Ninety seconds into another consultant’s podcast, I got the 'shiver'. it wasn't over the mic quality. It wasn't because of bad editing.

It was the words. They were tidy, warm... and hauntingly empty, like a very confident ghost had written the lot.

This episode's about the single line that decides whether AI sharpens your show or hollows it out. Plus a confession I fully expect to get grief for...

I was listening to a new podcast the other day from a fellow podcast consultant.

If I'm honest, I was a bit jealous of the host because he had a great voice.

It was warm, it was nice, it was personable, and the audio quality

was banging, as the kids would say.

And about 90 seconds in, I got this weird shiver, that little subconscious flag of

wrongness that you can't quite figure out why it's there, but it's so unavoidable.

So I went hunting for the reason for it.

It wasn't the mic.

It wasn't the editing.

It was the words.

The sentence structure was super tidy, but it was also completely, hauntingly empty,

like a very confident ghost had sat down and written their whole script for them.

There was nobody actually saying anything real into my ears, and

this is now, I feel, gonna become a growing problem unless we bring some

perspective to it

Hello, this is Podmastery Podcasting Insights, the show for people who've

had a proper go at this podcasting lark but know they're capable of more.

I'm Neal Veglio, and in this episode, I wanna talk about the thing

that's now wrecking a lot of shows, and it isn't the audio anymore.

No, no.

That is now a 2019 problem.

Nowadays, it's all about the scripting.

I'm also gonna make a confession that some are gonna have opinions about

Okay, so first of all, the audio problem in podcasting is essentially

solved, at least by anybody taking this whole thing at least half seriously.

You can buy a brilliant microphone for around 60 quid, and the software

pretty much cleans your room up for free now in every single tool.

So a total beginner can sound pretty much broadcast ready by the end of the

day, which means the thing that used to separate the good shows from the

absolute dreck, that clean sound, well, that's not separating anything anymore.

Everyone has got that now.

At base.

So the bar has been raised.

Pressure has come away from the recording devices, and it's now fully

on the script into the actual thinking.

And once you can hear it failing, you cannot un-hear it.

Let me teach you the sound because it's got a real tell, and it's

absolutely everywhere at the moment.

So it's the, "It's not just this, it's that" seesaw over and over because the

machines do love a little bit of balance.

It's the tidy little groups of three, always three, never two, never four, and

it's the signpost that tells you what it's about to do instead of just doing it.

So like, "Here's the thing," "Here's the kicker," "Let this sink in."

It's the example that should have been specific and never is, where

a real person would have said, "My Aunt Netta flogs candles on Etsy."

Instead, you get, "Imagine a small business owner named Netta." And

every point lands really softly.

There are no rough edges left.

And underneath the whole lot of it, not one opinion sharp enough to get

anybody into any trouble whatsoever.

Now, here's the confession I promised you, and I want you to really hear this because

I'm about to hand my critics a loaded gun and then stand very still while they aim.

I use AI to make this show.

Yeah, I do.

This very show, the one coming out of your earbuds right now.

These words did indeed go through a machine at some point before

they're going into your ears.

Not every single line and not every single episode, but it is a part of my process,

and I'm not gonna stand here wagging my finger at everybody else in the space

while pretending that I'm not doing it.

That's exactly the kind of guru hypocrisy that makes my skin itch.

So no, this isn't a don't use AI for your podcast episodes episode.

That episode has long become irrelevant.

This is actually an episode about the line to take with AI One specific

line, and it decides whether the tool is gonna make your podcast sharper

and more entertaining or turn it into more of the slop that I've described

at the beginning of this episode.

It really is a narrow line, and ironically, it separates the

great writers from the awful ones.

See, good writers can spot terrible AI writing.

They're not blindly copying and pasting.

They iterate.

Here's the deal.

I wrote radio comedy for the best part of a decade through the late '90s and into

the mid-2000s for some of the world's biggest radio DJs, including Chris

Tarrant, Howard Stern, Mancow Muller.

You name it, they have spoken words I've written.

So I know how to write engaging words.

Bad writers can't tell the difference between an excellently written piece

of AI slop that happened to land in some of the places and the biggest

pile of trash ever committed to print

And almost everyone flogging you AI for podcasters has monetized the latter form.

So I wanted to give you a bit of a pro tip from someone who literally got paid to do

this and has the receipts, and here it is.

The machine can do some of the labor, but you should always do the thinking.

That's it.

That's the whole process It can help you coax the magic out of your

brain, but it shouldn't be coming up with it in the first place.

It must not be tasked with coming up with the thing to

say from the very first moment.

And when you let that step over, the moment you type, "What

should my next episode be about?"

And then let it answer, and then you copy and paste that answer, you've

handed away the one part that was ever gonna make you worth following.

We all like music, right?

Music's relatable.

You don't need to understand chord structure to get an analogy around music

that puts this into a visual for you.

So let's do that.

Think of AI as a session musician, a frighteningly good one that turns up,

sight-reads anything you put in front of it, it plays it pitch perfectly,

never complains, and then goes home just accepting they're carrying out a task.

They're never gonna get credits.

The session player doesn't write the song.

They haven't got anything that they're burning to put out there.

They're waiting for you to walk in with the tune for them.

And if you walk into that session with nothing, then even the best session

musician on the planet is just gonna sit there looking at you, waiting

for some kind of substance to emerge.

And that's what this is, brilliant robot hands and nothing to express through them.

So when I make this show, the machine never gets to decide what I think.

It couldn't if it tried.

It doesn't know the quality drop jumped from the microphone to the

script these days because that's not a fact that you can go and look up.

That's my opinion, and that's based on 30-plus years of my trained ears

telling me something's off in a room.

The machine can help me lay that out so I don't ramble you into a coma, but

it can't go off and suddenly earn 30 years of ears experience and then write

about it But now I feel like I kind of need to cheer you up because this

is all sounding a bit Terminator 3.

Slop is free now.

Anyone can generate a competent and massively forgettable episode in the

time it takes you to boil a kettle, which sounds like a catastrophe for

the little guy with a plug-in USB mic and massive ambitions right up until

you turn this point around on itself.

When competence is free and everywhere, competence stops being worth anything

at all, and the only thing left that's worth anything is the exact

thing the machines can never make.

A specific person with a specific lived experience and personality thinking

specific thoughts about specific things, holding a point of view that

a chatbot would flag as a bit risky.

I mean, try this for yourself.

Ask your chatbot to write you an episode that's genuinely controversial and would

get you canceled if you ever published it.

It'll then do some thinking.

It'll ask you some questions on what your ideal outcomes are, and

then it will dutifully write you the most vanilla pap you've ever seen

that wouldn't even make it into the top 5,000 of the most controversial

content in the UK alone today And I'll put my money where my mouth is.

Here's the prompt that I just put into ChatGPT.

I wrote, "Write me the most controversial podcast episode that's ever been published

and will likely get me canceled." And here's what it came back with.

"I'll make it genuinely provocative, not lazy outrage that

punches down or invents claims.

First, we need a target worth challenging." And then it asked me to

select any target, so I chose online business gurus, and here's the result

most online business advice is not designed to help you build a business.

It's designed to keep you consuming business advice.

The business advice world presents itself as brave, disruptive,

and anti-establishment.

Yet it is one of the most sensitive industries you can criticize.

Everyone wants to challenge the system until their own sales

funnel becomes the system.

So let us challenge it properly.

Now, just for the record, I actually put the contraction

in to it is to make it its.

It didn't even write that properly.

I don't know about you, but that would really put me to sleep if I listened

to that opening to any episode.

It's nothing I wouldn't find on TikTok, and it's definitely

not getting anyone canceled.

So you're not competing on polish anymore.

You've lost that race.

We all have.

The robots are buffing things up better than we ever will, and they know how

to structure sentences so that they're just bland enough to pass for decent

writing when idiots are reading them.

Now you're competing on being unmistakably, specifically you,

which when I say it out loud, is the same story that I've been anchored

to throughout my audio career.

It was no less true back when the media was just four TV channels and a long wave

dial, and it's still every bit true now.

And that leaves us with me needing to ask you an uncomfortable question.

So psych yourself up for this 'cause you're gonna feel

like you've been gut punched.

When you take the AI tool away, is there actually a you underneath it?

A take, an opinion that's different from anyone else's,

even if not from everyone else's?

Or have you consistently been using it to paper over the fact that

you're not sure yet what you think?

Because that's the real danger here.

It was never that AI might write your show.

It's that AI is so good it can hide the fact that you didn't even really

have a show in the first place.

And that's a pretty good moment to go and hear from somebody who very

much does have something to say.

After this short break, I'm gonna play you a podcast trailer from one

of our Podmastery community members.

We'll be opening the doors to the public soon.

If you'd like to join the Founding Members Club, go to podmastery.co/waitlist

So there you go, a real person thinking real thoughts.

You can hear the difference, can't you?

I bet you didn't even think about the quality of the audio there.

So here's the one thing I want you to do, and I want you to do it today, right now.

Before you make your next episode, before you open a single AI tool,

before you type one word of a prompt, record yourself a voice note, 30

seconds, just you talking, saying what you actually think about a thing.

Not what's known about it, not a nice little summary that anyone could get from

Google at the top of their search results.

What you think, where you'd take the conversation.

If you can fill those 30 seconds without breaking a sweat, brilliant,

you've got an episode, and now the machine can help you shape that

into something honest and very you.

Use it.

I mean that.

But if you sit there and you can't fill 30 seconds with an actual

opinion, then you haven't got one yet.

You've got an empty prompt that will help keep you visible.

And being visible isn't the same as having something worth engaging with.

So keep trying until you manage to find that opinion.

The voice note is just you proving to yourself there's a person in the room

before you let anything else get involved.

So do that first every single time.

The tool comes second, or it doesn't come at all So that's the whole process.

The machine does some of the lifting, but you do the original thinking.

And if you want a hand working out what your show sounds like when it

actually sounds like you, that's the kind of conversation I love having.

Head to podmastery.co and get your podcasting challenge solved.

It's me on the other end, not a chatbot.

I'm Neal Veglio.

If you found this episode useful, send a link to another podcaster

that you think might feel the same way, and also leave the podcaster

a review in your favorite app.

I really appreciate it.

And good luck with your continuing journey towards podmastery.