Creative Strategies for Standout Podcasting with Kevin Chung

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When you have a podcast that focuses entirely on creativity, it can be hard to think outside the box and do things that are maybe a little different or inspiring. Today, we're talking with Kevin about how he uses his podcast stand up creative to engage with creatives in a different way, and one of his most inspiring creative discussions, as well as how he's utilizing substack to create additional content around his offshoot of the podcast, where he specifically talks to authors. What I love about this conversation is that Kevin just gives so much behind the scenes of what's working, what's not, some things he's thinking about, and how you can take this episode and take even one little bit of inspiration and change how you approach your podcast in a new and different way. Please join me in welcoming Kevin to the podcast. Welcome to podcasting, unlocked the show for purpose driven podcasters.
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I'm Alesia Galati, founder of Galati media, and I'm here to share actionable strategies to help you amplify your message and grow your audience. Hello, Kevin. I'm so excited to have you on the podcast. If you could start by telling everyone who you are, what you do and a bit about your podcast.
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Hi, I'm Kevin Chung, and I do many things, but for podcasting, I have a podcast on creativity. It's called standout creatives, where I talk to creative people on how they build the businesses without burning out, how do you sustain your business? How do you grow your business? Stuff like that.
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And I started a second podcast called standout authors Unbound, and I have a sub podcast for that that's just standout authors, but the one with unbound is with authors who are part of underrepresented communities. And Alesia has given me many great recommendations. I love talking to all the people she has on her own podcast, just to give them the spotlight, because they usually don't get it. So I'm just trying to give everyone who deserves a spotlight a chance to shine, because we're all trying to just make our way through life and through creativity, I think is one of the best ways to put your effort, because most of life tells us to just follow the system, do whatever you want. So people who do any charter creative thing, is what I'm interested in,
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yeah, that's so cool. I'm curious how you use your podcast, right? Like, is it meant to be something that is like growing your network? Do you offer services to authors and creatives, and that's why you're targeting these people, just for to kind of level, set the expectation for our audience of how you're using your podcast and being strategic with it?
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Yeah, so one aspect of it is just to have interesting conversations with people I think are creative and interesting, and a lot of that is just what are my own curiosity elements of how they do their thing. And most people are not willing to do something like have a conversation with you, unless you know they have an end goal for that conversation, and I think the podcast is a beautiful way to do that, not only as a way to talk to people, to get to know what they did, but just to get to know people on a human level and see what sorts of interesting things people do and how other there are a lot of creative things you can do, but a lot of it is stuff that many people do.
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So even if you don't consider yourself a creative person, you can do many creative things, which is, I think, a side benefit for people who don't think they're creative but can benefit from the lessons that creative people. The other thing is, my audience is for creatives who want to expand the number of things that they're doing. So if they have a lot of projects they want to work on and they need help. Oh, I need help with marketing. I need help with my website. I need help working on multiple things. Just because they're creative and they have a lot of ideas they want to generate, I want to help them be able to execute on the things that they don't want to do, like the marketing stuff, a lot of creative people are opposed to the marketing aspect of it, although, yeah, that thing is like, where you can be the most creative, right? How can you take your message of the work that you do, because that's the reason you do it, and make it interesting for the people who want it? So it's not, I'm trying to sell. It's how can I do things creatively to get my thing out there and benefit the people who actually need it, versus just shelling it out to social media posting and saying, just buy it. That that's the strategy that might have worked in the early 2000s but that stopped working a long time ago.
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Yeah, that's so true creativity can it can come in all different shapes and sizes and avenues. I'm in North Carolina. And if anyone has ever been in North Carolina, in March, everything is colored yellow in pollen dust. It is, like, so bad, like, right now my allergies, like, I'm on so much Benadryl, because I'm like, Oh my God. I've been like, doing like, allergies. I dropped like the whole nine yards trying to keep my allergies from ruining my life. And I saw a video. It was a car dealership, and they were like, any car yellow gets our special discount. And the guy's, he's in all black, and he's like doing like, starfish or snow angel kind of thing going this one gets a deal. This yellow car. It was a red car.
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Like, underneath the yellow, this yellow car gets a deal this and, like, progressively through the ad. I'll link it in the show notes, because it was just so stinking funny. It's a car dealership. Usually those ads are like, come on down to Anderson and buy our Toyotas, whatever like to use that as a way to creatively have some fun with the marketing. I think was so unique and so fun. So I'm curious, from the people that you've interviewed and talked with, what are some of the ones that you're like are maybe not your typical quote, unquote creative people, where it's like they're doing something that is, yes, creative, but it's not what I guess mainstream society would classify as creative.
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This is something that I did a lot with my original podcast, which was called cracking creativity. And that podcast was to teach anyone how to be more creative. I switched a little in the last couple years. I took a long break and came back just a couple years ago, but that podcast explored the way that anyone can be extremely creative. And the story that I love to tell the most is there was a guy who I went on a trip to Japan with, and he does tours of Japan. It's a white guy. He's from Texas, and his origin story was he had heard so many great things about sushi, and people told him, Oh, you got to try sushi. It's so amazing. So the first time he tried sushi, oh, this is not good at all. But the thing is, he didn't give up on it. There's got to be a reason.
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And what he later discovered was that the particular place that he went to didn't serve sushi.
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And I think people will have a misconception at least, about the sushi with rice. The rice is actually the thing that makes the sushi what it is, versus the fish itself. So it's kind of an interesting tidbit, and he only learned that because he continued to go, and he learned more, and he became so interested in it. He learned Japanese. He started taking these crazy tours of Japan. I think it was insurance before.
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So it was a lazy story that he completely left all of that, and he essentially became this unofficial ambassador to Japan through sushi. He had hosts like sushi making events for corporations and organizations and clubs and stuff like that.
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So that's like, a supreme example of creativity. How do you take your interest, even if you didn't like that interest in the beginning, and turn it into something people aren't interested in? That's like, a super captivating story.
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Oh, that is really cool. I'm curious. I think all of us who are creating podcasts are creative in some way, in how we're creating content, but what are maybe a few ways that we can going back to your original podcast? What are some ways that we can maybe tap More into our creativity, get outside of our own this is the way I'm going to do it every single time to like, maybe spice things up in our life
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a little more. This is something that I've thought a lot about, but I haven't actually done. Alesia and I belong to the same podcasting group, the feminist podcast collective, and when I had my hot seat with the group, my idea was, how do I make things more creative, and it's really bringing something that is part of you, that you're really interested so I think the thing that came up during the conversation was improv. Since I like to do improv, what are ways that I can implement improv into my podcast episode? Can I have a through line where I do, like, maybe a couple lines with each guest and do, like an improvised scene, and they have to be good at it. It's just for fun. It gets out of your head all that stuff. But what are ways that are interesting, that you haven't interested in, that can help you relate to your guests in a way that's not just a regular conversation? This is not something I've done. I want to do it. It's just like one of those things where you have a hesitation. I think everybody has those hesitation when you're just thinking about what to do, and will my audience like it?
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It's like one of those things.
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It's so interesting and weird and brand new. Is it gonna make sense? But sometimes you could just gotta take a chance on things that might or might not work, and people will let you know if they liked it. Yeah, that's
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so true. We had a recent episode. We'll link it in the show notes. My friend Jeff, he has a live podcast, like studio, but it's not necessarily a studio, like, there's a stage and like, you can do a live podcast. He's based out of I want to say it's. Philly, and what I loved about the discussion with him was like getting outside of your typical, okay, I'm sitting in my home, I'm recording this thing. But instead of getting out of your house, going out and actually interacting with your audience in some way, engaging with your guests in a different way, and like finding little pockets to do that. Maybe that's taking your microphone to a live creative event or some type of Con and asking people questions and then compiling that right.
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There's just so many different ways that we can do something a little different that can spark creativity and spark that curiosity of what would happen if but I do think that a lot of us are hesitant to do it, because, one, it's different, and it takes usually a little more work than we typically have, and we're our goal is, I just want to be consistent right now. So anything you can do to just be consistent, that's what I'm going to do. So we don't maybe want to overdo it, because then we don't want to pod fade.
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But I think, to your point, like, even if it's something as simple as improv, or something as simple as just mixing up questions or doing different questions, or one of the recommendations I was going through, like a Gemini chat, AI thing about, like, different ways to make the podcasts we read smut more engaging. And one of the things was, like a rapid fire and like questions that you could do at the end. And I'm like, that's cool. Also, I'd have to come up with new ones for every person. I don't know if I want to do that, because I don't want to ask the same questions. Rapid fire every time. What are you reading? What was the last five star book? I guess maybe I could, now that I've said it out loud, I'm like Alesia, that's actually quite easy to do, but like something like that, where it is something different, or maybe you just do it for a season to test it out.
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There's so many different options now, you use sub stack for quite a bit of your repurposing and your content.
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You even do live videos on sub stack. Sub stack is quite a bit of a hot topic, at least in the circles that we're running in.
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Like you said, the feminist podcasters collective, yes, men are welcome. As you can tell, Kevin is a guy, everyone is welcome. If your values and your core beliefs align. It is a, honestly, one of the best podcast spaces I have ever been in, and I have been in a lot, and what Becky has created there is just, I wouldn't even say it's unique, but it's unique in the way of the value and the diversity of the levels of each of us, Right? There are people who are just starting out, and there are people that have been podcasting for 10 years in that space, and everyone gets something from it. And so I absolutely love that space. Go to feminist podcasters collective.com, we'll have it in the show notes as well to go check that out. So substack is something that we have been discussing quite a bit over there, and I know I started doing some substack stuff with we read smut. I'm at 11,000 subscribers, like email subscribers now, which is, it's very weird and strange to me how that happened, but you're using the live video component. How are you using that? Are you integrating it with your podcast? Is it just additional content? What is your thought process around using that as your Live platform?
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Yeah, so I think sub stack is great because it allows you to do so many things with it. You have not only the live but you can talk to your subscribers, and you can toggle things based on paid or free.
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You can lock or hide things based on whether somebody is a paid member. You can have co contributors to articles or anything that you're writing.
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There's like a Notes feature, which is kind of like Twitter or threads or blue sky or what have you. And all of these elements help you work in the way that you want to work. Because a lot of the downfall of certain places are you have to work within the framework. But since they build a platform where you can experiment and do a lot of different things, you're allowed to the freedom to experiment and see which one works for your particular publication. So the what I do through there is the standout authors Unbound, and I want to highlight those authors in those communities and let people ask questions for those people. So one of the things, if you have a lot of fans, this makes it a great avenue for them to come in and ask questions from your audience. So it's an additional way to get people engaged. Make the conversation more interesting. It makes it more dynamic, because you have to adapt to what people are asking or saying in the chat, and it just makes it so that your conversation feels like you're in a room with some people that are having a conversation. You want to just jump in. I have a question about that, and you can expand, and you don't have to worry about the episode to end, to take those questions. So I love the interactive element of it.
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Yeah, I'm curious how you navigate that. So my brain works quite interestingly in that if there are side discussions going on, I get really distracted by those do you take? Okay, we're gonna get through this set of questions or these few questions, then check the chat. Do you check it as it's rolling? I know everybody's brain works differently. So like, how are you navigating that? In my
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case, I watch it as the person is answering. So only if there's like, a question in there. Do I look back afterwards and know I need to say something about it, but usually I'll just let whoever is talking answer or finish whatever they were saying, and then try to jump in after that so it's not interrupting the flow of the conversation, right?
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Yeah, that definitely makes sense. Yeah.
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I've always found that interesting, of like, when people use live elements for their shows to be able to have the back and forth talking with the audience and how to best navigate that. So then, once you're finished with that episode, like, or, sorry, once you're done with that recording, what do you do with it? How are you putting it on your podcast?
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Are you chopping it up into bits and putting it on social media?
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Or how? Or is it just, hey, this is just for the substack people, and then it's behind a paid tier afterwards. How are you doing that part?
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Yeah, at the moment, what I'm doing is I'm actually bringing it into Riverside, which is where we're at right now, and I ask it for notes and quotes based on the conversation. So that way, when I'm writing the show notes, I can just pull stuff easily or modify what it gave me to just to streamline it, because otherwise I have to re watch the thing note what happened. And this just helps me do a lot faster. So that was one of the issues that I found when I was doing my original podcast way before AI was a thing. I think it was like 2017 or so. I was listening to the episode, I was writing notes, as it happened. I was typing the quotes exactly as I heard them. Re listening to the episode, and just just took way, way too much time. So that's one of the reasons coming back has been a lot easier, because I use these tools that are available to us now in order to take snippets of the conversation. Oh, which ones do I like? Which ones don't I like, and how do those things that they said apply to an audience at large versus, you know, just this conversation that we had?
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Yeah, that's definitely important. One thing I like about substack is that it's free for creators and for users, but most of the other platforms, especially when you're recording lives, you're uploading lives. You have a podcast on the back end, you have a blog on the back end, you have you can actually export your the emails of the people who have subscribed to your stuff. A lot of those tools cost money, and so what I love about substack is that it is free for creators, and is, I think, a good place for people who want to have that social aspect where the algorithm is feeding their content to people, but also have almost more of a pulse on your audience, which I think substack does a really good job of. What other things you mentioned Riverside, but what other things are in your tech stack that you're using as you're navigating podcasts as well as live components?
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For the most part, it's just sub stack and Riverside. If I add any more, I'm like, getting overwhelmed and don't want to do anything.
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So Riverside is great because I can take that same uploaded video and extract the clips, and it gives you multiple forms of clips. So you can do the shorts the I don't know, you can set the size. If you want Instagram size video, it'll give you that.
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If you want a YouTube size video, it'll give you that. If you want to tick tock video, I'll give you that. So it's it helps to, like, take any clip in your thing and turn it into whatever format it needs to be.
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And that saves so much work, because otherwise, like, how are you going to repurpose all this stuff? Especially if you don't have any experience in video editing, it's just a great way to quickly get things now, obviously, you can take the video and do whatever you want outside of platform and have a video editor do it. But if you're a solo creator and you're trying to save money and time on things you it lets you do them pretty quickly. There are a lot of elements of Riverside, and I use Captivate for hosting that they offer, and there's just so many things that have gone unexplored just because you, if you wanted to, you can spend like all day just doing podcast stuff. Yeah, but I think we all have, like, a goal bigger than podcast in mind when we're creating these shows. So what is it that I need to focus on at this point in time? But Captivate is really. Ad for anything AI related, because it can give you where to insert your ads smartly. So where does it take a break? When does it make sense to insert an ad? So if you have dynamic ads, it'll let you dump it in there. It'll create chapters for you. You can also use it to schedule guests and find guests. It's just all sorts of things. Obviously, I'm not using most of them, but if any tool that you're going to use, just know what is available and what you can actually do and not worry about everything, because if you do that, you'll just get stuck in a rabbit hole.
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Yeah, 100% I noticed recently that I use buzz proud as my hosting platform, and if you have a newer subscription with them. I've been with them for years and years, so I pay their previous pricing, but since they upgraded their pricing, pretty much anyone that I've launched in the last six months or so who uses that new pricing, the transcripts are included and where it will automatically transcribe the episode once you upload it, and when I saw that recently, I was like, I'm paying like, $30 a month for otter to transcribe the final copy of what we've edited and stuff.
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Would it make sense to simply not have otter at all? And so navigating that, and I also use descript to edit so could we export it that way too, sure we could, but it wouldn't be a txt file which is or SRT file, which is what I want to be able to upload to Buzzsprout and otter does that. So like you, I think sometimes, especially with the advancement of a lot of these tools to your point, you have to, every couple months, step back and say, All right, what am I paying for across all these platforms? What do I actually need? And can I do two of these things with one of these tools, instead of having two different tools that are doing similar things or have the ability to do the same thing? So I think that's really important, especially because, like, we're in and out of these softwares constantly, and we get into a rhythm of all right, this is what I do, and then this is what's next, and this is what's next when there could be an easier way to do it. So I think that it's important to check that out regularly. You mentioned finding guests through people. You know? What are some other ways that you are finding people? Because when you think about creatives, you're not just talking to Yes, Your Author series is specifically authors, but you're not just looking for authors specifically for the creative series. What are some ways and maybe some connections that you're using, or are there groups that you're in that are helping to facilitate the podcast side?
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Yeah, so like you said, I use a lot of referrals, so people who are creative know a lot of creative people. So even if I just worked on that alone, that would be enough to feel it. But also, as I'm looking through sub stack, or I'm looking through threads, or I'm looking through these different platforms, who is very interesting, that also goes onto podcasts, because usually it helps when somebody has already been on podcast, because they know the deal. You don't have to worry about, like, convincing them to be on a podcast. What is a podcast? All that stuff. So one, there's that, and then I think one of the biggest things is going to, like, networking events. If you're able to, if you have networking events that you like to go to, you can meet so many different people across the board, a lot of them will not be part of your target podcast guests, but they might know somebody who does fit that you're like, Oh, I'm looking for creatives or authors. Like, oh, yeah, I know somebody. So a lot of it is just who do your people know and who can they introduce you to? And just by being in the podcast collective, I met so many different people because Becky hosts the pitch days or pitch events, and a bunch of people come in, and there's so many interesting, creative people coming into those if I worked on that alone, plus the referrals of the people I could run forever. So my issue is not, how do I find guests? My issue is, which guests do I actually want to feature? Yeah, and you have
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to be strategic with that. How do you decide because you said, like, you could literally just go off of referrals and be good. But how do you decide? Do you have themes that you go off of, or is it really just, hey, I'm curious about this person. I definitely want to have them on the podcast. How do you navigate them? Right?
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Right now, almost all of my guests are book related or adjacent, just because that's the niche that I'm putting myself in at the moment. That doesn't mean it can't change. But I think anyone who is an author, what do they get out of this? So I talked to someone recently who is running an anthology. If you want to be part of an anthology, this is how you can either start one or join one, right? So what are the other things authors need? They need editors. They need like a book coach. So those are the types of people, at least recently that I've been talking to, because they all serve the same purpose. They count double as creatives. How does that help? Just the creative. Side of the audience, and just because you're not an author or writer doesn't mean there aren't things that you can learn from those people, because the biggest aspect of creativity that people overlook is like combining unrelated elements into something new. So I think that's really the crux of creativity, is finding out how your connections like the sushi guy, what is it that you can learn from his lesson in the things that you're doing? You're not running like trips to Japan, but if you wanted to do like a local event or something like that, what can you learn from his story to bring into
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your world, or even open up your eyes to trying something again, right? That could literally, even if it's not creative, it could literally just be, hey, I'm gonna try a different sushi place, right?
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Because I didn't necessarily like it that first time. I know, for me, serious side tangent, but I don't like sushi. Except the reason I don't is because I don't like seafood. So, like, I don't like shrimp, I don't like fish. And so when we do go to like our local hibachi place, and they have fairly good sushi, according to my husband, I will get the mango sushi, which is mango avocado, and I think, like cucumber or something, so it's like, very light and refreshing.
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And then I will get the sweet potato roll as well, which is so yummy and delicious, because sweet potatoes are wonderful and they taste great. And sweet potatoes plus rice. Yes, please sign me up. And the glaze they got. Yes, it's perfect. And so if I had been like, No, I just don't like sushi, instead of being like, Oh, they have options that aren't fish or aren't seafood, let me try those out, then I would have been limiting myself in my options.
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So I think, yeah, definitely trying things new, going outside of your what you think is the box that you have to be in, being a little more creative in your content, being a little more creative in your life can really take your content to the next level. It can take your life to the next level. Kevin, this has been so much fun. If people are like, okay, yes, one, I'm a creative and I want to be on your show. I want to talk to you about this stuff, or if they are someone who wants to hear what the people that you're interviewing have to say they want to check out your sub stack, where can people find you, to get to know you and maybe stalk you on social media, respectful, of course.
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Yeah. Thanks so much for having me on. This has been such a pleasure. We've been meaning to do this for such a long time, and you gave me the reminder that I need to come on.
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You can find me at standout creative business.substack.com or if you're on Instagram, standout creative business, and those places have a lot of different links that you can look through. You can go to standout creative business.com where that's all the stuff that I'm working on as an umbrella.
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So yeah, if you're interested in creativity, if you're an author, any sorts of things, find me online perfect.
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And we will make sure that we have links for all that stuff in the show notes, including the few things that I mentioned as well, so you guys can go check the show notes and the YouTube description for those links. Kevin, thank you so much for being on I appreciate you. Yeah, thanks again. Bye.
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You.