John Corcoran is a recovering attorney, an author, and a former White House writer and speechwriter to the Governor of California. Throughout his career, John has worked in Hollywood, the heart of Silicon Valley, and ran his boutique law firm in the San Francisco Bay Area, catering to small business owners and entrepreneurs.
Since 2012, John has been the host of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where he has interviewed hundreds of CEOs, founders, authors, and entrepreneurs, including Peter Diamandis, Adam Grant, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Marie Forleo.
John is also the Co-founder of Rise25, a company that connects B2B businesses with their ideal clients, referral partners, and strategic partners. They help their clients generate ROI through their done-for-you podcast service.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [2:24] John Corcoran highlights why The AI-Driven Leader book stands out for modern executives
- [3:40] How leaders should integrate AI into daily problem-solving and planning
- [4:28] The impact of Apple’s 30% policy on app-based purchases
- [6:54] Why authenticity becomes your most valuable asset in an AI-saturated world
- [10:49] The biggest mistake new podcasters make — and what drives ROI
- [14:02] Does having a podcast make your business look more credible?
- [15:33] John’s perspective on AI-driven job creation and industry evolution
In this episode…
The digital business landscape is shifting fast, and companies are struggling to build trust and connection in a world increasingly dominated by AI and automation. At the same time, businesses investing in content strategies like podcasting often fail to see results because they misunderstand its true purpose and potential. So, how can companies stand out, build trust, and create real value in an increasingly artificial world?
John Corcoran addresses these challenges by emphasizing the power of genuine, human-to-human conversation as a relationship-building tool. Instead of chasing downloads, he urges podcasters to focus on using their shows as door-openers to meaningful partnerships, collaborations, and long-term growth. He also outlines how leaders can integrate AI into their workflow to boost efficiency without sacrificing connection — using it to prepare smarter questions and deepen understanding, not replace real dialogue.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as Chad Franzen interviews John Corcoran, Co-founder of Rise25, about navigating industry shifts and the importance of authenticity. John discusses the Apple ruling, how AI is reshaping leadership, and the underestimated power of podcasting for relationship-building and business growth.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Chad Franzen on LinkedIn
- The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions by Geoff Woods
- AI Leadership
- Niche in Control
Special Mention(s):
Related episode(s):
- “Scaling Your Agency for Exponential Growth With Jesse Gilmore”
- “Jason Swenk | How to Scale Up an Agency Business in an Economic Downturn”
Quotable Moments:
- “Authenticity is going to be even more important in an AI-saturated world.”
- “A podcast is a tool to build relationships — not just a marketing channel.”
- “You don’t need millions of downloads; you need the right conversations.”
- “Use AI on the periphery to prepare and distribute, but keep the human core.”
- “Podcasting creates credibility — even before you talk to a prospect.”
Action Steps:
- Embrace AI as a leadership tool: Use AI not just for tasks but to ideate, strategize, and enhance team output. This keeps leaders efficient and competitive in fast-moving environments.
- Focus on authenticity in communication: As AI-generated content becomes harder to distinguish, real-time conversations and human interactions will gain more trust. Prioritize platforms that showcase your genuine voice.
- Leverage podcasting for relationship building: Don’t expect overnight fame — use your podcast as a means to deepen client relationships and open doors to new collaborations.
- Position your podcast for credibility: Your podcast isn’t just content — it’s part of your brand identity. Prospects who listen will trust you more and move further down the decision funnel.
- Recognize secondary benefits from content: From joint ventures to high-quality referrals, the biggest wins often come after the episode airs. Treat every interview as a strategic investment in long-term partnerships.
Sponsor: Rise25
At Rise25 we help B2B businesses give to and connect to your ‘Dream 200’ relationships and partnerships.
We help you cultivate amazing relationships in 2 ways.
#1 Our Predictable Podcast ROI Program
At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 200 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution.
We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work.
What do you need to start a podcast?
When you use our proven system, all you need is an idea and a voice. We handle the strategy, production, and distribution – you just need to show up and talk.
The Rise25 podcasting solution is designed to help you build a profitable podcast. This requires a specific strategy, and we’ve got that down pat. We focus on making sure you have a direct path to ROI, which is the most important component. Plus, our podcast production company takes any heavy lifting of production and distribution off your plate.
We make distribution easy.
We’ll distribute each episode across more than 11 unique channels, including iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon Podcasts. We’ll also create copy for each episode and promote your show across social media.
Cofounders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars, YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk, and many more.
The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.
Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships.
Are you considering launching a podcast to acquire partnerships, clients, and referrals? Would you like to work with a podcast agency that wants you to win?
Rise25 Cofounders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.
#2 Our Comprehensive Corporate Gifting Program
Elevate business relationships with customers, partners, staff, and prospects through gifting.
At Rise25, thoughtful and consistent gifting is a key component of staying top of mind and helps build lasting business relationships. Our corporate gift program is designed to simplify your process by delivering a full-service corporate gifting program — from sourcing and hand selecting the best gifts to expert packaging, custom branding, reliable shipping, and personalized messaging on your branded stationary.
Our done-for-you corporate gifting service ensures that your referral partners, prospects, and clients receive personalized touchpoints that enhance your business gifting efforts and provide a refined executive gifting experience. Whether you’re looking to impress key stakeholders or boost client loyalty, our comprehensive approach makes it easy and affordable.
Discover how Rise25’s personalized corporate gifting program can help you create lasting impressions. Get started today and experience the difference a strategic gifting approach can make.
Email us through our contact form.
You can learn more and watch a video on how it works here: https://rise25.com/giftprogram/
Contact us now at [email protected] or message us here https://rise25.com/contact/
Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
All right. Today we’re talking about the groundbreaking ruling against Apple that is going to revolutionize the way that companies like Spotify and Netflix, and all of their subscribers are using those services today. We are turning the tables, and Chad Franzen is here, and he’s going to be interviewing me. So stay tuned.
Intro: 00:19
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:36
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. And you know, if you’ve listened before that usually it is me interviewing smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies.
And you can check out the archives for some of those episodes. But today, we’re turning things around. I’m going to be interviewed. We’re going to be talking about some of the topics affecting our industry, which is B2B, podcasting, and marketing. And before we get into this interview, this episode is brought to you by our company, Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you to run your podcast. We are the easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do three things which are critical.
This is the three-legged stool. We do the strategy, we do the external accountability, and we do the full external production and execution. In fact, we invented a platform that helps us to do all those things. It’s being called the Wix or the Squarespace of B2B podcasting. It’s a Podcast Co-pilot.
So if you want to learn more about that and learn more about how Rise25 can be the team of magic elves that run in the background to make it look easy for you, your company, to have a podcast and have it produce great relationships and ROI for your business. You can go to Rise25.com or email us at [email protected]. All right. With that, I will turn it over to Chad Franzen.
Chad Franzen: 01:57
Hey, thanks so much, John. It’s great to be here. Great to talk to you. This is kind of another episode in our series where we focus on a recent book that you have read. A little known tool that you have used, someone in your network who has impacted you, an issue in your industry.
And this time we’ll be talking about a common mistake that you help your clients overcome. So I’m looking forward to talking to you once again about all of these things. Why don’t we start out with a recent book that you have read? What’s one that comes to mind for you?
John Corcoran: 02:24
Great. So the one that I chose for this week is another one on the hot topic of AI. It’s The AI-Driven Leader by Geoff Woods. Geoff is someone that we have Jeremy and I have known for a lot of years now. aileadership.com is his website, and what I like about that book is that it’s, you know, it’s a bit timeless because it’s talking about not the tools that are constantly changing, but it’s talking about how leaders in any organization can be leveraging AI as a tool to to come up with new ideas, to strategize, to. Create plans, things like that, and to really integrate it into their process so that they can be a better leader with their team and produce a lot more in the time that they have. So I really like that one, and it’s really good. It’s good for CEOs, it’s good for executive teams, it’s good for really anyone who wants to be a leader and wants to be more efficient because so many of us can utilize AI in so many different ways. So my leadership team checked it out.
Chad Franzen: 03:34
So it encourages the leader to use AI, him or herself or to encourage the team to use AI.
John Corcoran: 03:40
A bit of both, but definitely, you know, using it themselves. I mean, we all Google things, right? I mean, I did for, for me, a couple of months ago, I just stopped googling things and I said, every time I’m thinking of googling something, I’m going to go and use. Sometimes I use two of them and test and see which one comes up with the better result. So I don’t know many leaders that are at such a high level that they’re not even googling things themselves, or they don’t have their phone near them.
That’s an extremely rare situation. Generationally. I think anyone you know of, any age has really got a phone in their pocket all the time. So it’s utilizing these things and encouraging your team to utilize them.
Chad Franzen: 04:20
So the next category, a little known tool that you use, this is where you kind of mentioned it a little bit earlier the ruling against Apple.
John Corcoran: 04:28
Yeah. So this is not really a little known tool. But there was an important ruling that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention. There was this ruling against Apple. So Apple has taken a policy that any app in their app store in the name of security and creating a consistent policy, there’s a number of different rationalizations for it, but they charge 30% of any subscriptions that go through it.
And companies like Spotify and Netflix have chafed against that. And so they have not made it kind of difficult. That policy has made it difficult for people to go and buy things through those apps. So for example, with Spotify. Spotify has tried to grow an e-book audio book business as an alternative to audible.
I’m all in favour of that because I love audiobooks, listening to audiobooks, and they’re also increasingly, you know, audio products that are kind of a hybrid between a paid podcast and a paid audio book. And they know you can’t buy them through their app. You have to like, navigate over to a website, log in with that website and then pay, and then go back to the app, and you can listen to it that way. It’s really kind of a clunky process. Same thing with Netflix and some of these other companies.
And so these companies have said that that’s not fair. So this ruling came down that said that Apple couldn’t do that anymore. So this is going to be unfolding, and it’s going to allow companies like Spotify, which have been growing like crazy to go and, you know, charge their customers and they’re not taking 30% off the top. So it’s kind of a really important ruling and a significant one that I think is going to affect the growth of Spotify and other tools out there.
Chad Franzen: 06:14
Okay. Very interesting. Tell me, somebody in your network who you feel like has impacted you recently.
John Corcoran: 06:23
So this is a guest that was on my podcast. His name is Jesse Gilmore. Niche in Control is the name of his website and his business, and he’s someone who has a lot of experience in the agency space. And he guides and advises marketing agency leaders on how they can grow faster, which I think is something that’s really important in today’s day and age. And so I would encourage everyone to go check them out, especially if you are an agency leader and you’re interested in that topic.
Chad Franzen: 06:51
What about an issue in your industry?
John Corcoran: 06:54
Okay. So this is one that has come up a lot. So what are we going to do as we get to this point where anything we see online, we’re not sure if it’s authentic or not. Where a tweet, we don’t know if it was written by the real person. Even someone’s voice we don’t know.
Is that really, you know, Martin Luther King Junior speaking, right. Or is that, you know, a person, you know, talking? Is that the real voice or did someone make it up to videos? Same thing. Is this authentic or not?
And so I really believe that in an age of AI where we’re going to be skeptical about whether things are real or fake, then we are going to be trusting things that we know are authentic that much more, and those things are going to be so much more important. True authenticity is going to be important. So face to face in-person gatherings, I think are going to become more important. Interestingly, I think this happened in the music industry in a different context where the music industry, because of the way that things were monetized behind the scenes, more revenue was derived from the live music experience. So I think that in the age of AI, we are going to be focusing more on authenticity.
And what can’t we fake? We can’t fake this, like you and I, having this conversation, even though it’s over zoom, we can’t fake it, and I don’t think we’re going to be able to fake that anytime soon. At least I kind of hope that we can’t fake that anytime soon. And who knows, maybe it’ll be regulated or something like that. But I believe that this will make it more important for people to be using authentic tools to build relationships with clients and prospects and referral partners.
And for me, that’s what doing a podcast is. It’s having an authentic human conversation with someone that you respect and admire and asking questions about them and sharing that with others and telling other people about that. And so I just see that that is going to be even more important, as all this other noise increasingly becomes stuff that we don’t know whether it’s real or fake. So I think authenticity in the age of AI will become even more important.
Chad Franzen: 09:08
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