Rob Greenlee: Human-Hosted in an AI World

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The Sound Off Podcast, the show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:13  
Rob Greenlee has worked at Microsoft Spreaker, Podcast One, Libsyn, Stream Yard, and Podbean. He is the founder of Trust Factor Lab, the Trust Creator Community, host of the venerable New Media Show, the first chairperson of the Podcast Academy, and he's been in podcasting since its inception. Oh yeah, and he's also in the Podcast Hall of Fame. Over the years, Rob has had a front row seat to the evolution of podcasting, and now is as good a time as ever, to see what its role is in the new media landscape. And now Rob Greenlee joins me from Nagateuk, Connecticut. The last time we did speak, by the way, was a couple years ago, and we were really wrestling with what is a podcast, and it took you about a year after we did that episode to really sort of land on the definition, and there it is, right on the front page of your website is the definition of what a podcast is, and I feel it's it's ongoing, it's moving, it's fluid, and it's also so many things, but I feel like we've sort of landed on the right spot now.

Rob Greenlee  1:14  
Yeah, well, I think it's it's where it's been for a while now, it's just that the industry didn't want to accept it.

Matt Cundill  1:21  
How did we get here to where the definition of a podcast sort of became so many things?

Rob Greenlee  1:26  
I think it's just the nature of the evolution of technology and the evolution of media, and how we are becoming, or we have become the primary media out there, and I think, as you've seen, the power of these big platforms kind of flex their muscles, they're forcing creators into sometimes making different decisions and different choices, and look for other types of opportunities that maybe are more control-oriented. The bottom line to really what the battle lines are right now are around control and who has control over what, and who has control over the audience, and what platform has control over the creators as well as the audience, that's the battle lines right now, and I think what's happening with AI is threatening that balance, and it's also causing people a lot of frustration around what the future looks like with what they're doing, and then the pressures for monetization and the professionalization that is rampant out there right now, that the big shows are getting bigger and they're getting bigger budgets, and their productions are becoming TV show-like, and so we're moving down this path of change that is very fundamental to content, but at the end of the day, Matt, it's the same basic stuff, though, right? It's, it's the content is what really is important, and in this intimate relationship with audiences is never been more important, so in a lot of ways the fundamentals of what's happening here have not changed dramatically. So I think that the movement towards commercialization and the integration of monetization strategies that have been linked up with more legacy media, radio, TV have been pushing their way into the digital realm, or, or what I'm calling now the new media landscape, which finally the name of my new media show is Feels Appropriate Now.

Matt Cundill  3:33  
Well, that came around well.

Rob Greenlee  3:35  
Yeah, after all these years, I lucked out, Matt.

Matt Cundill  3:39  
Yeah, I mean, I would listen or watch the new media show, as it were, and you know you and Todd Cochran were talking about podcasting every day for the 10 years, and then all of a sudden you're talking more about new media all of a sudden and stuff that's coming into the podcast space.

Rob Greenlee  3:55  
Well, and now Todd's Todd's gone, so it's it's my, it's my show now to shape and to reflect what the present is and what the future looks like, and and that's what I'm trying to do, and sometimes it's not always the easiest path or the one that doesn't ruffle feathers, but that's what the new media show has always been about, it's about, you know, challenging people's perceptions and and pushing the envelope of what this medium is and how it's being perceived and and where the opportunities are.

Matt Cundill  4:27  
Well, perception is reality, and one of the perceptions I just love holding up the picture of two people on Netflix talking to one another, and people will say that's a talk show, unless you put two SM 7b in front of them, and then it becomes a podcast,

Rob Greenlee  4:43  
exactly. Yeah, but that's what the audience perceives, right? So, is the audience wrong? I don't know that they are. So, we may not like it as content creators that they see it that way, but you know who's who's to decide.

Matt Cundill  4:57  
Can you remember the first time when you. Started to see new media encroaching on podcasting. Was there one thing that said, "Oh, this is really changing?

Rob Greenlee  5:06  
Oh, I think it's always been there. I think change has been the whole idea of podcasting. It's around changing the traditional media model, and since the very earliest, and I think podcasting and YouTube were really the pioneering platforms that even made this concept of new media even possible, though one exception would be probably like a Napster, and some of these RSS-based, you know, feed readers of sorts in the early years really transformed one's ability to gather media and to aggregate it and to consume it, and that really started this chain reaction of platforms wanting to embrace change and embrace different forms of distribution of media, and so I think it's always been really, it depends on, I mean, if you look at the definition of new media, if we're going to talk about that, it goes back to the late 90s, it's not really a new term, but it's a term that wasn't used as much, because it was always linked up with very specific type of distribution strategies, like RSS and podcasting and YouTube, and things like that. It wasn't brought together based on a very diverse ecosystem, and that's what we have now, is that lots. There's lots of options, right? You can build private communities, you can publish content into private proprietary platforms, you can create monetization models over there, you can create whole companies around newsletters, you can create short form content, long form content, all sorts of stuff. So that's really what new media is, is it's the spectrum of everything.

Matt Cundill  6:44  
I can think back to probably 2019 perhaps, and it was Signal Hill Insights, and Jeff Fiddler, who recently retired from there. I've long worked with him in radio. He used to do audience auditorium testing for our radio stations, and I've known him since the early 90s, and he would release, you know, data that said that most people are discovering or consuming their podcasts on YouTube, and you know, I just figured out how RSS works, and then you say that the number one discovery method is on YouTube, and I didn't know what to make of it, and then I remembered he's just asking questions, and the audience just answering the questions

Rob Greenlee  7:22  
exactly, so the audience is deciding it's not the podcaster deciding, and I think the industry has confused that over the years, where they think just because some survey says that people think that's a podcast means that that's how the creator needs to think, but I think the creator needs to understand what the technical differences of the distribution approaches between these RSS and more API-based or proprietary distribution platforms? There's been a lot of these big platforms that have wanted to play in that proprietary side, and even Spotify, Facebook wanted to play on that side, Pandora wanted to play on owning the distribution, owning the content, getting the content via RSS, but then redistributing it on their platform, not having the ability to centralize the hosting of it, and that's what's really different about if you look at the spectrum of the platforms that are out there today, and Apple kind of broke the mold a little bit by doing this API sharing of HLS stream links, which is a little bit of proprietary and pass-through at the same time. They're kind of creating a, and that really causes a lot of confusion in the industry right now, too, about what Apple is actually doing here.

Matt Cundill  8:35  
Well, myself included, I used to get very uppity about, you know, anybody who wanted to cash audio and then redistribute it and not allow for pass through. And my question is, is that how do you get over yourself right and get past that right after years of being defensive about and defending the RSS feed, and now sort of just okay, yes, okay, HLS, we'll let that one in. Yeah, YouTube will let you into it feels like we're letting a few people into the party now, and getting a little bit - we're getting over ourselves a bit.

Rob Greenlee  9:05  
We are well, and I think that it is true that there has been a slow drip concerted effort to really kind of establish a different pathway for content syndication, and that is not using RSS, I would say at this point RSS is still the dominant methodology, but that's not to say that these big companies wouldn't love to disrupt it a little bit. So, if you look at the history of this, which I've followed it very closely, there has been a slow drip towards proprietary, because that plays into the market advantage for these large platforms, and that's what they would like. It's more control and more access to be able to monetize that content in a rev share deal with the creator instead of centralized hosting. So, in this case, both things are true at the same time, that RSS is strong, but yet there's strong interests that will. Want to disrupt it,

Matt Cundill  10:02  
so I only started a podcast, so I would at least have a basis to pretend I know what I'm talking about, and so actually it's this month, we've been doing this for 10 years now.

Rob Greenlee  10:12  
Yeah, you've been doing it a while,

Matt Cundill  10:14  
I know it's like 500 plus episodes in 10 years, and we are still getting to this day more than 95% of our consumption is via RSS, and I'm happy to go and put the video out to YouTube, and then Facebook, and X, and LinkedIn. There's just not a lot of people there. I think a lot of people are watching it and going, 'That reminds me, I'm going to go and download this on Apple or Spotify on my way home,

Rob Greenlee  10:42  
yeah. And I had a guest on my show here recently that I'm trying to bring on people that are not from the podcast space, that are from kind of upstart media people out there that are coming out of the tech sector and out of Silicon Valley and VCs kind of stuff, and how they're looking at the media landscape, and you know, a lot of these bigger platforms, like X and LinkedIn and Facebook, to some degree, YouTube, they're all kind of siloed ecosystems of creators, to some degree, there's some crossover that's going on, but increasingly there are this movement towards creators that are just publishing to one platform, they're not doing this broad distribution approach, and part of the reason for that is concentration, being able to elevate what they're doing via the algorithms on those platforms, and just the sheer complexity and the difficulty of trying to be everywhere, and that's what the power of RSS was, is a published once and it goes everywhere, but we're increasingly coming into a situation where these separate large platforms, they don't want you cross posting to other sources of content, they want people to create content on their platform, keep the content on their platform, and don't even outlink to other platforms, and they will de-emphasize your posts based on you doing external links, and so we're, we're creating this very complex ecosystem of content distribution that is really scaring a lot of new creators away from, you know, doing a syndication approach, and RSS is kind of losing its awareness to some degree. I mean, I think you talk to someone that's a creator on X, half of them won't even know what RSS is, and even care. So that's the other thing that's going on too.

Matt Cundill  12:36  
So I have a friend who started a YouTube show, she comes from TV, and I had to write her a letter, because that's the way you got to get through to people, was actually with through the post office, but I said I think you're missing an opportunity by not having this show in audio form on RSS. I think there's a lot of available ears out there, and then I know I go back to the other thing, which is, you know, building your empire on somebody else's ground. In this case, YouTube's.. I kind of feel there's a missed opportunity there for that person.

Rob Greenlee  13:11  
Yeah, I would say for many shows, depending on the format and the content. Yeah, I would agree. I think there's platforms out there like Blueberry has a what's called a Vid to Pod platform that you just put your channel in there and it will extract the audio and create an RSS feed, and wow, you're a podcaster with your YouTube channel, so there are pathways to do it that are simple and easy, but it gets back to what I was just saying about how increasingly new creators are feeling siloed because they don't feel like they have the knowledge or the maybe the skills from the standpoint of knowing how it works, how to be everywhere, how to create a piece of content that works on Facebook and works on X and works on YouTube and works as a podcast. I mean, that's a complex equation now to figure out and be able to publish on a regular basis, too.

Matt Cundill  14:05  
I'm very happy, by the way, to go and to upload my video to X. It just takes a lot of time,

Rob Greenlee  14:12  
it does,

Matt Cundill  14:13  
and I'm not sure about the ROI and what I'm getting back from it. I just know it's a good thing to be everywhere.

Rob Greenlee  14:19  
It is. I would agree, but it's increasingly hard to do that unless you have a team. Guess what, you know we're back to the professionalism again, and the big shows are getting bigger, and it's because they have teams of people that are able to effectively do what you just said that you would like to do, and to create maybe different versions of their shows, doing different approaches on each of the platforms that is more effective that they've been able to test against to see what works and what doesn't work, and a lot of kind of data feedback loops that are driving these big shows to be able to manage the ecosystem, and their bigger shows are starting to leverage AI to help them manage all this stuff. And I think that is an opportunity for new creators as well, but that's a difficult hill to climb for many as well, right now,

Matt Cundill  15:09  
and the barrier to entry, oh my goodness, in 2015 2016 it was a few 100 bucks and a connection to the internet, and now it's cameras, you need high speed internet, you need a team,

Rob Greenlee  15:22  
you're starting a business, Matt. You're starting a media company, right?

Matt Cundill  15:26  
Yeah, yeah. But I remember feeling how wonderful it was. Chicago 2016 a podcast movement talking about the very low barrier to entry that changed very quickly, and it changed with video. I think,

Rob Greenlee  15:38  
yeah, I think, well, video has kind of always been a part of podcasting to some degree. It's just it went through a span of about 10 years where it wasn't as much of a part of podcasting. I worked in the era of the very early stages of the podcast space when it was a lot of video, but it was very different back then. I mean, there were startup companies that very similar to today that were starting networks of video podcasts, and they were, you know, these companies were that's all they were doing was video podcasting, and under the definition of RSS delivered media, and it, it just faded when YouTube started to get traction, and it also faded because a lot of these big media companies couldn't figure out how to make money at publishing video in RSS, because the monetization tech stack didn't exist back then, and I traveled the country back when I was working for Microsoft, back in that video podcast era, that early video podcast era, when all these big networks were publishing full TV episodes into their RSS feeds, like I got full episodes from Showtime and HBO and Nat Geo and Viacom and Comedy Central, and I mean, just go through the litany of these media companies that were publishing full TV episodes into RSS feeds, and, or, you know, clips, or, you know, it was a variety of different things that they were doing, but they got out of it because it was too expensive to deliver the video files during the time when that happened. The country was in kind of an economic collapse. It was back in that 2009 10 eight 910 timeframe, and they were looking at budget cuts, and I talked to the MSNBC folks, and they were right on the cusp in that timeframe of canceling all their MSNBC video podcasts. Fortunately, they decided, because of fan outrage when they announced it, they changed their mind and kept it going. And so you still have today, you still have some video podcasts that are put out by that network, but you know, Apple kind of ignored those for many years, you know, as we shifted into, you know, priority one was audio and serial, and, and that's the era that we're, that we've been coming out of now for like the last two years or so.

Matt Cundill  17:56  
How hopeful are you about HLS video?

Rob Greenlee  18:00  
I think it's a little bit of a mixed bag right now, because the technical aspects of it haven't been fully deployed and worked out, and I think the monetization layers inside of that, from the programmatic side on the video and the audio side, feel like the early years of programmatic very scattered and not very well defined, and each company is trying to, you know, do it maybe a little different way, and so we're, we're really in this kind of very confused landscape right now about monetization, because the other big shift that's coming is that the video now increasingly is going to be the source of the audio, and that also is causing conflict in the industry too, because some of the platforms are still going to put the audio track from the RSS, they're going to encode it into an MP file and make it available as a, as a enclosure, either in the alternative enclosure tag or in the regular enclosure tag and RSS, and make that available as well, so any kind of listening platform that wants to pull the MP file, they can still do that, because having the ability to turn off the video and continue listening to the audio is what these big platforms are trying to achieve right now, because they're trying to create a kind of like a flow of an experience by the audience where they can start listening to a podcast in the car on the way home, and then when they get home, they can resume it on their television, either via YouTube or Apple Podcasts. Once Apple supports in their Apple TV the HLS streaming capability, which I'm sure is coming very soon, but to create that kind of experience where you can start and finish with, you can start audio, finish with video, or the other way around. That's the experience that they think that users want right now.

Matt Cundill  19:52  
What about the new media show? Because I have a decision to make with the Sound Off Podcast, and that's, do I edit from the. Video, and then just let the video become the mp audio, and then people can scroll back and forth between the two, but you have an mp and an mp because you had, were always, you had RSS.

Rob Greenlee  20:13  
I've been doing that for 14 years, so yeah,

Matt Cundill  20:16  
I know, but now it comes HLS.

Rob Greenlee  20:19  
Now I haven't moved HLS yet.

Matt Cundill  20:21  
Are you thinking about

Rob Greenlee  20:22  
it? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm, I'm talking to a well, Blueberry is going to support it, but I'm also talking to other platforms too, to see what the best path is, because there are differences between each of the hosts on how they're rolling this out, what the process is for you to talk to Captivates doing it a different way than you know, you talk to our 19 or you talk to megaphone or you talk to, you know, they're all still kind of like in this this phase of development in deployment and they're still working out the back end and they're still working on various aspects of it, so it's still early, though people are doing it already, so it's not like it's not active. It's fairly limited to just the high-end iPhones right now, mostly. So, a lot of the older iPhones probably don't have it and won't have it. It's this phased rollout thing that's going on with it, and I just don't feel any significant benefit from doing it. I did see a big jump in the video plays of even my MP RSS feed after they had launched, because I'm my new media show was listed as a video file, just like any HLS video is listed in Apple right now, so it looks the same. The audience can't even tell what the difference is.

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Matt Cundill  22:16  
So I'm not really sure what to do yet, because I understand that Apple want to have that seamless transition between back and forth, and to be able to toggle really between the two, but I'll use last week's episode as a great example. It was really designed for audio. We had an audio imaging professional on, and we put some audio clips in that are really designed to be listened to. And I just looked at the video, I said, I'm not going to be putting in this into the video, I'm not going to be editing the same way, and it's still just going to be the raw presentation, and this episode, too, we're going to finish at whatever minutes, and then the audio is going to be about three or four minutes shorter than that.

Rob Greenlee  22:49  
Yeah, I'm increasingly trying to get the new media show to be consistent across the audio and the video, and I'm increasingly using AI to help me do that, but it's, yeah, like I'm using the Descript tool because the Descript tool has this underlore that they have built into it now that has the integration with Claude Opus 4.7 and so I can upload separate local recordings up into that and tell it what to do, and it'll combine them in a multi-camera production for me, and do all the editing, and do all of the sound optimizations, and that I want it to do. I just tell it what I want, want it to do. And now, obviously, it doesn't always work perfect. The analogy I like to talk about when I do this is, is I feel like I'm a director. Sure, I created the content originally, it did the interview and stuff, but when I give it to the AI, it's like I need to instruct it exactly in detail what I want it to do, and hopefully it'll do it, you know, and occasionally it screws up and it doesn't, or it doesn't do it in a complete way, and I find errors, and then I have to go back in and tell it to fix this or fix that, and all that kind of stuff, which really is, I think, a great example of really where we are right now, and using AI to create content. It's not entirely doing the clone stuff, and automated productions, and things like that is not really the best use for it, but people are using it like that, right?

Matt Cundill  24:19  
Yeah, I actually have Descript, and I never really thought to do that. If I were to go, I mean, I actually considered maybe I'll just edit tonight's show on the video side and see what happens. I've been doing 504 episodes the other way, right?

Rob Greenlee  24:35  
Yeah, it's a hard shift. I mean, I had to think about it completely different, because prior I was exporting merged files, right? Merge that has, like, both of us is a good example of it in one video file, where now I'm exporting everything, even the screen shares and things like that, that I do as separate video files, and then I just upload all the video files into the AI, and they do the merging and combining. Switching and all that stuff for me, but it's based on what I want.

Matt Cundill  25:04  
I wish I could just keep those files separate into script. I'm always like, separate them, keep them separate, don't put them together.

Rob Greenlee  25:11  
Yeah, it's not a multi-track editor, which maybe that, that would be an okay interface to have to what it's doing is just have it stitch it together in a multi-track interface,

Matt Cundill  25:23  
I think of all the other places. Afterwards, you could have, like, people come up to me, they say, 'Oh, I saw your show on Instagram, it's a reel. I see the show on TikTok, right? And I'm like, 'Okay, we put a minute or two of that up there, but people think that's the show, and they register that as having watched, right? And that's what I'm using Descript to help me do.

Rob Greenlee  25:42  
Yeah, keep hearing everybody talking about you got to, got to do more shorts, you got to do more shirts, you know, these vertical videos. And my pushback on that is it's great to get the views, but if you're monetized, it's not a great way to monetize, from what I've heard. So, you know what I'm saying there, it's like put all this energy into shorts, because that's what YouTube wants, but I don't know that it pays off in every case.

Matt Cundill  26:06  
I think it's hitting a lot of people that would never listen to my show and are still not going to listen to my show.

Rob Greenlee  26:11  
It's true, they're still not gonna.. it's.. it's trying to get them to convert right from watching the short to getting into the longer content.

Matt Cundill  26:21  
Somebody used the term, you know, a funnel. This is strictly top of funnel, and once they scroll it, you know, they flip out of the tunnel and they move on to something else.

Rob Greenlee  26:31  
Yep, yeah, there's always the next dopamine hit that's right behind it, right?

Matt Cundill  26:36  
But I think back about six, seven years, actually, I still get this today, though. It makes me nuts, you know. Podcasting has a discovery problem, which it didn't back then, but you know, it's possible that my show has a discovery problem, right?

Rob Greenlee  26:51  
Right. Yeah, I think that that's probably more of the truth.

Matt Cundill  26:54  
But this new media opportunity just opens it up and kind of solves the discovery issue. Now there's more discovery opportunity for your show.

Rob Greenlee  27:05  
Yeah, that's true. And also more, more work to get that discovery too. That's the exchange, right? Podcasters are the hardest working folks in the kitchen right now. You know, if you want to achieve a level of success, it's either that or you have an unlimited budget where you can hire experts that can manage various parts of what you're doing.

Matt Cundill  27:26  
Well, I've seen some people go out and hire experts, and they are hiring short form people about that, and

Rob Greenlee  27:33  
sometimes it works good. I mean, I hear a lot of these folks that hire people, and sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn't, you know,

Matt Cundill  27:40  
but they let go of the long form guy to hire the short form guy, and I was like, "Oh, I don't think that's..

Rob Greenlee  27:47  
we don't think you want to do that.

Matt Cundill  27:49  
Yeah, you know, and been talking a little bit with the people from YouTube as well. They've come to a few of the events that I've been to, the Soundwave Summit, and also in Calgary, we went to.. we went to Pod Summit, YYC, you know. And there's YouTube. YouTube shows up, and they're there to help podcasters now with everything, and I know with subscribers and likes and, and all these other things. And then, you know, I'll ask and say, what's the most important stat? And it's watch time. It's, you know, the same as what would be for us that we've known as consumption.

Rob Greenlee  28:18  
Yeah, it is, and it's with HLS, it's going to become something that's important to podcasting too. Frankly, time spent listening is just the top level metric to get to what everybody wants, which is, did the advertiser's ad get listened to? At the end of the day, that's what they want, and then the secondary piece of that is, well, what's the conversion to a customer off of that hearing of that ad? So that's the attribution part, and that's where we're at right now with podcasting, and that's been one of the biggest complaints that the advertising industry has had of podcasting, is that there's a lot of downloads that don't get heard, and how do we know that the ads that were delivered in that download actually ever get heard, and HLS puts us on the path to solving some of those questions. I don't know that it's perfect, because I do know that Apple will pre-store, pre-download the audio track from the HLS stream with that same mechanism that they've been doing for a long time, so there still may be a little bit of a hiccup on the delivery and consumption side, but you will be able to map it up right. So let's say that audio file was delivered to the device, but then the Apple's ecosystem will enable you to identify whether or not the audio was actually heard, then that's what will be reported. Do

Matt Cundill  29:43  
you want to hear a cynical take about Apple and video and HLS?

Rob Greenlee  29:47  
Yes, please.

Matt Cundill  29:48  
It will remind people that there's a video, and when they get home, and they can finish it on YouTube, because YouTube is super, super easy, and it's in every bedroom on every TV. Every phone,

Rob Greenlee  30:01  
every iPad, and every tablet, too.

Matt Cundill  30:04  
Yeah,

Rob Greenlee  30:05  
so that's the other part of it. But yeah, with more than half of the consumption happening on big screen TVs now, there's a shift coming, and it's probably coming to a self-driving car at some point, too.

Matt Cundill  30:18  
Well, we did predict that a while ago, especially, I think the prediction came around when g was going to hit. It hasn't happened. Then you get the autonomous car and the g, and you know we're going to be traveling across the country in the back seat as alleged co-drivers,

Rob Greenlee  30:35  
or even in the front seat,

Matt Cundill  30:39  
and watching video

Rob Greenlee  30:41  
or playing games or watching movies, or

Matt Cundill  30:44  
yeah, that might be a little harrowing for me. I'm not sure. I can't even do it on an airplane. I'm good for, like, my Apple podcast stories, and that's about

Rob Greenlee  30:52  
it. Yeah, you have a choice. You can either take a nap, read a book, or watch a movie, or a podcast.

Matt Cundill  30:59  
Let's just bring it back to RSS for a sec, is there an opportunity for it to expand and make itself a little bit more valuable or increase what it can do? I know there's the Podcast Standards Project that is going on. We hope to have Justin Jackson on in a few weeks to talk about that, but you know, for RSS, is there an opportunity here for it to do a little bit more?

Rob Greenlee  31:18  
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I'm seeing it with many of the hosting platforms right now, with some of the tags, and it's interesting how we've, we kind of marched through the path of time, and some of these tags of Podcast 2.0 Project are getting picked up more and more, and I think the one that's going to get picked up increasingly right now is the Alternative Enclosure tag, and that's going to be used as a secondary method to make a HLS stream link available to other consumption apps that are out there that want to support HLS even outside of the Apple ecosystem, so this may be kind of like that open door to HLS becoming much more widely adopted, and via RSS, and I think that's the new energy of RSS is going to be the support of HLS streams inside of the alternative enclosure tag. So

Matt Cundill  32:16  
I know we're all excited about Apple picking it up, but iHeart has done it as well. I got an email from them saying we're doing this, just bring it.

Rob Greenlee  32:25  
Yep, so they're going to push in that direction, and I do know a couple other hosting platforms that are going to embrace the alternative enclosure tag, and it's going to be possible to include an MP if you want, potentially, but I think the real energy is coming from the HLS stream, since the hosts are already generating the HLS stream link that they're sharing with Apple. Well, why not make it available as part of the alternative enclosure tag in RSS?

Matt Cundill  32:50  
Looking in the rear view mirror, there was a time when there were these venture capital groups, and they were just piling money into podcasting and trying to become the Netflix of podcasting in and amongst other things, and then it went away, and it went away very quickly, around 2022 They gave it a few years and didn't see the ROI, but do you see a period coming up in the next couple of years where some new groups might be coming in to put some money into some companies?

Rob Greenlee  33:17  
Well, I think there is a lot of investment being made right now, the investment is mostly being made into content infrastructure companies, not specifically podcasting infrastructure companies, but ones that are creating different methods of content, right, and I think we've seen a little bit of a spurt, but we don't hear about it much in the podcast trades, these investments in AI content companies that are coming up and I've, I'm having some of these folks on on my new media show too, trying to cover this because there is a a movement out there that is embracing AI at a different level than what we see in the podcast industry right now, and there are experiences. I've got a couple of episodes coming up with a couple of platform builders that are building something completely new math. These aren't what we traditionally think of as media companies. These are ones that are embracing clone personalities, doing a lot of dynamic content, but also having heavily interactive engagement layers with audience, human audience utilizing AI personalities and AI content, but a lot of the derived content that the AI is doing is coming from the humans, so you have this interactive layer that's being developed, and a lot of those companies are the ones that are coming from like PhDs out of Stanford, and folks that are that are really trying to use this agentic technology that's developing out there to create forms of new media, you know, and I also, I was at a conference last night in New York City, and I was sitting. In front of, and asked the question, because he was presenting on stage, was the CEO of the X Games. Is another example of what I'm talking about, about heavy investment into AI technology, that is using that AI technology to analyze the grading and performance of various kind of sports, right? So it's taking this human decision layer out of the process, and they're using AI to analyze body position, you know, form and style, and to score. Think about even things like gymnastics, or football, or tennis, or any of these, where you can have eyes that are watching various lanes, and if the ball goes outside of the lane, the AI will detect it easier and quicker than a human would with fewer mistakes. So AI is being used to create content and to analyze content at a level that we've never been possible before. That's what's happening with it.

Matt Cundill  35:58  
I never want to see anybody lose their job, Rob, but quite frankly, the Russian judge at figure skating, we can let that person go.

Rob Greenlee  36:06  
Well, it's like the person that sits in that chair along the lines on the tennis court, right, that their whole job is to see if the ball hits outside of the line, right? So you have like four or five people like that sitting in front of lines on this tennis court looking for overages, those jobs are going to be the ones that get eliminated here. So,

Matt Cundill  36:26  
I had to eliminate a job from my group. It was just a small part-time one. Was also my son, so he didn't feel too badly. I let him cut the lawn instead, but he used to add up revenue sharing for the ads for our network, and then we would have to pay creators out, and it would take me, would take him six hours, it would take me one day to do it all, and you know, I wrote Chat GPT, and it was done in probably 20 seconds by the then I spent the day to double check to make sure it worked, and it did work, and it was accurate, so I mean, what am I to say, I just saved myself a day, right?

Rob Greenlee  37:02  
Yeah, and I think it's a good example of how this is really going to be used. A lot of people in the industry are all caught up in this, the backlash, the AI slop, and things like that. And I think it's a flash in the pan of really a huge issue, but at least in the podcasting space, but it's really.. it's more to do with, I think, anyway. In the long run, it's more to do with identifying what's human. That's what I started to do with the with the new media show on my album, or I say in bold letters on the album art now, it's human hosted. So not that it's a big issue in the podcasting, I don't think right now. I mean, most shows that are publishing podcasts now are still human-hosted shows. I mean, sure, there's 10,000 shows out there that are getting spun up by these AI engine platforms and things like that, and I've had those people on my podcast too. But it's still kind of a flash in the pan right now, and a lot of that stuff is being bashed and it's not being listened to, so it's going to fade away eventually, anyway. It is

Matt Cundill  38:02  
what it is, you know. They get 20 downloads off it, they get a few pennies as well, and it's, you know, people just banging the search bar looking for something, they find something, they download it, and then they move on. I think we see and know it when we hear, see that it's AI, and we move on quickly, and we're not terribly impressed by it, and I, yeah, I just think a lot of people are looking for something brilliant,

Rob Greenlee  38:29  
right? And that's not to say that AI-generated content won't be brilliant at some point, but I don't know that we're, we're quite at parity with what humans are capable of doing, you know, it's got access to a lot of information, and people are using AI to do a lot of things now, so humans are putting in a lot of trust into AI, increasingly to manage their businesses, to manage their communications, and to think that just because an AI makes a podcast, you know, it's the devil incarnate is probably a little bit of a disconnect from human behavior that's going on right now. There's people establishing very intimate human type of relationships with these AI bots now, and so you know it's the inconsistency that really kind of drives me a little crazy, is that you know I'm looking for rational, responsible uses of this technology, and that's what I'm advocating for, and that's part of what my company is about. Trust Vector Lab is creating media that holds on to that trust layer, you know, and there's only really one clear path of doing that, and that's transparency and disclosure, and making sure that what you create is equal to human quality and not compromising your, your brand too.

Matt Cundill  39:48  
Yeah, and I think that's one of the nice things you've done on your website and with your shows is you disclose how you use AI and what you did it for. I tell people, listen, we only edit by hand, we will. Rarely use any AI to edit, because we want to do it for audio, we do it with the ear. We don't know how much longer we'll be doing it like that, but I do know that, and you pointed this out earlier, that when you go to edit a podcast and you want to use AI to remove ums and ahs and likes and okays, or whatever it is, the extra words, it could be quite a bumpy ride, and you have to roll it back quite a bit. It's not an efficient use of AI.

Rob Greenlee  40:23  
No, it's really at the end of the day, it's around, is it going to reflect my taste? Am I using it to fix human errors that I make in the content? That's the other aspect of it too. And, like Todd, my co-host of my new media show for many years, he didn't care about that stuff. He would publish it unedited. There's two ends of the spectrum on this, right? Do we be at the extreme of raw, unedited human content with all its flaws and its mistakes and everything, and is that somehow better than edited content that maybe doesn't have as many, and that is more polished, and you know that's the tension that I see happening right now, and it's increasingly going to, you know, be exasperated by AI, because AI is going to be able to polish us up.

Matt Cundill  41:16  
You're wearing the hat. Tell us about the Spoken Life Show.

Rob Greenlee  41:19  
Actually, I'm shifting towards a new show, too. It's called Spoken Human. This is an older brand, but I changed my brand to Trust Factor Lab, and so that's what I'm shifting towards, is that type of approach. But the Spoken Human show is really focused on talking about these, these more in-depth issues around AI and human interface, and how we're going to manage that, and labeling, and transparency, and walking the line. I think a human creator can have a human clone or a human AI clone and be able to do it. I haven't done it yet myself in full transparency, but I fully intend on giving it a try and seeing if I can duplicate that trust layer that I hope I have in my, my human-created shows. Will it be believable? We might reach a point where it is, and at that point, that's where we hit this wall of, we have to have disclosure around what is real and what is not real, and that's the only way you're going to hold trust is to have that disclosure layer, and I just increasingly think that eventually it's going to be disclosing, certifying that it's human content is going to be the layer that we land on eventually.

Matt Cundill  42:41  
Well, a lot of things have changed in podcasting over the last 20 years, but more specifically in the last seven or eight, but it was, you know, trust was always podcasting's biggest attribute, and it's great to see you sort of double down into the space and kept podcasting next to trust while still embracing all the new technologies, so I get it, Rob. I get it.

Rob Greenlee  43:02  
It's the subtleties of this, it's the nuance that's where all this makes sense. It doesn't make sense to play at the extremes of swinging from one end to the other, you know, and I hate this, or you know, I, I hate AI, and and then there's people out there that are like, you know, pro AI, or they, they feel like they can't express themselves to say that they are, they like AI, because they feel like they're going to be disgraced out there, kind of like politics, Matt, it's kind of like that, right? You're either left or right, and if you express left or right, there's dangers, and that's an unfortunate situation, because I think that the nuance of this is where the opportunity is, and some people are going to miss out.

Matt Cundill  43:48  
Rob, thanks so much for doing this and being a supporter of the show with your time and your mentorship over the years. It is very much appreciated.

Rob Greenlee  43:55  
Thank you, Matt, for your steadfast efforts in keeping your podcast going and Ron, and I hope it's working out well for you.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  44:07  
Another Sound Off Media Company podcast,