513. Why Independent Podcasters Are Losing Control

Ralph Estep, Jr. (0:04): Well, good morning, podcasters. Today is Friday, 05/06/2026, and this morning, we're joined by longtime leader Rob Greenlee. We're gonna start this current conversation around podcasting two point o and his fringe comment. Gonna give Rob some space to share his perspective, then we're gonna dig into AI content, video podcasting, trust in new media, and finish with our wins of the week. So if you're listening on Clubhouse, hit the share button top right hand side of the screen and share it however Clubhouse lets you.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (0:35): If you wanna join us live on the video, which we don't have today, you don't do that. So if you're catching us via podcast, YouTube, LinkedIn, please share this episode with fellow podcasters. Give us about thirty seconds, and we'll get things going. Thank you so much for being here.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (0:52): The podcasting morning chat is powered by Ironick Media, helping podcasters launch, polish, and grow great shows. And by content creators accountant, helping creators build real business behind their content.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (1:21): Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome to the show for Friday, May 8. Marc is away this morning traveling to his son's graduation, so we wanna send him some congratulations for him, his son, and the whole family. It's a big life moment, and we're happy for both of them. Now don't forget on Monday, we're gonna go to our Obsession Worthy podcast with Jonathan. This week, we're gonna be talking about 99% invisibles, the Roman Mars, Mazda virus.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (1:48): And you can find that at podcastingmorningshow.com/owp. Now our guest this morning is Rob Greenlee. Rob has been part of podcasting and new media through a lot of different chapters, Early podcasting, as well as creator strategy, hosting, monetization, video, and now the impact of AI and trust in media. Now before we get into Rob's background and the bigger future of podcasting conversation, I wanna start with something current. Rob has recently been in the middle of a pretty intense discussion in the podcasting community around podcasting two point o and the use of the word fringe.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (2:25): Now, like I said, my point of view, I feel like some of the reaction has not always been given Rob the benefit of the doubt. And I don't want today to be a pile on session in either direction, but I do wanna give Rob a fair place to speak for himself. I want him to be able to explain what he meant, what he didn't mean, and what he thinks the community can learn from this. So Rob, before we talk about the future of podcasting, I wanna give you space to address the current conversation around your podcasting two point o comments. What do you want people to understand, Rob?

Rob Greenlee (2:55): Yeah. So I wanted to talk about that. That show was really trying to discuss the whole long journey of the podcasting two point o project and all of the tags that are involved in that project. It's basically a a new kind of kind of feed, kind of set of features and of which many of them or most of them have never been adopted and and also others that were great ideas and everything like that, but they never got really accepted by any of the players in the industry. Now certainly, that isn't to say that the whole podcasting two point o project has been a failure or anything like that.

Rob Greenlee (3:46): I wasn't trying to imply that. But the comment was really in in regards to that fringe comment really just wasn't the appropriate word or wasn't really the right word to use, but it was really to describe a lot of the new tag recommendations that that are in there that have not been really embraced by the broader industry over, like, maybe, you know, four or five years. And so it's great that they're there and everything, and there has been some successes like with the chapters and transcripts and some of the platforms, you know, embracing the alternative enclosure tag and a few other things like the, you know, like pod roll type features and things like that. So there there has been some benefit to the podcasting two point o project. There's no question about it.

Rob Greenlee (4:41): But really that fringe comment came from trying to describe how big companies have viewed the podcasting two point o project because all of them have known about it.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (4:53): Hey, Rob.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (4:54): But they haven't

Ralph Estep, Jr. (4:54): chose Let's do something right now because a lot of people hear the word podcasting two point o, and they're like, I have no idea what you're talking about. So let's zoom out a little bit and go to like 30,000 feet, I know D.R. And I were talking about this before the show. Explain to us in as simple as you can terms what they mean or what people mean when they say podcasting two point o so that everyone can understand exactly what we're talking about here.

Rob Greenlee (5:20): Yeah. I think it's a pretty simple concept, but it does involve some it's really a geeky thing in the podcasting space centered around RSS feed tags. Right? And so the concept is, well, let's offer some new ideas in what we can offer in RSS. And that's a really simple syndication.

Rob Greenlee (5:45): And really at the bottom line, it's features and functions that are turned on or unlocked in the RSS feed that are then made available to the podcast listening apps. Right? So like a chapters tag or whatever what's called a lit tag, which is a tag that was structured in this new namespace for RSS that basically enables a live streaming link to be put in the RSS feed. So whenever you go live like we are right now on Clubhouse, that would signal to the podcast app that they're the show that you follow or subscribe to has a live stream that you can click on and listen to. So that's one of the tags.

Rob Greenlee (6:33): And then there's another tag too called the alternate enclosure which gives you the option to add different formats of shows that you could link to or files that could be downloaded. So like in one RSS feed, you could have a link to an m p four file, which is a video. And then in the other alternative, Well, there there's primary enclosure and then there's the alternate enclosure. The alternate enclosure could have could create a situation where an RSS feed has a link to an audio and a video file. That's just one tag out of maybe 25 or 30 tags that are recommended in the namespace that the podcasting two point o project has put forward.

Rob Greenlee (7:22): And also ability to do micro transactions using Satoshi's that is linked up with with Bitcoin. And I think this conversation about the podcasting two point o project is a very technical discussion that is only relevant to everyday podcasters from the standpoint of, well, those are features and functions that we we as an industry would like to have in the podcast apps and also thus in the listening apps. So there's hosting. There's the hosting side like Lipson or Busprout, whatever, and then there's the listening app side. And so the hosting side has to embrace these tags in their platform to create like fields that need to be filled out in the platform that you can populate in order to get that function and feature into a listening app.

Rob Greenlee (8:19): And those listening apps, and that could be like a Spotify or an Apple or an Overcast or any of these consumption apps, we need to embrace those tags at all. I mean, you can have them in your RSS feed if you want, but it doesn't mean that anybody's gonna utilize them because if the listening apps don't embrace that functionality that is available inside of the RSS feed, then it doesn't get used.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (8:44): And I think that's really the whole point, right? I mean

Ralph Estep, Jr. (8:46): Right.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (8:47): And I think that's what you were getting at. Now, Rob, I wanna pivot back a little bit. You've been around podcasting and new media through a lot of its major areas. You've seen the early RSS days, the rise of platforms, hosting companies, monetization, now video and AI, and I think that gives you a pretty unusual vantage point. So I want you to take us back a little nostalgia, if you will.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (9:08): What was the first moment you realized podcasting was going to matter?

Rob Greenlee (9:12): Well, it's been an evolution over twenty two years because when it first happened, Adam Curry kind of created a big splash about it. He was creating a buzz about a new medium really a lot of hype at the time. It wasn't that's the honest comment about it because when I got started, I was mainly on the radio, and I was also doing a lot of direct downloads of m p three files, not through any kind of podcast app, but other platforms or making it available just off my website. And so at the time, it really wasn't that big of a deal. It had a very small chunk of my audience.

Rob Greenlee (9:49): I was also up on satellite radio at the time with XM. So it was a very small part of my content experience, but it just grew slowly over time. It was the growth of consumption of podcasting has grown about anywhere from two and a half to 4% growth every year on the consumption side. So it's been a very slow growing medium. So it wasn't a big deal for me.

Rob Greenlee (10:16): It was just one of those things. You know, I it was just as simple as me adding an enclosure tag to my RSS feed that was associated with my blog at the time. And so it just steadily grew over many years. It's really what's happened and it's become, you know, something that is part of popular culture now. It's a word that refers to lots of different kinds of audio and video medium.

Rob Greenlee (10:44): And when podcasting started, podcasting was an audio and video medium from the very early years. It's a journey that has been fraught with a lot of frustration and a lot of challenging situations. I used to work at Microsoft and ran the Zoom podcasting platform for seven years, And that was in the early years, and that's when we were pushing to tell people what a podcast even was. Most people didn't know what a podcast was. And so when you were out there talking about it, you say, well, I have a podcast, and they get a puzzled look on their face.

Rob Greenlee (11:21): What is a podcast? So this has been a progression that's been going on. It's just that now we've reached pretty much mass adoption and mass awareness that's pushing 80 plus percent of the population is aware of what a podcast is.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (11:38): No. I agree with you. And, actually, I'm gonna ask you the question everybody gets in a big debate about, and that is, do you still think the heart of podcasting is RSS? And I ask that because and I know James Cirdlin actually quoted you this morning. I was listening to the Pod News Week review, and what Spotify is apparently doing now is they're actually breaking the RSS feed as they embrace this HLS technology.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (12:01): So I guess I have two questions for you. What do you do you still think the heart of podcasting is RSS and why is that? And the second thing is, do you have some concerns about this HLS actually breaking the independence and breaking down that open source?

Rob Greenlee (12:16): Well, it's not so much that HLS is gonna somehow break RSS. My concern has really been about this slow progression over many years. It started with Anchor, which is owned by Spotify, in their overall dismissal of RSS just more broadly. And ironically, one of the big criticisms that has been given to RSS is that it hasn't been innovating enough. And Spotify took this position many years ago with the Anchor platform that they can do it better.

Rob Greenlee (12:52): Right? So they Spotify has always been anti RSS because they want to control the content. If you look at all the other types of media that Spotify has in their platform, it is hosted on their servers. It's directly uploaded to their platform a lot like YouTube. Right?

Rob Greenlee (13:14): The only reason that Spotify is what's considered to be a pass through via RSS right now is because the industry pushed them into it. And we basically told them that they couldn't have our podcast content unless they signed a what's called a pass through agreement that allows the RSS feed to just deliver metadata, right, to their platform and that they would have to play the content off of the links that were delivered via RSS. And that's why we have that today. If you were to submit your show to Spotify outside of a podcast hosting platform right now, you would be forced into having your content hosted and delivered on Spotify to the Spotify platform. So even though you submitted an RSS feed to them, they would grab all your episodes and they would rehost that content on your behalf.

Rob Greenlee (14:14): So there's been this progression over the years of trying to push RSS kind of aside. And granted YouTube supports some RSS for their audio ingestion of podcasts right now, but it's not like YouTube is all excited about it, but it's just the way for them to get the content. Because if you look at YouTube, YouTube is just grabbing your media file out of your RSS feed and rehosting the content on the YouTube platform because they converted into a video of sorts on their platform because that's the only form of media that YouTube supports is video files. So then you look at what Apple just announced is that they announced if you wanna get video into their platform via HLS, it has to be delivered by the podcast host via an API, which is a similar type of protocol that was just announced with Spotify. It's a deliver video content to and the same thing that YouTube is doing too.

Rob Greenlee (15:20): Any video file is delivered via APIs. And so unless you go to their platform and upload the content directly yourself as the podcast host, but each of the hosts are increasingly adopting API connections to each of these platforms. And that is a proprietary connection. It's not via RSS. So there's a progression towards, I think, to move at least with the big three players in the industry, there is a progression that's been happening over many years to get off of RSS as the method of delivery to their platform.

Rob Greenlee (16:03): That's what James was talking about today was and it's not necessarily about HLS, but HLS is being used as almost like a Trojan horse to get in and disrupt the long term use of RSS now.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (16:17): Now, Rob, why do you think that's an issue? I think I know why it's an issue, but what is your what do you think the issue is with doing that?

Rob Greenlee (16:25): Well, it's really going back to what the roots of podcasting are, which is it's an open medium, And what the result of this likely would be over the next couple years is that we'll see a bifurcation in the industry where the top three podcast consumption apps are delivered content via API, which I believe is what they prefer, all three of them. And then you you have RSS, which is basically only gonna be able to be used with the smaller consumption apps. So like the Overcast or the or the Pocket Cast or the Fountain. Those other more upstart kind of consumption apps that maybe have anywhere from maybe three to four to less than 1% of the overall listening or viewing of podcasts. So that's what I see happening if you look out two years if we continue down this progression.

Rob Greenlee (17:26): And so it basically takes the open ability of RSS, which is when you publish it once and it goes everywhere via RSS, it puts an end to that to some degree. And I think that's probably overall bad for podcasting. But I do think that the ultimate destination here is that it also silos monetization into each of those three big platforms, which is separate from monetization that would come from the RSS feed. A lot of the hosts have built what's called programmatic advertising, which is host controlled, show controlled advertising. And these three big platforms are increasingly moving us towards having advertising that's sold by Spotify and YouTube.

Rob Greenlee (18:17): Now Apple hasn't done this yet. Apple is not really an advertising company, but they are gonna make some money off of having an API HLS stream submission that's delivered by the podcast hosting platform, and then the hosting platform can deliver ads into that show. So Apple has done a better job of this of still embracing RSS for now. But this does open the door towards them eventually, potentially getting both the audio and video since HLS is also a way to get audio and video into Apple's platform. That's the other truth of the matter too is because now all these platforms are building in the ability to turn the video off and just listen to the audio side.

Rob Greenlee (19:07): So increasingly, users are gonna be listening to the audio from the video as their audio podcast experience. So this is where we start to part the c's as well, is that there's gonna be audio first creators who are gonna continue using RSS, and then there's gonna be video first creators who are gonna be putting video in there which are gonna be used for the audio and video. And this is very geeky and technical and complicated, but the audio from the video will replace, and this is the key thing, will replace the audio from the RSS feed. So that's what Spotify is it has been doing for a while now. And then what happened now, James is just pointing out this as we move into this new era, but Spotify is not embracing HLS.

Rob Greenlee (20:03): So they don't embrace video unless it's sent to them via API or it's uploaded directly to them, which is outside of RSS.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (20:15): So But I guess, Rob that Yeah. It makes sense, Rob. But I guess the other concern, though, I have is if you get to the point where there's only a couple of big players using API keys, then the chances of you being censored or them just deciding, I don't want you on my platform anymore. We've seen a lot of people have that happen on YouTube. YouTube just decided, well, we don't want them on their platform anymore, so you get booted off, and you could have an income.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (20:41): I'm the money guy on the show. You could have your income stripped out right from underneath of you. And as I understand it, that's the value of RSS because you can't really be banned per se. I mean, each individual player, I guess, could ban you. Is that part of the concern here too, Rob?

Rob Greenlee (20:56): That issue has been with the medium all along. Just because you're in there via RSS doesn't stop Spotify or any of these platforms from taking you out of their catalog or stripping out episodes. Now if you look at YouTube, they do capture a cash copy of all your content. So, yeah, they're in the driver's seat to do whatever they want with you. Spotify is a little bit different even though they issue takedowns to the podcast hosts all the time for copyright violations, and it was all part of their terms of service.

Rob Greenlee (21:34): So shows get taken down even with RSS now too. So there isn't really anything special on that side. They will have ultimate control if the whole industry moves towards API based syndication, and we eventually, nobody embraces RSS anymore, yeah, I think it does create a situation where these platforms can decide to limit your ability to be monetized or take down certain episodes. But in a lot of ways, that functionality has existed in all these platforms all along.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (22:11): Well, and that leads me to my next question, Do you think, Rob, we're in the golden age of podcasting? Do you think we're in a reset, or do you think we're in a category identity crisis? And I asked, what do you think is healthy right now in podcasting, and what do you think is fragile? Do you see this as a real interesting turning point in the industry with you're a hall of fame podcast. You've been doing this for a long time.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (22:33): Where do you see the industry right now, Rob?

Rob Greenlee (22:36): I think we are in a transition time in the industry. This move by Apple into HLS streaming is a significant inflection point in the industry. In the early years, video was delivered in the same way that the m p three or the audio is delivered as a progressive download playback. And Apple still supports the m p four delivery to their platform for viewing. So I think the big thing here is this growing threat to the utilization of RSS because in the early years of podcasting, there was a lot of video in the podcast medium, and that's video delivered via RSS.

Rob Greenlee (23:20): And there's been a lot of criticism of RSS based delivery of media, and it really gets back to playback performance. Oftentimes, a lot of these big platforms feel like that the media that's being delivered by RSS is not as reliable on the playback side because they don't trust the hosting platforms, especially if you have a large video file. It takes a little bit of time to cache that video file into the player on Apple before it starts playing, where HLS starts playing right away. So it's a in some ways, it's a increase in the flexibility of HLS and the ability to deliver different quality levels too. So HLS can it depends on your player.

Rob Greenlee (24:11): It depends on your Internet speed. It can deliver an appropriate size video file to your device for playback that's compatible with your screen, that's compatible with your Internet connection. So having that streaming capability is a big upgrade. But in a lot of ways, it comes with a lot of strings here with the ability of these platforms to control this content. But it does create a better viewing experience for the delivery of video.

Rob Greenlee (24:41): And I think that's really the revolution that we're in right now and what really is changing. And then the other part of it we haven't talked about yet is the changes that are brewing around AI content, and I know we're gonna talk about that too.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (24:55): Yeah, let's talk about that, but before we do that, I just wanna ask you one more question because a lot of the listeners to this show are independent creators. Do you think independent creators, independent podcasters are in a better position today or a harder position right now? Do you think they're in a better spot or in a worse spot, and why do you think that is, Rob?

Rob Greenlee (25:14): Oh, I think it's much more complicated, much more difficult to be a pod caster now than it was even five or ten years ago. It's so much more complicated. Each of these platforms and you can tell just from what I'm saying here this morning is that trying to comprehend and understand what these platforms are trying to do takes a lot of concentration. It takes a lot of research to even understand what each of these platforms are doing. Just the fact that you have to spend so much time trying to comprehend what which of these platforms is doing what with podcasting is not helping.

Rob Greenlee (25:52): Right? And a lot of these companies don't do a very good job of educating people about the changes that they're making and how they're adjusting what they're doing and how that affects creators. Because a lot of ways, these big companies I used to work for Microsoft, so a lot of these big companies don't want to tell the the real story behind this. And that's where you see this happen with James Kudlin coming out and making a post about Spotify is doing this or Spotify is doing that. Nobody knows about that because Spotify isn't gonna talk about this because in a lot of ways, they kinda wanna hide it and they kinda wanna do it in a way that doesn't cause a controversy or doesn't get the company in hot water or something like that.

Rob Greenlee (26:39): And that's unfortunate because creators are put in this very difficult position of having to navigate these very complex waters, especially with the big platforms. If you're just talking about RSS, it's not as complicated, but then you layer in this conversation that we had earlier about podcasting two point o, and we're just throwing so much complexity and so much confusion at the creator around what this medium stands for, how it works, what's coming, what's next. Each of these platforms makes different changes to their experience, and somehow we're all supposed to understand and know of all this. And what it does is it causes creators to make a bunch of unfortunate, unforced errors, the term for baseball, because they just don't know about it and they don't know how it impacts various aspects of what they're doing by making certain moves with your podcast, and that's an unfortunate thing. So I think it's harder now, I think, to be a podcaster.

Rob Greenlee (27:43): And that's why we've seen it split because now there's two ends of the spectrum. There's the professional podcasters and there's the more upstart middle of the road podcasters that aren't as sophisticated as professional people that are able to hire big teams to work on their shows. And so those shows have an unfair advantage because they have experts in there that understand these details. But if you're just an individual podcaster, you're at a disadvantage in the market today, I think.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (28:13): I agree with you. Well, let's pivot to AI because I know you want to spend some time talking about that, and I do too because AI is touching almost every part of content creation right now. Writing, editing, transcription, clipping, translation, synthetic voices, synthetic video, ad creative, audience research, discovery, and some of those things are helpful, but some of it makes people uneasy. So, Rob, where does AI generally help podcasters right now, and where do you think it starts to damage the relationship with the audience?

Rob Greenlee (28:45): Well, I think it does fundamentally get back to this whole big concept of trust. And I think AI has its strengths and it has its weaknesses just like human creators have strengths and weaknesses. I think that it is a little bit of a double standard to some degree about what humans think of AI content, but that's that's not to really answer your your question. Really, right now, the best use of AI around content creation is really more in the preproduction phase and a light amount in the kind of postproduction side. And so when I say preproduction, I'm talking about show planning, show scripting, show outlines, writing descriptions.

Rob Greenlee (29:38): AI is not a place that you think about on the recording side or the real production side. Though I think we're moving into an era where AI is gonna get more involved in the production side with AI voices and hybrid human cloning that will will enable a human creator to extend themselves into an AI version of themselves. But but that is something that's brewing behind the scenes, and it's growing, and people are testing it and things like that. So I think that the era where we're seeing this a lot of controversy over this this concept of AI slot content, which is entirely AI generated audio and video content, is where the controversy is right now because it threatens, I think, the perception that humans have towards their role in this medium, and I think it causes a negative reaction. But also keep in mind too that AI content is not perfect today and it doesn't it's not trustworthy right now.

Rob Greenlee (30:47): It's not you know, what's funny about it is that I hear this tension around AI is too it's gonna be too polished. It's gonna be too perfect. It's gonna be too potentially accurate. And then on the other hand, we talked about human creators now as the value prop is that the human creators are a mess and that they're somehow because they're flawed, that makes them more valuable. I don't know of too many podcast creators that think of their podcast like that, that somehow they need to make a show that's flawed.

Rob Greenlee (31:21): I think what most podcasters think is that they're trying to eliminate as many flaws in their content as they can and that's what's aspirational about it. But if we get to a point where that's the dividing line between AI generated content and human generated content, I'm not sure that I like that outcome either. We're we're forced to say, well, because we're flawed, that that's what's gonna attract audiences. I don't think that's the case. I really think that it's going to be AI is gonna become better and better and it's gonna force human creators to be better and better to really compete with it.

Rob Greenlee (31:57): I think that's more the one year, maybe two year time frame out because the AI, and I know this is said a lot, the AI that we see today is not the AI that we're gonna have a year from now. And so if you look out a year and think, well, how much quality and how much value is this AI generated content potentially going to be? That's a hard thing to predict right now. Let's say that AI generated content is based on a human that you trust. It's in their voice, it's in their likeness, it's in their knowledge, it just happens to be AI generated.

Rob Greenlee (32:38): And we're already seeing this proliferate on YouTube. You're seeing current doctors and other people that have doctor's licenses and have expertise generating a version of themselves doing content on YouTube and video. That's all AI generated. And it's those shows are garnering hundreds of thousands of views. We can't really make this blanket statement that all AI content is going to be AI slop or it's gonna be content that nobody wants to listen to and nobody's gonna trust.

Rob Greenlee (33:17): But I do think once we hit this threshold of you can't tell between a human. So right now, I'm talking to you in an AI clone version of myself and you don't know that, but you learn after you've listened to me that you just listen to an AI, then there's gonna be a break in trust. Right? Because then that creator basically perpetrated a deception, right? So I think once once we get through this period here over the next six months to a year, labeling of AI content is going to be is gonna be required.

Rob Greenlee (33:59): Don't see any

Ralph Estep, Jr. (34:00): Let's other way around talk about that. So what you've really said there to me is a question, and then how do real creators stand out if the Internet gets flooded with AI content? How do we, as independent creators that are not AI, stand out against this superior AI content that just keeps getting better? How do we make that happen?

Rob Greenlee (34:20): Well, that's the existential question. I don't know that anybody has the answer to that entirely, but I do think that there is talk that humans will have their pathway. They'll also be labeled. Human created content will be labeled human created. That's what I think is gonna happen.

Rob Greenlee (34:40): And there's gonna be certain platforms, certain areas of content creation that will be purely human. They'll probably be entirely separate platforms that will only do human content.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (34:57): Hey, Rob. One of the community members, Junaid, has joined us on stage. Junaid, you made a comment in the chat. I just wanted you to bring that out, something that Junaid said. Go ahead, Junaid.

Junaid Ahmed (35:07): Hey. Good morning, everyone. And this is something that Rob has been doing for many years, live streaming. You can't really fake live streaming unless if you have prerecorded stuff that you're streaming a lot, but that can get you also marked down. But live streaming is something that we can completely control and show our authentic selves and authentic voices.

Junaid Ahmed (35:29): And on top of that, building a community is going to be something that we should actually also be looking at because the idea of creating a community or creating content is to, again, to belong to a community, to be part of a community, to help other humans. And if these doctors are creating these AI videos and whatnot, they're serving a purpose or they're bringing clients to their offices. At the end point, is there a human connection or not? That's the question.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (35:59): Now Rob, do you think, because Matt Bliss put something in the chat, that he thinks that live streaming is gonna fix this because he Matt and I can't speak for Matt, but it seems like he thinks the AI is going to make live streaming inroads as well. What do you think about that, Rob?

Rob Greenlee (36:13): Well, I've talked to some companies in Silicon Valley that are actively doing live streaming with avatars. So it's coming to live streaming too. So let's not feel like that's our island of opportunity here that is safe from the influx of AI. But I do think that there is always gonna be an element of the type of content that humans create that's different from AI. And that's where the real difference is going to be.

Rob Greenlee (36:44): Right? It's like what we're doing right now to some degree. Now granted, this is live. And I do think that live will be an important part of human content, but I think it really gets back to is that there's gonna have to be labeling human content and AI content. That's where each person that is consuming content is gonna have to decide which one is more valuable to them.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (37:12): But Rob, here's my question for that though. I don't disagree with you, but who's gonna be responsible for labeling that? That's a slippery slope because you could say, Well, I used AI to create the script, or I used AI to put some voices in it. How do you measure that and how do you mark that, and who's responsible for policing that?

Rob Greenlee (37:31): There is a growing movement on the governmental side and in the podcast industry and the advertising industry to come up with standards around labeling. And so there there is active efforts. I know that the EU has put out some policy standards that I think are going into effect here in June that people will have to label content. And you're starting to see it get labeled in YouTube and in the social platforms. But there is a recommended outline of what types of AI content, what's the level of AI content that's in your program.

Rob Greenlee (38:16): And there is a website that you can go to and learn about this. It's at shouldidisclose.ai. And it it basically runs through a whole list of criteria of when you should disclose and when you don't need to disclose, which is really helpful, I think, for people to get some sort of a mental picture of what this will likely look like. Now I haven't seen any standards around the disclosure of human content, but I do think that's gonna come next. So I think the first thing that what we have to do is label label the AI content based on certain criteria.

Rob Greenlee (38:59): And this criteria here, I can pull it up in front of me and I can run through it a little bit.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (39:04): Now, Rob, before you get here, I just wanna make sure I understood you clearly. Are you a proponent of a governmental body doing this, or are you thinking self disclosure?

Rob Greenlee (39:14): I think that there's going to be rules that are put in place by state and federal government as well as, like, the European Union is on on track to doing it that will force the industry to adopt certain minimum standards. And I know that the advertising industry is actively doing that right now. So I'm not advocating for this. I'm just saying that there's gonna be a certain amount of self self deployment of this, that each one of us is gonna have to decide when we have to check that AI box in our publishing process. And I think that is where we're going to all have to get educated on this is that each of us uses AI to create content in slightly different ways.

Rob Greenlee (40:03): So we're gonna have to go through this list, and it's really a good website. It was actually written by one of the cofounders of rss.com who has a PhD in human behavior and media and has worked with AI for many, many years. But I can give you just a small sample of what

Ralph Estep, Jr. (40:22): Go ahead, Rob. Yeah. We got a couple more minutes, and I wanna transition to our wins of the week. But let's end with that. Tell us about that, and I'll make sure we put a link to that in the show notes.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (40:30): But go ahead, Rob.

Rob Greenlee (40:31): Yeah. So if you're an AI as a performer, right, you're gonna have to disclose that. Right? So if the AI voice narrates the episode, if the AI conversation and dialogue happens in the episode, if AI translated the episode into another language, you have to disclose, is the AI voice delivered content segments. So like whole segments of the content.

Rob Greenlee (41:01): Because I think we will see hybrid content that's human voiced and AI voiced blended together in one episode. And then there's also cloned voices plus AI written script. So that's where you get an AI to write your script and then you run it through the AI and it voices it in a synthetic voice. And then human voice plus fully AI written script. Now that one's a little bit controversial because that gets back to what we were talking about before, but it's still human voice.

Rob Greenlee (41:34): But what you're saying is really what the AI said. And that's gonna be a touchy one because I think a lot of people are generating their show scripts via AI, but they're still voicing it themselves. I think where it gets a little bit at the edge is how much of that script are you reading verbatim or are you just taking it as a suggested outline? And then on the other side of the coin, where you don't have to disclose is that you're using your cloned voice, That would be a synthetic voice, but you're using your own handwritten script.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (42:14): Yeah. That's what Gabe just put in the actual chat. He says, I have cloned my voice to do my intro bios. And, yeah, that's a whole that's a whole question mark, isn't it, Rob?

Rob Greenlee (42:23): Yeah. It is. I think it's a really good question that we we all need to. I think the human voice with a fully AI written script and then also the your cloned voice with a script that you human wrote and didn't use AI to write. You don't have to disclose that.

Rob Greenlee (42:42): So that's gonna be an interesting one that I I think the industry is gonna have to flush out because I think that if there's any signal in that clone AI voice that it sounds synthetic, I think it triggers a distrust reaction potentially in the audience unless it's disclosed. So in some ways, that one may wind up in the disclosure side in my opinion, But short AI intros and outro bumpers don't need to be disclosed. So James Quiddlin's a good example of that. His Pod News weekly show uses AI generated lead ins and bumpers in his content. So he doesn't have to disclose that because that's not primary to the content.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (43:25): And I just I wanna leave it at this. It all comes down to trust though, doesn't it? That's what we're really talking about here, is Exactly. At the

Rob Greenlee (43:32): end of the day, that's really what it is, and if your audience learns that you're using AI to generate some contextual orientation towards the content, I think you do get into this kinda gray area of disclosure. I agree with you.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (43:47): Well, Rob, I just wanna say thank you for joining us today. We wanna get to our wins of the week, and I apologize since we had a little technical glitch here at the front. I'm pushing us past the normal ending time, but Rob, do you have a win that you wanna share with the group today?

Rob Greenlee (44:00): I think just keep doing human content. Don't see this AI wave as any kind of a discouragement. I think the more humans creating content, the more significant it is, and it will make it more difficult for AI to capture the market. I do think we all have to accept the fact that AI will capture a certain percentage of the audience because I'm already seeing it happen. It's not like it's gonna happen at some point in the future.

Rob Greenlee (44:28): It's happening right now. AI is garnering audience. And so but we as humans and human creators need to keep striving and getting better at what we're doing with content and building that trust layer and building community just like what was said earlier. That's my win for the week. Go

Ralph Estep, Jr. (44:49): Thank for you, Rob. And my win for the week is having you on the show. So thank you so much for agreeing to come on here. Again, I apologize. I'm not sure what went on with the livestream through Riverside.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (44:58): It's mighty frustrating because I'm one of these people that test everything 15 times, and everything was good when we started. And then all of a sudden, it wasn't. So thank you so much.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (45:08): Yeah.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (45:08): I'm gonna go to D.R. for her win of the week. Go ahead, D.R.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (45:11): Okay. Well, this is the third and final day of our bathroom renovation. My bathroom is completely done, and now they're switching over to my husband's bathroom today. And, yes, we have separate bathrooms, and, yes, we have separate TVs. That is the secret to our twenty five year marriage.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (45:32): So yeah. So that's my win is that this is the third and final day of the renovation. Yay.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (45:38): That sounds like a super win. Janae, do you have a win you wanna share?

Junaid Ahmed (45:42): Yeah. My win is we recently had our front yard and backyard redone. So all of the plants are put in. We have vegetables in the garden, and we are ready to harvest them in a few weeks. So that's my win.

Junaid Ahmed (45:55): Thank you.

Ralph Estep, Jr. (45:55): Awesome. Well, again, I wanna thank everybody for joining us today. Don't forget to come back on Monday when Jonathan will be doing our Obsession Worthy podcast, and you can find that again at podcastingmorningshow.com/owp. So I wanna wish everybody a happy and great weekend, and we'll see you again on Monday. Take care, everybody.