Web3 CMO Stories

How Human Connection Beats AI At Scale – with Joe Pulizzi | S5 E47

• Joeri Billast & Joe Pulizzi • Season 5

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What if the safest career move right now is the one that looks riskiest on paper? We sit down with Joe Pulizzi, author of Burn the Playbook, to unpack why synthetic content is rising, why the algorithm favors cheap efficiency over human craft, and how creators and marketers can still win by building audiences they truly own. The stakes are real: job security is fragile, feeds are optimized for cost, and the window to establish direct relationships is closing faster than most realize.

Joe lays out a clear path from uncertainty to ownership. We explore how to move beyond platform dependency and invest in durable channels—email, podcasts, in-person gatherings, and even print—that foster human-to-human connection. You’ll hear why “we don’t build factories anymore, we build audiences,” how a small base of true fans can power freedom and optionality, and the many ways a creator can monetize without losing integrity: sponsorships, memberships, ticketed events, premium communities, and productized knowledge. We also tackle the artist-versus-seller myth and show how leaning into your unique tilt is the most defensible moat in an AI-heavy world.

If you’re stuck at start, we break it down: list ten curiosities, recombine two into a distinctive niche, pick the medium you can sustain, and commit to a consistent cadence. Use AI as an assistant to repurpose and polish, not to replace your voice. Along the way, Joe shares personal lessons on exits, compounding trust, and why creators often support each other more than any corporate ladder ever will. Ready to stop renting attention and start owning your future? Press play, then tell us the one asset you’ll build this week—and if this conversation helps, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review.

This episode was recorded through a Descript call on November 6, 2025. Read the blog article and show notes here: https://webdrie.net/how-human-connection-beats-ai-at-scale-with-joe-pulizzi/

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Joe Pulizzi:

You could be really, really good at your job. And tomorrow you could go in and it's gone. And I think everyone understands that today with the number of companies you're seeing, the Amazons and Google and Microsoft, all almost haphazardly just say, Yeah, we're letting 100,000 go, we're letting 50,000 go, or we're not going to hire.

Joeri Billast:

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories Podcast. My name is Joeri Billast, I'm your podcast host, and today I'm fired up to talk with Joe Pulizzi. Hi Joe, how are you today?

Joe Pulizzi:

I'm great. It's it's great to be back on the podcast.

Joeri Billast:

Yeah, it's been a bit less than three years. A lot of things have happened in those times. Guys, Joe, if you don't know Joe, he's called the father of content marketing. And Joe's new book, Burn the Playbook, is a wake-up call for everyone tired of following someone else's rules. It's about building real freedom, true ownership, connection, and meaningful work that lasts. And what I love, Joe, so this is for people that would see the video version of it, this is your book. And what I love is uh the message connects which I have been exploring in my own book, which is this one, which came out very recently too. And uh yeah, my book is the future CMO, and actually it's about how leaders and marketers can rebuild trust and visibility in an AI data-driven world. And not by chasing the algorithms, but by creating uh human-centered systems that serve everyone. So today we are diving into those both worlds, I would say. Yeah, they meet the creator economy and then yeah, AI ownership and what it takes really to build something that lasts. So I mentioned it, Joe, three years ago. Uh we you were talking about, I think about a bit about web three social tokens. Since then, the creator economy and AI have exploded. So what has changed? What has changed most in how you see creators building real businesses today?

Joe Pulizzi:

Thank you for the intro. I think that I'm struggling along with everyone else, just trying to figure it out. So we're learning along the way, but I really do think that we have a limited time period as human beings to make an impact. If you're in the business of building direct audiences, it for whether that's for your business, whether it's for your brand, whether you're an individual creator or you have many people on your team, we we have to figure out, we have to figure out pretty quickly how we're going to build direct relationships with people and leverage content in that way. Uh before I believe, and I mean I spouse what Christopher Penn's been talking about for the past many years, is that we're going to, whether it's our cars, our phones, our glasses, whatever the device is that we're getting our content from, it's going to start creating synthetic content for us on the fly. And what I mean by that is it's not going to be creator or human driven. It's going to be there, obviously the language models are learning from all of us humans and they're training on it, but ultimately they're going to create their own original content. It's going to happen really quickly. It's going to solve people's pain points and needs very quickly. And if you're a human creator, you're going to be left out of that equation. So I almost feel like right now there's a sense of urgency. I think that as a creator, like you said, the creator economy is booming. I don't know how long that's going to last, to be honest with you, because I think the window is closing. But right now, we do have that opportunity where we can build direct relationships. We can focus on our email channels, our podcasts, things that the algorithm can't take away from us. Of course, I'm not saying social media and YouTube and use all the tools we can right now, but at the end of the day, we have to have something where we get human-to-human connection. And I think that leads where you've been talking about this. You've been doing, you've been on the speaking tour, you know, where I see really it's a lot of potential in-person events, in physical magazines and books and things that are outside the algorithm, if you will, that create that kind of connection. That's where I'm like, it's funny. It's probably been the last six months that I've really been on this. We don't have enough time. Like, we I've always been the one Yuri that goes out and says, Look, if you want to be a content creator, you got to find your niche, you got to find that tilt. What differentiates you? We're going to create something consistently over a long period of time, focus on a certain channel, build that audience, diversify, more focus on multiple revenue lines, and good, you've got your business. You can be a content entrepreneur. It's not that's going away, but I just don't think we have the time anymore to say we can be so patient that we can have three to four years to build that. I'm thinking we've got to really accelerate the timetable because I don't know what's going to happen. Nobody knows, but I don't know what's going to happen in two to three years where if I mean you're already seeing it, consumers are they're just in front of their feed. And what's going on, whatever's going to go in front of that feed is going to be the cheapest and the that gets the best response. That's not going to be humans. That's going to be synthetically created content. There's no doubt in my mind that's going to happen. There's no doubt in my mind that in five years, most of the content that people are going to be engaging with from a music standpoint is going to be AI generated. You're definitely going to see it on the commercial side with Coca-Cola launching an AI. You know, they're testing their AI commercial. It's going to happen more and more as cost comes down, as it's more efficient. And it's not that the system that's evil. You know, this people aren't evil. It's just the system is striving for efficiency. And that and AI is very efficient and is becoming more and more efficient. And that's what I see. So I'm going to end up this whole word salah that I'm giving you and just say, I think there's a great opportunity for creators and content marketers right now to build direct connections that lead to human-to-human contact. But if I was on, so we did this three years ago where I was talking about tokenization and all that stuff where I felt we got it, I got a little bit wrong. Now we'll see if I'm wrong again. But I think in three years from now, we're probably not going to have this conversation because you and I might not have podcasts. So I'm just throwing it out there. I don't want to be the naysayer, but that's kind of how I feel.

Joeri Billast:

Yeah. Yeah. I saw your LinkedIn post yesterday about that. You said we cannot outcreate AI, but we can out-connect it. Is actually the message that you're bringing. When it comes to tokenization, I don't think I think that will be back. You will see, but not maybe.

Joe Pulizzi:

No, no, I I I you know what's funny? We should say a brief thing on tokenization. I think you're right. I think it's the right idea that we have some kind of control and loyalty system and something that lives that can live outside of all these platforms. I think the problem is when you and I initially, well, me for sure initially got involved, they weren't decentralized. They were still centralized companies that were running these things. And that was the problem. And I think if we would have started, it would have been much slower, started completely decentralized. But I think that I probably would have something right now that if I didn't start my token three years ago under another company, I think that we would probably have something. That's where I made the mistake because it's like you think it's decentralized, but it's not. So that's where I think now you've got it where I think people know better. The technology is a little bit easier, people are understanding more wallets, and I think that in a few years, people, I mean, it'll be very seamless. Where I feel that way about cryptocurrency, where people say, Oh, it's very difficult to buy Bitcoin. Well, it was really difficult to buy Bitcoin 10 years ago. It is not very difficult to buy it now. It'll be not it'll be completely seamless with our all of our other financial systems in a few years, where if you want to buy it, you just do it like that. So, anyways, that's so that's we're just waiting on technology, right?

Joeri Billast:

Absolutely. And of course, thanks to my podcast and everything that I'm doing, I meet those companies that are building that are actually systems that are really easy, like for instance, Rio, which is my sponsor, they have a solution for that that you can buy crypto. They say it should be as easy as your grandmother should be able to buy Bitcoin or buy things with Bitcoin. Now, yeah, everyone is pivoting. You know, when we met at CX a few years ago, then we were discussing about the name of the podcast, and at the time it was CMO stories, it became Web3 CMO stories, which brought me into the niche, and which now I define Web3 as an umbrella term, not blockchain only, but also AI and all emerging technologies. Now, back to your book because you burned a playbook, it opens with a bold idea. You say that to people, to the readers, you've been sold a story about success. So what do you think that most marketers and entrepreneurs still get wrong about freedom, about success?

Joe Pulizzi:

I don't, yeah, I don't I feel like I'm continuing to be the bearer of bad news, but I think that we have always we've grew up, or I did, that there was security in a job in working for someone else. And I really do believe that most kids go into college and younger folks, and even people my age, and I'm a Gen Xer, they still believe that the most security you can have if you want to live a life of freedom and meaning, you do that by working for somebody else. And especially during our converse with our conversation from AI, I don't think we can do that anymore if we ever had that opportunity for the past 20 years. I mean, I'm lucky that I made the jump in 2007 to stop working. I was I tell this story, I worked at a large B2B media company, and when I started in 2000, there were seven people between me and the CEO. So I was just a project manager, I was getting involved in content marketing, didn't know whatever. We the digital revolution came along, and we moved from print media to digital media, and within 24 months, I was reporting to the CEO seven layers of management gone, all laid off, which is scary when you think about it, especially with what's going on right now, and that was just the internet. And I think what's going on with AI is probably 10x that, maybe more. We don't know how much bigger this is today, but it's incredible what's going on right now. And our freedom, our the meaning that you want, it it's got it. I think it's got to come outside of wherever you go to work for somebody else where you literally have no control. You could here's the truth: you could be really, really good at your job, and tomorrow you could go in and it's gone. And I think everyone understands that today with the number of companies you're seeing, the Amazons and and Google and Microsoft, all almost haphazardly just say, Yeah, we're letting 100,000 go, we're letting 50,000 go, or we're not going to hire. Or maybe the worst thing is they're being rewarded for not hiring. We're gonna see that more and more. Oh, there's a lot of startups out there that say, Hey, can we be a billion-dollar startup with less than 10 employees? Things like this that that that Wall Street likes, financial markets like, stakeholders, investors like. So there we're we're as workers, they're we're involved in all that. So what do we do about that? I really believe that's true. I don't know how long uh people listening to this, if you're working for somebody else, uh I don't know how long that job's going to last. So I think right now, back to our previous conversation, now is the time there I think we have to focus on owning something, creating some asset. And it doesn't have to be about your job and it doesn't have to be about marketing. It could be about a passion project, it could be about something that's in service to others, but I'm thinking a podcast, an email newsletter, a community of some kind, an in-person event, a dinner series, a print magazine, it's something where you're creating something that you own that you can build an asset that lives outside the algorithm. I feel that right if I was to make this, and I wrote the book for my kids, and I'm saying this is what I want. I think we all need to do, but I think you need to do right now because that's where I think the safety is. Yeah. So the risk, the former risky move was doing that, was starting your own business, was creating your own thing. That is not the case anymore. That's the safe move. The risk move is not having the ability to make your own choices in an environment where even in you with you when you excel, you're going to probably not have a good outcome. And a lot of that is going is because of what's going on uh with artificial intelligence today and a number of other things, but AI is leading that charge, and I think it will continue to.

Joeri Billast:

Yeah, one of the quotes in your book is we don't build factories anymore, we build audiences. Can you maybe piggyback a bit on that?

Joe Pulizzi:

The current economy in the in I'll speak for the United States since I live in the US. The current economy has been built on the manufacturing process. And we've been in the slow decline of manufacturing into okay, we're gonna change into knowledge workers. So we've seen that Peter Drucker was absolutely correct with what that's happened. And there was always this fear that uh, well, I don't want to be a blue-collar worker because I could lose my job. So I'm gonna go and I'm going to be an expert in something. So and of course, marketing is part of this knowledge worker camp. Okay, I'm gonna know something about the processes of marketing and I'm gonna protect myself because I know that. And by the way, we're seeing, which I actually like, we're seeing more people that are taking kids that are taking double majors in school because they're not sure if one of those majors is gonna work for them, anyways. Because we don't know what the where the jobs are going to be. So we move into this knowledge worker camp, but it's still that factory process and it's still a mentality from a C-level standpoint that hey, look, it I just how I know that I will get compensated more if I'm a manager and executive, and we will have a better outcome if we lower labor costs. And it's been like that forever. But layer brick cross used to be blue-collar workers on the manufacturing line. Now those jobs have shifted to knowledge workers, but the same thing is happening right now where those people are going to be let go. And so, what can we do to protect ourselves? What can we do so that you can make your own decisions and you can work when you want to work and you can try to build generational wealth? You have to build direct connections with other people. And that's called building an audience. So if you were talking about doing that today, well, hey, if I build an audience of 500 people, something relatively small, that audience you can directly monetize in many different ways. You can service that audience whenever you want to. You can get up early in the morning, you could stay up late at night, you could do partnerships with other creators that are trying to do the same thing. And once you build an audience of whatever the size is, and today it's great because it doesn't have to be a large audience. I really do believe in Kevin Kelly's Thousand True Fans thesis, where you know, if you get 500 or 1,000 people, you can actually have the freedom that you want, find the meeting, find the wealth, the different wealth avenues for you, revenue channels. And let's just say that you still want to work for somebody else, which is completely fine. A lot of people don't have that entrepreneurial spirit. If you have built an asset, you are a thousand times more marketable than like I'll people have asked me for years, hey Joe, I want to get into content marketing. How do I do that? I said, build an audience, go do a thing. You what do you like? Do you like butterflies? Do you like flowers? Do you like different kinds of bicycles? Do you like to collect sports memorabilia? Do you like the mechanical systems process of building a new engine? I don't know. It doesn't matter what it is, but if you have some kind of expertise or not, or you're just curious, and you build anything, the podcast, the newsletter, a video series, whatever that is, and you understand. Oh, then you start to learn. Oh, how do you build an audience? What does audience development mean? How do I keep in touch and keep a relationship with these people? How do I monetize that? Or whatever the case, you'll do all those things, you'll get hired as a content marketer anywhere you want. Because that's all content marketers do. They're just little media companies. We're just trying to figure out, oh, how do we build an audience and monetize? Content marketing is, oh, how do I build an audience? And then how do I sell more products and services or keep people more loyal? If you're in the creator economy, it's how do I build an audience and then drive sponsorship or paid subscriptions or or tickets to an event, whatever the case is. It's all the same. So I think that's our protection today. And if you're in marketing, if you're working for somebody else, I would absolutely have the side project going right now. If for nothing else, if you care about the future of your career, so that you have something going, because it will change. Like your job is not going to be there. It's going to be something else. It'll either be something else in your own company or it's not going to be there anymore. Companies like when I worked there 25 years ago are going to completely go away or fracture or sell off, and it's going to be something different. So that's burn the playbook is I my calling to people saying, look, you can live the life that you want to, but if you want, you probably have to do a few things differently than go out, get the job, work for 10, 20, 30 years, retire, and live a happy life. I don't think that's a thing anymore. Yeah.

Joeri Billast:

And therefore it's good to be able to be curious and to talk to people and to read books as you have written, because then you can get these insights. And then if people around you are thinking different, then you feel a bit stronger and more confident to follow your own path. Actually, that's how I started the podcast, being curious, asking questions, and then growing like that. And then before I had content, and then I've written already a book like three years ago, and then Mark Schaefer said to me, But Yuri, I have interviewed so many people, so many CMOs, so many marketing people, AI specialists and so on. You can write a new book. And indeed, Joe, I already had a lot of content, and it helped me to write his book, which is again an asset next to the podcast. Now something in your book you also write because I know that uh many creators they feel a bit trapped between being artists and between being business people. And so how can they create like an artist and sell like a pro and then without losing their authenticity? I know that's something that a lot of them struggle with.

Joe Pulizzi:

The most important thing is where it may be in the past you didn't get credit for being yourself, for being the we're all unique and crazy in our own ways. And I think that maybe when I started in marketing and business, it was the move was don't disrupt, do your job, don't you know, be don't be the crazy one with the weird ideas, whatever. Today you are incentivized to do that. You the winners are the crazy ones. The winners are the ones, if you lean into your crazy, into what makes you unique, we call that your tilt into your differentiation area where you can rise above all the other clutter and content. That's the opportunity today. So I would believe, I feel like you should be the artist that you want to be and lean into that even from the business side. Because you, if somebody like Gary Vanderchuk is a really good example, he was crazy from the start, and other lot of people that hated him. And you know what? He's still the same crazy person, and by the way, probably almost a billionaire. So good for him and all the things that he's doing. And I think we could take a page from that and say, look at you know, just be yourself, be a little bit crazy. And if you're creating this art, if you're creating your content in the written form or in a podcast like you've done, Yuri, or in a video series, or whatever it is, yes, lean into yourself, be the artist. But at the same time, you need to know that these things can be monetized. And I don't think we should feel bad about it as artists. And I actually think that when you build, and we've seen this with whether it's me building and my team building Content Marketing Institute or Content Marketing World or the Tilt or Content Entrepreneur Expo or those things. If you build an audience that knows, likes, and trusts you, they want to buy things from you. They actually want to buy the art you're creating. And I think a lot of artists feel badly, oh, I don't want to sell for this. I know a lot of musicians that are like, they don't want to, they don't necessarily want to monetize their music, but they just want to do it because they love it. Great. That's even that's the best case scenario. You love it, you love to write, you love to create music, you love to create art, you love to create videos, whatever you love to do, you need to know that you can also monetize that. Well, how do you do that? You could have somebody that wants to sponsor the thing that you're doing, you could have people actually give donations, would be a wonderful thing. You could actually do an event where you sell tickets to the thing. You could actually have exclusive art, exclusive creation that you could sell a private community to. You could have gatherings for you. It's 20, 30 different ways that you can monetize. And that's, I think, that's where we ultimately get to freedom. You're you're already we're talking about building meaning. This is something that is important to you. You love to do it, you have a passion for it, you're connecting that creation to people that really want that thing. That's a wonderful thing. You're creating meaning for yourself and meaning for other people. Then you're saying, okay, well, then I can have how do I have this? It creates that freedom where you have choices with this revenue coming in that you don't necessarily have to work for somebody else if you don't want to. You could work when you want to. You could go on vacation with your family and still work odd hours or take things, take care of things before you go on vacation so you don't have to worry about it. I can tell you wonderful stories about just being an entrepreneur myself and being able to go to wonderful places with my family for a week or two weeks and to do things that I wouldn't do. I'd never be allowed to take that much time away from work. Even a month, spent a month in Key West last year. I can do that as an entrepreneur. I don't think I could do that working for somebody else. So these are the types of things that open up that freedom. And then, of course, we all want the generational wealth opportunity. That was always my goal, is I want to provide for my family and my family's family. And I was really thinking about that. It's very difficult to do that unless you're at the very highest level of the executive branch in these companies to generate that kind of wealth, long-term wealth opportunities. And but I think you can do it because you've built this supportive audience that is willing to fund you. You've built an asset. And once you build an asset, assets can be, you can build on that top of that and make it more valuable, or somebody might say, Hey, I would like to buy that asset. And that was our case when my wife and I sold Content Marketing Institute. We decided, oh, we created this asset. It was doing about $10 million a year. We valued it. There are a couple companies we're interested. We sold that and we created that generational wealth opportunity. You some people want that exit, some people don't. Either way is fine. But that's where I'm at with the opportunities moving forward in this window that we have.

Joeri Billast:

Yeah. And anyway, you for me it's the same at Joe, so I decide when I work and how, and I don't, it doesn't feel like work. Sometimes I have the discussions with my girlfriend that I said, I just I'm having fun right now recording this podcast with you right now. I'm not feeling like I'm working. You mentioned Gary V, you mentioned authenticity. So in the beginning I thought, should I start a podcast? Because I'm not a native English speaker, I have my Belgian accent, but then it's actually it makes me more authentic, right? I stand out. I saw Gary V actually here in Lisbon. He was speaking at an event, and I went straight up to him and I said, Gary, I met you in New York in 2019 there. I'm the guy I was a guy that came from Belgium. I've written a book right now. Philip Kotter has endorsed it. Do you want to call my podcast? And he said, he took my phone, Joe, and he said, Yes, my okay, let's make it happen. And he put his contact details in my phone. But I went to him like in that way, straight on, with the assets that you mentioned. But I know he's will not say yes to everyone because this guy is so busy. But yeah, so that's uh it's just building and then being curious, and at a certain moment things can happen.

Joe Pulizzi:

I love that example. Well, first of all, bravo to you for doing that and going up. But what I found is that like Gary is a creator, I'm a creator, you're a creator. We it's the one area, it's not like we're competing against each other. We want all of us can succeed. And that's what I think is great about this whole industry. If you're trying to build an audience, there are other creators and content entrepreneurs that want to see you successful because we know how hard it is to make that decision, to get started. You have so many people out there saying you can't do it, you're the wrong person for the job, don't go ahead, it's too risky. All that is coming down. When I got started, even close friends were like, Why are you leaving your job? You must be an idiot. Why are you doing all these things? You get it all the time. So we're all very supportive. So anybody listening to this and not quite sure, you have you will have support from anybody that around around you in the creative space. They want you to succeed as well. So you have a lot of positive momentum as you felt, as I felt. You have those mentors around. So that's what I love about the creator economy too. You just have a lot of cheerleaders because we've all made the risky move, we've all made the leap, and we want to see each other's success. Absolutely.

Joeri Billast:

What is the worst thing that can happen? You know, you just need just need to try it because there will always be people against you, or they will cheering you for you, or they will supporting you. So finally, uh Joe, if now someone is listening, feels re-ready to burn their whole playbook, but they are stuck in the system. Um what is maybe the very first small step, but a meaningful step that uh yeah, that you want them to take this week?

Joe Pulizzi:

So I think the hardest place for a lot of people is to figure out the what, because we're very different people, we've got different needs, we've got different interests, different things that we're good at. And so there's a little sheet. I have the sheet in the book, but and it's very easy where you just say, what are the 10 things that light you up that you're curious about that you're interested in that maybe you know more than other people? Just list them. And try to get to 10. Don't think too hard about it. Like I would say, oh, if I'm writing this down, oh, I like I like baseball, I'm interested in Bitcoin, I like the music of Billy Joel, I love different aspects of the history of marketing. I'm interested in business-to-business publishing. I like print magazine. I'm just this is me. Anybody can do this. Start listing those things off. And ultimately, what you find out is that by themselves, there's nothing significantly powerful about that. But what you do is what Adam Alter calls a recombination. And that's where the power comes in to find your tilt, to find your differentiation area, to find the thing that you want to do the email newsletter or the podcast about or whatever, where you take two of them, combine them together into something different. So if you think about nothing's really original, but if we start combining things, we can create something original out of them. And mine was simply I took my interest in marketing and my and what I knew about business-to-business publishing, and I combined that together and I created for me this niche of content marketing. That was in 2007. So that was my activity about doing, writing this whole thing down and said, okay. And then ultimately I said, who is interested in this? Marketing professionals would be, but my focus, like down the line, I figured three years later, was not small business marketers, it was marketers in larger enterprises where they had significantly more complex content marketing issues than a small business would have, as other companies would focus on those. And so that was my niche. I was going to focus on the practice and strategy of content marketing, and the target audience were enterprise marketers. Anybody, and it worked, it worked fairly well for us, and it could work for anyone else that does this, but you have to find your own thing. So it could be something that's business related, it could be something that's personal. You could match those two things up. So I would list that thing and spend a couple weeks with it. Write it down, all your interests, and something you're curious about, and something that you have a little bit more knowledge than most. And to your point about curiosity, is probably the most important. If you do not have to be an expert in it if you're really curious, because you just have to be one half step ahead of your audience going down the process at all, and then you will build that audience because they have the same questions that you do. So, whatever that is, and that's and then you might say, Okay, I found that. Let's say you find your tilt, then where do you go from there? I always say lean into the thing that you're most comfortable with or you're better at. So if you're really uncomfortable about being in front of a camera, don't do video. But if you're a really good writer and you enjoy the Writing process, maybe an email newsletter is for you, or maybe it's a blog series or article or whatever. So lean into the things like I always use the Harry Potter sorting hat. If Harry Potter didn't want to go into the Slytherin community, wanted to go in, it's the hat. It's like you have a choice. You're not forced to want, you're not forced to do video because video's hot. You're not forced to do a print newsletter, you're not forced to do anything that you don't want to do. So go to something that you like and then you'll figure that out. So if you like writing, do writing. If you like video or audio, do video or audio. There are opportunities everywhere, and then you focus on doing one thing well. So if you said, hey, I'm gonna do a podcast, then you say, okay, do it consistently. You're gonna do a podcast every week on this recombination idea from your tilt. Are you gonna have guests or not? Figure out a couple things and then just do it. Don't think too long about it. You will the first couple episodes, the first couple articles, the first couple anything you create, nobody's gonna listen to, anyways, because you haven't built an audience yet. You're learning how to do this thing. Move forward by the time you get to 10 or 20 or 30, you're gonna be feeling really good. You're gonna know what makes sense for you, you're gonna know better what the audience's needs are, and you're gonna start to really do it. And then if you get to as you have with your podcast, you get to 50, you get to 70. I'm on two podcasts, both are over 500 episodes. We know exactly what we're doing, we know exactly what the comp what the audience wants, and it's working, and we're monetizing, and it's everything's great. So you just get to that point. I just got 20 years behind me. That's the difference in doing it. But I think the opportunity is there. So that's what I would start with. Find your tilt, do the exercise, then go to the next step is what do you like to do? What's the output going to be? Focus on who that audience is and then go.

Joeri Billast:

That's how I started the podcast too. I was having interesting conversations with people I could learn from, questions I wanted to ask them. I was networking with people in my niche, I was building a community around me, I was getting to know and people. If you invite them for a podcast, it's a different story than if you just ask people because they say, What does this person want for me? But coming on a podcast, and then suddenly 18 months later, Coindesk reached out to me and they said they wanted to sponsor the podcast. So it's just a matter of being consistently and showing up and being yourself.

Joe Pulizzi:

My experience, Robert Rose and I in 2012, 2013, we were doing weekly calls about content marketing and about the business. We had an hour call, and after that call done, it says, We should have recorded that. And that was a really good call. Next week, we had this old marketing podcast, and we really was just our weekly calls talking about the news of content marketing. We put it into a podcast, and whatever it is, five, six million downloads later and five hundred episodes, and so you're right, it doesn't take much. You just the hardest part is actually taking the first step and doing it.

Joeri Billast:

Yeah. And then also you mentioned choose what you like to do. I just like to talk, speaking. It's easier for me to connect even with people I don't know, you know, to just go in a room full of strangers. Most people hate that, but I love that to discover people. But writing is a bit harder for me. But now in the AI era, AI can help you to repurpose and to help you assist you, not replace you, but assist you based on your own content. So, Joe, time always flies when I'm talking to you or hearing you speak. People now listening to the podcast and they are curious about the book. Where can they find the book or where can they find everything that you are doing?

Joe Pulizzi:

Sure. Yeah, burntheplaybook.today. If you go to burntheplaybook.today, it'll take you right to the landing page. You can buy it wherever you want to. You can buy it direct from me. You can buy it on Amazon or Kobo or Barnes Noble or where any anywhere else that you want to buy it from. So that's great. And then uh joepolitzi.com, P-U-L-I-Z-Z-I.com is everywhere else where you can sign up to the Tilt newsletter, find out whatever else I'm doing. But I do a weekly newsletter every Friday. It's called the Tilt. Uh it's me writing about the same things that you and I are talking about. And I talk a lot about my struggles, and I am struggling with this. So if people want to listen to my struggles, I'm trying to get out there so I can help other creators and content entrepreneurs kind of find their way through this crazy AI forest we're going through right now.

Joeri Billast:

Well, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Joe, by the way, all links that you mentioned, all information that Joe mentioned, guys, it's in it's in the blog article, the show notes related to this podcast episode. So you will find everything in there. Joe, it was really a pleasure to have you again on the show.

Joe Pulizzi:

Thanks for having me, Yuri. You're doing a great job. I love what you're doing. Keep it up.

Joeri Billast:

Guys, what an amazing episode. I'm sure that you know people around you, other marketers, other entrepreneurs, people working in bigger companies. Um, share this episode with them. You will think you will be giving a lot of ideas, a lot of inspiration, a lot of courage if they listen to this episode. Also, if you are not following the show, this is a really good moment to do this. To hit the subscribe button. If you haven't given me a review yet, if you give me these five stars, this will help me reach an even bigger audience. And of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care.

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Joeri Billast

Host