Drew: Hey. So somebody asked me the other day... can you actually make a podcast
Drew: with AI? Like, the whole thing? And here's the thing — you're listening to
Drew: one right now. This whole show is made with AI. So... yeah. The answer's yes.
Drew: But there's a whole spectrum of what "yes" looks like.
Drew: This is AI Honestly. I'm Drew. Each episode I take one real question from a
Drew: founder or business owner — and tell you what's real, what's not, and what it'd
Drew: actually take to build. No hype. No DOOM.
Drew:
Drew: So I get this question because making a podcast sounds like a lot of work.
Drew: Recording is hard. Editing is hard. Writing a script is hard. And most people
Drew: who have something to say don't have a free afternoon every week to sit down and
Drew: do all that. So when they hear "AI can make your podcast," what they're
Drew: wondering is... can I skip the tedious part and still end up with something
Drew: good?
Drew: And the answer is yes. With a catch. Let me walk you through how this show
Drew: actually gets made, because it's a pretty good example of the whole range.
Drew: Here's the flow - I talk. That's it, that's my part. I open the voice memo app
Drew: on my phone and I just... ramble. I could be in traffic with sirens going. I could
Drew: be in the car, I could be at my desk. Doesn't matter. I go back and forth, I
Drew: repeat myself, I lose my train of thought — none of it matters, because the next
Drew: steps clean it up.
Drew: The voice memo app gives me an automatic transcript. I take that transcript and I
Drew: feed it into AI, and that's where it gets turned into a script. Now, I've set up a
Drew: bunch of guidelines ahead of time. What an episode is, what it should cover, the
Drew: tone, all that. So it's not just summarizing me. It's reshaping my
Drew: rambling into something that actually holds together.
Drew: But that script sounds like AI if you don't push it the extra mile. You know
Drew: the tells. The em-dash with the little descriptor after it. The line that goes
Drew: "it's not this - it's that." All that stuff. People can smell it. So I've got a
Drew: long list of things I tell it not to do, and that gets me maybe 80% of the way.
Drew: The last 20% is me, by hand, just chopping. Cutting the AI-scent stuff out.
Drew: And that part actually works for me, because I'd rather a show be a little
Drew: abrupt than a little eloquent. I don't need the fluff.
Drew: Then the script goes into ElevenLabs. That's the voice part. It's a clone of my
Drew: voice, and it reads the script back to me. And ElevenLabs is also where I do my
Drew: editing — I'm listening live, chopping things, rearranging, and that's where I
Drew: drop in my theme music too, which is a little AI-generated track. I just tuck it
Drew: under the front of the episode.
Drew: Here's a thing about voice cloning, though. You'd think you'd want the most
Drew: polished, professional clone possible. You can do that. But a really polished
Drew: clone often has this... AI scent to it. Sounds too clean. In my case?? My actual
Drew: delivery is kind of monotone and flat. So when I run it through AI, the quirks get
Drew: masked, because flat is just how I talk. It works in my favor. That's not gonna be
Drew: true for everybody — but it's worth knowing that "more polished" isn't always
Drew: "more real.".
Drew: Okay. What it'd take if you wanted to do this yourself.
Drew: The voice part — ElevenLabs — is the one real cost. You're looking at their
Drew: Creator plan, which is twenty-two dollars a month. That's the tier that gets you
Drew: the good voice cloning. And it runs on credits. Here's the thing to watch: every
Drew: time you edit and re-render the voice, you burn credits. So if you're doing a
Drew: weekly show with a lot of fiddly editing, you can chew through your allotment
Drew: faster than you'd think, and then you're paying overages. Budget for that.
Drew: The rest of my pipeline is basically free. After ElevenLabs, I export two
Drew: files — the MP3 of the episode, and a VTT file, which is the transcript with
Drew: timestamps. I hand those to my pipeline in Claude Code and I just say, publish
Drew: this episode. And it does the whole thing. It writes the show notes. It
Drew: builds the new entry in the feed, the one Apple and Spotify and Amazon pick up. It
Drew: creates a page on my website for the episode — which is partly SEO, but it's
Drew: more than that, people actually go back and read these. And it publishes all of
Drew: it to Cloudflare.
Drew: And Cloudflare makes this nearly free. Normally, hosting a podcast — unless
Drew: you're locked into Spotify's ecosystem — runs you at least twenty bucks a month.
Drew: Cloudflare is so cheap that storing this stuff is basically pennies. Maybe if I
Drew: hit a hundred episodes and I'm storing all of it, I'd start paying something. I
Drew: don't know. But right now? Pennies.
Drew: There's even some simple analytics baked in. A little dashboard — filters out
Drew: bots, deduplicates, shows me who downloaded an episode, who viewed the
Drew: page. Nothing fancy, but it's there. And the system also pulls out clips
Drew: automatically — finds the interesting soundbites, drops them on a graphic with
Drew: subtitles and the episode question up top. So I've got social posts ready to go
Drew: without doing extra work.
Drew: Now — what to watch for, beyond the credits thing.
Drew: Building the pipeline itself takes real time up front. The per-episode workflow
Drew: is fast — ten minutes to talk into my phone, then up to a half hour of editing
Drew: before it's live. But the pipeline that makes that possible? That was the work.
Drew: So if you're picturing zero effort, it's zero effort after you've done the setup.
Drew: The other catch. The hard part of a podcast was never the production. And AI
Drew: just took the production part and made it accessible. What it didn't solve — what
Drew: nothing solves — is the marketing. The distribution. Getting anybody to actually
Drew: listen. That's still the real job. The making is largely handled now. The
Drew: being-heard is not.
Drew: So... can you make a podcast with AI? Yes. And it's a genuinely good setup,
Drew: especially compared to cloning yourself on video, which is way harder — voice is
Drew: much easier than video. If you've got something to say and you don't have the
Drew: time to run a weekly show the old way, you can replace most of that with AI and
Drew: end up with something real. This is actually episode two, so I'm still
Drew: finding out how it holds up. But the production? That part works.
Drew: That's it for this episode. If you've got a question you've been wondering about...
Drew: can AI do this thing?? send it to me. The address is in the show notes. I'm Drew.
Drew: This was AI Honestly.