The Real Podcast Payoff, with Paul Colligan

Welcome back to part two of our chat with our friend and podcasting expert Paul Colligan. My name is Gord Vickman, here as always, with Dan Sullivan.

Paul, I've just been reading a book called the Master Switch by Tim Wu, and what he gives is a history of a kind of framework and structure that in the information businesses, starting with Western Union and the mid-1800s, and then moving on to Bell, which became AT&T. And then you have the radio stations, and NBC became the really huge. And RCA in the recording industry. And then you have the growth of television. And then right up until the present moment, we have the Googles, the Apples, Facebook. And what he says is that they all start the same way and they all end up the same way. He says they start with a new technology which is really, really easy to use. And he said 10 people want to create a telegraph network and create a telegraph network with some posts and some wire and a little bit of electric juice to move things through the line. And he said, same thing that he said when telephone started, that there were literally 10,000 phone companies in the United States. But he said the public kind of finds that interesting, but if they want to use it, they want big and reliable, okay? So he says there's this natural tendency of the marketplace to actually push a new technology that's being used by a lot of companies or experiment towards one big company that can just give everybody maximum reach, maximum capability, and maximum reliability. And he said they always end up as monopolies. And they always. He said they start becoming the topic of antitrust legislation. And he's very, very keen on Facebook. He says we should break up Facebook. He said they're too big for anybody's good. Gord has been very beneficial to me because he brought a vast radio experience and packaging experience, and then he really dove deep into podcasting. But it seems to me that all those other mediums, they're actually owning a scarcity after a while. There's only so much radio frequency. There's, you know, there's legislation, there's regulation of who gets monopolies. Cable television are all local monopolies and everything else. But the podcast seems to be a different world because there is no scarcity. As a matter of fact, there's as much abundance as you can possibly want in it. So with that type of, let's say, ambition on the part of a large corporation, take Apple, for example, to kind of monopolize the podcast world, it seems to me that the nature of the medium doesn't allow for that part of.

What podcasting is, is what you just described. Nobody owns it. Everybody acts like they do, but nobody owns it. There was a big, major thing for me in the publishing world. A lot of people don't realize this, but if you publish with Amazon on demand, there's a button that says expanded distribution. And what's funny about expanded distribution is there's only one database in the world now for books. You're either in that database or you're not in that database. And so if you click expanded distribution, you've left just Amazon to everybody else. But back in my day, there was this thing where fine books are sold. You know, if you click the expanded distribution in Amazon, you are where fine books are sold. Well, something really interesting happened recently in podcasting. There is no audio platform right now that doesn't have podcasting. So now it's not find me at Apple, find me at Google, find me here, find me there, wherever you get your audio. And what's neat is because right now, there's this land where everybody's having their HBO and Paramount plus and the Friends reunion and all these things. People are grabbing things and holding it behind the firewalls. I'm a big Trekkie. I've always loved Trekkie. Star Trek was my inspiration. Star Trek was how I looked to the Future. The whole nine yards. They added it to Paramount Plus. Can I afford $10 a month? Yes, of course I can afford $10 a month. But it's another logistical piece, you know, by podcasting being everywhere, there is no place that your shows are not. And Gordon, I. Whenever I hear about a new one, I email Gordon and go, hey, make sure you're there. You know, and that is so different than, you know, I'm wherever fine books are sold. I'm wherever audio is found. Is so different than, yeah, to watch me, you have to buy this or you have to subscribe to this or you have to be there. Now, Apple recently has been doing things to kind of bring it inside. They've been trying to make it not as open as it was before, and that's part of this premium play. And people are wondering what's happening with that, because now it's a little bit more difficult. You know, three weeks ago, if your podcast wasn't at Apple, but it was live, your audience got it. Now, if your podcast isn't live at Apple, but it's live, your Apple audience isn't getting it. So they're coming in, they're playing strange, which makes it interesting. Spotify is doing the same thing. Interesting stuff with Spotify, but while this is happening, the same guy who started podcasting, by the way, XMTV VJ Adam Curry, who started podcasting back in the day, is now working on podcasting 2.0 to get around this. And there is talk, there is conversation that maybe we're going to go back. The hosting company you guys use, it's funny, the CEO of the hosting company, he has a podcast book that he wrote that came out before podcast was ever an app in the Apple infrastructure. My book, my first one, the Business Podcasting Bible, actually came out two years before the iPhone, which was one of the big changes. But we could go back. But yeah, your content can be available anytime, any place, anywhere. You're in countries where social media is banned, but you can't ban podcasting because it's not on the platform. Podcasting is the platform. So, yeah, I think you're right. It's an interesting trend. And if it's the same thing from Union to today, it's a trend we should follow.

For what reason, Paul, do you think that this walling off of the medium is happening by Apple and Spotify and whatnot? Are they doing nefarious reasons or. I mean, they're trying to. Ownership is. You want to own it, I guess. And they're pulling more things behind their walls.

So it's scarcity and it's mismanaged scarcity too. It's scarcity where they didn't even run the books on this one. You know, it's even short term scarcity versus long term scarcity. The example I give Spotify, you know, Michelle Obama show, they got Michelle, you know, and she's the world loves Michelle. Season one was Spotify, only season two, they're like, yeah, this isn't going to work, you know, and you can now get it on the other platforms. You know, it's happening that quickly. You know, the world thinks that way. They don't realize why this is so different. You know, Star Trek has to sell, so they gotta be somewhere. So they went with Paramount, plus closing it off to even Paul, the big Trekkie.

Well, I think one thing that we had, you know, which naturally I guess move things in the direction that we're talking about, the monopolies and the control of scarcity is that we lived so much in a physical world that, you know, it was a real estate world because. And then when you got into the frequency world, well, that was electronic real estate. We had a podcast about six weeks ago. Gord asked me, what are Your thoughts about Blockchain, I listen to that one. I said, gord, you're asking somebody a question. I'm still trying to figure out where the cloud is.

Right, right.

But the thing is that a lot of our concepts of communication, our concepts of relationship are very real estate based and there's various kinds of real estate in the electronic world. There's frequencies and it's tightly controlled by government. The frequencies. It's just amazing the control that here in Canada, the crtc, I think the crtc. And it's like if you're really good, Paul, we're going to let you watch something, right?

Yeah, yep, yep, yeah.

You got to be really good though and. Right. And pay your taxes when you're going up the escalators. Got to be on the right hand side.

Yep, yep.

So my sense is that we're used to this monopolistic world, whether it's at the government level or the corporate level. But it just seems to me that this one particular medium is not regular. Zoom kind of gives me that. We had a meeting with our accounting firm and we have one of the big ones because we're in three countries and they have a team where all three countries are represented on the teams. There's movement of money between countries and there's different tax laws that have to be taken. But with the new virtual global, everything is US dollars. So it's full price US dollars. And it's all electronic. I mean it all comes electronically. Babs was telling the lead person on our team, you know, all the money goes right back to Toronto because we get a premium on every US dollar. You know, we've had about $26 for 32 years. That's the difference. And it's really profit, you know, that 26% is really profit. And the guy says, well, no, no, this is global. Now we have to take into consideration, you know that you say you got people from India and you have people. And she says, no, they're in India, but the workshop isn't in India.

Right.

And he says, well, where is the workshop? And she said, nowhere, right? Yeah, it's nowhere. And she said, what do you mean nowhere? So no taxation, no regulation. It doesn't exist. You know, it doesn't exist. So I'm wondering if. Yeah, we're just freewheeling here. But people really don't want to be regulated and taxed.

Right.

And they don't want to be monopolized either. Right.

And the shows are nowhere, but people want to make them somewhere. And Paul, you brought up Michelle Obama. It was interesting. One of the things that I wanted to touch on as well was the celebrity podcast boom right now, because they had walled her off, and then they opened it up again because they realized Rogan's doing quite well being walled off of Spotify. A writer for the Guardian, Fiona Sturgess, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Hope so. She wrote that celebrity podcasts are an invasive weed, hoovering up budgets, smothering competition, and dropping quality. How do you feel about the celebrity podcast boom? Because none of them were doing this prior to maybe. Well, I mean, Rogan's been doing it for a long time, but everyone's jumping on board right now. I would tend to agree that a lot of them are just not that good, but they're doing it because they draw the attention.

Well, I think Fiona's own podcast isn't doing as well.

That could be the reason. Maybe she didn't get the budget.

That's kind of what I'm thinking here. You aren't quite getting the draw that maybe you were before.

Yeah, could be sour grapes, but she may have a point as well that a lot of the money that could be directed towards people who have the skills and the talent and the proclivities to do this, a lot of that's getting funneled over to a celebrity rambling about not much of anything just because people want to hear their voice.

If somebody really likes me, somebody else can compete with the fact that somebody likes me. Yeah, I think it's the same thing. I mean, it's a free ocean. Anybody can swim in the ocean they want, you know, So I think she's looking at it from a CBC standpoint or something, you know. Yeah, I mean, I'm really in favor that they stop paying the. Not cbc, BBC. But, you know, they have a licensing fee. Whether you have a television or not, you pay licensing fee in Britain for the BBC. And I. I said, you know, maybe 1920, 1930, this makes sense to get something started. But I think there's just an angst in the. What I would call the legacy media, that nobody's watching them anymore, nobody's listening to them anymore.

And I think the celebrity podcast thing, I just don't play in that game. So I don't have a single client who's going to be affected by a celebrity podcast getting the money and the attention. I read that article. So he brought it up. It was funny because I saw that one, too. Gord, we play in many of the same playgrounds, you and I. But what I thought was an old friend of mine who shot up the ranks at. @&t. Shot up the ranks. And I finally got a couple of beers in him, and I. I asked him, how did you shoot up the ranks? And he admitted to me, Monday morning, he would send out a group email to all of the leaders introducing some sort of controversial topic, and then all the leaders would spend the week debating each other on the email. Well, he'd get work done, and at the end of the week, all of his leaders, there was this long email thread where everybody made their best points, and he just closed clients, made deals, and that's how he shot up the ranks, was he just created distraction. And I sort of feel like these celebrity podcasts are kind of that if you're fighting for that sweet, sweet mattress money, you know, you might want to worry that, you know, that the latest celebrity is coming out with a podcast. But here's the deal. Don't compete for the sweet, sweet mattress money. I cannot think of a single podcast. Now, Rogan. Everybody talks about Rogan, but here's the thing. Here's what history teaches us. Rogan is not new. There's not a single thing new with Rogan. We used to call him Howard Stern. Okay? Howard Stern used to be available on all the radio stations all across America. And then one day, a big company paid Howard Stern a lot of money to only be on one radio station. It wasn't a good move for them. They're dying. Sirius is dying. It was a good move for Howard. You know, fast forward 10 years there, whatever it was. Spotify paid a lot of money for Rogan. Rogan made a lot more money by going to Spotify than that sweet, sweet mattress money. So was it good for Rogan? It was great for Rogan. Was it good for podcasting? Who cares? I'm not a big fan of the show, and I can get it anyway if I want to kind of thing. So it's distraction, you know, it's the best move Rogan can make. Best move Rogan can make. Best move Stern could make. You know, less people listening to than ever before.

But who cares? Well, the other thing. Can a celebrity actually attract and hold a podcast audience?

You know, there's a few who have.

No, no. But what I mean is, it's not like you're being a celebrity automatically guarantees you.

Exactly. Yes, yes, yes.

You might be an idiot.

Yeah. You know, maybe that's why you're a celebrity.

Might is the operative word.

I thought, you know, Stephen Hawking is deserving his Nobel Prize. I've read a lot of physicists and say this was a real breakthrough, but when he talks about whether God exists or not, he's an idiot. What's he know about God? You know, he knows about black holes. So the fact that you're a celebrity as a result of your activities in one industry doesn't necessarily come across the border. But the whole point is that it's a completely free market to try out anything you want.

Go nuts. Go nuts.

Yeah.

People ask me all the time, are you worried about the 13 year old who's offering his podcast editing services on Fiverr? No, I'm not. God bless him. Yeah. Where is the competition really? And if the competition is in that word, not what you're doing with that word, you don't understand what competition is.

One of the things that was so refreshing about Rogan was we spilled more verbal ink on him, was they were talking to him about Spotify had removed a bunch of episodes. I think they removed about 45. There were some guests that their folks didn't like, and they removed them. So they asked Rogan, and I think they expected him to get all riled up and say, well, I won't stand for this. And, you know, start pounding on the desk. And Rogan just very simply, he's like, I don't care.

It's their show. They bought it.

It was so refreshing because, you know, whether you think it's wrong or you think it's right, Rogan basically, in not too many words, said, listen, they drove a dump truck full of money up to my house. They dumped it off the people that I interviewed. Yeah, they had controversial opinions and they were, you know, they had political this, that, and what else? But this is not a hill I'm dying on here. I'm not going to start fighting with the guy who gave me $100 million to make sure that I have an episode for a guy that I haven't spoken to in four years remains on the program. He's just like, yeah, I don't care.

Well, the truth is the money Rogan got paid for the canceled show, but Spotify didn't.

Exactly. Right. You just said, I don't care.

They just said, you know, we're so angry at this show, we're just not going to take any money from it.

But the fact of the matter is, there's that too. But what's really important is, like, I'll give you a guaranteed way to increase downloads of multiplier mindset. I guarantee you that if you released slowly on Social Boy. I'm so glad that that canceled Coach member is now no longer in the Multiplier Mindset archives. You know, people will dig into the Multiplier Mindset archives to figure out, you know, what episode's missing, and they dig through it, and they play through it. Rogan's really good at getting publicity, and there's no better publicity right now than getting censored or getting canceled.

Well, the other thing about Rogan, you know, and he's unique at it, and that is, in a polarized political world, he's not a polarizing person. No. I mean, I can kind of get a feel for what his political preferences are, but he's got both sides on his shows, and he treats them with respect. He treats people respectfully. He's got good questions. He lets them do the talking, you know, and I think he was just sort of a, whoo. Oh, that feels good. I didn't know what the opposite of stupid really felt like.

So let's present a solution for the bellyachers here. Paul, in your opinion, for those who may be upset that celebrity podcasting is hoovering up all of the money, how do you compete with that? What would you tell your client or any client who approached you and said, geez, you know, really worried about this? Everyone's listening to Rogan. No one's listening to my show about, you know, toe fungus. What are you telling them to drill down on? Because it's a question that we get from Strategic Coach clients a lot.

Yep.

Just one more little footnote to this that I'll throw at the top. I spoke to a client of Coach, and he is an optometrist, and he said, I do a podcast, and here's who it's for. Optometrists who own their own clinic and own the building the clinic is in. And I said, holy smoke, that's a great niche. And somebody would think, well, who's going to listen to that? And he's like, well, 600 people a month listen to that. And I said, I'm not surprised, because that's so niche. Is that where people need to go? In your opinion, is that what the advice you'd give your clients, or is it something else you would tell them to do?

So I have been lucky. The one thing I have, you know, my joke is I've been in podcasting for 16 years, five of them profitably, you know, for being in this, you know, for 16 years, I've said, niche, niche, niche, niche, niche, niche. And it hasn't worked. People think they're just more spectacular than they really are. That model doesn't work. Here's the model that works now. Podcast partnership. We have four questions. I talked about the first two on the last episode. We'll talk about number one, what do you want your podcast to do? You know, I want my podcast to make money. Great. Question two, you know, how is it going to do it? I'm going to sell mattress ads. Yeah, inventory's out. This Larry podcast got all the mattress ads. Oh, well, then what am I going to do? And then once we get to that, how does it make money? We can go there. So number one, what do you want the podcast to do? Number two, how you know that it's doing it? You know, a client call says, I want the podcast to make the phone ring. I go, great. Tell me this. When the phone rings, you're going to ask how they heard about you. You're going to go right to the sale. He says, I'm going right to the sale. I go, great. Let me send you a cell phone. We know now because I have a cell phone records. I know how many times the podcast made the cell phone ring. What do the podcasts do? How do you know it's doing it? And then here's the crazy one, guys. Here's the crazy one. Is it doing it? You know, are you getting the checks from the sweet, sweet mattress money? You know, you know, is the phone ringing? Are you converting these people? You know, and then the fourth question is, how can we do it better? That's it. So when somebody calls and says, I want to make money in ads, and it's funny, the guy who I sent the cell phone to, who we realized quickly is a million dollar podcast, he called me about the mattress ads one day. You know, dude, he's less than 500 downloads per episode. But it's a niche market. I just don't use that word niche anymore. So the way I guide people is just the four things. What do you want the podcast to do? How are you going to know it's doing it? Is it doing it? How do we do it better? That's it. That's the coaching process now. You know, it's a process I put tms by and whatnot. You know, through my leadership through the Strategic Coach Organization. They have nice little graphics and that kind of thing. They're all one page PDFs. But that works better than niche or niche or, you know, whatever it is. That's where I take people. Now the four questions.

Yeah, I talk about, you know, because there's marketing ideas. One of the conclusions that I came to after a year of zoom is that I will never again for the rest of my life, which is a long life. Oh, yeah. Ever travel for marketing or sales reasons? I said, I'll be right here at this desk and I'll be marketing. But we're writing our books for a hay house. So we've got a 10 book, 10 year contract. Ben writes the books. Tucker Max is the packager. I mean, basically the design, the COVID design will go with that. And he's kind of the overall editor, whether this is a good book or not a good book. So one of the things that's really hard for authors to do because they think they're writing for the world. And I said, you know, I said, I only write for one person. You know, we were talking to Ben and he says, well, gap in the gain. Who are we writing for? I said, well, right off the bat, we're not writing to teach people about goal setting. We're not teaching people about goal achievement. We're not talking to have successful goals. These are people who were born achievers. They're born goal setters, they're born achievers. They just missed all the classes on being happy, right? So he says, well, who is that? I said, tucker, Max, whenever you're writing the book and you're in indecision, what would Tucker think about that? Because Tucker was super successful at 28. He had four New York Times bestseller. He had a movie made on it. He just missed all the classes on being happy.

The day I realized the implications. There was a popular show, popular tech show in the early days. It was one of the biggest shows on the planet. Quarter of a million downloads every episode. Okay. There was an event where they were going to play all of the recordings from that event on the podcast. Now there were 11 people in the event. I flew down to LA on my own dime to speak to the 11 people because I wanted to go to the quarter of a million people. And I started my presentation. I said, welcome to a live recording of the Podcast Tools episode, you know, which was the thing that was going on. And the crowd went wild. We had a fun time with it. But like, so was that me flying? Would you fly somewhere to be on a podcast with a quarter million downloads?

No, because a quarter million downloads probably doesn't mean anything to us. Who's downloading of the right downloads?

Yeah, for me it was getting my.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That got me a session at hp that Got me to session at Micro. Yeah.

We're in our 32nd year of the program, and I know exactly who I'm looking at. I'm looking for ambition, creativity, and cooperation. We got three characteristics. People who have a combination of ambition, creativity, and cooperation. And I said, when you think about creative people, you know, you'll find they're missing one of those. When you find ambitious people, you'll find they're missing cooperative people. They're missing one. The sweet spot is when they have all three. Because I'm looking for Free zone people.

Awesome.

I want everybody signing up in the free zone within a certain period of time. Bigger economy than China.

Let's do it. And in the US Dollar as well.

That's the goal.

And in US dollars.

I'm happy. Everyone's happy. We're all coming out of a very, very odd year. You know, it's interesting how when the lockdown happened globally, getting messages out into the world, the companies, the firms, the individuals who had the infrastructure to do that. We were lucky that we had a head start here at Strategic Coach. Paul, you've been giving companies head starts now for, what was it, 20 years. There were some bumps along the road on the way, and things weren't perfect. I don't want to minimize the damage that was done. But for those who were a little bit ahead of the curve, I think a lot of entrepreneurs that we speak to here at Strategic Coach, they had a pretty darn good year, I would say.

The other thing I'm really interested, and this will be for another episode, Paul, is your podcast partnership. Because I can see a lot of free zone collaboration here where you put together my whole notion of a free zone collaboration is that you're in love with the same end user, and then you come back upstream and you take one capability here and you put it with another capability and. And you create a third thing that neither of you could create. So we should talk about. Because my sense is that what I've seen so far in the Free Zone is that everybody's got a really unique take on something, but they don't have all the capabilities necessary to trigger it. So I think we should really introduce you. And right off the bat, why don't we get Paul in for our Free Zone Summit next February? So we have a keynote speaker every February, So we'll have Paul in.

Well, thank you.

Making things happen. Making pizza here on podcast Payoffs.

You know, we'll talk between now and then. I'll see you in 10 times, and we'll talk about it, but I think this is a missing capability in the whole free zone picture that we have right now, and you might as well be the capability.

Well, thank you, Matt. I'll take it. I'll take it. Yeah.

Paul, where can people find out more about you and the work that you do?

PaulCulligan.com and HeadSuperTuesday.com is my weekly email newsletter. It's just what's happening in the industry that'll lead you in all the other directions.

Thanks so much for joining us on Podcast Payoffs. If you enjoyed this episode, please do share it with a friend. And I want to thank once again, Paul Colligan for joining us today.

Thank you for having me, man.

Really been a pleasure, Dan, as always. Pleasure. And join us on the next one.