Building the Next Generation of Podcasting With AI

0:00Hey, I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres and if you'd like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to MissionMatters.com and click on be our guest to apply. All right, so did I have Jared Goodset on the line and he's CEO and founder over at Rebel Audio. Jared, welcome to the show. Hello sir, thanks for having me. All right, today's topic, I know my listeners know I love talking about podcast and that's what we do around here. So we're going to get into podcasting tools. We're going to talk about, of course, Rebel Audio, what you're doing there. But before we get into that, let's get into your background a bit here. So I know you're a serial entrepreneur two-time Emmy nominee. I like talking how did you get started? I got started. I was an editor and a frustrated rock star in the early 2000s. Came to New York during the Web 1.0 bubble. Basically all the jobs in tech had gone away because the bubble burst people were like this internet thing bad. So I got a job working as a TV editor

1:03to pay the bills while I was doing my masters at NYU. I was also basically at the epicenter of the indie rock DIY movement in New York City playing with all sorts of bands that were on the rise. And that would have been roughly like 2002-ish, so that'd be like the whole day. Yeah, that was a strike. Wow. So I played lower in the body. But to be there during that time would have been something else. Go ahead. That's amazing. It was incredible. And I got pretty much every band of that era I opened for. So during that period, I learned how to edit. I learned how to record on Pro Tools. And I became a one-man show every job that I would get as a freelancer led to another job. And then I got my dream job on Dave Shapel show. And as I got the dream job, he quit and went to Africa. And then it became a big inflection point in my life. And I basically at that point, so I was sneaking my music into this into the show edits. And that became the genesis of my first business Jingle Punk's by putting music in Shapel show, the other show creator, Neil Brennan, who's a very famous comedian.

2:06He used to call me a Jingle Punk in Jingle Jared because he was like stop singing music in the show. Essentially, a year later, I had an epiphany because I got a check for $5,000 for music royalties. And it was better money than sitting around in the edit room all day. And I realized that a galable career using technology was something that it was right under my nose. But I didn't really put two and two together. I put that plan in action. And from there, things just went bananas. I started Jingle Punk's went from two people on the lower side to by the time I sold it 150 employees. And I was the largest provider of background music for American television for almost a decade. I ended up doing the voice, ponds, stars, American pickers, real housewives. But at the time, nobody knew what any of these shows were. You know, on scripted television was looked at as not a cool medium. People didn't even see this as being a long-term area. You were early. You were early. I was lucky. It's that they always say it's better to be lucky than good. Sometimes opportunity

3:08favors are prepared. And for me, I just had I was running. The candle was burning on both ends. And at some point, I had to get one of the one of these things to really work, whether it was the music thing or the media thing. And I literally just met it in the middle. And that's where Jingle Punk came from. And there's a big parallel between that and what I'm doing now with Rebel Audio too. That's a great transition. Let's get into it. Rebel Audio. So bring us to this. Obviously, a lot of things you could have done in the space. I see the term founder here. Why the size Nia? Was it an Epiphany? Was it a transition? Was it a built? Why the space right now? It was literally an Epiphany. It was the same. I would say that the first go around my Epiphany. Hey, man, I gotta hang out with you. I'm like, I know where this is going. And next one, I'm like, so Jerry, you guys need Epiphany? No, I'll take you later. Okay, fine. It's true. It really was. I had as a epiphany during Jingle Punk that the cloud would be a new distribution technology to allow me to distribute music. This go around. Exited Jingle Punk's. I sold that business to private equity to William Morrison Devar,

4:10which is the largest private, sorry, which is the largest talent agency on the planet. That's Ari, a man who's also Ari Gold from Entourage. You know, had real great adventures in Hollywood. And then as I was thinking about the what's next, I essentially was thinking where's Audio going, what's the next medium? And I was tinkering with building original podcasts. And I found that to be the hip-striven businesses. Very difficult. Although I have picked hits in my life, really my strength is on platform. And all of a sudden, one day I wake up and my Instagram feed is exploding with conversations about AI workflows. And I became obsessed. In a very short time, I got involved with these first wave companies. So just trying out the tools soon, lovable brought me in. And I actually won a hackathon with zero experience. And I'd beat out season coders from people who are at Uber, people who had been coders at Meta and Google. And then like mid-tier engineers would just fight the vibe coding experience. I would be able to build things

5:11as a creative person that otherwise were untenable. And at which point I said, this is it. I'm going to build a brand new platform for the fastest growing media that I can see in front of me right now. And that's podcasting. Instead of betting on making a few hits shows, I want to bet on the whole marketplace. And within record time, I built this platform, got funding for my feed. And really, the journey, the audacity that I've been on since mid 2025 is something that I've never experienced in my life as someone who's built and sold a company twice and had incredible unicorn style the opportunity now to start a business. And as a solo entrepreneur, become a billionaire and less than the possibilities for becoming a billionaire are higher and more tangible than ever. If you create and you're using the tools of the moment, which are changing every day. So it's been for me a reawakening and an epiphany that more so than even podcasts, the AI of it all,

6:12has really opened my eyes to the potential of what platforms are going to become and what's possible. Wow, that's amazing. What about this space? What drew you to it? Like you said, a growing space, you said, and by the way, I'm a huge proponent of podcasting. I tell everybody, go start a podcast. And this is, I love people creating tools around it. I'm like, the thing that the noise is the most with something like, insaturate, I'm like, do you know how many there are? There's only like, there's a hundred and ten million YouTube like and that's not. Yeah, we're not even admitted. Yeah, we're not even in the first innings of this right now. So I love it. Come on. Casting is the lowest evolving medium in the history of all media. So if you look at radio, came on like gang busters and by the time, you know, the technology had totally ubiquity, which it still does. Radio is still very powerful. Don't underestimate the power of the human voice and or music. And then the power of television, the came on crazy from the black and white era to the color era all the way to cable to where we are now streaming. It never

7:16stopped evolving and iterating for some reason. Podcasting got stuck in a 1.0 mode and could never really figure out how to break out to have more interactivity. Right now, everyone thinks of podcasting is like the Joe Rogues on the color doudies, but that's like the music business. That's the one percent that sits at the top. Think about how much room there is in the music business for everything below. That's Jinglepunks was. I focused on everybody who wasn't famous and built a hundred million dollar business off of like scrap metal collection. What I found was that by aggregating this sort of singles and doubles of that industry, a funny thing happened. I discovered 500,000 pieces of music in our catalog. Many of them were okay, but they stand out, you know, because I had the metrics and I was following the data. There's two people who signed up for our library. One person named Jelly Roll, another person named Little Dicky and those offshoots from that business became massive bohemists for our company and reputation for me. Jelly Roll was a white rapper from Nashville who is also a former gang member and everybody was like, don't do that. There's nothing

8:20there. That by looking at the data and looking at the potential of how I could shape and take something instead of trying to sign everything under the sun, I only signed two things and both of them under the Jinglepunks umbrella became absolute game changers. I think in podcasting, by us aggregating hundreds of thousands of new podcasts, we're going to end up seeing very clearly who these future winners are. Now I love that. I love that and I wrote and you don't know this, but I'll just remind my audience. I wrote a whole book. It's free on this and my thesis in that book, by the way, Jared was very simple. That YouTube's growth was based off of them when they introduced their partners program really early on. I think 2002, podcasting dynamic advertising wasn't available for the masses until recently. I'm talking last, let's call it five years or whatever it was, even though podcast has been around 26 years. So because dynamic advertising didn't exist, the people that you're talking about that would have created great content and great platforms and all this,

9:20they quit pretty early on because there was no reward. There was no incentive. There was no and many people still don't even know how to define what a podcast is. It's very absolutely defined. Is it a YouTube show? Is it audio only? The new Apple and Spotify platforms and APIs of video. I mean, there's so many, but it's a very pure play and it's a very democratized medium. I think it's more powerful than anything else in the space. And I think that's where Netflix, Amazon and Disney are going. They're going to want to bet on creators as opposed to writing huge checks for stranger things and shows that may or may not work in the marketplace. And look at the day they got their data. Yeah. The supports my kids who are of a certain age. They don't really care about script and television as much as they care about their doom scroll feed. And you know, when we've lost them from using TikTok and Instagram, they go over to Pinterest where content is being syndicated from every other and by the way, the one stuff, the one area

10:24that we do let them roam free is podcasting because it feels like a more made for sanitized area of the internet because it hasn't been quote unquote, memified. Yeah. I love it. I love that you say what it said. This thing hasn't even started. And so that actually that brings me to your platform. So rebel audio from what I can see you're making it a lot easier for people to get those shows off the ground. Can you go further into that? Yes. So I found when I was making shows, I create over 40 shows in the podcast space over the last several years under my previous media company audio up. And those shows won awards. Those shows were big ticket items when I heart and serious XM and audible were paying big ticket prices for shows. Our average advanced that we got was on par with what record deals would look like. And we were flying through those. The market softened. And I realized that I had spent several years making shows that had no idea how to market a show, how to publish a show, how to package a show once I did get all the

11:26recording and the creation of it. There's a power in knowing how that last mile works. And I spent my AI epiphany era learning all the holes in the gaps in which everyday creators including myself felt frustrated. I don't want to spend my whole day entering metadata into antiquated one point of technologies. I want to be able to finish my podcast. I want it to immediately publish to all the major platforms. And I want all the clipping, all the transcripts and all the social media tentacles like being able to immediately reach sub stack LinkedIn X with the same content being syndicated from one to many. And then I looked at these APIs which were completely open for anybody to use if they wanted to. But nobody was taking advantage of the fact that you could have just an operating system, a podcast operating system that doesn't offer you. There's certain things out there like the script and Riverside that are spent a lot of money building technologies that are now completely replicable today. Like I could build that technology in a day like based on

12:29what's available in terms of information that you know whether you're vibe coding or you're pulling existing code down. So a lot of the pioneers who got into this distribution and tool space they say in the the old west pioneers get shot. I feel like timing is everything. I wasn't the first person to create a production music library when I created Jinglepunks. I was the first to hit it out of the park with it because I saw and I was a user of it. Remember I was creating TV shows. So I'd used every product and music library in the world. I saw what the holes were and I saw what upset people with these antiquated workflows. My innovation was I simply said okay no more CDs no more hard drives. We are now going to use the cloud and I think nowadays people want less clips they want to directly be able to publish into their own sandbox whether it's a show that they have or five or six shows or and they want to understand their metrics and their monetization in a clear way that's in every day English. I don't like having to use my brain to decode what all the

13:31metrics mean. I just want to know if I put something up and there's a dollar to be made how much of it do I get to keep? Simply put. Yeah I love it. It's great. There's only so much we can do obviously 15 minute podcast interview but I do but I want my audience to go check it out. Can you? I look I checked it out online and I can see you're I can see the website looks super simple. Could you talk about what went into the the user face and just the user experience of what it walk me through I sign up for the platform what does it look like to actually get an episode out because I feel like that that holds so many people back. So it is as simple if any I feel like we've now caught up with the growth curve if anybody who's a listener of yours has ever used plot or chat GPT then they're in you know what I mean they already know so there was a period where when that early adapter phase or you know my parents or certain kids did not understand the difference between how web 1.0 looked and the new version of how the internet looks to people everyone talks about FEO and the Google of it all more people are getting their day-to-day workflows flowing through

14:34cloud chat GPT any of the big LLMs so I wanted instead of having a thousand buttons and a thousand explanations in our user interface I just wanted it to be like publish your first show drop your episode in or record in our platform and then from there AI just prompts you the rest of the way through like an agent or a partner and that's as simple as I could put it it's for me someone who's somewhat tech forward but also tech phobic when it comes to I don't like to sit there and get into the minutia of of coding or instructions that are going to eat my productivity I wanted to make this a productivity plus giving people their time back giving people the ability to just seamlessly go from A to B with less clicks and less steps and hopefully more intuition. I love it it's great I'm a big fan I like I like this idea of making it easier for people to podcast because especially when you talk about democratizing there's so many layers even to that word I circle the globe at least two times that day I'm doing it and if you're in Africa I'm

15:38middle east I'm doing one and these people are all around the world podcasting and I feel like just the connectivity and the ability for us all to get together and to have these conversations to mean there's the higher purpose it helps lose humanity for it it's we're documenting a great I think that communication is a higher calling yeah I do I honestly do think about look it's a media sometimes is a frivolous tool and it's fun but it can also change the you know the course of public policy it can change someone's mind it can change it can help with human rights issues around the globe and I think many people don't understand how powerful that is especially when live in a world where most media has some form of bias around it and in the world of podcasts you can share however you want if you want to tell a story there's nobody stopping you love it Jared this has been a pleasure having you on man I hope this is another knock out of the part for for you for with repo audio and I saw the website so I'm sure it's just the way you made this really easy I can remember I've been doing I haven't only been to this maybe 10 years now but when

16:39I started first I guess in this business it is right but versus what I'm seeing in your platform man these kids these days and they're simple easy tools Jared I have speaking you know how do they connect with rebel audio and get a doubt on doing all that good stuff please anybody who's out there who wants to join the now it's the the public data they can go to rebel audio dot AI and sign up and we will get them jumped into the gang immediately and we look forward to having some of your people get into our world thank you so much for the opportunity to tell our story I love it thank you and for every listing just so you know we'll definitely put some links in the show notes so that you can just click on the links and head right on over and connect with rebel audio and speaking of the audience if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven't done it yet hit that subscribe or follow button this is a daily show you heard me correct each and every day we're bringing you new content new ideas and hopefully new inspiration to help you long the way in your journey as well so hit that subscribe or follow and Jared but an absolute pleasure thanks again awesome thank you