The ROAR Podcast: Seth Rubinroit, NBC Universal

[upbeat music] There's a version of the media business where a podcast is just a microphone and a conversation. Then there's the version Seth Rubinroy has spent his entire career building, where one conversation becomes television, becomes YouTube, becomes a clip on your phone at the gym, and fuels an entire revenue engine that keeps growing while the costs stay flat. Today's guest got a start young, really young. Seth and his brother talked their way into NBA Summer League credentials as pre-teens, reporting for outlets like Sports Illustrated for Kids and Time for Kids, and learning the lesson that shaped everything after: Always know what's in it for the other side of the table. That instinct carried him from a USC business degree and a scrappy basketball website to Universal Sports Network and then to NBC, where he worked the Rio and Pyeongchang Olympics before pitching executives on something they weren't sure they needed: audio. That pitch became one podcast, then two, to more than 30 shows, and one of the fastest-growing lines in the business. Today, Seth leads Audio and Digital Strategy at NBC Universal, teaches at USC, and thinks daily about where content, technology, and monetization all head next. In this episode, Adam digs into the reach versus revenue math behind a podcast slate, why the smartest shows follow the audience instead of the talent, how AI is quietly reshaping production, and what all of it means for the next generation of storytellers. I'm Bryce Clinton, and this is the ROAR Podcast.

Welcome to the ROAR Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Grossman. With me today is Seth Rubinroy. Seth, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Adam. Appreciate the, uh, invitation. Excited to be here.

Hey, excited to have you here as well. Thank you for the help with the pronunciation of your name before. So [chuckles] hopefully, we just were talking about it. Hopefully, we got it right. But it's great to have you on. Uh, you and I met at the SBJ Awards, and we're both judges at the SBJ Awards, which we'll talk about in a little bit. But it's exciting to t-talk about more what you're doing at NBC, particularly on everything going on with the World Cup, which we'll get into, all the stuff you're doing on the podcast side. But as we like to always say, we like to start from the beginning. So tell us a little bit more about you and how you got to this point in your career.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, Adam. Uh, th-thanks again for the, uh, the invitation. So I started, I started doing this really, really young. Do you remember the NBA Summer League before-

Oh

... it was in Vegas?

Well, first of all, I... You're really young. As we talked about even in the awards, like, really young is not that long ago for you. You're not that [laughs]

No

... a young guy, right?

No, no, no. Definitely, definitely, uh, you know, not that long, but it seems like I've been in the industry a lot longer than, uh, you know, my, my age would indicate just because of, of all the, the things and how early I started. Um, yeah. So it really kinda goes back to the, the NBA Summer League, which used to be, if you remember, in Long Beach, uh, you know, well before it moved to, to Las Vegas. Uh, my