've got people. Here's my commitment to the bit. I have a working fax machine beside me, and you could text a number or text a number. You could fax the number. You could fax the number right now, and it would spit like if go on a free fax website or whatever, and it would spit out a fax over here. And we work with a lot of healthcare companies, and they communicate with fax machines, but the way, the ease with which we can communicate with people now-that's amazing-and the difficulty lays in, as it has forever, cutting through the clutter because we've never had more choice. And so, as much as that can be great from a consumer perspective, there's also still like there's a lot of crap, and the cream always rises to the top, and I just think that that would be such a cool idea. I'd love to host it with my wife. We hosted about 70 episodes, 75 episodes of a podcast called Playing House, which we turned into a book behind me from Simon and Schuster Canada and Postal Press. You could read that. Comes out december 8. Pre-orders now, and that's been really cool as well. So the

Matt Cundill  17:48  
link is in the show notes, by the way.

Kolter Bouchard  17:50  
Link is in the show. Link in bio. I'm gonna tattoo it across my forehead. Fax me, and I'll fax you back a couple pages.

Matt Cundill  17:56  
This thing we're doing right now is actually gonna go everywhere media goes, including television, but it's just not going to go to radio. And this is kind of where I think radio is right now. It's it's off and it's over there and it's on an island and I can listen to it and it's live and now. But it's not the content that is created on radio now doesn't necessarily make it into other places. It's sometimes just use it once. That

Kolter Bouchard  18:21  
is, is it the infrastructure and all? Because a lot of studios have, they look amazing, man. They've got cameras, they got lights.

Matt Cundill  18:28  
Yeah, well, you know, a lot of the big markets they do, and the bigger budget shows, they do.

Kolter Bouchard  18:32  
Sure,

Matt Cundill  18:33  
but there are 1000s of radio stations across North America that you know the break is going to go once, and and that's it. Because if you want to add on to it, it you know you're going to have people who are going to be overwhelmed.

Kolter Bouchard  18:44  
Sure,

Matt Cundill  18:44  
I think the biggest problem radio has is because this happened to me a lot. Introduce a new toy to the budget, and well, we don't here see the ROI on that, so we're going to cut that.

Kolter Bouchard  18:56  
The shareholders have questions.

Matt Cundill  18:58  
I think the mistake that gets made is that you think the return on creating, you know, let's say digital content or clips or you know being a part of Facebook or like doing an additional live is that well, there's no direct money to it. We don't have any coming in, but it doesn't have to be money. It can be marketing. So a podcast is largely, especially the ones you work with, it's a form of marketing, and so you know, let's not look at it as some sort of item that you know has to have ads to make money. It's a piece of marketing that gets our name out there that somebody is going to engage with for 3060, minutes, whatever it is. And in short form, it could be 30 seconds, but they know we exist.

Kolter Bouchard  19:37  
Two points on that. So number one, playing house, the podcast my wife and I did 7075 episodes. We never made $1 of direct advertising income from that. That was always a way for us to for brands to see us, and we got a ton of work out of that from the brand partnership side, and also from the you know like I said we. Run a creative agency. We got four employees. We like we're very blessed and lucky to have a lot of work. I keep saying blessed. I'm not religious. I don't know. It's just one of those things that slips in there. We're very fortunate to have a lot of work, and that podcast made so many things possible for us. The other point is, I think there's still fear from a lot of broadcasters that, well, I don't want I don't want this to become a runaway train. I don't want this show to be able to find footing outside the infrastructure of this station because that's the value we as the station provide. We radio stations aren't providing inherently better content than any other medium or or you know one station versus the other. The infrastructure is you're able to people can press a button and they have you immediately, right? And the choice is limited. You know, in in Toronto, you probably got two dozen, two and a half dozen FM stations that you can pick up in the GTA, and online, you know, you're competing against a billion other people on TikTok, and so to be able to press a button, it's in your car, and also it's built into people's schedules. Whereas digital content, you can you can consume that any time. To be able to build a relationship like that with an audience, and I was at the edge for six years, and super super lucky and fortunate and grateful for that. I became part of people's routines, and they became part of my routine as well. You'd have the people that would call in over and over again, your regulars, your P ones, and it's disheartening to see that there isn't that buy-in or support from broadcasters because they haven't figured out how to directly monetize it. And I get it; it takes resources to put these things together. These studios are expensive. You're down to a couple of shows in a building, maybe, but I would love to see a greater emphasis on building, building a brand, building a show's brand versus we need to make sure that this quarter hour is 7% higher CUM than it was last week. Those things are still important. You're still ultimately selling radio spots, air spots. But also, what about digital integration? And some stations are really good at that. Something that was really frustrating for me at the end of my time with Chorus Entertainment, and this isn't just Chorus. I talk to people from any of the other broadcasters. It's the same thing. I remember asking a salesperson, "So when are you going to like? I've got good numbers online. I am approached by brands. Is this something you're going to start selling? And it just wasn't, and this is two and a half years ago, which is an eternity in media. But it just wasn't of really interest to anybody. It seemed, and I get it. It's a whole new skill set to learn, and it's a whole new set of contacts to learn. And also, how do you commission that properly? What what percentage of that goes to the talent? And it's another way. And this is going to sound cynical, and perhaps it is, but it's my lived experience. It's there's a lot of power in saying to an announcer, you have to run all your endorsements through us, because we're the reason you have an audience. Now you can look at people's numbers and go like, well, obviously that's not the case. You don't have, you know, an announcer that has a million. Chris Biggs has 1.3 million followers.

Kolter Bouchard  22:59  
I don't think Ottawa has 1.3 million people in it, and even if they do, that's obviously not just from radio. He has an excellent podcast. That's an example of a guy that that loves the craft and is expanding it beyond "quote unquote" just as if a major market morning show is is a just anything. But that's a great example of taking a brand and building it beyond the barriers of your six to 10 slot.

Matt Cundill  23:25  
There's a massive amount of discomfort, I think, in promoting the talent because you know what if they do get big, they're also using their own social media channels to

Kolter Bouchard  23:35  
sure

Matt Cundill  23:35  
you know to push that out. So who owns that? Well, and are we renting that from you? Is that out of your paycheck? And are you allowed to start a podcast? And if you do a podcast on while you're employed here, does that become our property? I mean, these are serious conversations that I've had with people.

Kolter Bouchard  23:54  
Well, and you did an interview years and years ago, and I forget the name of the show, but they owned the content and then licensed it to a couple of stations.

Matt Cundill  24:03  
Oh, on my show,

Kolter Bouchard  24:04  
yes,

Matt Cundill  24:05  
that's the Bob and Sherry show.

Kolter Bouchard  24:06  
Yes, that's it. And I remember listening to that at the time, thinking like, "That's such a cool model. And if you can convince a station to do it, you know, all the better to you. I wonder if that's actually going to become more and more common as we move forward, and as you don't necessarily you need you don't need a transmitter in order to hit all of these people. You can have a show that's going to have you could have me down here on this set licensing this content to a bunch of stations, you know, locally, nationally, internationally, whatever, and then they can sell spots against it. Or you can rent time maybe from a broadcaster, like essentially, like a like an infomercial in a sense, and then I could sell ads against it if that's what I wanted to do.

Matt Cundill  24:45  
You know, I've got three episodes, actually four episodes, dedicated to that particular show. Sherry Lynch has been on twice, but Tony Garcia, who has had years of you know working syndication, came on the show to talk about how he you know. About syndication in America, and by the way, if you do have a show, Tony Garcia is a great person to to reach out to to say, would this be a possibility? And we had we had Heather, who was their digital person, come on the show, and that was the first hire that they made, and she's been doing all the digital for the Bob and Cherry show, since

Kolter Bouchard  25:22  
yeah, our first hire as well was someone to help us with, and it feels wild to say we got a social person. It's like your job is primarily social. Her name's Chanil. She was our very first employee, very first full-time employee. She's been with us for coming out upon two years now, and has been instrumental in. I mean, every aspect of this, whether it's liaising with brands, my wife has talent manager. I've had, I've sampled with a couple of different talent managers over the years. Someone to help us, even even something as granular as we need these videos captioned, or I need you to pull some content, or we need some photos, or whatever. And it's been really great to train her up and to see her passion for this particular industry, which started off strong, really explode. And I've learned so much from her as well. And this isn't like business advice for anybody. This is obviously a very niche industry. But if you are fortunate enough, as we have been, to hire even one employee, Focus on focus on the things that are the highest ROI for you. You were mentioning ROI a minute ago. You know, shareholders and and well, this digital product isn't making money for us immediately. The most expensive thing, obviously, is time. And so, if I can focus on writing more content, if I can focus on closing more deals, if I can focus on whatever it is that only I can do, she can focus on things that either the whole team can, or things that increasingly are things that only Chanel can focus on.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  26:51  
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Matt Cundill  27:24  
I feel lucky because I was there when you were just getting started.

Kolter Bouchard  27:27  
Yeah, yeah, at the podcast conference in Toronto a couple of years ago. Yeah, it was

Matt Cundill  27:31  
just before Radio Days. It was the podcast power up.

Kolter Bouchard  27:33  
Yes,

Matt Cundill  27:34  
we spent the afternoon together and we listened to podcast people. Some pretty famous podcast people too.

Kolter Bouchard  27:39  
That was really cool.

Matt Cundill  27:40  
You know, you came loaded with so many questions. So, tell me why you started this agency, what it's all about, and how it's gone in I think two and a half years since you started.

Kolter Bouchard  27:52  
I wanted to milk a few bucks out of cancer. I think is ultimately what it came down to. As as a cancer survivor, and I jokingly call it this, but I'm also serious. It's a survivor's tax. Five years today in remission, and we have been fortunate enough that land some really great clients, some really great partners. Canadian Blood Services, we've helped them register item stem cell transplant. We've helped them register at this point 10s of 1000s of new stem cell donors across the country, which is amazing. And that, funnily enough, I get recognized a few times a day when I go out. That across the board is the most common thing I get recognized for. I saw your stem cell ads and I registered to donate, or I couldn't. I'm ineligible, but I got my whole family to register, and that is it. That's so heartening. The fact that someone there's a usually about 1000 Canadians that have either chronic illness or cancer or some sort of malignancy that need a stem cell donor. So blood.ca/stem cells. Please go there now. Buy the book first, and then register to donate stem cells. And then Lake Ridge Health Foundation in Oshawa. Lakeridge Health is where I had most of my local treatment. And then the Transplanter Princess Margaret. We also work with Ministry of Tourism, with OLG, and then on the brand partnership side, McDonald's Canada. That's always been a dream partner of mine. And so, our team of six handles the brand side, my account, my wife's account, or accounts rather, and then the same team handles the production, marketing, and creative work that we do for all of our partners, and it's been really cool to grow those things because, especially in the very early days when we first incorporated, maybe you were only making money from one side, and so we made a conscious decision from the get go. I never wanted to rent equipment. It's it's expensive to rent it. You've you rent it a couple of times. You've essentially bought it at that point anyway, and then the time suck of having to go and pick it up. And we were like extra lean at that point. Maybe I was able to hire a freelancer to help out on a job. I don't have time to go back and forth. So we have a couple of big brand partnerships that come in. I'm able then to buy the equipment we need for our first like big. Job, which we made no, we broke even on that one because we had to. We've spent all the money buying the stuff, but then as we've grown the company and we take on more work, and we're very fortunate to be able to do that, we are still charging a rental fee for equipment, as any business would. But we're paying it to ourselves, and we're finally at the point, have been for a while, where we are now generating money off of that equipment as well, so that becomes a revenue source. We don't rent it to other people for outside productions, but it's stuff like that. And for every good thing that we've done, there's 10 mistakes that we've made, and I'm not going to spend any time advertising those. But it's been really cool to be able to do this. And I remember that that day that you and I met for the first time, Matt, and you and I were talking about basically what we thought it was going to look like a couple of years from now were podcasts, like an hour long podcast. Were we going to see more? Were we going to see broadcasting start to go back to like block programming and and community radio and campus radio has always been great at that, and so I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. Where do you think? Where do you think the two? We see a lot of podcasts of radio shows; they'll take the best bits and whatever. Do you see in the future more of the inverse, more hour-long podcasts or half-hour, whatever, coming to terrestrial media,

Matt Cundill  31:22  
so I've been saying this for years that there's too much music on radio, and there's data, especially CanCon.

Kolter Bouchard  31:28  
Nobody hates CanCon more than this guy,

Matt Cundill  31:30  
me or you?

Kolter Bouchard  31:32  
You. Nobody hates CanCon more. You're like lower the rates. We should have negative CanCon.

Matt Cundill  31:37  
There should be no CanCon. If you wanted to level, all I've heard about is we got to level the playing field. The way to level the playing field is to remove the CanCon. We need to stop this idea of forcing equality through outcome.

Kolter Bouchard  31:52  
Old man shakes fist at cloud.

Matt Cundill  31:54  
But if you you can't regulate the outcome and still have an even playing field between Spotify and the stations, so don't equality can come in so many different ways, and the music Canadian music can be helped in so many different ways. So maybe it could be on a credit system, and these have all been suggested on previous episodes. I think Steve Jones had a number of great ideas, and we came up with a few, but we never talk about this. We're always trying to force equality of outcome, and if you want to know why nothing has changed, it's because you can't do it. It's never going to be correct,

Kolter Bouchard  32:28  
and maybe people just really like programming street heart. Matt, you don't know,

Matt Cundill  32:31  
you know.

Kolter Bouchard  32:34  
Anybody who works in classic rock just cringed.

Matt Cundill  32:37  
Kenny Shields, God rest his soul, he came to he came to my son's bar mitzvah, you know, it was in Winnipeg, and and he dropped by.

Kolter Bouchard  32:44  
Sure, yeah, Mazel,

Matt Cundill  32:46  
and all those Winnipeg groups from the 70s, you know. But you're not helping radio by playing, you know, these 40 year old songs over and over and over again.

Kolter Bouchard  32:55  
Well, and that's that's the point where well, I agree with you there that oftentimes CanCon is performative because you're playing the same stuff. And listen, if you're a gold station or a classic station, like that's what you're going to play. I get it, but I would imagine that a lot more of the can con you're hearing is recurrent versus. And listen, there are some there are some Canadians that are producing songs that are in power current or whatever your station or broadcasting company calls it, but oftentimes those are folks that have broken through into the United States, which is a tale as old as time. 70% of my audience is American; less than 10% is Canadian. I have more people. I have a bigger share of my audience lives in the UK than it does in Canada. And like, obviously, yes, this is an internet. Like, this has no borders. These are bigger countries. And

Matt Cundill  33:39  
so, are we trying to create an ecosystem because podcasting goes through this as well of of shows for Canadians by Canadians, or do you want to have something that is exportable to the rest of the world? Because those are two different planets.

Kolter Bouchard  33:54  
Not necessarily, Matt. Everyone's favorite show this year, Heated Rivalry. That's a great example. Super Canadian, and everybody loved it, but it's exported well, and that's a very fair point. Listen, when it comes to Anna Green Gables, there's only one show that I'm watching, and it Road to Avonlea. But there's a new version of it, and with an E, and I think that that's doing very well internationally as well. And that's an example of a Canadian story, I think, for a Canadian audience that's also doing well worldwide. So I guess that's the question when it comes to content. And for instance, I, I, people are surprised, and I have the little maple leaf in my bio on TikTok, Instagram, wherever. But people are still surprised when they find out that I'm Canadian, or like you live here, like are you visiting? It's like, no, I, I, I'm at the Oshawa Mall because I live in Oshawa. So like, that's just that's a quick walkover for me. I'm visiting from my house, yeah, technically, but maybe that's maybe that's me telling on myself that I'm not making Canadian content for Canadians, and that's not necessarily why my con. I think my. And it's relatable, and it's mostly talking about my smoke show, super funny, smart, kind wife. I think people find that really relatable, and that's what they like. Were I to to broadcast more the fact that I was Canadian, I don't. Would that have a measurable effect? I

Matt Cundill  35:15  
don't think it matters. And I, since day one on this show, I've made sure that this show is serves Americans and Canadians equally because they've got some pretty good ideas about radio, and Canadians have some pretty good ideas about radio. And I wanted to make sure that both countries heard them. Sure. Back to your question though about the content. I was just driving out of Winnipeg today, five in the afternoon, and I'm flipping the dial, and I either hear a commercial or I hear a song, and I'm not here for that. I want to hear a personality. I want to hear talk, and there's not a lot of that going on. If you want to play less CanCon, by the way, talk more.

Kolter Bouchard  35:53  
I mean, listen, tell that to the tell that to the programmers. Put this on their feed, not mine. I'm completely there with you. Announcers have been trained over and over and over again, unless you're in a talk format, and they're still playing a little bit of music to time out the hour, especially for network shows, and they need to make sure the stop sets are playing at the appropriate times. But everyone's been trained like you get in, you get out, one break, one thought, it's 45 seconds, 6090, whatever it is, and then like you're out of there, and so I would love to see a reversal of that, where we're encouraging people to have longer conversations. Because you say you mentioned Spotify a moment ago. Radio is not just in competition with itself; it's not the old station wars of whatever. And and I started in the industry in 2013 and left it in 2024. And even when I started in 2013, it was like at that point it was no longer a station war thing. You were in competition with with everything. You're in competition as a radio station. You're in competition with Netflix, with Spotify, with going outside, with pharmaceutical, recreational. Like you're you're any kind of drug, any kind of anything. You're in competition with it all, and I've been told this by many a program director. You need to be the out is when you are no longer more interesting than the next element. Well, okay, how are you being more interesting than any other medium? And again, for posterity, I am a huge, huge, huge champion of radio. I think it's such a powerful medium. I listen to radio every day. I got a radio behind me, and I would just love to see more of an embracing of that. But as people, as we see fewer and fewer jobs even available, people are spread thinner. You're doing maybe your your voice tracking for a bunch of markets while you're live in one market or many markets, and you've got another thing you've got to do, and you're also a promo coordinator now, and you're doing this and you're doing that. People are spread thin, right? It's it's. I'd love to see, I'd love to see more dollars in the industry. I'd also love to see those dollars in the industry spent more appropriately, and maybe we don't need to necessarily buy a sports team, right? Or maybe we buy a cheaper sports team, so that we don't have to fire like 300 people. That'd be nice. I

Matt Cundill  38:03  
think the radio stations that are doing the best right now are the ones who are waking up every day, thinking and doing radio every day, and not trying to you know move cell phones or cable subscriptions

Kolter Bouchard  38:13  
because you're not going to. But you can live in concert. Pardon the pun. You can live in concert with these, and that's this doom and gloom for years about like radios dying, and yeah, the the the shrink percentage is you know it's always always like two to 3% a year post I think 2010, and then COVID precipitated that obviously, and it's still losing market share. But like, what are you doing? What are you doing to attract people? What are you doing to attract younger people? And that's that's a question. If you could fax me, please let me know.

Matt Cundill  38:45  
Well, you have to go. You have to go where the audience is.

Kolter Bouchard  38:48  
Sure,

Matt Cundill  38:48  
that audience is on YouTube. Listen, I did not want to be on video. I was perfectly fine in my basement, in the middle of Winnipeg, recording audio. No

Kolter Bouchard  38:59  
shirt. Sometimes even the glasses come off. That's when you know it's spicing up.

Matt Cundill  39:04  
I was totally fine with that, and then you see the data, and it came actually from Jeff Fidler, who put together that that conference where we went to. He was working at Signal Hill, and it's like, yeah, these young kids, the Gen Zs, they're all getting their podcasts from from YouTube, and I go,

Kolter Bouchard  39:18  
sure.

Matt Cundill  39:18  
Well, but an RSS feed is not on YouTube, and my show's not on YouTube, and there's no podcast on YouTube. So be it. Went out, bought a camera. I clearly did not buy anything to make me look better.

Kolter Bouchard  39:28  
I put it. Listen, I put a lens filter on my camera.

Matt Cundill  39:30  
I should probably do that.

Kolter Bouchard  39:31  
I'll mail you one.

Matt Cundill  39:33  
You know this podcast. Now I get it. Okay, I want Gen Z to pay attention to this stuff, and so I make sure that this video is on YouTube, it is on Apple Podcast Video, it is on iHeart Video, and it is on Amazon Music Video. As of now, in the U.S.

Kolter Bouchard  39:51  
because you need to meet people where they are, right?

Matt Cundill  39:54  
You got to put. You got to be everywhere, man.

Kolter Bouchard  39:55  
100%

Matt Cundill  39:56  
You got to be everywhere. You can't just pick and choose. I'll never forget. It was you know Rob Farina was on stage at at Radio Days in I think 2018 2019, and they're arguing with the people from Radio Player Canada over what station goes on what app. No, you should be on our app. No, you should be on our app. And I'm like, what is this? You guys don't get it. But it's the

Kolter Bouchard  40:16  
classic Canadian crap in the buckets story, right?

Matt Cundill  40:19  
Yeah.

Kolter Bouchard  40:19  
Well, instead of all of us having one app and just making sure that people are listening to radio, let's have two, and we'll make them both kind of crappy. And then there's going to be a third, even crappier one, and then eventually they're going to consolidate because that's what ends up happening anyway. Hashtag serious satellite radio or Sirius XM radio. It's this. Well, let's squeeze the last few dollars we can out of this because this generation of decision makers. We're retiring in a couple years anyway. Like we don't care. And hashtag not all radio programmers, but hashtag a lot of radio programmers have this attitude. Like that the the salesperson I talked to, where I'm like, why aren't you selling digital? Well, I'm gonna I'm retiring in a couple years anyway. And like I appreciate the honesty. Thanks for the candor.

Matt Cundill  41:01  
Yeah, the running out the clock people,

Kolter Bouchard  41:02  
and now we see people, and you know, there's going to be another mass layoff at another company. If it wasn't, if it was Rogers last time, it'll be Bell next time. It'll be you know, insert station here next time, and it's it's just so frustrating because we see another couple of 100 really talented broadcasters that are all fighting for fewer and fewer remaining jobs because this industry, and I love this industry. I don't like a lot of the decisions that are being made in this industry because it's it's the shortest term quarterly gain at the at the mortgaging of the careers of hundreds and 1000s of people. My nephew is 18. He's starting college in the fall, and he's doing a media program. And I have heard from him. He goes, "People go like, well, why would you do media? You know, it's a dying industry. It's it's an evolving industry, just like any industry is evolving. Farming has been evolving. Every industry is evolving, and you are being expected to do more with less. However, the barrier to entry is much lower than it used to be. Like to have all of the equipment, and we have a couple of $100,000 in filmmaking equipment, but to be able to have all this stuff 20 or 30 years ago would have been probably a million dollars, and you'd need a separate warehouse for all of it. Like we were able to create this fake living room, like this is a fake window. We used LED panels, and like yeah, we have 1000s of dollars of of lights on this set, but the barrier to entry is just so much lower than it used to be, and so we have the ability to create so much more. And I think the difficulty lays in creating intentionally because it's been drilled into our heads over and over again, you got to be consistent, consistent, consistent. And people have taken that as yes, you need to post frequently, you need to post consistently, but the quality needs to be there as well. I'll admit there have been times where I'm tied up with something, and we have batch recorded a bunch of social content, and we're posting every single day, twice a day, sometimes, and I go. The engagement we got in the last couple of weeks, where I wasn't creating anything purposeful that day, the engagement sucked this week, you know. But like I posted consistently, but the quality wasn't there consistently. And then when I when I'm able to put some time into that and focus on being present and mindful and actually giving my audience what it's telling me it wants-that's when I see engagement skyrocket. But I'm also like, we have a private corporation, and I don't have shareholders or or anything like that that I'm accountable to. And that's not the reality for most people. Like we can begrudge the fact that the industry works like this, but it's expensive. It's expensive to run these companies, and it's expensive to change the way that these companies work.

Matt Cundill  43:46  
Yeah, and radio is in like the ultimate shitstorm right now. So I know we've come down hard on it on a few spots, but but

Kolter Bouchard  43:52  
all is not lost.

Matt Cundill  43:53  
No, of course not. But like the CRTC not doing anything for the last 30 years, 2530, years.

Kolter Bouchard  43:58  
Yeah. Well, didn't they take like a two year vacation or something-they're like, we're just gonna we're gonna nap for a bit. What are you talking about?

Matt Cundill  44:05  
It's incredible, and they get more money every year. I think the budget's now about $120 million for 600 employees. I don't know what goes on there. I don't think are they

Kolter Bouchard  44:14  
hiring. I'm gonna. Are they advertising a milkman?

Matt Cundill  44:17  
There's the C 18. You know they passed legislation. This is where Facebook decided that they weren't going to be allowing news outlets to post any news anymore, right?

Kolter Bouchard  44:30  
Yes, that's crazy. You can be posting Toronto news from Toronto, and unless you're in Amherst, which, like my condolences,

Matt Cundill  44:38  
home of Ronald Gronkowski. That's right,

Kolter Bouchard  44:40  
the Gronk.

Matt Cundill  44:41  
So that leads me, by the way, to your Facebook story because I thought Bill C 18 was a pain in the ass. But the story that you told about you being a content creator, first of all, why can't Canadian content creators monetize with Meta?

Kolter Bouchard  44:56  
I don't know. With Meta, you can. As far as I know, it's only on Facebook. You can accept like creator gifts and stuff like that, but like that whole thing is super cringe. Especially when people are giving gifts on live streams to like celebrity. Like, what are you doing? Why? Why, as a content creator, are you accepting that? Anyway, the reality is you can't make any money off TikTok. YouTube has like you know you make money on YouTube and you've been able to. I think they were one of the first social media platforms that introduced monetization, but Facebook was like this rare little gem in the. I was going to say the the desert here in the media landscape, but it's Canada, so the Arctic desert, and I've been able to monetize every other aspect of it. Facebook is my smallest platform. I think I've got about 200. It sounds like a flex. It's not. I want to give context. Maybe it's a bit of a flex. 200,000 followers on there, and I'm getting like millions and millions of views a month. And my wife has been able to get her account, which is smaller, monetized. And we've seen the checks that have come in, and they're amazing. And so I'm not able to monetize for some reason. You have to be invited to a program, but then you sit in like limbo forever, and you can't get a hold of anybody who works at the company. And it's big, and I get it. And nobody owes me anything. I'm a user of their service. They don't don't owe me anything. And I have people that are scraping my content, so saving the video, like downloading the video, and then reposting it on their own accounts, and they're able to monetize in some situations the content that they've stolen from me that I report and it doesn't get taken down, and I sound like such a whiny, entitled influencer, and I get it, but it's frustrating. It's it's it's and again, it feels so wild to say this is intellectual property theft when I'm like, it's a thirst trap of me in my bathing suit or my wife and I doing whatever or making a silly video. But it's frustrating that you can't get this stuff taken down. I myself can't monetize it, and then I'm seeing other people that are in some situations being able to make money off of it, and you want to scream.

Matt Cundill  47:03  
The question is, once you upload it, is it your stuff anymore? Who owns it? And you know that's probably written in the terms and service. You know, and YouTube's another one. They can move the bar at any time,

Kolter Bouchard  47:14  
and they are. I think in February of next year, there's the the threshold is higher.

Matt Cundill  47:18  
Yeah, so you're going to need to monetize. You're going to need 1000 subscribers plus 8000 watch hours, which is up from 4000, and 20 million shorts views up from 10. A lot, you know. So some people who have been living around that line for a long time, they're not going to be getting a check anymore.

Kolter Bouchard  47:35  
When you have one super yacht, Matt, it just begs for another, right? Like, and and then you need gas for the super yachts. Come on, and then these these pesky protesters, right? They start protesting the yacht, and then you got to get more security for the yacht.

Matt Cundill  47:49  
And I'd like to remind everybody: please stop calling government and asking them to regulate them, because every time they we drop a C 18 or a C11 and try to get these companies to bend to Canadian culture, inevitably, what happens is exactly what I said. What happens? They're just going to wind up slapping a tax on. If you can't figure out who's going to be paying for this, it's going to be us. If Netflix is, let's-I'll just use Netflix as an example. If Netflix is going to be forced to pay X amount of dollars into a Canadian creator fund, who do you think is going to pay for that. They're just going to add that onto our bill. I asked a conservative investor. Verb the noun. Why do you call? Why do you call it a Netflix tax? And says, "Well,

Kolter Bouchard  48:28  
people understand it. It's like the death tax, you know, the estate, the inheritance tax, or the estate tax in the United States. There's a great movie, Vice, with oh God, Christian Bale, and he plays Dick Cheney, and as he does in every film, complete transformation. But they, there's a great clip of basically like workshopping the term. I'm pretty sure it's Vice. It might be the Big Short, but I'm pretty sure it's Vice. And it's coming up with something that it's controlling the narrative at the end of the day. It's taking a very big idea and making it small so we can hold it in our hands. And we all do that every day.

Matt Cundill  49:01  
One more point I want to make about YouTube, and we were talking about how do we get Gen Z to engage with radio. I'm not saying this is a solution by any stretch, but this is the importance of having a YouTube channel. You can get to that 1000 subscribers by noon, and who wouldn't want to be part of the second largest search engine in the world,

Kolter Bouchard  49:22  
100%

Matt Cundill  49:23  
Could you imagine if somebody had said to me, "Do you think we should be, you know, have a website and maybe get involved with Google? No, no, no, we're not doing that. Like, there's no planet where that would happen.

Kolter Bouchard  49:35  
Oh, listen, I couldn't agree with you more. And when you talk about creating digital content and a way to monetize it. This is something I've been advocating for for years. If you have broadcasters that have salespeople, and I think more of them are selling digital, or they're selling digital value add-on packages, or whatever. But if you want a really hyper engaged audience and you want to really niche down, then. A show like a like an extended podcast or whatever you want to call it that you can either put behind a Patreon link and maybe you want to don't want to do that and I also don't know what the the legality is around that because it's a the broadcasters although they're private corporations there is we the public on the lines but also it's not recorded for broadcast I don't know somebody smarter than me, a Ryerson graduate, can figure that one out. It's

Matt Cundill  50:24  
not called Ryerson anymore.

Kolter Bouchard  50:25  
Listen, I always joke that it's a school so bad they had to change the name. That's actually being quite glib about a very tragic reason why the school was named that. Anyway, these shows you could also have a sponsor that maybe is funding some of this, like you know, whether it's behind a paywall or not, content where you've got maybe 5% of your listening audience or 1% of your listening audience from broadcast is listening to a podcast. You have those are like your your super P ones, right? Those people will be with you through thick and thin, and those are the people that are also supporting sponsors. Those are the people that are going to buy the things that you're trying to sell them.

Matt Cundill  51:04  
For anybody who was in your position when you were at you know Edge doing an afternoon show, they're on the air now.

Kolter Bouchard  51:11  
Make them pay you to leave. That's what I'd say. I had six years of seniority saved up. I should have made them pay me to walk out the door.

Matt Cundill  51:18  
Give a piece of advice. What can you tell somebody in radio about what you've learned that you would take back to to the edge if you went there tomorrow.

Kolter Bouchard  51:25  
I had a great conversation with Drax, who now does Afternoon Drive on the Edge, which is the show that I had for six years, and we had a really great conversation. And I wish that I had his point of view, because his point of view, according to him, was that if he ever got fired from the industry, and of course he did rather famously from a station in British Columbia, a very funny story, or not? I don't want to get canceled. the The point of view he had was like this could all I could lose this tomorrow, and I'll still be okay. Like I'll still get a job somewhere. My point of view was if I don't have this, I will swallow a gun if I don't have radio, and I was fired. I got fired from that show in Dubai. If I don't have this, like, then what's my identity? Who am I? And I think if I was only doing, if I was only working on content creation for my personal brand right now, I would probably have a similar outlook. But because the majority, 70% of our income comes from you know production and marketing and creative work we're doing for clients, where I'm primarily behind the camera. I I think that that certainly affords me the luxury of not going, man. If I lose this, like who am I? What am I going to do? I would say like get a hobby that is not at all like touch grass sometimes, get a hobby that is in no way related to this, and also recognize that in the same way that if you were big, if you had a million followers, but you only had one platform, what happens if you get a couple of community violations or you're flagged or you're deplatformed? What do you have? And that was me, I guess two years ago, at the beginning of 2024, I had half a million TikTok followers, which I think was impressive at the time, and I was happy with that. And I had like 8000 Instagram followers, and then I had my account suspended for 24 hours, and I'm like, shoot, what's going to happen here? And so then made a concerted effort to grow Instagram as well, and then to grow Facebook, and we're we're working on Snapchat, but you also that's the thing. You also have to like it's got to be pencils down at some point. I have worked 7080 hour weeks for the majority of last two and a half years, and it's a different kind of stress, and it's a stress that I'm more in control of. And although I don't have a program director, I still have a boss, and the boss is the mortgage company, the boss has our clients, and I'm very fortunate that I'm very fortunate that I'm able to walk into a sales meeting and maybe someone someone has probably seen my content and feels like they've got a they've got a parasocial relationship with me and they feel like they know me a little bit better and so that's a leg up that I have that not everybody has. My piece of advice would be: work as much as you can on if this is what you want on growing your brand. Because if you lose, if you've got like a five-legged stool and one of the legs comes out, your broadcaster fires you. You get deplatformed. One of these things gets shut down. I don't know. Then at least you've got four other legs, and you can build up the other one. It's like we have, and I always get very weird looks, understandably, when I say this. We have a server that has 100 terabytes of capacity, and I am probably on a lot of lists because of the amount of hard drives that we've bought. Not anymore, because they're so expensive, but we have redundancies. We have a server, and it has eight. It's a network attached storage. It has eight drives. Two of them are redundant. We could lose two drives, and it gives you enough time to like turn it off, put in two new drives, and then it'll back up the data again. That automatically gets backed up to another NAS offsite, and then we archive it on. It's called LTO. It's like tape.

Kolter Bouchard  54:59  
Magnetic tape, but it's the same thing with your career. If if you lose one of these legs, especially with an ever diminishing number of available positions and an increasing amount of work and less time and less less time to do other things and also less money to spend doing them, like it's tough. And so try to work as much as you can on you, and that's and also like don't get jaded. Try not to have try to avoid being cynical because it's also easy to bathe in cynicism and go, oh, these guys are the worst, and they're going to take everything away, and then I'll have nothing. Work your ass off and try to try to ultimately figure out what it is you even want, and then like send me a DM if you want. Email me. I don't have all the answers, but I can give you some of the tips that I've learned over the years, and I can more importantly, I think, show you some of the mistakes that I've made over the years and advise you on avoiding those.

Matt Cundill  55:49  
I think the best one there is: don't build your media empire on rented ground.

Kolter Bouchard  55:54  
100%

Matt Cundill  55:54  
You should have a website with your name on it. My case, it was mattundill.com. I got let go. I didn't have that. Shame on me for not having that. I got one a couple days later, and if you're going to do a podcast, make sure there's an RSS feed. Absolutely, I know a lot of people, especially the Gen Zs, are like, "Oh, I'll just put it up on YouTube, or I'll just you know put it here and Spotify. I'm like, "Well, where's why aren't you everywhere? You're not on Apple. Like you've got to go everywhere with this stuff, and an RSS feed and a website are really good because you can't be deplatformed.

Kolter Bouchard  56:26  
And also try to own an email list if you can. Now it's that's not necessarily salient advice when you're a broadcaster. Like, give me your email or whatever, and don't steal people's texts or their phone numbers from the SMS tool or whatever. That's going to get you fired pretty quickly, but whatever-if you can own a piece of your brand, that's great. Obviously, if you can have a constant stream of content where, when people outside of your radio area, your market discover you online again, completely aside from your work as a broadcaster, that's a way that you can, and it's still rented ground to your point, but it's a way that you can at least have a little bit more security, if security even exists. Security in this sense, that you've got more and more touch points with people, and also like take a minute and and really decide what it is you want. What I wanted when I started my career is not necessarily what I want now, I didn't think that what I do now was was even necessarily like a job. And I pay my mortgage doing this, which is really cool. I started a company with my wife. We have employees. Like all of these things are really cool. I I wrote a book. Like I've survived cancer. We've been able to travel. I got to travel to Sri Lanka for work this year, and I got to travel to. I've never been to California. I got to shoot the desert for Groupon. They sent me out there, and I got and I shoot medium format film. And they were like, "We love the look of that. Can you take that out to the desert? And I'm like, "Oh, cool. Well, it's going to be like 1200 bucks for the film alone, and then we got to process it. But like, I feel really, really grateful that I'm able to to do these to pitch cool ideas and get people to give me money to do them sometimes, and that was a frustration with the limited budgets. And let's live in reality, right? The limited budgets, often of radio broadcasting in general, is that you'd go, "I have this idea, or like, "I want to, I want to publish video content from the show. Okay, well, like if you want to pay for it and do it, like no problem. We'll give you the permission to do it, I guess. But if you wanted to do something like, hey, I want to go and I want to rent a car and drive through the desert and I want to take a film camera, which is the least practical thing in 2026, because you have to avoid getting the film X-ray and and it's you're getting sand everywhere. And same thing with Sri Lanka, like we pitch that as we want to go and we want to photograph all of these amazing things, and we brought our daughter along with us, my wife and I. That was really cool, and it's been amazing for me to feel confident for the first time in my life that I've got these kooky ideas. But like some of them are pretty good, and when they get backing, and when I'm able to, when I'm able to fully commit to these things, I've had some success, and that begets more success. And and I I want to be very careful about not sounding glib about this, or just like, well, pull yourself up by the bootstraps. I lucked out. My second or third video on TikTok did really well, and I was like, "This is fun! I'm going to keep doing this. And then it grew, and then I was able to sign on a brand partnership, and my wife and I were able to pick up a couple of clients. And then I've got this cancer story. Like everybody's situation is different, and comparison is the thief of joy.

Kolter Bouchard  59:38  
And I think we all know that, but I am finally understanding and living that, and I am genuinely, genuinely, genuinely happy when I see friends or people I just see online, people that I followed that are having success. I go, that's awesome, dude. That's amazing. I'm so happy for these people, as opposed to, man, like what I see. They're bringing a new announcer into the building. Like, are they coming for my job? And that's still the reality. For a lot of people, and it's frustrating. It sucks,

Matt Cundill  1:00:02  
man. I'm just so happy and proud of you. Oh,

Kolter Bouchard  1:00:04  
thanks, thanks, Dad.

Matt Cundill  1:00:05  
I'm gonna put links to all the all the stuff that you make down below, including some of the stuff that people I think should listen

Kolter Bouchard  1:00:11  
to. Oh no, I haven't vetted any of this.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  1:00:19  
Another Sound Off Media Company Podcast.