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Stop Using “Authenticity” as an Excuse for a Sloppy Podcast · Your Mic

• 0:00
  Once upon a time, a client's phone went off mid-recording, and I jokingly said, don't worry, we'll leave it in. We had a great laugh, the client and his guest. Well, except this doofus at 1130 that night fell asleep and mistakenly left it in.
• 0:19
  It was an accident. Remember, I said I was joking. I would never sabotage somebody's work like that. That's not how I operate. God bless that client. He was gracious when I explained to him what happened. And we ended up working together for probably about a year after that incident. But I guarantee you, that was not a strategy. That was a tired entrepreneur working a job and trying to operate his business. And I should have known my limitations.
• 0:49
  My name is Freddy Kruse and this is your Mike, a podcast about podcasting. And today we're going to talk about why making mistakes on purpose, not in a joking fashion where you end up falling asleep and the mistake stays in there, but you're like, oh, I meant to do that. No, making mistakes on purpose to prove you're a human is one of the dumbest ideas floating around the internet right now. And to lay this out, I want to talk about a very popular podcast that I like to listen to.
• 1:18
  The name shall remain nameless. It's in the Instagram world, and I really do enjoy the show, except for this one episode because it drove me up the wall, which is why I'm talking about it now. The host, he was covering AI and personal branding, and his point was that in an AI world, people are going to be looking for mistakes to prove that a human made the content. So his approach...
• 1:44
  was to leave things in on purpose. Don't edit the stumbles. Don't clean up the mess. Let the rough edges show so that people know you're real. This guy probably would have been like, yeah, leave that 47 seconds in. And I'm like, no, absolutely not. And listen,
• 2:03
  I'm one to tell you, you don't need to edit every single um or ah or every single pregnant pause. You definitely want to edit something when a client's phone goes off mid-session. All right? You definitely want to edit that out. But you don't want to start leaving in deliberate mistakes.
• 2:20
  Also, in a very similar vein, because as podcasters, we do write copy. We write show notes and LinkedIn posts and Instagram captions, things of that nature, blog posts, email newsletters. And so this absolutely ties in.
• 2:36
  The M dash. Oh my goodness. If you've spent any, any time on LinkedIn and you see the anti AI crusades coming at the M dash, then you know what I'm talking about. If you use it, you're a robot. You're just copying and pasting chat GPT slop and you're fake and you're a nobody and you don't know anything about whatever.
• 2:57
  By the way, I love the M-dash. And at the moment, I'm actually reading this book by David Goggins. It's called Never Finished. It was written a few years ago. Plenty of M-dashes. The book came out before AI was in every single LinkedIn comment section. And by the way, David Goggins, for your information, is definitely not a robot.
• 3:19
  And here's what really irks me. Here's what grinds my gears about the intentional mistake as a brand strategy. Before AI became the villain of the week, a typo was just a typo. It was low quality or an oversight. It was the thing you quietly fixed and hoped nobody took a screenshot of.
• 3:37
  And now we're supposed to just celebrate it. We're supposed to give it a parade. Now the typo is the proof of humanity. And I get the instinct. I'm a type A, very driven kind of guy. And when I see a typo in something that I did and I can fix it, I fix it ASAP. I will pull over my car in a parking lot if I'm at a red light and I see that I've made a mistake. I'm like, oh, no, no, I am that obsessed with writing. I really am.
• 4:06
  typos, mine specifically, drive me up the wall. So I get the instinct. The internet is drowning in AI-generated sludge, slop, garbage, generic and hollow. It's content that reads like it was written by a confident intern who has never experienced a single emotion. But I gotta tell you, and I'll tell you twice, the answer to AI slop is not intentional human slop.
• 4:33
  Again, the answer to AI slop is not intentional human slop. The answer is better thinking, a sharper perspective, you know, taste. A point of view that only you have because you are the only one who has lived your one weird, very oddly specific life. And that is what makes content human. Not a typo.
• 5:00
  Not leaving in a whole bunch of mistakes. Mm-mm. Now, if you are trying to build a show that sounds human without sabotaging your own quality, that is literally what my company, Speak Podcasting, exists to help with. If you want some help with that, head to speakpodcasting.com and hit the contact form. Tell them you came from this very show and what kind of show you are wanting to build.
• 5:27
  Now back to that intentional mistake. Here's what genuinely frustrates me. These ideas, well, they're not coming from small accounts. They're coming from creators with actual reach, literally hundreds of thousands of followers across all the platforms hosts who have built legitimate shows, which means the people are listening. The new podcasters, the
• 5:53
  The new people to Instagram, the aspiring hosts, the people already terrified of hitting record, they're going to hear that and think, oh, well, you know, that's one less step. That's one less thing off my plate. They're going to leave so much on the table because here's the truth about using AI the quote unquote right way.
• 6:10
  Now, when I use AI to help outline an episode, it's using my ideas, my voice, my stories, my clients' episodes. It's not manufacturing something generic from thin air. If I have an idea from a carousel that I saw on Instagram, I screenshot the carousel, I upload it, and then I tell it, I tell perplexity exactly what I'm thinking, what I would like to talk to, how this relates to this podcast, and then I want it to formulate both an outline and a video.
• 6:37
  And a script because it's based on my experience and what I saw on Instagram at 7 o'clock in the morning as I'm eating breakfast. Got it? Good. It's taking what came out of my brain and helping me organize it faster so I can spend more time on the part that only I can do. The delivery.
• 7:00
  The instinct. The moment mid-episode when I go off script because something better just occurred to me. That, my friend, is the human part and no AI overlord is touching that. Yet. We'll see in 2030. But I'm not going to just handicap the process by leaving in a phone ringing just to wave a flag that says a human being was here. You know what else proves a human was here? Yeah.
• 7:28
  A story that hits. An observation nobody else was willing to make. Saying what nobody else wants to say when it actually costs you something. And that right there is the proof.
• 7:39
  Look, change is uncomfortable. I'm pretty sure that the Gutenberg press made a lot of people, especially those in power, very uncomfortable. AI is moving legit fast. It seems like it's improving by the day, by the hour, by the minute, by the nanosecond. It's moving uncomfortably fast.
• 8:00
  But there's a version of skepticism about AI that is healthy. And not everything generated by a machine should be published. I get it. Some of this stuff is really bad and it should be called out. I've had my chatbot make absolute garbage and I've never used it.
• 8:17
  There is, however, a difference between healthy skepticism and what I'd call the intelligent luddite. Someone who understands the technology, sees the potential, and chooses the typo anyway. Because it feels more authentic. And I promise that's not a content strategy. What that is...
• 8:37
  It's dressed up as philosophy and it's doing a disservice to every podcaster watching and taking notes. Ums are fine. Pauses are fine. They're almost mandatory. A stutter here and there. We all do it. It's what we call the flow of a natural human being talking.
• 8:55
  Now listen, I'm not asking you to sand down every rough edge. I'm asking you not to add rough edges where they weren't there and where they were absolutely not necessary. Because your listener is not there to verify your carbon paste. Your listener is there because you said something that mattered to them. So say that thing. Edit out all the garbage. Keep your em dashes. And remember...
• 9:21
  If you're tired of authenticity being used as an excuse for low effort content and you want to show this both human and high quality, hit up speakpodcasting.com. Hit the contact form. Let me know what you think and what you're building. I'd love to hear from you. Appreciate you listening.