308 - AI Innovations for Podcasters, Spotify Analytics Changes, Podcast Awards Buzz & More!

0:05 Good morning podcasting Morning Chat. Today is Wednesday, May 21st, 2025, and today we're digging into the latest headlines around the world of podcasting, from global awards and shady Spotify listings to AI baby host podcast polls and tools that promise to save you time. So if you're listening live on Clubhouse, hit the share button, bottom left hand side of the screen and share it. However, Clubhouse lets you. And if you're listening via podcast, please share this episode with a fellow podcaster. And now give us about 30 seconds and we'll get things rolling. Thanks for being here. Good morning again podcasting morning chat. Thank you for being here.

1:24 I am your host, Mark Ronick and here on stage with me, my Co hosts, we have Nick Nolback, Jonathan Howard, DRFA and Sid Meadows has joined us. I thought Sid was on vacation. We'll have to find out about that in a minute. And Speaking of quote UN quote vacation, I guess we can call it that. Yesterday, as some of you know, we took the day because I was celebrating my stepdaughter's graduation from college. She finished nursing school at the University of Maryland. That was a fun event. You know, graduations, however, they can go on and on and on.

2:07 This one wasn't too bad. It was probably about two hours, maybe 2 1/2. And you know, you, you sit and anticipate, you wait for your kid to go up there on stage and accept their diplomas. And then after that, you're kind of like, all right, let's go. And you got to still sit through everything else. And in our case, we, our, our daughter was one of the last up there. So we just had to sit there and anticipate a long, long time. And it was a great time. We, and then we did a nice family dinner afterward. So thank you for allowing that time off. I did not want to ask the the crew to take over for me again after doing it for two weeks straight. So that's why we just went dark yesterday. And yeah.

2:57 So, Sid, Speaking of vacations, good morning. Are you back from your vacation? Good morning everybody. Yes, we got back Monday night. We took a little what, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday a little five day mini vacation. We went to Paso Robles, CA which is the Central Coast wine country with the two other couples. This is the second time we've gone with the same group, the third time we've gone to the same place and really enjoyed hanging out and, you know, drinking wine, tasting wine and all that kind of good stuff. So it's a lot of fun. Glad to be back with you guys. I missed you yesterday, but Mark, I actually would like to answer the question that you asked on Monday if I could. Sure.

3:37 Which question was that? What did we learn while you were? Gone. I would love to hear. Yeah, so Dr. Fasten your seat belt. So what What I learned is that Dr. is a massive chatter inside of the inside of the messaging app on Facebook. Like 1 morning mark, I woke up. I usually get up between 5:00 and 5:31. Morning I woke up to 100 messages. Oh my. Yeah, Oh my. And then, and then there was 1 morning I was hosting and I didn't get up at 5:00 like I normally do.

4:22 I got up about 5:30 and she'd messaged at 5:15 asking me a question. At 5:30, she's messaging Sid question mark, question mark like checking to make sure. I know that feeling, Dr. 'cause you've seen me go through that when we're expecting a guest or somebody to take over and I haven't heard from them. I know that panic it. Was all good. It was all good. We missed you. No, no response, just or no comment, just a little bit of a Oh my God. OK, that's fine. Dr., You don't feel like you left 100 messages for Sid? I really do not.

5:06 I think. I think he's hallucinating. So I will tell you it did cross my mind while I was on vacation to unsubscribe from that message chat for fear that it was going to wake me up in the middle of the night. But I decided to put my phone on do not disturb so that I didn't get any of the messages at 3:00 in the morning in California. So said any other lessons besides DRS frantic messaging. You can be over prepared and for one of their I did, I think I had two rooms. I hose one of them was really good. One of them was OK, and that was because I was over prepared. So lesson learned.

5:46 There's there is such thing as over preparing for something and being, you know, too intentional, I guess. And sometimes you just need to let the conversation flow the way the conversation is going to flow. I love that and I completely relate to that because that's where I've shared once or twice here with everybody that Dr. and I sometimes remind each other to trust the process. We say TTP, and that's because sometimes we will get a little frantic about preparing for the show, and especially a show like today when it's news and we'll go back and forth whether or not we think we have enough to cover a full hour. And what we always find is even if we only had two or three stories, it usually takes us through the entire hour because of all the great conversations around those two or three different stories. So yeah, trusting the process, not over preparing. I think that's a big one for this show. And quite frankly, I think a lot of podcasters could probably learn from that too.

6:46 Sometimes we over prepare and then, you know, for example, if it's for an interview, sometimes if we're we've got too many questions, then we don't get to the really good questions because we're trying to rattle through every single question. And then we don't get to the to the meat of it with the guest and it may fall short. So yeah. Oh, not overthinking it is really important. I love that, Sid. Thank you. OK, With that, I think we will jump in. By the way, no producer Ashley today. She is off the rest of the week at another music festival in Florida, I believe. So enjoy that, Ashley, if you're listening right now. And with that, let's get into some news, shall we? And as I like to do when we start the news, I like to start with some data for you.

7:43 The number one podcast on Apple Podcasts. No, it's not the Joe Rogan Experience. It's not Amy Poehler's show. It's a show called Deep Cover. And I'll give you a little synopsis from Deep Cover. They say it's a show about people who lead double lives. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jake Halpern reveals webs of deception and dark underworlds through interviews with federal agents and convicted criminals. Well, that came out of nowhere, didn't it? Yeah, it sure did, and sounds really intriguing. Yeah. Yeah, I'd love to love to listen to that one, so I'll add that to my list and #1 on Spotify.

8:27 Well, I'll let Dr. take it from here. Go ahead, Dr. And I don't have the timpani handy today. That's OK, so let me Scroll down to the Spotify one. OK? So #5 Mystery Mondays, which is new. OK, Mystery Mondays #4 this past weekend with Theo von #3, Huberman lab #2A good hang with Amy Poehler and #1 oh, you just couldn't have guessed this Joe Rogan experience. That's right, yes, Joe Rogan still on top at Spotify, but cool to see deep cover number one on Apple and Dre. There's another top five.

9:12 Well, I know you usually do top fives in different categories, but I know there's a a new top five list that you want to talk about. We're going to add this to our Wednesday list of charts. YouTube has launched AUS only weekly podcast chart. It's updated every Wednesday and yesterday is Wednesday, but it's too early for that update apparently. So this is like and they will always be a week behind. So this is like from 2. Well, we. Should say we will always be a week behind on that because like what you're saying, it's it's too early for the charts to update today, so we'll give you the previous week's top five. Right, right.

9:56 And of course, Joe Rogan is leading the pack whatever and has consistently held the number one spot since the charts inception on March 18th, 2025. Other top podcasts. I will get to the chart in just a second. Now let's define podcast quote UN quote podcast on YouTube only playlist playlists designated as a podcast by creators during the upload process are eligible for the chart. Clips and shorts are excluded. Editorially created Podcasts homepage. In the US, YouTube has revamped its podcast homepage to feature editorial created sections like award-winning or music minded or gaming and sports, things like that using square podcast artwork just like the tiles.

10:49 And international users currently see the older algorithm driven layout. So #5 on the podcast, on the YouTube podcast charts is the Midas Touch podcast #4 is the 48 hours #3 Rotten mango #2 Kill Tony and #1 Take a guess, Mark, take a guess. What could it be, Joe Rogan? Whatever. All right, there you go. And I do have a random chart of the week. This one comes from Spotify. Random chart of the week is from the TV and Film chart. So #5 is my diary animated official #4 is HB OS The Last of Us podcast #3 through #1 is kind of interesting because they are all from the same network #3 is the watch #2 is the big picture, and #1 is the Rewatchables.

11:57 Rewatchables Another Rewatchables is a film podcast from the Ringer Podcast Network as the other three are features The Ringers, Bill Simmons and a round table of movie lovers from Ringer Universe discussing movies they just can't stop watching. Listen to the complete archives of 300 movies including Pulp Fiction, Silence of the Lambs, John Wick, Alien, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and many more classics on our special. This is course their their description on our special re Watchables page on The Ringer. You can also watch these episodes on the Ringer's Movie YouTube channel. So that's what that's about.

12:37 Thank you, Dr. Appreciate that. And I know it's egg cooking time, so go for it. And I know you got to make some eggs for the. Hubby. Yeah, go ahead and do that and I'll cover here. I'll do this. I'll cover some events going on, although not a ton of events going on, but there's one big one happening right now as we speak, and that's the podcast show in London. I'm sad I didn't get to make that work, being that I was just in Europe and flew home essentially when I think things started. Kicking off for the podcast show wasn't in the cards for me this year, again, because of graduation.

13:18 I am determined to get there next year. So yeah, the podcast shows happening in London and today if you are listening and in the area at the podcast show Riverside, our friends at Riverside are hosting a happy hour tonight or this evening. It's at a place called the Angelic right across the street from the venue of the podcast show. And I believe that starts at 5:00 PM their time. If you're interested in that, go check that out. If you're in the London area, also a virtual event for you. And I will put all of these links in the show notes on today's episode.

13:59 Let's see. This is hosted by our friend Gordon Firemark. Gordon joined us once as a guest, probably it's got to be at least a year and a half, two years ago now, but I still keep in touch with Gordon. He is known as the Podcast Lawyer and he's hosting Protect Your Podcast with Easy Affordable Legal strategies. That's today, I believe, at 12:00 PM Eastern. I will share that link again as I said in the show notes. And also the Asia Podcast Awards are now open for entry. It's the third year of the awards and the winners will be announced at Radio Days Asia in Malaysia later this year.

14:41 And of course, as I like to do in this segment is remind you the Empowered Podcasting Conference is coming this September, the weekend of International Podcast Day, September 26th through the 28th, hosted by yours truly, my company, Ironic Media, empowered by this very community and some people on this very stage as well. Jonathan, a big help and contributor to the team. And the speaker deadline, I wanted to remind you, is coming soon. So if you want to be a speaker at our event, now is your chance. Just go to empoweredpodcasting.com/speakers and you can hit that apply button and apply today.

15:22 All I ask is if you're using AI, no problem. And as you'll hear throughout today's show, there's a lot of AI to discuss. So I have no problem with you using AI, but please put your own spin on it. We, and especially me, I can tell when things are completely AI generated or mostly AI generated, and it is a bit of a turn off. It feels like, you know, come on, if you're going to be a speaker at our event, let's hear a little bit from you, not from ChatGPT only. So yeah, sure, if you want to use it to enhance what things sound like, what your presentation will sound like, OK, fine. But I want to make sure there's your voice in there somewhere. So please do if you don't mind.

16:04 And I say this because last year, I think a lot of really good speakers may have been turned away because their application just felt way too generic. And it didn't feel, and I'm not even saying at that point that we said, oh, this is AI generated. We're not accepting them. I just think that the the ones that were human generated stood out a lot more than the AI generated ones. So that's why we ask you to do that. OK, so I'm going to ask Nick if he wouldn't mind sharing a little bit more from the world of AI and what specifically may be of interest to us content creators. And I know yesterday Google had a big event announcing some pretty big upgrades to the AI that they have out there for us to consume.

16:57 So Nick, good morning to you. What did you learn about yesterday's event, which I know you were watching in double time this morning to catch up on it 'cause you missed it yesterday. Go for it. Good morning. Hey, good morning. Yeah, I they held their big Google IO 2025 event yesterday and I was looking forward to it all last week. And then I completely dropped the ball and missed it yesterday. So this morning I was like speeding through the video to try to catch up, like all the major details. And they have some pretty big upgrades coming. Some have already launched. I don't know on the on the iOS side of things, what's all been released at this point, but it sounds like all that live interaction inside Gemini is supposed to be out or very soon for both iOS and Android for any user of Gemini, doesn't matter if you're on a paid plan or a free plan. So that's pretty cool.

18:02 They're bringing a ton more integrations with their Google Apps. And one of their big goals is providing kind of like that agentic experience where you can basically be having a live conversation with Gemini and tell it to do things in other Google Apps for you. So you can take a picture while having a conversation or show it a picture of like a list and say, hey, add this to my Google Keep shopping list or send an e-mail, pull documents from Google Drive, etcetera. They're they're trying to make it so you can just literally have a conversation and Gem and I will go into the different apps and do things for you, which is wildly impressive. Nick, I'm feeling like maybe down the road when I'm starting to feel like with this advancement in AI where Chachi BT has something similar where you can have conversations. I feel like one day and we may even see the day ourselves. I feel like keyboards may become obsolete at some point. Do you agree with that?

19:02 I mean, seeing how the live conversation thing is happening, we've already seen that across all the apps. And then another thing that was announced at this event, their Android XR, they kind of went a little bit more in depth with that. I mean, that's headsets and glasses. You don't have physical keyboards. It's basically poking and touching that things in the air and having a conversation with Gemini strapped to your face. So I mean, it's possible that we ditch keyboards at a certain point. I could just see, you know, our grandkids or great grandkids looking back and seeing pictures of keyboards, much like, you know, if you give a kid today a gaming system from the 80s, they look at it like, what the hell is this?

19:46 I could see the same thing happening with keyboards years later. Yeah, right. I will say though, so having used several of these, like these voice tools like the Gemini and the ChatGPT and the Rabbit R1 where you actually talk to the device to get to do stuff. It's still kind of weird doing it in public where if you're in a group of people, then you whip out a device and start talking to it. That feels strange still. So I, I kind of think that could hold keyboards and touch screens and things still intact, 'cause I mean, even just walking down the street past a bunch of people and you're sitting there talking to yourself. Asking questions to nobody. You might get some funny looks, but yeah. But people are doing that already with, with. Yeah, people are already doing that when they're on the phone. And they're, you know, how many times have you walked through the grocery store and you hear somebody talking, you think they're talking to you, and then you realize, oh, they've just got their ear earbuds in and they're talking to someone on the phone.

20:43 That is true, yeah. I thought Dr. had her hand up. She got DRI am not completely on board with saying goodbye to my keyboard. I there's something very I mean the clock clock, that little sound that it makes and you know when you are typing something out, you are typing something and then all of a sudden you stop because you're thinking and I don't know, doing the voice thing. Whenever you stop, it'll say are you still there? Or, you know, it'll say something in that gap of silence where you're trying to gather your thoughts and stuff.

21:25 I, I don't know, I now I kind of feel like my grandmother who wants to hang on to her, you know, 8 track tapes. I don't know. Right. Go ahead Jonathan, I said that part for Dr. holding on to her 8 tracks. Yes, Nikki, Got anything else for us? Yeah, so within the Google IO event and Mark actually sent me a post about this this morning. It was in fact announced at Google IO. Mark, by the way, they are launching, it might actually be available now for some users, but they're VO3, which is their video text to video, image to video model.

22:06 VO2 is the one that they recently just fully launched out to everybody and they already launched VO3. And what makes VO3, aside from the videos themselves just looking absolutely insanely realistic is it can now incorporate sound. So when you ask for a video to be generated, it can create voices automatically. It can create sound effects. A couple of the demos that they played, it was like 2, like an owl and a badger or something like that. It was kind of like an animated kind of deal. And they like had a conversation and you can hear the the sounds of the wildlife at night when they're in the woods talking. And that is all generated from a single prompt that they use. So now we go from video with no sound to basically a full-fledged scene just by having text conversation with AI.

23:02 Yeah, so here's an example of a prompt, and I've shared the link. It'll be in the show notes today. There. Here's an example of a prompt and what Nick is talking about, if you It says a medium shot frames an old sailor, his knitted blue sailor hat casting a shadow over his eyes, a thick Gray beard obscuring his chin. He holds his pipe in one hand, gesturing with it toward the churning Gray sea beyond on the ships railing. This. And then in quote it says, this ocean, its force, a wild untamed might. And she commands your awe with every breaking light and the image that it shows, or I should say the video that it shows is exact.

23:47 It described to a TI mean this looks exactly like the description. And he is in fact, I can't play it for you here right now, but he is in fact saying those things. And you would think this was an actor. This does not look AI generated. This looks like a scene from a movie of a sailor sitting on a boat talking about the seas behind him or beside him. It's fascinating. And there are example after example of this on this Instagram post I found by ChatGPT Tricks. That's the name of the Instagram account. And like I said, we'll share this in the show notes for everybody as well. Anything else, Nick? I did see Sid have his hand up I think, and then I got one more. I had a question about that because I think we've all experienced the ChatGPT image creator where it misspells things.

24:40 It you want it to change a color of something and then it completely redoes the image. So it's completely different than the one you wanted to edit. With these new updates, are they making the editing easier where it's not totally redoing the the image that was created and and giving you keeping that image and but yet changing what you're asking? Is it getting to be specific like that or is it is it doing what it has always done which is make a new image? So last week, yeah, Nick, I'll let you take it. But last week I saw something from Google that answers that question. A profound yes that there is now that ability to just change certain elements of an image and everything else remaining the same.

25:25 But I'll Nick, I'll let you take it from there. Yeah, I was going to say very similar. I think it was like a week or two ago, Gem and I announce image editing capabilities where you're not just generating but actually editing ones. You could even upload your own image if you wanted to and edit it. I had tried it at the time it was announced and I still didn't have access to that specific feature. But it sounds like yes, that is a thing and it from what I've gathered the video editing is also a piece of that. It might not be available yet, but they are promoting editing for images and videos. It's not out yet. It's it's very soon I would imagine.

26:06 Yeah. For example, one of the images I saw or the examples I saw was an image of a very realistic image of a car in front of a brick wall on a side street. And the prompt was simply make this a convertible. And everything in that picture remained exactly the same, but it removed the top and actually made it look like a convertible. Wasn't like it just erased the top. It actually we included the details to make it look truly like a convertible. So those are the kinds of things that are coming very soon from that announcement that I saw last week. Yeah, Right. Oh, that would be cool. I'd like to see that.

26:48 OK. You said you had one more, Nick. Yeah, it's, it's a catch because there's always a catch. And this kind of actually blew my mind in a bad way. So Gemini or Google had recently announced that they are modifying their paid tiers slightly. So right now, well maybe not right now, I think it's already been adjusted. You could have been paying the $20.00 a month for Gemini Advanced. And that gave you the advanced models, early access to some of the tools, the video models, all that kind of stuff. And they're adjusting those models to be called Gemini Pro and Gemini Ultra. The Gemini Pro model is essentially the Gemini advanced model or plan renamed.

27:32 So nothing changes with that. So $20.00 a month. But the Gemini Ultra where you get access to VO3, you get access to some of the early access to some of the agentic like AI agents that they're working and building right now. That's going to be in the Gemini Ultra model. And that model is $250 a month. I I looked it up this morning and you can get Gemini Ultra access for I think $125.00 a month for the first three months and then it goes to $250 a month. That sucks. Yeah, I hate that. I'm wondering how big their audience that particular tier will be.

28:21 It feels to me like that's something that they're going to roll back. I don't know. Well, I mean Chachi BT still has their $200 model and that's still going strong. I don't know how many of their users are actually doing it, but that hasn't gone away and that's had to have been available for around a year now and they haven't changed it. And I'll tell you the one thing I like about it is that, you know, we, I'm sure many of you have heard how AI can be really hurtful, putting it lightly to the environment because of how much energy that it uses. And so putting a more expensive tier out there would hopefully limit the amount of people using it, especially using these higher tech features that are probably requiring way more energy to execute. So this could keep that down a little bit, I suppose. And I'm sure it's not.

29:13 I know. To be clear, it's not the only solution to this problem, but maybe it does help the problem. You know, another thing that I'm going to piggyback, I'm sorry, Nick, another thing I'm going to piggyback on that about the energy is that I heard two different sides of the stories. And Nick, I want you to comment on this, that using that being polite when you say, when you type out the word, please, or you know, something like that, that being polite now is using too much energy. So we have to pare down and just get very pointed and direct. Yeah, and I. Think that even a story I. Think that that is it is a story. I've seen that and I think really what that speaking to is it's using unnecessary additional words in your prompts.

30:02 I think the more concise the prompt is probably, I think this is where that was going. The more concise and direct the prompt is, the less energy it's going to take for it to come up with the answer. So I think that's why you don't need to be polite with with AI. So if you're if you're doing that, then. Go ahead. I think there's a danger in that because people, I mean, I'm going around saying, oh, lol, you know, it's become part of the colloquial kind of thing. And if we're not typing out the word please, doesn't that mean that eventually, in generations to come, that will not be part of the, you know, the vernacular? I mean, I'm sure, yeah, I'm sure it could head in that direction. And hopefully there are better solutions that come between now and generations from now that isn't, you know, where we can use AI and it's not going to be sucking up all the energy. Who knows?

30:59 We'll we'll have to see Did. I see Sid's hand up. Yeah, you did, Sid. Go ahead. Yeah, I think part of what this conversation was about, what briefly I read about it was, you know, how you ask it to do something and it does it and you're like, oh, wow, that's really good. And then you just type. Thank you. I think it's about stopping that part too right? And not just in the prompt itself, but then responding to the prompt with. Thank you, this looks great and unnecessary things I think has a lot to do with it as. Well, I can I can see that taking up too much energy, but the whole please thing during a prompt is difficult for me to to get away from. I I did see this pop up and I actually saw Sam Altman had tweeted against it saying that yes, being polite is costing more money and resources, but it might be worth it.

31:51 And it was kind of a kind of a joke that if AI become so smart and takes over, you'll be glad that you're polite to it. Oh, that's a different take on it that I was thinking. Interesting. I, I did want to briefly comment on the, the price thing, because we're, we mentioned how expensive the models are and Dr. said depending on who the audience is. I do think with how a lot of these AI tools are coming out with the more advanced image and video model like generation, those are going to, those are going to use up a lot more resources. Those are going to be a lot more expensive in terms of how the company is able to provide that as a service.

32:33 And you have to imagine a lot of the people that are going to be using that are bigger companies, the companies that are already spending a lot of money to produce videos that maybe have teams to do that for them that are now trying to cut costs. And this being one of those ways. And if you figure you could hire a whole team of set design actors, all this stuff, or pay $3000 a year to generate a lot of different assets to them, it's going to be a no brainer. To an average person that generates a video once every month, it's probably not going to make a whole lot of sense. So I think that's probably who they're catering their higher tier models towards. But it just sucks because they're they look like a lot of fun and something I want to play with too. Yeah.

33:23 All right, so here's what we'll do. I want to keep things moving and there are a lot of AI tools specific that I want to share with you. But before we do that, I want to check in with Jonathan, who has a couple of social media news stories, stuff that again, may be of interest to us as content creator. So I'll go to Jonathan and then we'll dig into more of the headlines around the world of podcasting. Take it away, Jonathan. All right, I'll be pretty quick. Today I actually have an AI1 TikTok AI animation tool. TikTok release the AI Alive animation tool, allowing users to animate still images using AI right on the platform.

34:04 So you're able to now animate still images directly on TikTok with their AI Alive feature. Threads has an advanced now profile that allows 5 links on each profile. Threads is continuing to grow and there's a lot of people going going viral on Threads so if you aren't there yet, maybe hop on over there. They also introduced some Threads, new creator tools that are allowing you to actually track your analytics on threads to see what's performing, what's not. And then Blue Sky, Blue Sky hit a huge milestone, over 30 million active users to actually 34.6 active users on Blue Sky, which is a decentralized social network. It's first of its kind really that is available for you to use.

34:53 It's similar to Twitter if you're unfamiliar with it. And yeah, so that was, yeah. So the updates on social media, I think I went over last week's storylines on Instagram, which is something they're testing, where friends can actually link their stories to each other. So like, Mark, you'd be able to link your story to the Empowered Podcasting Conference story to, you know, my story or something. So that's something they're testing and some people have it and others obviously do not, as Instagram rolls things out in a funny way. Yeah, thank you, Jonathan. Appreciate that. And yeah, congratulations to Blue Sky, one of the few platforms that I really have not dug into yet.

35:34 I've I've set up an account, I've tried it here and there, but have not really dug into it yet. Threads on the other hand, I'd say I've dug into more. I'm not using it consistently, but it also both kind of alternatives to X formerly known as Twitter. And I like to think, well, at least for me, Threads feels like a much friendly earlier version of Twitter and Dr. You had a question. Go ahead. Yeah, well, two things. One, I'm taking a threads course, so there's that. Very cool. And and two, Jonathan, when you were talking about blue sky, what does decentralized mean? You described it as being decentralized. I think is the word you use.

36:18 I did and it's what it allows people to do is actually their content they create there is their own content and they can pull it off at any point and put it on another platform that uses the same actual software that this one is built on, which is going to be I guess a common kind of user controlled platform in the future. So and it it's loosely related to the blockchain technology. So, yeah. And I know only a little bit about the blockchain technology. OK. Thank you. Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you, Dr. And I'm going to jump. I, I'm saying this, I guess more to Dr. than anyone else, because not everyone's looking at our rundown here. I'm going to jump for a second to one of the headlines because it's since we're talking so much about AI, I want to this is related to that their headliner.

37:10 They've launched something called TLDL, which stands for too long didn't listen. This is a beta tool that creates personalized short form podcast summaries by blending real episode clips with AI generated insights. What does that mean for those of you who remember? We've talked a lot about it in the past. If you think of Google Notebook LM and how you are able to feed it information, whether it's PD, FS or what have you, it will take all of that info you give it and create an AI generated podcast episode, for lack of a better term. And it on that particular platform, you have a male voice and a female voice and they're talking and it, it sounds really, really good. It sounds a lot like to people actually talking. It doesn't feel terribly AI generated, very natural sounding.

38:04 Well, this is kind of the answer headliners answer to that. It's designed to tackle the common issue of limited listening time. TLDL allows users to select up to five podcast episodes and generate summaries ranging from 5 to 20 minutes, facilitating quicker content consumption. By providing succinct previews, TLDL aims to improve podcast discoverability, enabling listeners to sample more content and decide which full episodes to engage with. One way that I, and I'm going to play an example for you here in a second. I use this.

38:44 The way I look at this, for example, I missed a lot of episodes of the podcasting morning chat while I was away. So I put in the last three that I quote UN quote missed. I say that because, you know, I popped in and out of those rooms from here here and there and I wanted to see what it does. And although I would I will say in advance, I think it does sound a little more AI generated doesn't sound as natural, I would say as Google Notebook LM does. I really like how it's adding in clips from the show, so I'm going to play a little bit of it. This is a total of 4 minutes long. We probably won't play the whole thing, obviously, but I will play some of it for you. And it's going to be a little makeshift because, like I said, I'm not at my home studio today, so I'm going to literally point the microphone down at the speaker for you so you can hear it.

39:35 If it really doesn't work, you'll let me know, but I think this should work just fine. So this is the last three episodes of the podcasting Morning Chat from last week. Welcome to Headliner TLDL, where we take your full podcast episodes and turn them into curated highlight reels. Today we have three amazing episodes from the Podcasting Morning Chat that tackle some of the most pressing challenges and creative strategies and podcasting. In this first episode of Podcasting Morning Chat, the host dive into the challenges faced by podcasters like managing guest expectations and overcoming imposter syndrome. They share valuable insights on how to communicate authentically in a crowded podcasting landscape.

40:16 Let's jump into a thought provoking question posed by the hosts. So the question is, there's a lot here, but what we're really asking is what would you do if you were this podcast manager? Or alternatively, have you ever had a guest get confused about like maybe you've got 2 podcasts? Did they ever get confused about which podcasts they're appearing on? And how did you clear up this confusion without burning any bridges? Now, let's move on to the next episode of Podcasting, Morning Chat, where the host discussed the power of humor in business podcasts. They share personal anecdotes and strategies for effectively blending comedy with professional content. Here's Amanda sharing her unique journey and insights on this topic. But the question is, even if you have a business podcast, why not put a little humor into that business podcast? What are you afraid of?

41:07 Are you afraid of hurting the brand? Are you afraid of insulting people? What? What are you afraid of? But Amanda, I want you to give us your journey all. Right. I'm going to stop it right there and I'm curious what people think about that and would you use something like this with podcasts that you listen to? I know you you can take off your podcast host hat for a second, but on your listener hat, is this some a feature you would take advantage of? Go ahead, Dr. Well, number one, it it said this is Amanda and my voice came on. So it was incorrect in that way. Well, I think it was due. It was playing the setup, it was playing the question, and then if I kept playing it, Amanda would have come on to answer it.

41:50 OK, you know I have the e-mail version of this. There is a company called What's the Inbox Hive, INBOXHIIV, and you choose the podcasts that you want these little snippets to come out of and they send you the e-mail version of this, which is would be all, you know, readable stuff. I kind of like it. I really kind of like it. Yeah, I like it too. And I, I, I like the idea of it, especially for our show where I know we're, we're putting out a lot of content five days a week, 5 hours a week at least of content. And I know that not everyone's going to be able to listen to it all the time.

42:38 So I feel like I would even encourage it as a host to my audience and say, yeah, go use the headliner feature and catch up on the episodes you missed. And that could then entice them, as this, as headliner is saying, could entice the listener to engage more with one or two or three of the episodes that happened over the last week, for example. I think it could be a really good tool. Sid, what say you so? How would like, how would the host actually use it? I think asking a listener to go to headliner and drop in three episodes and get a summary is not something they're going to do right?

43:20 So how would a host use it? To promote. Shows, right? Or to promote a couple of episodes. That's what I'm more interested in. So that's kind of an open-ended question. Yeah. And I will say, I think I think that they might use it because the headliner makes it pretty easy. You go into the feature and you just type in your favorite podcast and then it populates. It finds your podcast probably on Apple or Spotify or what have you, or the RSS feed for that matter. You select the episodes you wanted to summarize, whether it's one or up to five, and then it does its thing and within literally within minutes, it spits it back, gives you that summary.

44:03 So I do think people would use it. And as the host, I think you you can. What happens is you'll get an e-mail when the summary is done and it gives you a link. You could share that link in the show notes. The only thing I don't know is how long does that live for? In other words, you know, in two weeks from now, will people be able to click on the link and go back and get that summary? I don't know, but I think that would be one way I would at least experiment using it as the host. So yeah. You could do it for just a single episode. You can. Right. So if you had a, a long episode that would say was more than 45 minutes, you could ask it to summarize, it'll create a 2 minute clip about it. And then you could take that clip and potentially post that clip on socials or send it in an e-mail to people to say, hey, here's a quick recap of today's episode. If you'd like to listen to the full one. Here's the link to listen to the full episode. Yeah.

44:58 And accurate, that's accurate. And what I love about it is it's not just an AI generated voice summarizing, it's also playing clips from the show. I think that's really helpful because it really gives them a better feel for what that episode was. It's not just a computer or AI generated summary. I like that it's giving the real vibe from the show as well. So yeah, that is one way you could absolutely use that. There you go OK Dr. take a story for me. Well, the. Awards. OK, let's let's talk about the awards for a second. The International Women's Podcast Awards announces 2025 nominees Now, the International Women's Podcast Awards has unveiled its 2025 short list, and it's a record breaker. Entries poured in from 35 countries, from Seagal to Qatar to the Philippines, demonstrating the truly global reach of women's voices in audio. Now in its fifth year, the ceremony will be held on Tuesday, June 17th at the London's BBC Radio Theatre with a live global stream to remote audiences. Over 1/3 of this year's submissions benefited from the IWPA That's International Women's Podcast Award. They have a fund and the fund is backed by BBC Sound, Amazon Music and Wondering and underscoring the awards commitment to financially

46:29 accessibility. I'm sorry, financial accessibility, the new gifting initiative even let's attendees share tickets with others who might not otherwise be able to join. I think that's really cool. I have another award story and the Podcast Academy has introduced 2 new international awards, International Impact Award and International Governor's Award. And let me take a fast look at the audience room. No, he's not here, but James Cridland, editor of Pod News, receives the first International Impact Award for his global advocacy advocacy in podcasting. Stephen Bartlett, host of The Diary of ACEO, is honored with the International Governors Award for his influential storytelling and entrepreneurial impact. These awards will be presented at the Podcast Show in London on May 20 oh today as part of the Ambi's Celebrating Excellence in Podcasting.

47:36 This initiative marks a significant step in recognizing and celebrating the global influence and diversity within POD within the podcasting community. Congratulations to James Credland, very cool to have seen him join us last week. I think he's probably not here because he's either accepting his award right now or definitely doing something over at the podcast show in London. Let me jump ahead for a minute because this is an important story that I wanted to make sure this is really I want to give some kudos to Spotify. I know you guys, at least I'm pretty certain you guys last week covered how they made some changes to their the way that they display analytics, particularly publicly. They had announced that they were going to start displaying your download counts publicly, much like view counts are displayed on YouTube, and that caused a lot of stir in the podcasting world.

48:36 There was also an issue because they changed the back end where previously you could go in and get us at least a summary. There is an analytic section, but you could go in and look at your list of current episodes that you've published and it will show you a download count for every episode. And it was combining that count among all platforms where somebody pressed play on that episode. And then with this new change, they removed that. And we're only showing us creators in the back end. They were only showing us play counts that were specific to Spotify. So if a Spotify user presses play, you'll only see those numbers.

49:17 If somebody's pressing play on Apple, it wasn't displaying it. That was a bigger problem to me than the publicly shared statistics. Well, they've made some changes. They've reinstalled the All Downloads column in the analytics dashboard, so that's allowing podcasters now to view combined download numbers across all platforms. And then they have another column next to it that is Spotify specific for download. So now you'll see the grand total, and then you'll see specifically how many people on Spotify are pressing play. A new play metric has also been added, reflecting the number of times users have actively watched or listened to an episode on Spotify.

50:01 The metric differ differs from streams, which are counted after 60 seconds of engagement. So you press play, that's a, that's an additional download number for or play. And then, yeah, let me start over. You press play. That instantly gives you another count. Then if they press play and at least 60 seconds are are listened to, that's considered a stream. And so and they now they'll make sure to separate those so that people can see the difference. Initially, Spotify displayed exact play counts publicly. This is what I was talking about a moment ago, leading to that backlash from creators concerned about how low numbers are deterring potential listeners. So they're feeling like if a small show that's maybe only getting what whatever, I shouldn't even say only, but they're getting a few dozen say downloads at A at a time. Those people feel like those are that's going to hurt if it's publicly displayed because they feel that audiences will see that and say, oh, it's must not be that good of a show. It's not that popular.

51:10 Let me go find one that more people are listening to. That was the concern. Spotify now shows public play counts. The changes is that only after an episode surpasses 50,000 plays and they display it like a milestone marker. So it'll say 50K. It'll then say 100K when you hit that 100,000 mark instead of sharing the exact numbers. I think that's a great compromise to help those creators that do feel that way. I haven't made my own personal decision on whether or not I like the idea of publicly displaying podcast download numbers. I think I'd prefer it not being shown and I like the idea of it showing the the milestones.

51:57 I think that's a great compromise. And Spotify has also expanded access to consumption hours. This is the metric that we often talk about here as really the most important or the most eye opening number as far as podcast analytics go. It's providing insights into how long listeners engage with your content. So this data is now available to all creators, regardless of what hosting platform they're using. So you can log into the back end of Spotify even if you are not on that platform, let's say maybe you're on Bus Sprout, you can still go to Spotify and see these consumption hours. Yeah, Dr., go ahead.

52:40 Well, the problem is that Apple measures by a different yardstick, so to speak. So out of the categories that you've mentioned, the streams, the consumption that you mentioned, a couple others, which one of those mirrors Apple's measurement? I think actually it's very similar. Apple displays these numbers as well. They show the the download numbers meaning just any time somebody hits play. And then they also have what they call engaged listeners. And those are the listeners that are listening to actually, not just pressing play, but actually listening to the episode, to more than 60 seconds of the episode.

53:25 So I think it's now putting it more in line. Spotify is putting it more in line with the way that Apple is displaying your numbers. The difference is, is that Apple is showing just Apple. And I think Spotify, I think, don't quote me on it, I think Spotify is showing that across the board. OK. And you know the, the transparency part of it is not anything new. I mean, how many of us have said rate and review, you know, give us those stars or whatever. So we we're always seeing the amount of stars that that, you know, a show gets. So this is just getting a little bit more Gray. Yeah, I think so.

54:07 I think so. And look, I'm going to wrap things up just rapid firing this last headline because we've been talking so much about AII think that this is a good way of wrapping up the conversation. Wondercraft's 2025 AI report has come out, and that's specific to how creators are embracing AI in content creation. And I think there's some important numbers to share. Food for thought, if you will. Over 80% of content creators are now integrating AI into their workflows, with nearly 40% utilizing it throughout the entire content creation process, from ideation to distribution.

54:47 And contrary to expectations, creators aged 35 to 54 are adopting AI tools more consistently than their younger counterparts. Only 42% of creators under 25 report using AI throughout their workflows, suggesting that maturity and professional demands may drive adoption more than age. And as far as gender differences go, it says here that women are slight slightly more likely than men to fully adopt AI across their creative process. While men tend to experiment with a variety of tools, women often stick with trusted platforms, especially in roles emphasizing tone and consistency, such as HR and education. The leading advantage of AI integration is time saving at 24%, followed by the ability to repurpose content across formats, 19%, and sparking new creative directions. That's 19% of the users.

55:54 Creators are leveraging an average of three or more AI tools, combining platforms like Wonder, Craft, 11 Labs, Bead, and Canva to produce diverse content efficiency. I found that really interesting, a little bit surprising too, in some of these categories. I certainly expected younger people to be adopting AI tools more consistently in content creation. And I'm kind of proud to see that the older generation is adopting AI tools more consistent, more consistently. And I'm really happy to see that it seems that the way in which they're using it, all creators are using it. It's more for time saving purposes. It's not necessarily, at least right now, to just create all your content for you.

56:44 That doesn't mean people aren't doing that, but it means that the number one way people, content creators specifically, are using AI is to save time, which I think is one of the best ways to use it. So thank you to Wonder Craft for putting out that report. I think it's really helpful as creators to know those kinds of things. So listen, we'll be back tomorrow, 7:00 AM Eastern talking all things podcasting. Please come join us. And remember, we do it every Monday through Friday at 7:00 AM Eastern. So join us live here on Clubhouse. You can get that information in the show notes. Otherwise, you can pick us up on your favorite podcast platform just a few hours later.

57:24 So until tomorrow, make it a great day everybody take care.