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Well, thank you so much for being on the show.

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I'm so excited to have you here.

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I can't wait to talk all about PodFest.

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So can you do us a favor and introduce yourself and tell us what you do?

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Yeah.

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Chris Grimizos here.

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I am the chief creative officer of PodFest and we are the longest running

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in person continuous event since COVID because we've, we were very fortunate

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to have a big event right before the lockdowns, but, um, just, we organize

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an amazing community of creators.

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The majority of them are podcasters and we do have a smaller community of, uh,

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video creators and vidfests of YouTubers and Tik Tokers and stuff like that.

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Now, and you guys also, didn't you break a Guinness world record during the pandemic?

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Yeah, we set a Guinness world record and then we broke a Guinness world record

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because the pandemic went longer than we all thought.

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So it was like, Hey, we got nothing to do.

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Let's, let's keep at it.

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And we had over 5,003 people attend, um, virtually over a week's time.

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And the second time around, we had over 500 something speakers, 12

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languages spoken in, taught in.

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It was incredible.

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We were uniting the world, um, with, uh, podcasting.

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It was pretty awesome.

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It is very awesome.

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And I've seen some of the free classes that you guys have on your, on

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your website occasionally.

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So tell me, let's go way back, way back into the, you know, when you first began,

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tell me a little bit about your podcasting journey and how you started, how

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you got into this medium and how you finally founded podcast.

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So, I mean, I used to produce TV shows on terrestrial, um, through public access.

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So we used to do live TV shows, um, serialized, uh, you know, business

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shows, and then one was a political debate shows, a lot of fun.

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And then in August of 2013, we hosted a meetup about podcasting and I got bitten

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by the bug.

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I went home, told my wife, I'm starting a podcast.

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Uh, she said she's starting a podcast and we couldn't both do it because we were

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doing so many events at the time that she started her podcast, Biz Women Rock.

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And I became her marketing manager and it kind of dovetails perfectly

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into how pod vest was born.

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I would go all over the state helping people start their podcasts and I would

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use my wife as a case study.

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So it helped highlight her podcast.

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And then after doing that, all these people said, what do we do now?

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You helped us start a podcast and that's how pod fest was founded, um, with a

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hundred people in 2015.

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And since then we've doubled year over year.

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When we moved it to Orlando, that really was our, uh, inflection point of

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internationalizing the conference.

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So, uh, the last big in-person event we had was 2020.

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We had over 2000 attendees.

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Last year we did a much smaller engagement just to keep things safe.

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And we had literally an arena of the Amalie arena where the Tampa Bay lightning

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played to host pod fest origins since we brought it back to the source for one

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year only, but this year we're excited.

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We're, we're going full force in Orlando and we're, uh, I mean, we don't want to

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jinx ourselves, but it looks like we'll be over 3000 attendees.

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So it's pretty amazing.