Over the past couple of years, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the impact of video when it comes to what podcast audiences want and expect, and the changes this shift forces podcast creators to make—or at the very least consider.
What’s been discussed less is the shift in podcast audience behaviour as a result of AI.
And while most podcast consumers aren’t abandoning human-produced podcasts for AI-created shows, AI is shifting podcast consumption patterns, habits, and preferences in significant ways.
Ways that are changing what is required of us as podcast hosts if we want our shows to not just stay relevant to our audiences, but actually increase in relevance.
I got a stark, first-hand window into this shift a few weeks ago when I sent out a short email inviting Scrappy Podcasting readers to reply with what’s on their mind these days relating to their shows and businesses.
One response stood out as a warning—and a clear indication of where things are moving when it comes to podcast audience behaviour.
The response came from my client, Sam Webster Harris, the host of How to Change the World and Growth Mindset Psychology, two shows that collectively drive hundreds of thousands of plays per month.
“I’ve recently spoken to a few listeners who now just get AI summaries of most of the things they used to listen to. Which has me wondering: What makes your content worth listening to in its original form because it is uncompressible?”
As Founders and podcasters, this is the existential question of our times.
See, the value of our audience is directly correlated with their consumption time—the actual minutes and hours they spend engaged with our content.
If that consumption time drops, then, because our audience skips through chapters or gets the AI summaries of our episodes, the value of our audience drops with it.
I think of this type of extractive consumption behaviour as Strip Mine Consumption.
And it’s safe to say that strip mine “listeners” are significantly less likely to end up hiring us than those who consume our episodes in full.
Strip Mine Consumption Is a Show Problem, Not a Listener Problem
Before we can fix the problem, we need to understand one all-important point: Strip mine consumption isn’t a listener problem, but a show problem.
Consider this.
Personally, I can think of several shows I’m happy to blaze through at 2x speed and dip in and out of based on the chapters.
But I also have shows that I dial down to 1x.
Shows I spend days eagerly anticipating immersing myself in.
90-minute (or 4-hour) shows that generate a pang of sadness when each episode ends—the same feeling upon reaching the end of a great book or TV series.
Some shows, I even listen to episodes more than once.
In all these cases, I am the same listener. And yet, my consumption behaviour varies wildly, directly stemming from the way the show has been designed.
If we want to counter the natural tendency of listeners to strip mine our content, we too must design for it.
Because at the end of the day, the content dictates listener behaviour, not the other way around.
If we want to adapt, we have to first understand a key shift in the broader content ecosystem.
The Value of Information is Trending to Zero
One of my clients, Natalie, a branding expert, sent me an email that encapsulates this shift in podcast preferences perfectly.
“When I first started listening to podcasts, a decade ago, finding reliable, high-quality information required real effort. You had to search through blogs, read books, and spend time piecing things together. Podcasts let me go deeper on topics that mattered — long-form conversations, a sense of depth and exploration, access to discussions I wouldn’t otherwise be part of.
But over time, that shifted. The space became saturated. Shows started to feel repetitive or transactional. You had to listen to an entire episode just to maybe get to something actionable — and often, the show never even got there. That created fatigue.
Now the context has changed entirely. With AI, information is no longer scarce or gatekept. I can get a clear, immediate answer personalised to exactly what I need.”
In short: The value of Information is trending to zero.
Podcasting used to be a convenient way to download information into our brains.
But as more convenient, personalized, and efficient solutions have emerged, there is little need for the types of shows that used to thrive—the “how to do X”, tactical breakdowns, and expert interviews.
The problem isn’t competition or even a higher expected bar for quality.
It’s obsolescence.
Podcasting’s Unique Opportunity Hidden in the AI Content Problem
Today, the core problem facing us all has swung from information scarcity to information overwhelm.
We’re drowning in data and information, but have no idea what to do with it, unable to see the forest for the trees, let alone navigate it with confidence.
Which is where podcasting as a medium is uniquely capable of thriving — if hosts understand the real job listeners are hiring them to do.
While the early wave of podcasting was built by hosts who delivered scarce information, the next wave will be built by hosts with the scarcer skill of skillfully exploring, unpacking, explaining, interpreting, and making sense of their topic.
Natalie’s feed reflects what’s happening across many listener’s subscriptions right now, including mine:
“I’ve gone through my feed and removed the podcasts that feel generic or surface-level content that could easily be found through a quick search. What I’m drawn to now are voices that offer a distinct point of view. Not ‘storytelling’ in a vague sense, but the ability to take a concept, strategy, or idea and translate it into something tangible through analogy, lived experience, or a clear framework that shows how it actually works in practice.”
Natalie might be just one listener.
But her experience reflects a broader shift in what audiences want, expect, and value from a podcast.
Your listeners already know, feel, and are acting on this.
Are you?
There Is An Audience for Depth & Nuance
Podcasting is the medium that is best-positioned to take advantage of this shift.
But to take advantage of it, we have to embrace a countercultural idea:
That despite the TikTokification of content and culture, there is an audience for slowness, depth, and nuance.
The public play counts of algorithmic platforms make it seem that what people really want is sensational claims, breathless editing, surface-level-takes-presented-as-profound, and the continual compression of ideas into their smallest atomic units.
But there is also a large (and growing) audience of people hungry for more substantive content.
For slow, thoughtful, nuanced, immersive explorations, unpackings, and debates on the topics they care about.
This content is not surface-level, top-of-funnel, biggest-audience-possible content. It will never generate tens or hundreds of millions of views.
But it is exactly the type of content that your best future buyers are most hungry for.
The type of content that does the heaviest lifting when it comes to building trust, transmitting your point of view, and demonstrating your expertise.
And there is no better medium to facilitate this type of content than podcasting.
There are a few reasons why.
The first is podcasting’s platform psychology — the subconscious expectations and usage patterns consumers bring to a platform.
Most podcast listeners consume other forms of content on other platforms, after all.
So when they reach for a podcast over one of the alternatives, they are looking for a specific experience.
But what?
For one, as a predominantly long-form medium, when someone chooses to listen to a podcast, they have implicitly indicated that they are actively looking for a long-form exploration of a topic.
Otherwise, they would have gone to AI, Google, TikTok, or YouTube.
In addition, podcasting implies a certain experience that other content platforms struggle to capture—an experience grounded not in performance and production but in natural, authentic conversation.
In short, podcasting simply feels more real than other mediums.
The second reason podcasting is so well-suited to build audiences around depth and nuance:
Podcasting is an intent-based medium.
We are not served up podcasts for mindless consumption. We actively choose them.
In fact, many of us like podcasts particularly because it feels like one of the platforms where we are the ones consuming the content rather than being consumed by it.
Longtime Scrappy Podcasting reader and host of Famous & Gravy, Michael Osborne, articulated this perfectly when he told me, “Podcasting is where I go to escape the internet”, a feeling I feel more acutely each passing day.
The upshot of all of this is that, as creators, we should operate on the assumption that when someone chooses to listen to a podcast, they are actively seeking out a specific type of content experience.
An experience we should be designing our shows to deliver.
Rather than seeking to make our podcasts more like YouTube and social media—reducing the run-time, sharpening our editing, tailoring our titles, and content strategies to appease the algorithm…
We should seek to make our shows more like podcasts.
Because whether our audiences are consuming our shows via YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or their personal favourite podcast app, when they choose to consume a podcast, they want a podcast.
If you want to optimize your content and ideas to reach the largest audience possible, you should stop podcasting and dedicate yourself to Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok.
If you want to grow a podcast, on the other hand, you’re better off designing your show around the things that people come to podcasting as a medium to get:
Depth, nuance, context, discussion, immersion, understanding, wisdom, genuine insight.
These traits aren’t just what podcast consumers in general want when they choose a podcast.
They’re what your best future buyers are starved for.
And what a short-form algorithm-centric strategy will only take you further away from delivering.
Podcasting’s Unique Ability to Highlight Dynamic Human Interaction
Last week, I listened to three podcast episodes that have been rattling around my brain ever since, and which I’ve recommended at least a dozen times collectively.
The episodes cover three very different topics—consciousness, AI, and personal finance—from two very different shows—The Ezra Klein Show, and Money For Couples…
But despite their surface-level differences, they have two things in common. Two traits that point to the types of shows that will continue to grow and thrive in the age of AI content:
- The host of the show is a singular thinker with a strong point of view, deep expertise, and broad supporting knowledge, who is able to see the things we as listeners miss and make sense of a complex, chaotic world.
- The shows feature dynamic human interaction, with every episode built around a mix of palpable tension and momentum that pulls us through the show to find out where it’s leading.
In almost every conversation with friends and clients over the past year about shows they’re listening to right now, these two traits crop up.
Based on everything we’ve discussed in this series, this trend makes sense.
Given the ocean of information and the rapid pace of change we have to make sense of, it’s only natural that we seek out sages who can (or at least appear to) parse, distil, and simplify it to help us make sense of a topic, the world, and our lives.
And as more of our lives revolve around interfacing with machines, it’s no surprise that we might crave the experience of hearing two or more smart, funny, thoughtful, or otherwise engaging humans play with ideas.
On paper, this is where podcasting—a medium built around humans talking—should have a natural advantage.
And yet, most shows are squandering it.
Because there’s more to creating the kind of dynamic human-to-human interaction that listeners are increasingly drawn to than putting two people together and letting them talk.
In fact, that type of (frankly, flaccid) show is exactly what listeners are rejecting.
The type of overly agreeable show where the host and guest know pretty much exactly what each of them will say before the interview starts.
The type of show with few, if any, surprises, that is little more than an opportunity for a guest who has already made the rounds on 12 different shows to answer the exact same questions and give the exact same responses one more time.
Unfortunately, this is exactly the type of show that is most common, especially among business owners.
And if you want to stay relevant in the world of AI content, it’s the type of show you must do everything in your power to distance yourself from.
When I think about the type of dynamic, human interaction I and others are increasingly drawn to, it comes down to one thing:
Tension.
Tension can come in many varieties, from the set up and payoff of a joke, to intellectual sparring and debate, to an exploration into the unknown reaches of a topic, to the host and guest uncovering insights in real time together as the product of the conversation, to real, authentic vulnerability (not the trite, performative, buzzword kind), and more.
Regardless of the form it takes, captivating shows are grounded in tension.
In the best episodes, the host, guest, and listeners all walk away enriched—having learned something new and thought more deeply about their ideas and preconceptions.
Of course, the reason these shows are scarce is that, as a host, it takes real confidence to pull off.
It requires you to push back, challenge, play devil’s advocate, press for specifics and examples, not let the guest off easy, and steer the conversation into unexplored and perhaps even uncomfortable territory with questions the guest doesn’t have the answers to.
And yet, that unknown, unexplored, uncomfortable territory is exactly where all the best podcast episodes live.
David Bowie has a quote that sums it up perfectly:
“If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
True for making great music and making great podcasts.
Our job as hosts is to wade ourselves, our guests, and our audiences out past the conversations they’ve heard and had a dozen times already. Past the conversations the AIs have already incorporated into their training data.
Instead, we need to plant our shows, our episodes, and our questions in new, fresh, exhilarating, and unpredictable territory.
And then explore it together in a distinctly rich, deep, nuanced, human way.
There’s no medium better positioned to take advantage of this opportunity than podcasting.
But we, as hosts, must be the ones to take it.
