PATTAYA, Thailand – When Bruce the Adult Site Broker was just plain “Bruce,” a college student studying broadcast communications at San Francisco State University, he had no idea he’d someday wind up hosting a podcast.
For that matter, nobody knew anybody would be hosting podcasts in the future, because the whole concept of podcasts didn’t exist – and wouldn’t exist for many years to come.
Still, looking back, Bruce can now see how his current stint as a podcast host came as a natural evolution from his college days.
“While I was there, I started doing stringing work for some major radio stations and radio networks,” Bruce told YNOT. “I also broadcast the baseball, football and basketball games on the college radio stations. Later on, I got a job with a local East Bay area station, where I was doing both sports and selling advertising. I was at that station for 21 years.”
Years later, when weighing his options for a new project, his background in radio essentially led directly to the launch of Adult Site Broker Talk. Asked what first inspired him to launch the show, Bruce quipped “Isn’t everybody doing a podcast?”
“Seriously, I had some different friends encouraging me to start one and with my background in radio, it was a natural,” Bruce said, adding that he “also had missed that creative outlet in my life.”
Ironically, Bruce admits he’s not much of a podcast listener, himself.
“I’ll listen to an episode here and there of my guests,” Bruce explained, in reference to guests who have podcasts of their own. “In adult, Steph Sia does an excellent sex worker podcast, Stripped by Sia and Lily Craven’s Phone Sex with Lily is also fantastic.”
With the show’s 200th episode around the corner – an interview with adult performer and frequent Daily Beast contributor Cherie DeVille – Bruce has built up an impressive list of guests he’s interviewed and topics they’ve covered. From adult performers and owners of major adult entertainment companies to legal experts and sex work advocates, the conversations on the show have ranged from the outrageously funny to the extremely serious.
Asked to name a few of his favorite guests and episodes, Bruce said it’s “a tough question, because I’ve had so many amazing guests.”
“Brad from Mojohost has been on numerous times and he always has something important to say,” Bruce said. “I’ve had many of the industry lawyers on and those are such important episodes. Danny Z of Zbuckz has been on twice with some great insights on the gay space. Mike and Alison from the Free Speech Coalition have been on, talking about some important industry issues. There have literally been too many great guests to mention.”
What episode should a new listener start with, if they were to choose from the entire archive? That too is a difficult choice from Bruce’s perspective.
“I’d say maybe one of Mike Stabile’s episodes, since we all need to know more about the War on Porn and what FSC is doing to fight for us.”
As his moniker suggests, “Bruce the Adult Site Broker” isn’t just a podcast host, of course; he’s also the CEO of the company from which the podcast takes its name, Adult Site Broker. And while the career path from broadcast communications student to podcast host seems natural enough, his main gig came about largely as a matter of happenstance.
“It actually happened by accident,” Bruce told YNOT. “I had a client for my marketing company, Adult B2B Marketing, and he told me he’d rather sell his company, (which was) a series of gay affiliate programs. I sold it in three weeks.”
Following that quick, successful sale, the proverbial lightbulb switched on inside Bruce’s head.
“I said ‘Hey, we might have a business here’ and from there I opened Adult Site Broker, around 14 years ago.”
Starting the brokerage might have been an accident, but it has been a happy accident – and a lucrative one for Bruce and his clients.
“We’ve brokered seven and eight-figure deals with some regularity,” Bruce said. “Most deals are smaller, mid-to-high six figures, but there are large ones.”
Now 14 years into brokering adult sites and nearly four years into hosting Adult Site Broker Talk, Bruce, his brokerage and his podcast show no signs of slowing down. While 200 episodes published is a major milestone, it certainly won’t be the show’s last landmark. Upcoming guests include Jamey Bell from PASS, along with “a couple of AI-related interviews with Alex Georges of LustLab and Bob Kelland of Clonetwin,” Bruce told YNOT.
“I expect to have a lot of episodes like that in the next couple years, with AI becoming so important to our world,” he added.
That, in a nutshell, is what Adult Site Broker Talk is all about: anything and everything of relevance to the adult industry. Sometimes the topics and conversation will make us laugh. Other times, the stories Bruce’s guests tell might make us angry, not at the guests of course, but at the injustices and discrimination they’ve faced along the way.
In any case, the show will make us think and continue to forward the conversation, not just about adult entertainment, but the place of adult entertainment in broader society.
And if that’s not a great use of an education in broadcast communications, I don’t know what would be.
