486. Podcasting Shake-Up: AI Is Changing the Game

0:05 Good morning podcasting Morning Chat. Today is Wednesday, April 1st, 2026 and today it's our news and Comment edition. Podcast metrics are leveling up, the IRS is tightening the screws on creators, and another fully automated podcasting tool has some podcasters on edge. So if you're listening live on Clubhouse at the share button, bottom left hand side of the screen and share it. However, Clubhouse lets you. And if you're catching us via podcast, YouTube, LinkedIn, please share this with a fellow podcaster. And now give us about 30 seconds. We'll get things rolling. Thanks for being here. The podcasting Morning chat is powered by Ironic media helping podcasters launch, Polish and grow great shows and by content creators accountant helping creators build real business behind their content.

1:20 Good morning again Podcasting morning chat Thank you so much for being here. I am your host Mark Ronic and currently on stage with me. My Co hosts we have Alex Baelish, Ralphie Step, Dr. Fay Janaid Ahmed has joined us as well. Sid Meadows, BC Babbles, Nick Naulback. And from the audience, once again, our good friend Tide AKA Nikki is on stage with us. And I do want to say this stage is open to anybody listening live here on Clubhouse. You are welcome to be up here, join the conversation. And if you have your own questions about podcasting, even if you feel like it has nothing to do with what we're talking about, we don't care.

2:02 We're here to serve our community. And if you have something on your mind, something pressing that you'd like an opinion on, I want to hear from you. And I would love to hear it from your voice more than I would like to see it from the chat room. So feel free to come up and join us anytime. All right, a couple of housekeeping items for you before we dig deep into the news today. First, today at 1:00 PM Eastern, we are going live again on YouTube, Clubhouse, LinkedIn, etcetera, with our new special series, Empowered Podcasting Live. It's going to be hosted by me and my 2 business partners, Jason Zircon and Rich Perry. We'll have, of course, a special guest and title sponsor, Ralph Estep of Content Creators Accountant. And we'll also give you updates, special announcements, including our new creator partner program designed to give our community members more visibility in the podcasting industry. That's all I'll say about it right now. So come join us at 1:00 PM Eastern if you if that's of interest to you.

3:12 And of course, to find US live streaming, the easiest place to go would be Podcasting Morning chat.com/join us and then you can choose the streaming platform of your choice, including Clubhouse. So we'll do Clubhouse, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook. I believe it'll all be the same streaming platforms, but the focus will be on the Empowered Podcasting Conference, the community, etcetera. So please come join us if you can put that on your calendar and come join us at 1:00 PM Eastern. Also Speaking of community, Dr. has something she wanted to share, some community news if you will. Go ahead, DRODR. Do I need my cricket sounds?

3:53 I'm. On mute. Sorry, I was on. Mute. So. So in our group, we have someone by the name of Stephen Kofer. Am I pronouncing that right, Kofer. Yeah. OK, and he has posted a beautiful picture of he and his niece with the headphones on the whole bit and the post reads. Shout out to Janaid for the tip on the New York Times student podcast competition. I helped my niece produce a short series for a high school project she will be submitting. And again, the picture is great. They're sitting with a bunch of gear in front of them and it's a great picture.

4:34 Yeah, yeah. And very cool. That's something discussed, I think it was. Was it last week on the news that we did this and Janae brought that to our attention, that it was New York Times? Was that what it was? Dr. Or I think that's what it was, yeah. Or maybe Janae, you can tell us, yeah. Yes, it is New York Times that is opened up submission for youth podcasters and they're going to feature that podcast Whoever wins on your times on. Yeah, pretty cool. Yeah, thank you for bringing that. And that is the beauty of this community, right? And that and one of the reasons why we share different events here on the podcasting morning Chat. You never know who's going to want to take advantage of it. And so cool to see an uncle and his niece working together to apply.

5:20 So, yeah, congratulations to Steven and his niece. Great picture too, by the way. You can find that in our Facebook group Empowered Podcasting. If you want to see that picture, you can go for it over there. OK, last thing yesterday we talked about a potential name change to the podcasting morning chat. I told you that chat felt, and I think most people agreed with me, chat felt a little too casual and changing the name from Podcasting Morning Chat to Podcasting Morning show felt a lot better and it seemed like a lot of you agreed with me. There was one hang up. The hang up was we often call podcasting morning chat, the PMC, which would mean if we change the name to show it would be the PMS. And some of us were finding that a little funny. But it did stick with me and I decided that maybe that's not the route I want to go.

6:19 So I've decided I'm going to go a totally different route and I want your feedback. But I this is what I wanted. I'm going to move up BC with the I roll. I want to change this to something that still represents that we're a morning show. But again, I want to avoid the the abbreviation and I want your honest opinions. Even though I'm I'm moving forward with it, but I still want to hear good morning podcasting. What do you think? Any thoughts 'cause that will be the official name. I think as of I was going to wait till episode 500. I think I'm going to go with Monday as the official name I'm hearing. Robin, I'm hearing Robin Williams.

7:00 Good Morning, podcasting. Yeah, that was kind of the inspiration. BCI. Like it, though, I've got to say, there's a little something that I'm not sure about when it comes to like too many Ings back-to-back like that. So I wonder if like it should at some point be podcast as opposed to podcasting. So I thought about that. I mean. Sounds good, but that's like the one little thing that I'm like, I'm not sure how I like the sound of it. And Nick is saying in the chat here podcaster but interesting because good morning podcasting and then podcasting morning. Also lots of INGSI go back and forth.

7:42 I like the ING sometimes, other times I know it's just easier off the tongue to remove that. Yes, Sid, go ahead. Good morning, everybody. So this last couple of minutes is kind of like you're sitting around in a family meeting and your parents are saying, guess what, we're going to Disney World. Oh, April Fool's. If it's April Fool's stoves, Mark, we're actually going to Six Flags. So I've made the decision and you don't get to voice your opinion, but I want your opinion. What do you think about? It Oh God, it's too funny. I actually. Like it. It sounds really good, Mark, good morning Podcasting. I think it sounds it's got a lot of energy with it, especially if you say it the way you said it a minute ago. And it's much better than Welcome to the PMS Show. Well Sid, you hold on BC I'm just going to stop it right here.

8:30 Sid got me. He called it out. That was an April Fool's joke. I really don't think I wanted to go that route. Although I will say that Sid, I would say Ralph fully agrees with you. He likes good morning podcasting, but that really wasn't the route. I think podcasting morning show is really the way I want to go. But now you guys of course are making me double think everything and I was just trying to make a joke here so. Martin, what about the morning podcast show? Yeah, I think that was thrown around too. I don't like that it doesn't flow off the tongue as much for me. How about just leave it? How about just leave it to podcasting morning chat? I don't understand why I honestly, I, I, I think it's no whatever.

9:16 Well, we did see that it would actually be. It might lend itself better to SEO. We talked a little bit about that yesterday and Matt did a little research as well offline and shared some of that with me too. But yeah, OK, it was a joke. So maybe what? Not the best April Fool's joke I've ever I've ever had, but nonetheless an April Fool's joke. And I do have a counter to the whole PMS thing, Mark, OK, we just need to change the initials to the podcasting morning show. So then it'd be TP Ms. so we avoid the whole PM. True, but there's still PMS there. It's still in it. All right, I got to move on. OOP, wrong button.

9:57 Sorry. Let's dig in to the news for this past week. So these are all the stories that have come up since last Wednesday around the world of podcasting, and I'd like to start with a little bit of podcast data for you first. Over the past week, 582,585 podcasts published at least one new episode, which is up 4.1% from the previous week. And over the last 30 days, almost 2.5 million podcasts published at least one new episode. That's up almost 10% from the previous month. And before I go to Dr. and her top five, I do want to just share quickly.

10:44 Forbes posted an article recently that argues that podcasting is getting better at measuring what actually matters, not just downloads, but actual business results. That matters to brands that are looking for a better ROI return on investment. And it matters to podcasters, especially indie creators, because stronger measurement could help prove that smaller, more trusted shows can outperform bigger names. So the article points to new, newer measurement tools, especially Oxford Roads. Orbit ORBIT, as evidence that podcasting can now track performance with more precision than many advertisers may assume. Orbit says it's built on campaign results from more than 500 advertisers and $1.6 billion in annual spend. And the big theme here is the shift away from the vanity metrics.

11:43 Orbitz pitch is that it ranks podcasts by ROI and conversion performance, not by download, celebrity or chart positions. So that's especially relevant for DIY and indie podcasters because Oxford Road says 80% of its top performing shows are independent, not part of major networks. 1 Oxford Rd. Data Point says independent shows are 37% more likely to hit advertiser targets than major network shows. For brands, that take away is that podcast buying may need to become more outcome driven, with more attention paid to audience trust and conversion, not scale. That's an inference from the ranking model Oxford Road is promoting.

12:37 And for podcasters, the bigger opportunity is positioning. If advertisers keep moving toward performance based measurement, indie creators may have a stronger case to make them they ever had before. That's an inference, but it's supported by the articles focus on better metrics and Oxford roads indie heavy results. So again, the best thing for you as a podcaster didn't know with this is use some of this data to make your case when you're pitching to partners, to sponsors, to collaborators, excetera people that you may not know a lot about this game. And I think if you can provide and point to places like Forbes, places like Oxford, I think their orbit tool, I think you're you can make of a stronger case for yourself. All right, let's go to Dr. with the top fives before it's egg cooking time.

13:30 Go ahead, Dr. All right, so this is Spotify's top five at #5 We have Crime Junkie at #4 we have the Sean Ryan show at #3 start that Timpani is good. Hang with Amy Poehler #2 is Call Her Daddy with Alex Cooper at the number one show is the Joey Rogan Experience. That's right, the same 5 pretty much as usual. So we're going to go to DRS Random top five of the week. Go for it. Yeah, so this one's interesting because I chose a chart from Good Pods and this Good Pods platform and is ranked by listens, ratings, comments, subscriptions and shares.

14:18 OK, So it's the criteria is totally different. So #5 is the apology line number 4 is betwixt the sheets, The history of sex scandal and society #3 is Call Me Back with Dan Senior. Number 2 is on Being with Krista Tepit and the number one show you're going. To have to wait a second. Number one show is eyes wide open. Awesome. Cool. Yeah, Thank you. Thank you, Dr. So that comes from Good Pods, a wonderful app for podcast consumption, I'll call it.

15:00 And yeah, it's really a real focus, more so toward the indie podcasters, the DIY podcasting, etcetera. I love Good Pods. I actually need to use it more. Sometimes I forget just 'cause I'm so used to going to my default, which is usually Apple podcast, but I always enjoy the experience more when I'm using Good Pods. So yeah, give them a try, check them out. Thank you, Dr. Appreciate that. And let's yeah, that was right. Is that the old Stinger? Is that the old news Stinger? I can't remember now. Let me I'll play the other one next just to see. Let's get into some events around the world of podcasting and then we'll get into today's content creators. News bite, Business bite.

15:47 I should say first, this is a new one we haven't talked about yet, the Podcasting Moms Conference. This is a one day conference designed especially for mom podcasters. It's creating space for creators who are balancing content, business and family life. Focused on practical growth strategies. It highlights how marketing, monetization and operations can actually fit into a busy real world schedule. This happens April 20th. So this month it's now April and that's happening in Franklin, TN. That's outside of Nashville. If you're interested, go check that out at conference.momsfriendsmedia.com.

16:30 Also, we shared this recently, Military Creator Con is coming. It's a conference built for a military connected creators, entrepreneurs, storytellers and innovators. That's happening April 16th through the 18th in Arlington, TX. I think Sid said he may try to check that out at least because we've got several people from this community that will be speaking there. And this conference is designed to bring together service members, veterans, spouses, retirees and supporters for workshop panels, conversations and networking around creativity, media, business and impact. So check out Military Creator Con if you are interested and also Empowered Podcasting 3. I've talked about it a lot already as far as we're going to do a live show catching you up with all the things going on behind the scenes.

17:23 Empowered Podcasting 3 is coming this August 21st through the 23rd, happening once again in Charlotte, NC. More importantly, if you want to speak there, we still are accepting speaker applications. We are accepting them for two more weeks. I believe April 15th is the cut off date. I know that's probably a trigger word for Ralph when you say April 15th. And yeah, we want to hear from you. So go to empoweredpodcasting.com/speakers and apply. You can apply to be a single presentation speaker or if you want to do a workshop, we're also opening up workshop speakers as well.

18:03 So come there and apply today. empoweredpodcasting.com/speakers. And I just realized I should have had this ready to go. Quick tip. Smart moves. Yeah. Content creators. Business fight. And today's content creators Bite, Business Bite is brought to you by the guy who's about to host it, Ralph Estep, Junior of Content creatorsaccountant.com. Ralph is a licensed accountant and also my accountant with over 30 years of experience. And at contentcreatorsaccountant.com, he helps creators stop guessing about taxes, money, and turning financial chaos into clarity.

18:45 Working with Ralph has been one of the best decisions my wife and I have made, and I encourage you to check it out. Check him out at his website, contentcreatorsaccountant.com. OK, Ralph, what do you got for us today? Well, let me say something that might make you a bit uncomfortable today. Some of you in the room are one ordered away from a very bad year and you don't even know it. I was reading an article from Finance Buzz and here's the reality. The IRS is now actively increasing enforcement on side hustle and creator income. So this isn't theoretical anymore. I've mentioned this on the show before that they might come after this. This is the truth. Because of the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS now has more agents, they've got better systems and they're doing what's called real time data matching, which means they don't have to guess anymore, they can just compare.

19:38 Let me aint a picture for you. If you file your tax return and you report what you think you made behind the scenes, the IRS already knows things. They already get a copy of your 1090 nines from the platforms, any payment processor data. And they also, believe it or not, have access to your bank account for deposit patterns. And when the numbers don't match, you get a notice. Not a warning, a notice. And that's where it gets real for creators, because that notice turns into requests for documentation, requests for bank statements. And even requests for receipts. And if you can't roduce them, guess what's going to happen. The IRS is going to fill in the blanks for you and they don't guess in your favor. O let me be blunt.

20:22 Some of you right now, and I've talked about this on the show before, are mixing personal and business money. You're not tracking your income properly. You're guessing at deductions, and you're just hoping that nothing gets noticed. That's not a system, that's exposure. And here's what shocks a lot of people. If you made over $400.00, you're already in their game. You owe self-employment tax whether you like it or not. Now, a lot of creators think the risk is low because, well, it's just a side hustle. I was listening to the show this morning. They were talking about, oh, it's just a side thing. That's not correct. It's traceable income and now it's highly visible income. And listen, I work with craters every day. I'm telling you, the one who gets hurt are not the ones making millions of dollars.

21:07 They've got teams of accounts. They got people working for them. It's the ones who are unorganized, unaware, and unprepared. You don't have a tax problem. You got a system problem. So as I said before, protect yourself, separate your money, track everything, build a tax vault and stop guessing. So I want to throw this out to the audience. Let me ask you something. If you got audited tomorrow, you got that dreaded IRS letter or that state tax letter, would you be ready or would you be scrambling? Because the truth is, the IRS is not getting more lenient. They're getting smarter. And the creators who survived this shift won't be the most creative. They're going to be the most organized. And that's your content creators business bite for today.

21:49 Thank you, Ralph. Appreciate that. And yeah, if I don't know if anyone has any questions, I want to, I don't want to just breeze right by this, but yeah, OK, If anybody has any questions or comments about this, by all means, you are welcome to chime in. Yes, I was right. I was playing the wrong news Stinger before. Although I guess there's nothing wrong about it, it definitely still works. OK, let's keep things going here. This is just a quick news bite. Sometimes we've got some stories that I just find might be interesting to share but may not have a lot of discussion. Alex Cooper trades podcast drama for reality TV chaos. That's the headline.

22:33 I'll go further here. Alex Cooper is taking her Unwell brand, that's the name of it, into reality TV territory. The Call Her Daddy host is launching a new video series called Unwell Winter Games where 16 contestants will battle it out over 4 days of mental and physical challenges. Inside a park inside Park City, UT. Inside a chalet there in Park City, UT. The show drops on YouTube starting April 6th and leans hard into competition, shifting alliances and the kind of messy drama the Unwell brand thrives on. Cooper stays off camera this time, serving as executive producer alongside her husband and Unwell Co founder Matt Kaplan. I got to think this is somewhat inspired by creators like, say, Mr. Beast, who does this all the time, these competitive types of YouTube shows and channels.

23:32 So yeah, curious to see. I'm sure she will be successful. She she tends to have a lot of success in this space right now. We will see how that goes. And I'm going to keep it moving and actually go to UBC if you don't mind, because I know you have AI news for us and you also have a story about podcasting infiltrating the airlines, not the airwaves, the airlines. Let's hear from you BC good morning. Yes, we do, and we'll skip the AI one for the second story because I'm not sure how to feel about that one yet. Hashtag Skynet. So firstly, we'll discuss British Airways bringing brand new audiobook and podcast offerings on board. They have teamed up with Audible, the leading creator and provider of premium audio storytelling, to bring brand new spoken word entertainment to their customers at 35,000 and feet.

24:23 The package will include over 250 hours of podcasts and audiobooks for all customers to enjoy during their long haul flights. And the genres will include action, romance, pop culture and children's content, with a particular focus on shows that showcase British talent. So like home grown authors, actors and stories. And for someone who knows they just finished up the whole Harry Potter audio book series. I'm super excited. Not that I have any new plans to go to British airlines, but when I do, that'll be what I look into. So great new content for British airway customers to enjoy. Now the AI part. I want to stop you real quick because just a quick question because you just mentioned Harry Potter, are you excited about the new HBOTV series that's coming out? I saw the trailer and I got to say I got a little worked up. I'm excited.

25:16 I think it looked good. It was well done. I do hate, hate, hate, quadruple hate that the actor who's portraying Snake was getting so much stupid heat for stupid reasons, and I'm going to leave that there. But very excited, Yes, personally very, very excited. Yeah, I see Nick is also excited. He just flashed us the fire emoji, so he's excited too. It looked really good. Yeah, go ahead. Is this the one that Stephen Colbert is going to be writing, or is that a feature film that you go to theaters for? BC do you know? There should be a whole series. I don't know if Steve. 'Cause you know that Stephen Colbert got the gig of writing the new either movie or oh. We'll have to look that up. I don't know.

25:58 I mean, I did, I think. I'm getting my Harry Potters mixed up with my. Oh, Sid has something. Maybe Sid can help us with this. Let's see, you know I can't help her, so there's no. Help. But but I am curious, I saw the trailer for this TV series and the scenes they were showing it all looked very similar to the movie series. For fans, is it any different or is it just going to be exactly the same script, if you will, just now in the TV format? Based on the trailer, it looks like it'll be including more nuanced moments from the books that the movie is just based on. Timing could not fit into the story, so I'm hoping it'll fill in some of those gaps that the book readers probably didn't get during the original film series.

26:45 OK, there you go. Based on what I saw. Yeah, OK. And I don't think Stephen Colbert, Colbert has anything to do with this show. But I could be wrong. But what I'm looking at here, I, I'm not seeing anything at first glance, but we'll get back to you and let you know. All right, BC you said the next story is the your Skynet story of the week. Yeah, so. Lord of the Rings. He's going to be writing Lord of the Rings. Yeah, bottom line is. If you're not a Harry Potter or a Lord of the Rings person, there's plenty of other podcasts for you to enjoy on British Airways. So yes, my concerning story for today is about a platform called Pod Claw, which is podcast hosting built specifically for AI agents. So this means that this platform has nothing to do with humans. There's no dashboard, no user interface, no manual upload flow.

27:33 This is done for API calls. There's going to be a lot of jargon in here. I'm going to try to avoid the jargon because it's very technical. But bottom line here is that this is a podcast hosting platform for bots that publish consistent content. So the core concept here with Pod Claw, it's fully API driven podcasting. It becomes where podcasting is completely programmable. It's designed for autonomous AI content pipelines. End to end automation is the real product here. And yeah, it's basically kind of the idea of like if a business wants the business to, sorry, if a business owner wants their business to have an affiliated content podcast or podcast content series, they can tell Pod Claw to create one, but otherwise have nothing to do with the podcast. The Pod Claw uses bots to just create content and podcast format.

28:30 And this for me is kind of like, well, this is going to hit the podcasting world in some crazy ways, right? Because podcasting from this point is going to become machine generated at scale. Content volume is going to explode potentially because then we have all this, all these bots creating content in a podcast platform. That means discovery for all other podcasters will become a real battleground. And it'll even change the definition of what a podcast creator is. So I know we've we talked about AIA lot on this show. I want to hear from the group like we now have bots creating autonomous podcasting through pod claw. It's and it's being purposely set up to where there's no need for human whatsoever as aside from the original inherent request of make this business a podcast.

29:22 That is it. So what does the group think about this? All right, let's see. I know a couple people want to chime in. I'm going to go to Sid first, then Nick, then Ralph. Go ahead, Sid. So this story makes me cringe BC they make me. Cringe. Preach. My first like I was searching for an emoji AY emoji to tap onto your face. Like why? Like why? Businesses run on people and people resources. Businesses need people to buy from them. If you're a business owner, why would you lean into an AI only platform to create all of your content and tell your story without your intervention? You just give it a prompt and it goes off and it does it automatically.

30:07 People do business with people. There should always be a human in your story. I wish Jonathan were here to talk about storytelling. This is crazy, and I think it's crazy for business owners to lean into this. Now what'll happen is, oh, it'll be so easy. I can create a content, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it's not going to work that way. And I do think some of the things you said at the very end about the impact to the creator and search results and all that, I think that's probably overstated. I don't know if that's you or if that was the article saying. I think that's probably overstated because we listen to podcasts because of people, not because of a bot. We find our favorite creators, we go listen to them on a regular basis or our favorite stories that are being told. I mean, listen to them on a regular basis because we're listening to the people, because we have a desire to connect with people and we want to hear from people.

30:52 So I think this is a crazy idea and I don't understand why they would want to do this. Yeah, well, part of the reason I said the the whole thing about discoverability and impacting people and and I'll be very honest here, it's because I didn't know until recently some of the quote UN quote artists that I've been like having on replay for Spotify. They're not real people. I've been listening to AI artists on Spotify that I thought were real people for months. And I've had their songs, the replay, and I think the fact that it took me so long to realize that these are not real people with these songs on Spotify that have been in like my top, like Spotify Wrapped from 2025. That's what has me thinking like, if this is a podcasting thing now, it might cause potential, some real potential discoverability issues for human podcasters. But I mean, that might just be, again, more of a mere point of view.

31:46 But again, if Spotify AI artists are that effective, how effective will the AI podcasters be? Yeah, that's a great question. I will say, 'cause that reminded me when you mentioned Spotify and the AI content that's there. I mean, Spotify has their own AI stuff. I, for lack of a better word, including their DJ. They have an AIDJ and that DJ will talk to you by name. And I've got to say, like, I just used it again. I use it often and I just used it most recently on my road trip back from North Carolina or back from Maryland to North Carolina. And I've got to say like, I know it's AI generated and I kind of like it. I like that the DJ is talking to me. I like that, you know, he quote UN quote knows my taste and he sets it up.

32:36 OK, here's some music that you were listening a lot to in 2022, starting with such and such artists. There's something about it that I'm drawn to. I do like it, even though I know it's AI driven. I'm not trying to make a case for podcast created, you know, by AI. But yeah, for sure I there are some cases where I think it does work. Yeah. And I think in that instance, though, it's more like that's almost the Spotify's Alexa, right, where she's helping coordinate your request into a result, but she's not herself the actual result you're looking for. So it's almost like we're not getting a brand new AI system that helps us find podcasts or helps us, that helps us generate podcasts for humans to create.

33:18 It's that the bot is the result. Yeah. All right. I know other people want to chime in. Let me go to Nick and then I Janae, I see you. I'll come to you ASAP. Go ahead, Nick. So I, I kind of feel like this is the next evolution of Mult book. And for anyone who's not familiar with Mult book or Open Claw or any of the, the really intense AI agent stuff that's going on right now, it was essentially a social media platform that you could give your open Claw agent the ability to participate in. And it basically became a platform where AI is just talking to AI.

34:00 It's like Reddit, but for only AI, Like no human users can actually go in there. And it automatically goes in at specified intervals, scans what's been posted, replies to other AI posts, creates its own AI posts. And it's like all just AI talking to AI kind of thing. And I kind of feel like this is the next evolution of that. And I personally feel like it is such a massive waste of resources. Like the Motebook stuff to me was it was entertaining. It was funny to kind of see what the AI, how it interacts and how like the existential crisis from within kind of thing that these AI conversations like evolved into. But for what reason?

34:44 Like to what end is kind of where I'm at with it. Like I just, I don't understand the reason of just setting an AI to say, OK, every week publish a podcast episode and like, is it actually going to be in an RSS feed? Is it all going to be kind of internally housed where you just go to like the AI podcast Spotify version? Like there's a lot of questions I have with it, but I I'm not as concerned about the the information dilution as I am just the massive amount of resources that are going to get expended and wasted for nothing. Yeah, I think that's a great point. And I know that the younger generations feel really strongly about how we're using AI and how it's really hurting our environment and wasting resources, etcetera. And I mean, I know that there are older generations that feel that way, too, but I just know that the younger generation seems to be making more noise about it. And I would say rightfully so.

35:43 And yeah, I think that's a great point, Nick. That's something. Yeah. It's like, why are we wasting the resources there? Let me go to Ralph and then Janae, and then let's move on to the next story. Go ahead, Ralph. I really don't understand the issue here. I am the AI bot. What is the problem with this? What is the issue here? What do you mean you're the A? Oh, it's not working buddy. Oh, it's not. Working. No, now I'm not hearing you at all. Ralph was trying to do a sound effect and it failed miserably. Yeah, that's not cool. Sorry about that guys. Sorry, Ralph.

36:24 OK, we can edit that out later if you'd like. I was all ready to go with the AI bot responding back to us. Like this, right? You were trying to do this? Yeah, this is the robot voice that I chose. Trying to see if there are others, but yes, there you. Go here or you. Can type like this and I am a robot and an AI generated podcast. You can catch me every Monday. All right, let me turn that off. OK? Yes, that's what Ralph was trying. To do, that's exactly what I was trying to do, but man, it was a April Fools on the road caster for me. Janae, did you want to get the final word on this AI podcast content stuff? Yeah. So it's technically not really AI podcast. It's a system that enables you to use AI agents to publish your podcast.

37:12 Because currently we have to upload our podcast episodes manually. We have to fill out the forms. We have to do all of those things manually. But this enables that. Let's say you have a production going on, you drop all your episodes that you recorded in a Google Drive folder. Now your AI bot can take that episode and publish it for you. That's what this really is. Because right now with Spotify, Apple, like none of these platforms have an API that enables you to upload content to their website. You have to manually go to all of these platforms. This host enables you to create that show via API. So think about all the things that you guys just said and I'll think again what this really means. Thank you Janae, that really important and I'm glad that you're here to make that distinction and we still an important conversation that we just had about AI because we do know that the AI is out there generating content on its own with AI generated voices etcetera. But this is really important.

38:21 I am super appreciative that you called that out, Janae. I kept hearing. It AI is not creating content on its own. Let's just come back and think about that. Why is AI creating content? It's the people behind the AI. Well, sure, who are creating the content, right? So think about that. Like people who are creating content, they're behind. Like there's a person behind an AIAI doesn't have any agenda. It's the people who have an agenda that are using these tools and the way that they are. So just to ring that bell again, here's what's happening. Thanks guys. Yeah, and it's really, if it's not already here, it's pretty darn close to being able to generate it by itself.

39:01 I mean, with this whole open claw, and who knows what Pod Claw is going to do. I mean, it could get to the point where it does create the podcast automatically from start to finish it with the right commands, right? Like you, you could tell it to go to 11 labs, create a voice, follow a script, generate the episode, publish it like Pod Claw does for you now, etcetera like that. That is all very possible at this point. Yeah, 100%, yeah. BC did you want to chime in? From my understanding, that's that's what it is doing. So I put in the chat, but I'll iterate here. So what the people involved do, they set it up, they provide the API key, they define the goal topic, niche and then they own the output. From there, the bots generate the topics, write scripts, create the audio voice, publish the episodes, and then repeat that indefinitely for however long the people want the podcast to run.

40:00 Yeah, I'm looking at some of the features here and it shows like 4 of 4 commands that it's touting here. It says 1 is Step 1, you get an AI, an API key. Step 2, create a show. That's literally one of the commands that it has is to actually create a show for you. And then next step, publish an episode. Next step, get your live RSS feed. So these are all all already there. So I think it's actually, I think the conclusion we've come to here is it's both. It's what Janae has shared and what BC has shared, and we're just putting them all together. So yeah, really interesting stuff and something certainly for us to pay attention to, that's for sure.

40:46 Going back and forth with the new stingers this morning. Let's see how are we doing on time? All right, we have a little bit of time left here, so let's keep it moving. And thank you, BC, for those two stories this morning. Full disclosure, if you've been following along, BC had been doing, when possible, more celebrity style news and quite frankly, we got a little bored with it. There wasn't a lot of substance to that and BC preferred to take it in the direction he did today and I appreciate that. So thank you. BCDR. Do you want to take the next headline involving Beehive which I know is a competitor of like Sub Stack and some other?

41:26 Right, right. And just for everyone's information, Beehive is spelled B EE HIIV. So cute, so annoying, so annoying. OK, so Beehive is making a move into podcasting. Beehive is pushing into podcasting as it looks to attract indie creators who are building more than just a show. Reports say that the company is pitching flat pricing, ad monetization, a broker all in Its model is built around a flat fee instead of the 10% of a creator's revenue, which is a direct contrast to sub stacks approach.

42:33 Beehive already has a newsletter and AD tools, and it eventually wants to connect that monetization system to podcasts hosted on the platform. And the bigger story for DIY and indie podcasters is platform strategy. A lot of creators are still piercing together e-mail hosting websites and monetization across multiple services, and Beehive is betting that some of them want to be under that one roof. I have my opinion about the whole 1. Roof thing actually that was my question about this is to the group really, are you cool with how you're probably most of us are doing things which is using separate tools to get our podcast from start to finish right Or are you really desperate or in need of a true all in one solution?

43:30 I'm going to jump the line. OK, go ahead and then we'll hear. From BC, so if I was an investor, people who are in the know will tell investors to diversify. And that's kind of how I feel about podcasting and the tech stack in a whole bit. Because if Beehive goes down, everything goes down. If you are under one roof, under the beehive roof. So I am all about divesting. And I saw Ralph giving the thumbs down over there. Did you want to comment before I go to BC? Yeah, I just want to say I agree with DRA 100%. Don't put all your eggs in one basket because when that basket fails, you're going to be out of luck if they decide to close up shop or they get a attack or something like that. No IA. 100% agree with Dr. on this one. Or I would just say is make sure you have a backup plan. If you're going to have an all in one solution, make sure you know what you're going to do if that all in one solution goes away tomorrow or even temporarily goes away right in the middle of the, you know, heaviest part of your lift for your podcast, you you need to have a backup plan at the very least.

44:40 OK. I'm going to go to BC and then Janae and then we'll check in with Alex. Yeah. Well, I have like considered looking to Beehive more because I do like a good newsletter. I do like when I can, you know, share what my business is doing in a nice, you know, prim and visual fashion at the same time. I don't know how I would consider moving over to Beehive even for podcasting when Sub Stack, as we discussed on that Sub Stack episode provides free hosting and does some good distribution and it handles, it does to a degree have some like what am I trying to say, newsletter design capabilities, not nearly to the capabilities of Beehive. I understand that. But everything else it seems to offer that Beehive is trying to get into it offers for free, you know. So I'm not sure of the tactic here to try to convince Sub Stackers to move into Beehive for that all in one opportunity. All right, Yeah, fair enough.

45:37 BC And yeah, I think I'm glad you chimed in on this because I know you are pretty active with sub stack. Yeah, so maybe not enough to make the switch for Someone Like You. Let's hear from Janae. Go ahead, Janae. Good morning. It's it's another platform saying, hey, we're also offering hosting here we are. We have newsletter. You can come here because think about it, guys, LinkedIn has newsletters, then sub stack beehives like, hey, we do newslettersmedium.com for you to remember, they had newsletters. So again, eve all of these platforms that are going to come, they're really designing these solutions for newcomers. So if you already have your stack set up, you're not going to move because it's this system already works for you.

46:22 But somebody who's looking to start a new newsletter and new podcast and whatnot be have like, hey, we've got the solution, come drive with us essentially. So that's essentially what they're offering. Now I do want to touch on the point you all mentioned. If something goes down, what's going to happen? Well, guess what guys, all of us are hosting our apps and what not on AWS. So if AW goes down, we are in trouble. And we saw that one Cloudflare had that issue due to something that happened in the Middle East. So again, we're all literally putting our eggs in the same basket with AWS or Azure or Google Cloud. So again, they have really amazing infrastructures where if one server goes down, they can spin up your code base really quickly because again, it's all dockerized. It's like it's all virtualized, right? So that's already taken care of.

47:23 What's happening now is people who launch things like Beehive and Pod Claw and Open Claw and what not, they're building on top of these giant services that are already available. And the reason I'm a huge proponent of this is because guess what I'm doing? Guess what I'm doing with Pod Glue? I'm not building it in my home server, right? I'm putting it on a service on a provider that's already built out the entire infrastructure and now I'm going out there and pushing this together. So when we say we're putting eggs in the same basket, technically we're all dependent on Spotify to publish our podcasts and people to listen to.

48:05 We're dependent on Google servers and and YouTube and Apple Podcasts. Like, think about it guys, if we were to diversify, to say, hey, our show lives on here alone, what would that look like? If you come back one step, Apple podcast is gone, Spotify is gone. Where does your content lived in? That's a good point. It's a really good point. I don't have an answer for that. I mean, it would have to live on our own servers, which takes a lot of money and resources to run. So that would be the only way to really have full control over all of our content. It's a great point, Janae, and one that I think is going to be challenging for most of us to have a a solution for.

48:52 But yeah, something we're thinking about. Ralph, did you want to add to that? And then we'll check in with Sid. Yeah, I just wanted to say one thing. One of the things I think we need to be careful of is always putting all of our eggs and other people's platforms. I really am a proponent of bringing people to your own website, bringing all that content back to you because whenever you're using somebody else's sub stack or using one of these other platforms, if they don't like you tomorrow you're gone. You've got to build that connection with your audience back to what you actually own. You own your domain, bring people back there. All the things we're talking about and I I do a blog post for every piece of content I put out because I bring people back to what I own and I think that's a really important concept.

49:35 It's great that there's these great platforms we can do stuff on, but remember you don't own that platform and if you say something they don't like, you're gone. Yeah. And I mean, look, that can happen if we're putting our podcasts on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, etcetera. That can still happen. And yeah, doing something like putting A blog on your own website that you do have a little more control over for sure. Yeah, I'm with you there, Ralph. Let me go to Sid real quick. And I want to interject one quick demon. So anybody remember Infowars and Alex Jones, all of his content, even his website was brought down. So even then we don't have control. But I do agree that you got to have your own website, got to have a backup plan, so.

50:25 Yeah, I think you got cut off there. Even the host can pull your content, don't they? Yeah, absolutely. And even your website that you own that could very well be hosted on an AWS server or another server that you don't really control, right. So there is always those loopholes there. Yes, Sid, go ahead. So when you think about what it means to be a podcaster, there are a lot of steps we have to go through. There's, I mean, it's not easy to, you know, get a show from concept to out the door, you know, and going all the way to monetization. There's just a lot of things we have to do. And I think we all would love an easy button to make it easier to take away some of the pain and some of the things that we're doing. And I think that this is what this group we have might be trying to do.

51:11 But I'm wondering if they're trying to solve the wrong problem. Because when you bring out content or you bring out, when you create a business, right, you're trying to solve a problem. I'm wondering if they're trying to solve the wrong problem by putting us under 1 ecosystem and not looking at things that just would make a podcaster's life easier. And how could we do things faster? How could we get more really good content out the door? So I'm just wondering if these people are trying to solve the wrong problem. Yeah, I hear you, Sid. Yeah. And I don't have the answer for it, but I'm just as curious as you are about that. Absolutely. Anyone else want to chime in? OK, then I think that is a great place to start to stop. By the way, that Sub Stack episode that BC mentioned where we talked all about Sub Stack with the help of BC, that's episode 460 of the podcasting morning chat.

52:02 So you can easily check that outgoing to podcastingmorningchat.com slash 460 and you can hear that episode. It was a great one. Thank you for reminding me about that BC and thank you all for your contributions today. I'm going to give you about 5 minutes or so back for you to get and do whatever it is you want to do with those 5 minutes and reminder that we're back tomorrow or today at 1:00 PM Eastern Time with Empowered Podcasting Live. You're going to get all the behind the scenes info, all the things we're planning for this August, including a special program for the independent DIY podcaster who wants to get a little more visibility in this community. I think we've got a really great solution to share with you about that.

52:49 So go to podcastingmorningchat.com/joinus right before 1:00 PM Eastern and click on the app of your choice to join us live. And until tomorrow, make it a great day everybody. Take care.