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It is a weird time to be a content marketer. It feels like both a gold rush and a ticking time bomb at the same time. Because on one hand, it's never been easier to make content. AI can write your posts, generate your images, edit your videos, build your website, and you can do in a day what used to take a whole team an entire month. On the other hand, there's also this nagging feeling underneath it all when you make content, which. Which is why bother? Everybody knows that in five years, all the content that we consume will be made by AI, right? We can already see it happening now. LinkedIn has become an AI slop graveyard. You can tell that all of the posts are completely AI written and in the comments it's just AI agreeing with itself. On Instagram, we've got the opposite problem. More and more of what gets posted every day is AI generated. But over there, it's getting harder to tell what's AI and what's real. And there the comments do feature real humans debating, but they're not debating ideas, they're debating whether or not the video is AI. And this problem is not just on social media. Mr. Beast said last year that he's not getting the same reach he's used to. If Mr. Beast is struggling, what are the rest of us supposed to do? On top of that, people are also not consuming as much informational content anymore. If you go and look at the search trends for YouTube and you search how to lose weight, which historically has been one of the biggest, most evergreen search terms on the planet platform, since 2022, the term has been declining every single month. Why? Yeah, sure, ozempic, but more so people don't need to watch a 30 minute video to get information anymore. They can just ask an AI chatbot and get the exact answer totally personalized to them in like two seconds. So as marketers, why should we bother content marketing when AI is already through eating our lunch? Well, at the same time, there's also this feeling that it's still early in the content game, that now is the golden age of content marketing, that it's a great time to build a personal brand. Take Taylor Swift. She's one of the savviest marketers alive. And last fall, coming off the ERAS tour, which just made a billion dollars, it was time for her to promote her new album. And at that point, she was one of the most popular people on the planet and budget was not a factor. She could have chosen any possible marketing tactic to announce her new album. What did she choose? Content. She announced it on Travis Kelce's podcast, which got 1.3 million people watching it live on YouTube, which was later declared a Guinness World record. Meanwhile, the 2024 election, they're calling it the podcast election. Donald Trump went on Rogan. Kamala Harris went on Call Her Daddy. And when Trump won, his. His team literally thanked content creators from the stage. And if you look around and pay close attention, many more of the most successful entrepreneurs and investors on the planet are spending hard to believe amounts of money and their oh so precious time on content. So at the same time, AI is making content easier to produce, harder to trust, and less valuable across the board. But the biggest entertainers, companies, billionaires, and world superpowers are all investing heavily in content. So what is the difference between the content that is dead in the water and the content that is just getting started? Well, I think it's podcasting. Hear me out. So something happened this past January that made all of this click into place for me. I was waiting for Claude to finish something, and as you do, I got distracted. I popped over to YouTube and my plan was to, like, look up some analytics. But you know what happens when you go over to YouTube? You open up the page and you see like 50 thumbnails. And the first one that I saw was a new video that came up and was published only 24 minutes prior. And that thumbnail made me out loud, say, no way. It was Alex Hormozi and Tony Robbins in the same thumbnail. And here, Alex Hormozi had interviewed Tony Robbins. Now, I've followed both of those guys for several years, and as soon as I saw that video pop up, I stopped what I was doing and I watched the entire thing. It was over an hour and it flew by. I've actually rewatched it twice since then. That interview had a tremendous impact on me. And as somebody who has internalized a lot of what both Alex Hormozi and Tony Robbins have said over the years, this episode really changed the way that I look at my own life. And it wasn't just me. Hormozi himself said that that interview has gotten more engagement than any video he's made in two years. So why did that piece of content so outperform the thousands of other pieces of content that that Hormozi's team posted that much. I think it's because it was a real conversation, and real conversations are AI proof. Here's how that Harmozi Robbins conversation proved the point to me. So I don't know about you but there's a voice in my head that can be very loud, and it's that voice that tells you to grind harder, do more. Stop making excuses. You aren't good enough. You don't deserve anything. You. You haven't earned it yet. Right? We all have that. And I think that one of the reasons that Alex Hermosi got so popular when he did, he got popular saying a lot of those things. I mean, really, the top reason is because he's so good at explaining business concepts in a really, really accessible way. But also, the voice that he was putting it out was like that. It was, you suck. Work harder. The work is the goal. Fuck happiness, those sorts of things. And so that voice in my head that already exists and says those things to me became his voice. So I walked around with Alex Harmozi's voice in my head telling me, you need to work harder. You suck at this. You're not doing enough. And so whenever I consumed Alex Harmozi's content, I felt like I knew more about business, but I also felt a little worse about myself. On the flip side, Tony Robbins is also very good at taking complex topics and telling you about them in a way that makes you understand them. But his tone is always very, very encouraging. It's about joy. It's about what if life was amazing. So these two people actually spoke to each other. And in this conversation, Tony Robbins challenged that voice in my head in a way that I at least had been craving for a long time. And I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs who have followed Harmozi over the past five years who have said that hearing that interview did the same thing for them. Because in that interview, Alex Hormozi admitted to Tony that Alex doesn't enjoy any part of his life of this infinite grind, even though he's probably already past a billion dollars in net worth. And he makes all this money. He's got more money than he knows how to do with, but he's completely disconnected from joy. He literally said, I'm only doing this because I don't know what else to do. Hormozy's entire worldview has been presented as that life is about suffering and f happiness. And Tony challenged that head on. He said, no, f that f suffering. Which to see Tony Robbins say that to the almighty Alex Harmosi was crazy. And when he said that, I, and I know several thousands of other people breathed a sigh of relief. Now, that conversation, that episode, that piece of content, changed how I see Hormozi in a really Positive light already. I already viewed Hormozi positively, but that conversation humanized him in a way that I don't think any other content could have. When he was so clearly open to shifting his view of life, I shifted mine. That voice in my head that had taken on Hormozi's voice went from the tyrant in charge that was just constantly telling me I suck every day to since then, a voice that's still there and sometimes useful and sometimes I need to listen to, but it's more of a voice at the table. And it's been a couple months and that's rung true. My life has literally been better since hearing that conversation. I don't think any of that could come from AI. I don't think that type of true change could come from a solo explainer video or a blog post or a social media thread. It came from two humans interacting with each other in a room with no script, where neither one knew exactly what was going to happen next. Two worldviews collided and one of them won. And it was real. It was not a simulation. And that is the key. Anybody could have used AI to generate a simulated conversation between Alex Hormozi and Tony Robbins. And it may have gotten it right. It may have totally guessed what they would have said, but nobody would have cared about it. People are not walking around listening to fake AI podcast interviews, and they're not going to, because nobody will ever care about that. But if these two people actually got together and debated in real life, when I find out about that, I'm like, oh my God, that's crazy. I gotta hear it. It's kind of like the difference between watching the super bowl and watching a video game simulation of what could happen in the Super Bowl. Only one of those is going to have millions of people watching and throwing parties because it's real. So if all of this is true, and if real conversations is where the content puck is going, then what is a content marketer to do to stand out? I think it's podcasting, because podcasting at its best is a real conversation. And I think that a real conversation is the one thing that AI cannot produce in a way that we will ever care about. It can't commoditize it. Like it's going to commoditize short form videos and explainer videos and all the things that it's kind of already doing now as the Grow the Show guy. Yes, you can call me biased, right? But I'm not saying that podcasting is the moat, because I am in the business of podcasting. I'm in the business of podcasting because I believe that podcasting is the moat. Because about a year and a half ago, I almost quit podcasting entirely. I came from the audio podcasting world. I started in 2018, but by 2024, I found it harder than ever to grow podcasts, specifically audio only podcasts. It felt almost impossible. And I definitely was not alone. Spotify paid $230 million to acquire Gimlet Media in 2019 and and dissolved the entire studio by 2023. BuzzFeed shut down its podcast unit. Vice scaled back podcast production before filing for bankruptcy. Slates Panoply laid off almost all of its staff. The podcast industry has been a bit of a bloodbath for a while. And across the industry, companies that had raised tons of money were laying everybody off and shutting them down. And I saw that and I was like, well, I guess podcasting is dead. I guess I should pivot to something else. And I almost did. But then at the same time, I looked around and saw that podcasting was exploding. Podcasts are on Netflix now. Spotify and YouTube are growing like crazy when it comes to podcast consumption. And that's when I got it. I was like, oh, podcasting isn't dead. But the word podcast has changed. It doesn't just mean an RSS audio feed anymore. It now means a conversation, a real conversation. And if that's true, podcasts are exploding, right? Netflix is not signing podcast shows to multimillion dollars because they're charitable. Taylor Swift did not announce her album On New Heights to do Travis Kelce a favor. And the Vice President of the United States at the time did not appear on a show called Call Her Daddy because she lacked funding to buy TV ads. These are very calculated decisions by people and companies with more data and money than anyone else on earth. And that data is all pointing in the same direction. People want to watch and listen to real humans talk to each other. They want podcasts. Podcasting is the moat. Now, what's funny about this is as I have this realization, I can't help but laugh at myself a little bit, because I have spent the last six years telling over 500 podcasting clients and the more than 150,000 podcasters who have consumed my content to stop describing their shows as real conversations. It is vague. It means nothing. And I stand by that advice. You should not call your podcast Real Conversations. But I will admit that this is ironic, because AI has made Real Conversations retroactively profound. And what used to be the most obvious sign of an amateur podcaster calling their show Real Conversations, Unfiltered Perspectives, just total amateur hour. That is now the biggest differentiator in all of content, it seems. How about that? But that said, you need to know that finding success in podcasting is not easy. It is actually the hardest content type to grow and sustain. That is why I think it is a moat. Moats are not easy to dig. There is real work involved in taking a real conversation and making it consumable and making it perform. You have to package it up so that strangers want to hear you, a stranger, have a real conversation. You have to structure the conversation and edit it so that it hooks them in and keeps their attention throughout. You have to market that conversation so that the right people find it and actually listen to it. And yes, you need to make money, so you need the people who hear that conversation to ultimately buy something from you or from your sponsors, or else it's a hobby. None of that stuff is automatic. It is really hard, and it's why I'm in business. But here's what I will say. If you can get those pieces right, if your podcast makes a clear promise, if your episodes are packaged to attract strangers, if your conversations are structured to hold attention, and if you have a path from listener to buyer, if all that stuff's true, then you are building something that I believe will survive the incoming AI content doom. Because I believe that podcasting is the moat. Because really, what it comes down to is AI is going to replace anything that a computer can do. What a computer can never do is be another human who talks to another human. Podcasting is the moat. And if you need help digging, let me know.