The Podcasting Veteran's Playbook: Rob Greenlee on Platform Convergence and Creator Strategy

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an eye on the world and put my finger up and see where the wind's blowing to some degree. I know that can be a dangerous thing to do in this climate that we're in now, but it does help you kind of apply some common sense to what you're seeing in the world and try and, you know, connect the dots. So if that's a quote, I think it's helpful. You know, just keep your eyes open, don't be closed minded about things and and see change as positive. Not all change is positive, but I guess it depends on how you look at it, I suppose.

Step into the world of success with your brand amplified. The ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. It is an honor and a thrill to me to have Rob Greenlee on the show. Rob, you are somebody who's inspired so many of us in the podcasting world and you have a level of expertise that is unrivaled. Oh, truly.

Well, thank you, Hanika. I appreciate that.

You're welcome. So I want to go back because you are a 2017 podcast hall of Fame inductee, but you've been doing this for far longer. Before, honestly, many of us even knew what a podcast was. What was the spark that made you think audio content on the Internet was going to be something?

Well, I didn't think about it quite in that context. It was really more I got a marketing degree and so I could see what was happening. I was working with a lot of advertising campaigns and stuff for some of the jobs I was working with as a marketing director and I could kind of see what was happening in the Internet. This opportunity that the Internet was, was bringing to use direct relationships with customers and people that you wanted to attract to your kind of area of expertise at the time, I guess, and that was really what pulled me in was more of a content marketing focus and that's how I kind of move forward with it. I was doing Some search engine optimization work for clients and was looking for a few more clients. So I started a radio show called Web Talk Radio and it was really talking about what was happening with the web and it also included the Internet and all that stuff too. So that's how I got involved in it was customer acquisition of sorts.

And it's remarkable because I remember those days. I mean the late 90s, early 2000s, I was living in San Francisco working for magazine publisher. Actually launched official Xbox magazine. I know you're at Microsoft for a while.

I worked on the Xbox team for, for a few years.

Yeah, yeah. So I was the launch marketing manager and those were the days when we still went into music chat rooms or gaming chat rooms to try to find people who would be really excited about our magazine and want to promote it for us. Yeah, very different time, right, than what it looks like today. But you've had, you did have a foresight in starting the radio show, which then transitioned to a podcast. September 16, 2004.

Yeah, correct. Yeah, I took it out of the studio and the radio station and built my own studio in a spare bedroom in my house. So that's kind of where I started down that journey. And then I started pre producing the show versus doing it live on the air and the radio station. So it gave me a lot more flexibility on all the different segments of content that I could create because I would, I would incrementally record it during the week because I had a full time job at that time too. So I was working for other tech startups back then in the earlier years of the podcasting or not podcasting, but the online media era. And so I would pop back to home to record an interview or something like that during my, my lunch hour or so. And then I had a studio in downtown Tacoma, Washington in an office building for part of that period of time and would was working right down the street at another company and would walk down the street and pop into my studio and do segments of the show and then by the end of the week I had a complete show. So that's how I made it back in those. I don't really talk too much about how I created content in the early years. Cause I did have a full time job and I know a lot of podcasters still do that today where they have other jobs that they're doing in addition to creating an online show of some sort.

Yeah, I did until September 1st of last year. You know, it was a nice side project. Then I said, okay, this is actually monetizing now I can make some changes, which was fantastic and freeing. You started originally for customer acquisition. How well did that work for you? Was that a great means to, for discoverability?

Yeah, I think it was. I mean, I was on a local radio station. I was trying to tap into that local market. So it did, did help kind of, kind of spread the word. But that was also back in the era when people were listening to a lot of radio. So it wasn't, it was a completely different time. And, and that was one of the key reasons that I got kind of the high level guests that I had on the show back then was because I was on the radio. Because if I had had only gone out saying I was a podcast, nobody would really care because nobody knew what it was back then. So it wasn't really a significant thing. It was just a small piece of my syndication strategy that I had with XM Satellite Radio as well as like 15 other broadcast stations and in the local Seattle market. So. And then I was working with a lot of the early kind of podcast like distribution platforms back then or live stream recording platforms that would take my, my recording of my live stream and then make an MP3 of it and make it available on their platform. So there was a lot of derivative stuff. I even worked with Microsoft in the earlier years and the early 2000s because they had a platform called Sync and Go, which was really a early precursor for podcasting. And it worked with the Windows XP to Pocket PC devices. And I got paid 25 cents per transfer of radio show into that Pocket PC device.

Amazing. Yeah, I was going to say you've held senior roles at Microsoft, Zune, Xbox, Podcast One, Spreaker, Libsyn, Streamyard. Kind of a tour of the podcast industry's evolution.

Well, yeah.

So going back first to when your radio broadcast program became a podcast, was that just another step along the path? Did it feel different? Did you know you were making history at that time?

Not really. I mean, my show was, is considered, if you look in the Wikipedia, it's the first broadcast radio show in the world to become a podcast. But for me at that time it wasn't a significant thing because I was already building a new blog for my show and, and I had an RSS feed for my blog. And so I just told the developers and in Ukraine to just add this little enclosure tag to my blog feed and I was instantly considered a podcast at that point. It really wasn't any kind of a significant thing to me at the time, but there was a, a large upswelling thanks to Adam Curry, who was very effective at generating buzz in the media at that time, and it drew a lot of attention. So my show was one of maybe the first hundred podcasts that ever existed. And so there were others that were podcasting before me, but not very much longer before me. So it was like maybe a matter of a couple weeks, maybe. Yeah, yeah.

So you've seen obviously, huge transitions in the Internet, in the podcast world. What are some of the biggest shifts that you've seen? Besides the fact, of course, we all know, myself included, during the pandemic, many of us shifted to podcasting. I did have a radio show before that.

Oh, you did? Okay. Okay. So you. You started down that path too. So. So where was your radio show done on?

It was in Houston.

Oh, okay.

So I was living in Houston at the time. And it was originally digital radio, and then it was terrestrial and digital radio. So it was a small, small frequency channel. So it had AM and FM and then the digital. And then also we did it as Facebook lives, so we filmed everything. We did commercials. You know, we tried to really make it fun and interactive. And then I moved back to LA and that we tried doing it remotely because we were doing it in person in Houston, and it just didn't work as well. And then of course, the pandemic, so we couldn't have guests and as easily. I mean, we could have zoomed them in, but at that point we'd all kind of transitioned into other things in our lives. And that's when I started the podcast Journey 2019. So, yeah, yeah.

And a lot of things are kind of, for me, and my. My remembrance of my journey are kind of full circle moments. And because a lot of the. The same things that existed in the past somewhat recycled into the future. And I think we're kind of going through that right now with what's happening with video. And then there's other aspects of it that we are now. Podcasting is now the mainstream media, is what I would say. And that comes with some baggage. And so that baggage is one of the other big things that has changed, as I think about the earlier era of this, when I was kind of more playing in the mainstream media type of a format and distribution that we're kind of cycling back to that to some degree, which I think is really kind of interesting because I've spent most of my career seeing a dramatic departure from some of the practices of mainstream media. But some of those things are creeping back in, so it's interesting.

Well, and that's I would love to expand on that a little bit because our friend Jeff Specter, of course, also came from the radio world and then started Code adx because he said the CPM model that comes from radio is not necessarily going to work for podcasts. Yet that's what a lot of us depend on, for better or for worse. Right. If we're trying to monetize through advertising, we now see that a lot of the bigger enterprise hosting solutions are also touting, oh, we're not just on POD audio, but we're also on YouTube, we also are on Sirius XM and we also have this deal with this radio and this radio. And so we're seeing that a lot of that money still is coming from the more traditional means of radio, even though what we think we're putting out is the traditional podcast.

Right, right. They're all mushing together now, and it's not as clear as it used to be. And that's the other thing that's quite different is that with that kind of convergence of sorts between practices of mainstream media and podcasting, we are in an era of extreme kind of complexity is what I would probably call it. And it's riding along with this concept of professionalization. And so what we've seen in this podcasting era is that the expectations and the, the capabilities of it are constantly elevating. Right. And getting more sophisticated, more complex, more. And what Apple announced this past week is an example of that, is that these platforms and being a content creator now is, is really requiring more of a professional view on this. It's not a hobbyist medium anymore. And I think that's also pushing a lot of new people kind of out of it too, because they maybe feel like they can't compete or they're discouraged because of that complexity.

Yeah. So what do you think about these arguments that people are having? I'm seeing them on Facebook and everywhere else about, well, if you have video, because of course we know video is good for social media sharing, but if you're doing a video recording, it's not a podcast, because a podcast is audio only. But then that's not really true.

But that's, that's what people think. But if you look at the, the span of the history of podcasting, and I started working in it professionally at a place like, like a Microsoft or whatever, working on a Zune podcasting platform, which was the only alternative in that era to Apple. And so we built the Zune podcasting platform at Microsoft. We captured maybe 20, 25% of the podcasting market at that time. So it's kind of equivalent to what is more modernly done with Spotify. So it would be in that kind of a percentage of the market. And back in that timeframe, I would say 40% of my catalog of 35,000 podcasts. So if you compare that to how many podcasts are in the medium today, it's just minuscule. But I'd say probably 30 to 40% of my catalog was video podcasts. And major media companies all over the country every. I mean, if you were to name one major media outlet or media company, I could tell you that they had one or more video podcasts. And oftentimes they were taking full episodes out of broadcast television and putting them out as a downloadable MP4 file into RSS feeds. And there were whole startup companies that were started in that era that were just doing video podcasts. They weren't even doing audio. So I can name one right now. It's called Revision3. And the CEO of that company, his name is Jim Lauterbach, who is now the. Writes a newsletter for the creator economy now and was the former CEO of VidCon. He was the CEO of that company. And there were like a dozen video podcast shows that were exclusively published in video format via RSS back in that era. And then you kind of tag that along with what we have seen with YouTube. YouTube and podcasting started about the same time frame. I think YouTube started maybe a year later or so, but they followed a parallel track to each other. And even when I was working at podcast one, this was back in 2014, I had a lot of contact with the YouTube team because a lot of. Well, back in that era, people were. Were stealing clips from our podcasts on podcast one and posting them to YouTube. And so there was a constant kind of concern around that. Right. And they had a podcast team at YouTube back in 2014. It's just that nobody knew about it because they were working on it from kind of a different kind of vantage than they are right now. So podcasting has had a long history with YouTube and it's had a long history with video. And what's interesting is we're coming back to that now, and I think it makes a lot of sense. I've been seeing it coming for probably three or four years. So it's not a new thing to me, even though I started raising the alarm probably about three or four years ago about what I was seeing happen with YouTube. And then what. YouTube decided to create that podcast playlist, and it blew everything open and started to change things.

Now we have, of course, Netflix has video podcasts.

Well, we can talk about, talk about the Netflix thing. That's a, that's another journey.

Yes, please, let's do that. Because I think it was, I think it was on Pod News a couple days ago that I was hearing, okay, now Pete Davidson's video podcast on Netflix has a SAG deal, but they've categorized it as a podcast instead of a show. But then now people are also ripping the exclusive Netflix podcasts and posting pirated versions on YouTube. So I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about. Do you think that that's now what everybody's going to be doing or what are some of the insights that you pull out of this Netflix deal? If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know, having a trusted

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Well, I think it's a complicated one because I think if you go back and you look at the early deal that Joe Rogan did with Spotify, it's kind of very similar because Joe did this exclusive deal with Spotify. His show was pulled out of podcasting and put over into Spotify. And you know, I think he had a two year contract. It paid him, paid him very well. But he only made a show available on Spotify during that timeframe. And then at the end of his contract he went back and renegotiated with Spotify and said, well, I lost. This is what I'm hearing is he lost a lot of audience just being on Spotify. And so he could see a bigger opportunity for himself and frankly even Spotify by pushing for a more open distribution approach. And that would also bring more ad revenue to Spotify. So it could be justified. I think Spotify used that relationship with Joe Rogan as a customer acquisition strategy. And I do believe that that's what Netflix is doing today. Most of these shows that they've done deals with are My understanding that there may be exceptions to this are one year deals, which puts it in a very similar situation to the Joe Rogan situation, is that they're trying to tap into audiences that are following these big shows. On YouTube and, and podcasting and thinking that they can, they can pull new users or new subscribers over to Netflix by having these shows over there. But the problem is, is that eventually those shows are going to say, okay, it's great to be on Netflix. But when I was in YouTube and in podcasting, my numbers were like three times higher than they are on Netflix because Netflix is a much smaller platform than YouTube. So it's, it's, I think it's the second largest, but it's, it's dramatically smaller, like maybe a third smaller, something like that. So the opportunity for these creators that are sign these exclusive deals will be larger off Netflix exclusives. Right. And what is the long term play here for Netflix? Is Netflix really going to compete with YouTube? I don't think so, because I don't think they can. You know, the depth of content that's available on YouTube is just overwhelm the depth of content on Netflix. And that would require a whole different business model for Netflix or they, you know, and Netflix also tried to tap in at some point in time. They hired a woman out of Apple to run their audio podcast area in Netflix too, a couple years ago, and that kind of fell off of the wagon too. So I don't have really a lot of faith that this is going to work out. I think eventually those shows will turn in. Like you just said, they will turn into shows. Right. But do people really want to watch talk shows on Netflix? I think that they go there and they subscribe to that to watch movies and TV series. They don't go there. Or documentaries and things like that. They don't go there to watch a podcast. They can just go to YouTube and do that. So I'm not sure that there's a lot of value in what they're doing.

It'll be interesting to see how it plays out for sure and to see what else comes up, which other platforms go away or consolidate or start up.

Well, and then Apple changed the game this week too, right? Yeah.

For those who aren't aware of that change, can you talk a little bit about that and what are some of your opinions on what you're seeing with Apple?

Well, I think that there's a lot of confusion out there because Apple oftentimes only dribbles out information about what they're doing and they don't really paint a complete picture that helps people understand what they're doing. It's a little bit of a weakness that Apple has because they want to hold back information. They don't want to Disclose everything about their strategy upfront. But I think from what we're seeing here is, well, let me back up and say Apple has always supported, just like I was talking about earlier, they've since the very beginning of podcasting they've supported video. But most people now don't know that. Right? And that's part of the, the challenge and that's part of the bigger issue, right? So people are saying, wow, Apple now has video. Well, Apple has always had video on their platform. So the only thing that's changed is that they're now working towards trying to support HLS video streaming into their platform. From a a select list of podcast hosting platforms that are willing to invest in HLS streaming technology to deliver content to their platform on a pass through relationship. And so really what it's created is a bifurcated video publishing opportunity for creators into Apple. So there's the existing MP3 download via RSS capability that's currently in there and has been in there for 20 years. And now they've added this streaming capability which is the same technology for delivering video content that YouTube and Spotify use. So this makes them competitive. And I've been encouraging the Apple team for years now to make a similar move to this. I probably wouldn't have done it the way they did it, but that's a whole different conversation. But at least they've moved down this path of adding a priority around video because what they did was they pulled back on the video side of what they had in the catalog and made it very difficult to find video in their platform, which basically killed it as something that everybody understood about their platform. And they've been a little slow because we've seen this trend and I've been mentioning to it and other people in the industry have been mentioning this to the Apple team for a couple of years now. The wheels of change and upgrades at Apple are kind of slow. And I saw the same thing happen when I was working at Microsoft too. The timelines for making these type of changes take a couple of years because they have to get into the roadmaps and they have to get buy off of all the executives and then they have to develop it and then they have to test it and all stuff and this time runs by and it has to be justified, you know, around and why are we spending $10 million to build make these changes? Right. And so they added a monetization model so they're going to charge based on a CPM around ad insertion. And I'm getting in the weeds here to some degree, but they're going to charge publishers a per thousand insertion fee on being able to use programmatic video advertising in the content. But that's going to be handled by the hosts. So the hosts are going to do like they're doing with audio today. They're dynamically inserting ads into audio shows. Now Apple's going to say give us and we're going to embrace video inserted ads now into video shows as a way to justify the investment in offering video. Because Apple typically doesn't make money off of podcasts.

So this is actually going to be a great advantage for podcasters because that's just another way that they can monetize. Because one thing I've seen with other friends of mine in the industry even, yes, I record the video, I've always recorded the video, but I've always focused on the audio first. And then I have friends who focused on the having this amazing built out set and the YouTube first and built up their channels there, but then not been able to really transition as well and get that same audience, you know, so the audio only. So do you think that this is going to be a great equalizer so that more people can get that recognition? Whether somebody's on Apple or Spotify, they want to watch your podcast or watch a reel or a short like you can do on Spotify or they want to listen to it. There are more options for audience. So that might help us all grow.

It's a good move by Apple from a couple of different perspectives. It gives people what the research is showing is increasingly what they want and that's an option between listening and watching. And increasingly we're seeing consumption move towards the living room on the video side. And the audio side is more mobile. It's anywhere. Consumption's what it is. So you could start listening to a podcast on your way home from work and then you get home and you continue watching it on your big screen television. So you have this kind of continuity of consumption that is being created by Apple that really follows what people are increasingly wanting is the option that doesn't take away from the success of audio is that audio has its own larger kind of consumption ecosystem, right, that's around it that you can listen when you're walking the dog or you can do it, you know, listen while you're doing the dishes or something like that. Where video is a more dedicated kind of sit down kind of consumption experience, you have to pay attention and so you have different use cases and that's where the industry has been moving towards is being a medium that fits into people's lives where they want it to fit in. And so Apple has always had a video ecosystem of sorts with their Apple tv, and, and I've consumed video podcasts on Apple TV for, for years and years, so it's not a. A new thing because they've always had a podcast app on Apple tv. So what they do with it, though, from the standpoint of how this evolves into a greater play for Apple, you know, Apple sells devices, so they're going to keep doing what they're doing. Right. It's just a matter of they're able to tap into the trends in the market right now and then make a little bit money from the advertising side, which is something that they have not been able to do up till up to date. So this is really a. I frankly never thought that Apple would get involved in advertising at any level just because they've tried in the past, and it just didn't work with them because it required them to be too transparent around user data. And so that's, you know, they've had a pretty strict privacy policy that made it difficult for them to get into the ad business. Yeah.

So, gosh, you know, obviously another change that we've seen is AI, generative AI. And you and I both love talking about future proofing your content in this AI future, this AI era. So I'd love to hear a little bit about, you know, are you optimistic, are you cautious about where AI is going to take the creator space? What do you think is some good advice for people who are podcasting who might feel overwhelmed by AI, or they might be afraid to even start because they think that eventually all podcasts are just going to be AI.

Yeah. I think the truth of it is, you know, I could come on here and blow a bunch of smoke at you about what I really think is going to wind up happening. I've been doing a lot of deeper research, actually. My last episode of my. My new media show, I had Jeanine Wright, who is the CEO of a. Of a company called Inception Point AI, which is very controversial, a platform that's been cranking out AI generated audio content. And that was a fascinating conversation that I had with her around what she's doing, where she sees it going, and how it's working around labeling and how it's working around quality. Right. And how much care they put into the quality side of it and how it's improving and getting better and better and better every day. And so. And there's obviously quantum leaps with all of these AI platforms that the quality and the speed of production and the capabilities of creating content in those platforms is exponentially changing. And so my tough mention of this really gets back to is that it's going to happen and it's going to become a significant piece of the content creation engine. It's just another tool to create content and it will capture audience as it gets better and better and better. So the question that we have to all ask ourselves is, you know, as human creators, what do we have to do to be competitive with a engine of content that will be relatively perfect? It'll be hard to compete against ultimately in the end, and we have to all up our game, which is not something that everybody wants to hear. But it also rides along with the changes in the medium of what we were talking about earlier about the professionalization, the complexity. And AI tends to strip out some of that complexity and speed up the processes and do things at a more cost effective, less labor intensive process. And so I think that many people, and we're seeing the early stages of it, will create cloned reproductions of themselves. So like you and I could create a cloned hybrid of our, our visual likeness, our voices, our inflections, our capabilities. And one of the things that Janine talked about is the training that she's doing on her cloned human product that she's working on involves natural hand gestures, facial motions, tonality. You know, so it's not. These avatars of sorts are not going to be things that you can really tell by watching them that they aren't human. So, and we're kind of, I hate to say this, but it's like what we see with AI today is, is not going to be what we see with AI. You know, even two years from now, you're not going to be able to tell between the two. I mean, that's where it's going. So what does that mean? That means that there's an opportunity here and if AI is able to capture audience because there's so much value there, then why wouldn't we do it? So this is a very, you know, it's a human discussion too. It's like, well, yeah, there is a danger that these clones could replace human creators, but I would rather, if it's going to replace a human creator, I would rather that it replace me as who I am in AI versus having, you know, these non human type AIs be out there. So all of us as creators have to decide do we want to participate or not or do we want to resist.

Yeah, well, yeah, I still have for me the argument that these conversations, human to human, are so valuable. Right. AI is not going to be able to necessarily have the same tones, inflections, gestures, smiles.

Unfortunately, I think it will. So.

But I do agree that, you know, hey, Jen, all these different platforms that you can currently create a digital avatar on, they're not perfect. No, not currently. Not currently. But I do think to own our IP and to be able to, to move forward, we have to own those, we have to own all of our digital assets, clones, all of the different aspects. And in some ways it's also democratization because I've interviewed people on my podcast who have Tourette's, who are blind, who have other disabilities, cerebral palsy, any number of things, and the fact that they have great voices and a lot of value to what they brought to my show. But there are other people probably out there who won't feel as confident. But if they can have their image but as the digital avatar, but it speaks a little more clearly to the general audience, that can actually help them get their voice heard in a different way. Perhaps make more money and find more value even in themselves, or feel more self confident.

Yeah. And I think it's also going to create a much more competitive landscape for content too. And because there's going to be more people creating, like I could create, I don't know, probably pretty close today I could create a younger version of myself as a podcaster too. I could go back to when I was in my 30s or something like that and create a, a whole series of content that would be, you know, so you have this ability to really create whatever you want. And I think at the end of the day, what's going to make people stand out is their creativity and how they use the technology. Just like what people had to have when they had a paintbrush and paint, right. They had to have creativity to get something down on that paper. And I do think that that's going to be a big component of this, and we're already starting to see it now with the video side is that you could really go in if you had a, you know, a fairly decent budget, you could go in and create a full length motion picture now with these tools that would be theater quality right today for maybe a couple hundred dollars in AI time to make one of these things. And really at that point, what's the difference? What the difference is, is creativity. And that, that would be human creativity. Now granted, the AI is going to have some creativity, but it's not going to have human creativity. It's going to have its own creativity, which may not.

Yeah. I had the COO of Arcana Labs come in to speak to one of my classes recently and it takes them some time, but they can make a commercial that looks like very lifelike. They've created short films. They're working with every major studio to replace some of the need for maybe an Unreal Engine or a green screen. And one of my podcast ideas that I'm going to be launching sometime this year isn't going to be, it'll be my voice, my likeness, but it's going to be an AI cartoon version of me and telling a story because it's not something that's part of my main brand, but it's still part of me. So I want it to be different enough. Right. And so again, it's all time or having the right team member who can focus on that one project. But I do want to test this out because I, I do agree with you that we have to kind of get ahead of this or, you know, at least go along and put ourselves in positions to win, not to be left behind.

Yeah. That's the biggest challenge too, is that these tools can be a little overwhelming because they are putting a lot of power into your hands and what you can do with it. But that's really not that much different than, you know, a high level artist or a movie director or any of those folks. They, they're highly skilled creators. Right. And that gets back to some of the other stuff I was saying earlier, is that we're professionalizing. Right. So AI is just now a new tool for us to create even better content. And I think this whole conversation about AI slop in conjunction with this is maybe doing people a disservice because it's giving people the impression that it will always be AI Sl. Not sure that that's, that's really looking at where this is going. And, and it may put people in that position you just mentioned of people not embracing it because they have a human level reaction to it that is, is very negative. And while that's justified, I think there is threats to human employment and human opportunity here. But there's also the other side of it, which is a clear sky opportunity for those that are very creative. Yeah, yeah.

I'm gonna have to just have you back on so very frequently so that we can keep talking about these same issues and see where we're at in a month, two months, three months. You're the founder of Trust Factor Lab, the Adora Creator Network. You also the co founder of the Passion Struck Network. You're the host of the new media show. You also host the Procreator Playbook, Spoken Human. You have a number of, you know, you have your hands in a lot of different jars in this world and multiple networks, which is really interesting. So you Trul, truly are living in that space of multi platform creation. So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that ecosystem, why you've built it that way. I know you also have Deal Rush Live on whatnot that you're launching for E Commerce, I believe.

Yeah.

So yeah. So talk to us a little bit about that.

Well, I've always been kind of a technology tinkering. I like to play around with technologies. That's how I started my radio show back in the early years. That was the purpose of that radio show to some degree was to help people understand what's coming and where the technology is taking us and to bring people on that had more knowledge than I did and I could learn from them as well as they could share what people saw as what's in front of us and what the future looks like. And so that's kind of how I've approached all this is all these things that I'm working on are all kind of like tests for me. They're all pushing the envelope of what is going on with the content creation side, with podcasting, with how I see things, things evolving based on how I'm feeling. Because I'm a content creator too. Been doing it all these years, had multiple shows, have done it for the platforms that I've worked for and have been, you know, really engulfed in it. I would say that the new media show, which I've been doing for 14 years, was a live video show 14 years ago. And so, you know, living in this live world is, is something that's very, very native to me. But when I started doing it, it was very rough. I mean it wasn't. I mean I've got a YouTube channel that I've had for close to 19 years and a lot of the early content that I've put up there has had a lot of views, hundreds of thousands of views, but they're 18, 19 years old now and they were very, very raw and very rough and at times they're so old that YouTube doesn't have really much metrics on them because they didn't start tracking like they are now until like the last six or seven years. At the level of detail around audience Engagement and reach and those kind of metrics, you know, how far people are watching into the content. Things like that didn't exist when I started on there. So a lot of my, my older shows have didn't even, it wasn't even monetized back then. So that got one episode that's had a quarter million views and, and, but I really didn't make any money on it over the years and just, you know, so YouTube has benefited from it, but I haven't really. So. But that's all changed now. So, you know, I'm all monetized now and all that kind of stuff. But even my approach to YouTube has dramatically changed. I mean, well, it probably hasn't changed as much as I should have changed it. Like, I used to publish all sorts of different kinds of content to my YouTube channel, you know, different shows, and I still do. If you go there today, there's probably like five or six different formats and shows that I've done in my YouTube channel when I probably. And I've been increasingly kind of creating new channels for each one of these things because that's what YouTube wants now. So it's a, it's a complicated web of trying to keep moving with the changes that are going on.

Yeah, well, and with the networks, what prompted you to start one and then also co found another?

Well, actually I started the Adore Network back when I was working for spreaker back in 2015, and that was basically a project that I worked on. And I had a bunch of shows that I brought on to that network in that early timeframe of podcasting. And so I'm the one that created it on there. And when I left Spreaker, you know, just prior to iHeartRadio purchasing them, that network kind of died off, you know, because I wasn't working on it. And so after I left Streamyard, I reached out to the iHeart folks and asked them if I could have it back, you know, and so that's kind of how that came about. And it's a, it's just a platform for me to work with creators that are primarily focused on audio because Spreaker doesn't embrace video currently. So it's, it's really an audio only kind of a platform. So I'm, I'm helping a handful of shows kind of get launched and up on that, that platform because I can host them on the platform and monetize them and all that kind of stuff. It's a good, it's a good platform. I spent four years working on working for Spreaker, I was their first US employee. So back in the earlier years and then the passion struck network with, you know, which of course you're familiar with with John Miles is just, it's a passion project. John asked me to help him out with trying to build this, this network and we've just been working on it together and trying to make valuable connections with other, other creators that really align with the values of the passion struck platform and you know, shows that really matter to humans. You know, I have this tough conversation with John about this conflict between AI and human created content. And he's very, very pro human and I'm kind of like more flexible on that topic. And so it does create a little bit of friction between us because I think he's taking the more human mattering type of role in this process, which I totally respect. I mean I'm not against human created content. My goodness. I 20 years as a human creator, of course I'm on board with that. But I also am a realist around technology and have been ensconced in that for my whole career. So why would I not kind of see what's coming?

Right, right. Yeah, that's a. I think this is going to be continuing conversation that push pull between mattering and humanity and you know, how much AI we can use without feeling like we've lost that sense of self and part of ourselves.

Yeah. And I think that it's going to be interesting if AI can just be an extension of that. If it plays a role that is an extension, not a replacement for. I don't know if that's going to play out that way. We'll have to see. It's still too early to know exactly how AI is going to change things. I think it is going to replace quite a few jobs out there. Kind of like what happened in the industrial era in the US where automation came in and, and put a certain group of people at out of work. But it created new opportunities. Yeah. And I think that's. That may be what we see happen to some degree here. But it's going to be possible to have a billion dollar company be run by one person at some point. Or maybe it's a. The billion dollar company is actually all AI, so we'll have to see how this all plays out.

So I want to go back to something that you've mentioned a few times, which is the professionalization of the industry, obviously. I mean I have a podcast course at a university, we have a podcast minor I'm working on Getting the first conference there. Because we do see, even if you're in journalism or PR or any kind of comms role, we all see that podcast scene is a huge part of the ecosystem and needs to be something that we do have people set up to succeed in different roles. Not just hosts. Right. But storytellers, producers, all sound engineers, all of the different aspects that we need. Yeah.

So lots of people now. Yeah.

So I'm very passionate about that. I also help entrepreneurs with that. You help entrepreneurs with that. So I wanted to ask about your thoughts, because I'm very passionate about helping people really structure their podcasts as businesses and understand how to grow an audience, how to monetize, how to make it an extension of their brand. Not just to do a podcast because they think they're going to make a whole bunch of money, but do it because it's something you're passionate about and there is a purpose behind it. And I think that's going to continue driving me even as we have this AI discussion and figure out what else is going on in the industry. So I'd love to hear a little bit about your perspective. Do you think that this increasing. And we also, of course, see this at some of the podcast conferences that are now more focused on big media, big industry, professional organizations versus indie podcasters. Do you still see a role for indie podcasters? Do you think that there will still be people really striving to make this work because they have the passion, but they just need to make sure they're finding the right people to partner with or learn from so that they can make it past that eight episode fatigue.

Yeah, I think we're seeing a perception out there that the podcasting hill is pretty steep to climb. And I think that has been the reason why we've seen somewhat of a decline in people's interest in starting a podcast? You know, if you talk to a lot of the major podcast hosting platforms, they will tell you essentially the same thing, is that they're not seeing growth in their numbers. What they're saying is podcasters are churning out, they're stopping, but then there's a steady flow of new people that is keeping them kind of like on a level line, not a growth line. Right. So their total number of shows is not necessarily growing, but they're keeping their current numbers because of the churn and new podcasters that are coming in. It's not like in the earlier era of podcasting back, like in 2020, 2021 timeframe, where we were seeing one new shows starting every Month. And that's why, you know, like, like when I said in the earlier years when I was working on the, the Microsoft Zune platform, I had 35,000 podcasts, but now there's like 4.6 million that have ever been published. Right. I mean that's a huge Delta just in 10 years or so. So you can kind of see where, where we've kind of moved and there's been a lot of people that have started and then they've what's called in the industry pod fading, which means that they split, they go on this path of creating episodes less frequently and eventually they stop. And it's usually around seven to 10 episodes. It's kind of like that journey. If you make it past 10 episodes, you're probably gonna hang in there for a while. But most people don't make it beyond seven to 10 episodes before they drop out. And so that's been the hill that we're climbing is people starting a show thinking that it's going to be the next Joe Rogan and it's gonna, you know, be successful and you're going to be able to make an income from it has caused people to be in a situation where at some point they feel disappointed and they wind up stopping or life gets in the way. This has always been, there's always been a certain amount of pod fading that's gone on in the industry even in the early years because of life changes. People have a baby or they don't have time to do the episodes anymore, or they get a new job and they just don't have a place to fit it into their schedules. And I think what we've seen is, is people wanting to create a career around this and start a show because they want to start a business. Right. Which is not a bad way to think about it. It's. But it's also sets a pretty high bar of what can be achieved maybe with someone that doesn't have a lot of experience in creating media, doesn't have the infrastructure, maybe doesn't have a budget that is required to fund a team or fund the complete kind of marketing of a particular show. And that's where the professionalization has come into, is that those that are able to accomplish that typically have teams around them and typically now can invest a few thousand dollars a month in having a BA and to have a production kind of editor that can work on your episodes because you as the creator maybe have a consulting business or you have a full time job, right. And you just don't have time to do it anymore, which is limited the amount of new people that are coming into to the medium. Because back during the pandemic timeframe, everybody was stuck at home, right? They had lots of extra time to get behind a microphone and everybody was investing in cameras and stuff. I remember back in that time frame, I was trying to upgrade my own camera system here and I couldn't even buy a camera because they were all sold out. So back in that time frame because everybody was doing zoom calls and all this stuff, so everybody was buying up all the webcams and. But now it's completely different. So, you know, now you gotta be real. And the other factor that people don't realize too is that just because there's 4.6 million RSS feeds out there or podcasts out there, there's only like 3 to 400,000 that are actually active every month publishing new episodes. So your, your pool of competitors is really not as big as maybe people think at times. So if you can get really focused on what you're doing and you have it linked up with a synergized effect around your business or around your personal brand, around your goals, if you can synergize it with all those things, you're more likely to stick with it and make it work for you to help grow whatever you're doing, your career or your business. Absolutely.

I have several more questions for you, but I think what we're going to do is bring you back for another interview where we can do a check in on some of the changes that are coming.

Well, you're going to be a guest on, on my new media show so we can continue it there too.

Oh, fantastic. Yay. I can save some of the questions I have. This has been really delightful. I admired you. I've known about you and just recently had the chance to meet you in person when we were both at podfest just last month. It seems like it was several months ago. And I just really appreciate you coming on and sharing your knowledge where you see us going, what you've seen, and getting people to really think about some of these creative ideas, thinking about how to create our AI avatars and own our digital IP completely so that we can be the decision makers of what that journey looks like for our shows and for other parts of our work, perhaps. I think you're giving people a lot to think about, so I really appreciate that.

Yeah, I'm on that journey too. I want to do it too. I'm going to create all sorts of different versions of myself. Maybe I Don't know, we'll see. I do want them to be authentic to who I am. I don't want them to be some fake thing out there and give. Give people the creeps, you know.

So yeah, so intentionality. Yeah, it's a big part of that. Rob, do you have a favorite quote, mantra, verse, poem, family?

Really? I can't think of one off top of my head, but yeah, I just try and keep an eye on the world and put my finger up and see where the wind's blowing to some degree. I know that can be a dangerous thing to do in this climate that we're in now. But it does help you kind of apply some common sense to what you're seeing in the world and try and, you know, connect the dots. So if that's a quote, I think it's helpful, you know, just keep your eyes open, don't be close minded about things and see change is positive. Not all change is positive, but I guess it depends on how you look at it, I suppose.

Well, I think we have to go through change and agitation, right. To get to the gold.

So yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of change in the next couple of years. Hopefully probably a lot more than many people can really handle. And I'm one of them. So I'm there with you. Yeah.

And what's the best single source of truth for people to connect with you? Get on a strat session with you, get, you know, some coaching or figure out how else they can work with you?

Well, currently I'm still kind of building out the infrastructure of what I'm working on, but currently just robgreenly.com has probably the most centralized picture of, of me and my background and has links to my old radio show. If you wanted to go listen to the, the very earliest episode that I was on the radio back in 1999, you can listen to it on that website or, or you can see a page that talks about my work in building the world's largest class of orange juice. So you can. It's in the Guinness Book of World Records that I built back in 1997.

Oh my gosh.

And so, and then I'll links to all my, all my podcasts and all my content too. So. And then, then on, on YouTube at. Rob Greenlee as well is a great place. But I'm on all the social platforms and the show that I'm doing with James Cridlin is also available. Talking about this whole Apple on the video thing. So if you wanted to go check out newmediashow.com the episode will be up on there and you can hear us talk about all of the finer details of what's happening with Apple with video.

Yeah, well, this is going to be a must watch for all of my podcast students, whether they're the entrepreneur side or the USC side. But I'm also going to make new media show a must like I'm going to put into the syllabus. So.

Okay, thank you so much. I appreciate that.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah, I would love to be be a college professor teaching podcasting. So I'm talking to a couple of universities here in Connecticut to see there might be a possibility with that because I know that a lot of the universities around the country are adding, let's say social media or creator kind of minors and things like that through their curriculums.

Yeah, we have a podcast minor for undergrad, but my goal is to have an entire podcast division, so it'll be one of my first calls when, you know, when we make this happen.

Awesome.

Great. Thank you so much, Rob. And thank you to everybody who is listening to this episode. It's not often we just talk about the history of podcasting and all of the different things to consider, but as Rob said, there are so many full circle moments. So thinking really intentionally about how you're showing up in the world, in video, in audio, whether it's part of a podcast or any other item. Right. Any show, any social media post is really important in thinking about how we can continue to own and operate our own ip, how we can continue to be the creative spark, the strategist behind whatever we're doing, even if there's a lot of AI involved in it. And hopefully some of you listening who haven't started your podcast journey will want to do that. And Rob or I are great people to reach out to to get some practical advice. So I will have another amazing guest on in a couple of days. Until then, hope it's warm wherever you are and do think about that intentionality factor as you move through your business. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of youf Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out@yourbrandamplified.com. Los cosines siempresa ven fresco si deliciosos y tien en mass Vitaminas de y el de omega Tres. Eggplant's best Mejor sabor mejor nutriion mejores huevos. If you're an H Vac technician and a call comes in, Grainger knows that you need a partner that helps you find the right product fast and hassle free. And you know that when the first problem of the day is a clanking blower motor, there's no need to break a sweat. With Grainger's easy to use website and product details, you're confident you'll soon have everything humming right along. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickgrainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. If you like the show, please take a moment to rate, review and subscribe.

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