The Wild West of Podcast Development with WaitWhat’s Leital Molad

Leital Molad: The host should be on some kind of authentic journey to want to learn something. They can bring the audience member along on that ride. So whether they're interviewing someone or whether it is more of a documentary style podcast, the genuine quest for knowledge is compelling to listen to.

Jeff Umbro: This is Podcast Perspectives, a show about the podcast industry and the people behind it. I'm your host, Jeff Umbro, founder and CEO of The Podglomerate. Today on the show, I'm speaking with Leital Molad, who is the head of podcasts at WaitWhat, home to podcasts like Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman, Meditative Story, and Spark and Fire.

In this episode, we'll discuss Leital's long career as an educator and development executive, her aspirations for WaitWhat, and the company's recently released Listener Bill of Rights, which covers how producers can consider using AI in the work that they do. Let's get to the show.

You have a long history in podcasting, so I was hoping you could give us like a little bit of background of what you've been doing up until now, and then we'll focus on WaitWhat.

Leital Molad: So I started out in public radio at a show called Studio 360 with Kurt Anderson, which was at WNYC in New York and I actually started there as an intern when I was in journalism school.

It was right around the time that the show was piloting. And I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, that right when I was looking for a job, the show was launching and I, I came on as a, as a PA. It was incredible. It was actually, it was my dream come true. I came to New York to, I was inspired by Terry Gross.

I wanted to get into a culture show on the radio. And lo and behold, the stars aligned, and so I had a long tenure there. I worked my way up to senior producer, a showrunner, had a fantastic 15 years at that show, which lasted for 20 years. It only, it sunset just around COVID times, but after that, I worked on a different show at WNYC for about a year, which was podcast rather than radio.

It was about health and medicine. And then after that, I jumped into the Wild West of podcasting in 2016 at First Look Media. And that was the company that was both. A lot of things have changed since then. I mean, just shows how much media has changed. At the time, the Intercept, the news site was under First Look Media.

It's no longer, as well as Topic Studios. And so on the Topic Studios side, I got to work on shows like Missing Richard Simmons and, you know, we partnered with other podcast shops like Pineapple and Western Sound and Transmitter. So I got to work with a lot of great folks, just developing and EPing shows.

Jeff Umbro: That was the moment where it felt like anything was possible. Still very optimistic about podcasting, but back then was awesome.

Leital Molad: Yeah.

Jeff Umbro: You could come up with an idea and like the next day you had a million people listening to it.

Leital Molad: Yeah. And so the biggest show we launched when I was at Topic Studios was Missing Richard Simmons.

And I think that was one of the, you know, besides Serial, it was one of the biggest podcast hits. The first like kind of massive hit to break into the mainstream to be written about in People Magazine and stuff like that.

Jeff Umbro: You said something just now that I want to touch on. You, when you were at WNYC, you went from broadcast to podcast.

What was that like? Was it a big shift in terms of like your day to day work?

Leital Molad: A bit of a shift in thinking about how to build audience. Yeah, because I'd worked on an hour long radio show for 15 years, but we always, Studio 360, but we always had a digital presence. I mean, first we, from the early days, published the show in segments using real audio on the website, like crunchy real audio. And then we did release the show as a podcast. So we were always thinking that way, but it was radio first.

And then when I switched to launching the show called Only Human, there were a lot of questions about what should the cadence and frequency of the show be, you know, if we're going to do in depth reporting, does it make more sense to be seasonal or do we have to be always on and, you know, what's the role of a host and segments in a podcast and a lot of things like that that are a little different from working on a radio magazine show.

Jeff Umbro: And the beauty is that you got to do that before most people were even really thinking about it. Were you overlapping with Alex and PJ when they did TLDR?

Leital Molad: Yeah, I remember they were it on the media and I think that their show idea which ended up becoming Reply All/TLDR was, it might have been part of an internal pitch contest that we did at WNYC.

I do know for a fact that Death, Sex, and Money came out of that internal pitch process.

Jeff Umbro: Good talent pool.

Leital Molad: Yes, they were these budding talents, Alex and PJ, who were just really itching to branch out and do their own thing, and it had definitely a different, a more youthful tone, and it was all focused on internet culture, and it was just, it was really smart.

And of course, right at that time, Gimlet was getting started, and Gimlet snatched them up, and a lot of people from WNYC started to be poached at that time, and that's when I started looking for outside opportunities as well. And I ended up landing at First Look Media.

Jeff Umbro: And then from there, you went to Pushkin.

That's right. And you're currently at WaitWhat and you're also a professor at SVA, School of Visual Arts.

Leital Molad: I've been adjuncting there for over a decade and it's in their Design, Writing, Research and Criticism Masters. So it's a very specialized program, but it's, the students are always so interesting.

They come from all over the world, really thinking about the world through a design lens, so very broadly speaking, anything from urban planning to fashion design to product design. It's really, it seems very niche, but it is quite broad, the topics that they cover. And so I teach them a 10 week audio journalism workshop and they create a podcast that becomes part of their thesis portfolio at the end of the semester.

Jeff Umbro: This honestly just sounds like an episode of 99% Invisible.

Leital Molad: Yes. Yes. I use Avery Trufelman's work all the time to model for them. She's actually come in as a speaker.

Jeff Umbro: So at WaitWhat, you are the head of podcasts.

Leital Molad: Yes.

Jeff Umbro: Can you walk us through what that means?

Leital Molad: WaitWhat Was founded by two folks from TED.

And I would say that now those, the original founders have stepped down about a year ago and we have a new CEO and the company is going through a bit of a refounding and you know, the media industry has changed. It was originally more focused on kind of premium content, developing strong IP. That was the time that IP was really hot.

People were looking at adapting things on television, movies. And during that time, they created the show Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman, the co founder of LinkedIn. So that is still the flagship show and the biggest property that we have. And so now in this re founding moment with Jeff Berman, under his leadership, we're really turning our content focus more to, to business and tech.

To simply put it, I'd say the mission of the company is to inspire people at work. And so we make content geared toward people, whether they're entrepreneurs starting a company for the first time, growing a company, or if people just want advice and to be inspired on how to grow their own careers, how to be better leaders.

And so I was hired at the beginning of this year to kind of rebuild the, the podcast slate. And we're also in a really interesting time of figuring out how to make shows in both audio and video. So that's something I'm sure we could, we could talk about more. So we're very intentionally building our slate around sort of the, the flagship show of Masters of Scale and creating more shows in that like business and tech realm.

Jeff Umbro: You guys work a lot with like live events and building community like outside of audio as well. Is that correct?

Leital Molad: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not, it's not strictly a podcast company at all. So the flagship event that we do is called the Masters of Scale Summit.

If you can imagine a TED conference for business leaders and it's invite only, about 800 to a thousand attendees. And we get all kinds of, you know, interesting A list speakers from, you know, in the past they had Bill Gates, Arianna Huffington, folks like that just doing talks and I think a little bit of creative performance as well. We'll be recording stuff for the podcast, but that is the flagship event.

But we also do a lot of web events that are open to the public, that we do this series called strategy sessions, that's meant to, you know, give people tools on different topics. We've done a number of them around AI recently, and just giving people tools around how to maximize the use of AI at work and whether that's individually or for their companies and, and stuff like that. So it's definitely multifaceted.

Jeff Umbro: So your role as head of podcasts is in theory to help develop and produce the slate that's coming with this V2?

Leital Molad: That's right.

Yeah. So I would say it's definitely development, developing new content, but also just I mean, I, we basically built an almost entirely new production team. And so when I came in, a big part of, of the shift was to make our production more efficient, regularize, and make more consistent what we publish. And also, with Masters of Scale, with Reid, you know, Reid, as you can imagine, as people like him, is doing many different things, and so coming up with creative ways to expand the hosting bench for Masters of Scale, so that, you know, Reid can be focused and maybe do episodes once or twice a month, and so Jeff Berman, our CEO, is now one of the hosts, and then also, we took Rapid Response, which was a show living within the Masters of Scale feed, and we spun that out as a twice weekly show.

It's hosted by Bob Safian, who is the former editor in chief of Fast Company. And to really make that show much more timely and responsive to the, to the news development part, but also sort of overseeing production, bringing in, building staffs for shows, thinking about our, our processes. And we also had to build out working closely with my partner on the video side, retraining all of us in production to create shows that are being published in both audio and video.

So that's a big part of my job as well.

Jeff Umbro: It's tough, right?

Leital Molad: Yes. Yes. But we're doing it.

Jeff Umbro: When you're trying to do something a little bit more professional, like, the, the time, resources, money, and energy that goes into that, like, it dramatically increases pretty quickly. So we love YouTube. We love all of these new video platforms that are gonna maximize, like, our reach.

But it's not cheap. It's not free.

Leital Molad: Yes, for sure. And yeah, we expanded our, our video editing team. We now have three full time video editors. They also create content from our live events in addition to the podcasts, but yeah, we're constantly learning and tweaking things. So Rapid Response, we launched that in May as a twice a week show.

So we're doing both video episodes and audio episodes and I think our video and graphics team are fantastic. So they do, you know, like a graphic treatment and sometimes they add on in video, little visuals and stuff to kind of like animate points. One that you could look at is an episode we did around the time of the Super Bowl and talking about the Super Bowl commercials.

And so it was really great in the video version, we were able to like insert some stills in reference to what the guest was talking about. So yeah, trying to do that, but not in a way where it's going to take so much longer that we can't put it out on a timely cadence as well.

Right now, what we're figuring out, which I think would be, you know, is pretty new. I don't, I haven't really seen, or if you know of, let me know, other podcast shops that are figuring out how to make a video podcast that isn't just the chat, what do you do when you have narration? And so we're playing with that right now with Masters of Scale. So up until this point, the Masters of Scale video is just a longer cut of the conversation.

But right now we're in the middle of figuring out, okay, let's experiment with the video being closer to the audio product, which is more edited and has some narration.

Jeff Umbro: It's a fun project, right?

Leital Molad: Yeah. So that's, that's some of the cool stuff that we're working on.

Jeff Umbro: There are ways to do it. It's just, I have not found a way to do it without spending like gobs of time and money.

And there's some clever ways, like Darknet Diaries, which I'm sure you're familiar with, just has like a very pretty audiogram for every episode. So there's not really any like production, but it still looks high quality because you know, they churched it up a little bit when it comes to like what the visual is.

It's just like a dynamic audiogram. The opposite side of that spectrum is somebody doing like a whole animation or something to illustrate what you're talking about, which has its own problems because it takes time and money.

Leital Molad: Apparently, WaitWhat did do some animated videos in the past and they were, those were very expensive, much more so than just editing people talking.

Jeff Umbro: I love the direction because it is a shift that I think a lot of people in the industry need to make, and I don't know that everybody is. I wanted to, to take one step back and ask you about hit making in general, because across every platform and company that you've worked at, you have had some hand in making a big splash with a show that is listened to by a lot of people.

Leital Molad: Mm-hmm.

Jeff Umbro: And part of that is, is I'm sure like the platform or the host, and we'll get to that. But a bigger part of that is going to be like the construction of the show.

Leital Molad: That's funny because when I was working at Pushkin and strictly in development, my deputy Justine Lang and I, when we, at the top of our meeting agenda document, Google Doc, we put, "make hits."

If only I knew how to do that with every show, then.

Jeff Umbro: Well yeah, you would, you would own all of podcasting at that point.

Leital Molad: I think there are some rules of thumb, I would say. So much is, you mentioned hosts, a lot is host dependent.

So one, what kind of an audience do they have already? Do they have a presence, you know, on social media, et cetera, books, whatever. Do they have a fandom that can be built upon? Can we try to bring people in to the podcast who already love this person?

The second thing I was going to say is the host has to have charisma and the authenticity that comes across, right? So you have to have someone that comes across genuinely and for them to come across genuinely and resonate with the audience, they have to really want to do it.

I feel like those qualities and the host is where you have to start because people are gonna keep listening and coming back, number one, if they connect with hosts, like Dan Taberski, let's say, not only with Missing Richard Simmons, did he pick this, this perfect storm of a topic that was nostalgic, pop culture, everyone could relate, and then this just like fascinating story that was suspenseful, and then, and then Dan's own, you know, journey and quest, right? The quest always brings people in.

I would say in a case like Missing Richard Simmons, it, it did have a broad appeal.

Jeff Umbro: Everyone knows who Richard Simmons is. They've all seen the videos.

Leital Molad: Right, right. That show was not my idea. I have to give the, but, but I was, I was really lucky to have been able to work on it.

Jeff Umbro: You helped, you helped mold it.

Leital Molad: Yes, my boss at Topic Studios I think knew Dan, and Dan had been a documentary filmmaker and I think he came to them with this idea about doing a podcast and then I think my boss was the one who put Dan and Pineapple Studios together and then hired me to kind of make it all come together.

The true crime shows that I've been a part of have been also those big successes and it just seems that people have an infinite appetite for true crime. There's not, there's not any lack of true crime shows becoming hits. And what is that about? I don't know. I guess we have some basic, I mean, suspense, suspense is, we are, you know, Ira Glass even talks about this as one of the basic building blocks of storytelling.

You need to have a strong anecdote and it can be as simple as the example he uses is, you know, you're inside a house. It's very quiet, very, very quiet. This man, he, he wakes up, and it's just, it's just so quiet, and he starts walking down the stairs, and so just there, like, right away, you want to know, like, what's gonna happen, so it can be so.

Jeff Umbro: Well, with Ira Glass, it's like, I would listen to him read a grocery list. It's so interesting to hear you talk about, like, the different elements that you put into a story and, like, the things that you think of as essential. I am willing to wager that most people who are producing a show do not have those conversations before they put the show out.

And it's something that you learn with time and, like, you can build that muscle the more frequently you do it. 25 year old Lytle probably didn't know what, what you know now, you know?

Leital Molad: Yeah.

Jeff Umbro: But with the hosts of the show, you talked about Dan Tabeski, Ira Glass. For me, it's those two plus like PJ Vogt or Jamie Loftus, like, it doesn't matter. I will listen to anything that they do.

Do you find beyond the charisma and the authenticity that there are any characteristics that are innate to like a great host?

Leital Molad: The host should be on some kind of authentic journey to want to learn something. And then they can bring the audience member along on that ride.

So whether they're interviewing someone or whether it is more of a documentary style podcast, then the genuine quest for knowledge is compelling to listen to. Another show when I was at Pushkin that ended up being really successful and the host did not have a social following was A Slight Change of Plans, hosted by Maya Shankar.

And so she had a high profile in certain circles. She worked in the White House. She's a cognitive psychologist. She was a child prodigy on the violin, went to Juilliard, but she did not have, she wasn't an internet influencer or anything like that, did not have a book out yet. But she wanted to host this podcast so genuinely and was so 100 percent committed to building an audience and making this successful, even though she has a full time job at Google.

She just like worked, you know, her butt off networking, just building that audience. And I think the listeners can genuinely hear that. And the show is about transformative moments in people's lives. And so also, when she brought that pitch to us, I like to always say that the most popular podcasts are either crime or self help, which is like, what does that say about humanity?

But it's true. If you look, it's like either about improving ourselves or about, you know, death and murder. The true yin and yang of podcasting. So she was like hitting the spot that people can relate to emotionally. How, how can, you know, helping you as a listener get through tough times because people are sharing these stories about how a big change in their life occurred and how they grew from that experience.

So, I just want to bring that up as an example to say, you might want to check the boxes of a host that you consider that has some kind of built in audience, but she didn't have that, and yet the show was a success because of her genuine drive and the subject matter and the simple yet very compelling structure of that show of even though it's an interview, I would call it a narrative interview because the guests can tell this story of something happening in their lives this transitional moment and then sort of the denouement if you will after that.

Jeff Umbro: I was hoping you could walk us through the actual process of making a show and from idea to publication, in broad strokes, like what are the actual things that you do in order to capture that journey and put it out in a consumable manner.

Leital Molad: Maybe I can use A Slight Change of Plans as an example, because I was more hands on involved with that.

So that began as a pitch that Maya Shankar, the host, emailed to us, the pitch landed in my inbox. My, my colleague, Justine and I worked in development with me. We, we talked about it. Then we would bring it to our, our weekly pitch meeting that had different people from the company to evaluate an idea creatively with.

And then in that conversation, there were people from the marketing team as well. And so in that very first conversation where first the development team department, we're bringing a pitch that we think is worthy of discussion. We bring it to, you know, a group of, let's say, eight to 10 colleagues to get their different perspectives on how does this idea resonate creatively?

Do we think it's executable? How much do we think roughly it'll cost? And do we think there's an audience for the show? After that, if there's consensus that we want to put the show into development, then we do that. And so that's when we would begin making a deal with the talent for a pilot, and then we would, we created a pilot internally, that then we also evaluated at the end of that, let's say, six to eight week process of recording an episode, then bringing it to a team to listen.

I created this Google form to evaluate the pilot, then once again, we bring that to the group. And then the business team would do a bit of a financial analysis too, just trying to do some audience projections. And again, all of this is a gamble. You're just making your best, your best guesses on this.

Jeff Umbro: That's very smart, though, to bring in all of those parties before you even start production to, to Just make sure you have buy in and consensus on whether it's a good idea or not, because you, you can always be a little bit biased. It's just you or you or a couple people, you know?

Leital Molad: That's right. Yeah. So it's really important to evaluate a show idea both creatively and from a business perspective.

Once all parties are aligned and we decide that this is worth doing, then there's the step of building a production team. And so that would be the stage where I'd start to work with the head of production to figure out who's working on the show, what the production workflow is going to be, how many episodes we're going to make, and then also somewhere in that process, then a deal is made with the talent for however many seasons of the show.

Jeff Umbro: When you're negotiating with the talent and you make the pilot and you guys are all happy with that, do you include a trigger clause or anything in that initial pilot contract saying that like, if you want to move forward, these are the terms in which we're going to do it, or does that come later?

Leital Molad: I've done it a couple of different ways.

I would say that's probably the best. And actually, starting when I was at First Look Media, we did what they, we call the "step to deal," which would have the terms for development. And then yes, had the, what you're calling a trigger clause, sort of then if, if green lit, then these are the terms.

There's pluses and minuses to doing it that way. On the plus side, once you've gone through development, if you want a green light, then you can move quickly. You don't have to enter into negotiation again. But then on the minus side, then that's just going to take longer to negotiate before you start development. So there have been some cases, sort of case by case basis, where we decided, you know what, it will be simpler to just create a development deal right now that will allow us to pilot for a certain period of time.

And then, if we think this is worth doing, then we'll answer into a negotiation for production. So there's, yeah there's two different ways you could do it. Toward the end of the development process is really just the handoff to production. And so, right now, at WaitWhat, I've been working on developing a show that's gonna come out in September that I'm really excited about, that unfortunately I can't share too many details, but it's, it's a show about AI.

I've been working very closely with the host and the, the small but mighty production team. Eventually I'll be stepping away and Eve Troeh, our EP, will be, you know, overseeing that show, but right now I'm very hands on in, in the shaping of it.

Jeff Umbro: So you're involved in the development of the show, you hand it off to production.

Is there a point in which you come back into the equation to like discuss future iterations of the show or is it traditionally just, you'll be there to decide if you guys want to continue with it, and then it sticks with production from there.

Leital Molad: What's nice about WaitWhat is it's very small right now, and we have two active shows at the moment, soon to have a third.

And so I'm able to be more, I do pop into production meetings and editorial meetings every once in a while. So I would say it's not it's not a total like brush my hands off. But at Pushkin, when we were up to about 30 shows, I definitely did not have my hands in all those shows. We did do at Pushkin an evaluation process when we had to decide if we were going to renew a contract or if it was a seasonal show or do another season, we would do like a kind of big picture post mortem.

Jeff Umbro: That's smart. And you look at like how much money it made and how much it didn't and how much it cost you.

Leital Molad: That's right.

Jeff Umbro: Cool. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your role as a professor. It strikes me that that's a very smart thing to do because you're able to kind of zoom out a little bit for what you're doing on the day to day and also chat with the next generation.

What do you hope your students take away from the coursework with you?

Leital Molad: The students that I happen to work with are not strictly journalism students. A lot of them come from a design background. But they are in this program learning to write and research. And so I would say a small percentage of them are hardcore podcast listeners, but the majority are not.

And so really my main goal is just to instill an appreciation for the media and also to, as like creators and writers to really understand and think about what goes into powerful audio storytelling. And if I can just inspire a handful of them to ever do work that's audio related and, and definitely there's always like a handful of them who do, like that's really satisfying.

But even if they just grow in appreciation for the medium, that's great. Now I have done other workshops where people are already more interested in making podcasts. And then I just want them to, you know, to give them the tools that it's really not rocket science. It's, it's really quite simple. For example, you know, the, the secret to writing well for the ear is to write more simply, to write like you talk.

That's, and, and so people don't know that. I remember when I first started journalism school at NYU, I didn't know that either. I, I thought, oh, well, you know. If I study the print track, that probably has more in common with the kind of writing on This American Life than the broadcast television would, but I was wrong.

As far as, yeah, what do I want to give students is just really just an appreciation for, for the medium to begin with.

Jeff Umbro: I was a writing major in college, which was awesome. I loved every second of it, but my first interview post college, I was completely clueless as to like what I was actually hoping to do for a career.

I had an interview with a big publisher and I walked into that meeting and they're like, so why are you interested in, you know, X, Y, or Z department as opposed to ABC department? And my answer was, was not good. I did not get the job. How are you preparing your students for like career thoughts as opposed to just like, you know, a love of the, of the craft?

Leital Molad: I definitely have real talk about the industry and I really try to emphasize the importance of being on a staff of a show and how valuable it is to be a producer for another host and that, A, you're more likely to get a job that way, but B, that's going to give you invaluable skills. You know, it's typical that YouTube generation to think like, just think about, I'm going to become a star in this like DIY way.

Although now it's funny in like the current economy where the job market being tight in podcasting. On the flip side, I would maybe encourage people to do a little bit of DIY stuff and, and play on your own and learn how to make stuff and put it out yourself, even in a lo fi way, because that will give you experience and help you get a foot in the door.

I actually just hired someone who's awesome, who had reached out to me when we were hiring for an associate producer. He had reached out to me on LinkedIn and he made his own podcast for seven years on the side. And I thought it was fantastic. He had, he was working in a completely different field. He was working in immigrant resettlement and he had been a psychology major.

And he just said he was really itching to, he, he maybe had a little bit of experience of working on someone else's podcast and YouTube show for about a year. But I thought, I want to give this person, a chance like this is really great. So kind of contradicting myself where for a while I feel like I was really telling people stop trying to be a star, get a job. You need to, you know, be humble, learn how to produce for somewhere, someone else, which is still valuable.

But then now if the market is tight, sure, make your own thing.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. Well, it's about being versatile. And I come from a world where I was kind of like a, a DIY kind of producer slash host slash writer slash business person.

And I figured it out eventually, but it was so hard. And like, I am so happy now that I've done it. In hindsight, like I should have gotten that like assistant associate producer job somewhere and like, just learned how to build systems and how to work with other people.

You and WaitWhat have had a lot of topics and discussions surrounding the idea of how to use AI in podcasting. Can you talk a little about the Listener Bill of Rights?

Leital Molad: Yes. What inspired this is, so Reid Hoffman created an AI avatar of himself. Actually, he, he has two, he has a synthetic like video clone, but then he also was working on a voice clone, which we have dubbed "Reid ish."

Now, we did a whole episode about it, just sort of exploring, going behind the scenes, how it was made, why he wanted to make it, how might we use it. And really presenting it as a potential solution for a host who is very busy traveling the world all the time, and that voiceover is not his favorite thing to do.

He likes interviewing, but if you listen to the episode, it's really funny. It sort of opens with, with Reid, you know, stumbling on the mic and getting very frustrated. So this sort of opened the door to us talking about how and when would we use AI and, you know, Reid is very, I mean, it's an understatement to say like enthusiastic and hopeful about the applications of AI, but not, you know, Pollyanna ish, you know, definitely thinking about that there are ethical questions here and there are obviously issues of we, at WaitWhat, and him, you know, wanting to be transparent with our audience about how and when it's being used. So that inspired us to come up with an AI Listener's Bill of Rights, which is on the web, publicly available. It's open for anyone to sign on to it, and really we were asking other folks in media and podcasting specifically to sign on to this living document about what our promise is to the listener.

There are things such as, you know, always disclosing when there's the use of AI, never using AI to synthesize someone's voice without their consent, things like that. So you can check it out online. It outlines a number of different tenants for how we would use it.

Jeff Umbro: What's the response been so far?

Leital Molad: It's been good, though I would say when I initially, you know, a bunch of us sent it out to people we knew in the industry and a number of folks were hesitant to sign on from various companies were saying, yeah, we're definitely talking about and thinking about this but we're not ready to, you know, sign on to a certain set of standards or I had another company say we're actually coming up with our own guidelines.

So I think we're really early on this but, you know, hoping that it'll, it'll catch on.

Jeff Umbro: And most people don't even know like what's already out there as opposed to like what's coming.

Leital Molad: We're doing, I think I mentioned earlier, a new show that is all about AI and not just the technology and business behind it, but we're really going to look at it as a societal shift.

I think Reid likes to talk about it as the steam engine of the mind. You can think about it like the invention of electricity or any kind of momentum, or invention of the internet. So we're going to talk about it in all facets of society. So I hope that will, you know, raise the profile and get that audience also specifically thinking about these things.

I mean, the first time it was really on my radar, maybe yours too, the ethics of it was when the documentary about Anthony Bourdain came out. They cloned Anthony Bourdain's voice to, after he had died, to read, to voice a letter that he had written. And so there was this big like brouhaha about it of like, they didn't disclose it and, and all this stuff.

So that was the first time that I, at least in my circles, that we really started talking about it and the ethics of it. And so, yeah, the more that this becomes more common and these tools are more available, we wanted to make people aware and not, but very much not be afraid of it. Like we want to be very technology forward and play with these tools and show people how like you can do cool stuff with this.

How can it free up, free us up from work that we may not want to do. So you could hear that episode for Reid's synthetic voice, it's not text to voice, it's a voice to voice. So someone still has, a human has to voice it and then it recreates it in Reid's voice. So we go through a waterfall of different producers trying to do Reid's voice.

And one of them is British. It comes out a British accent. Another person, you know, like her voice is too high. And, you know, she's like, I sound like a, a scared forest animal. So there's just, we want to be really forward thinking with, with experimenting with these tools while being mindful and ethical.

Jeff Umbro: What are some of the tools that you're using so far that you found to be like really effective?

Leital Molad: All of our producers use Descript. And so I think as, you know, many podcasters do. And I know that they do use AI for their, you know, text to audio editing anyway, sort of in the background, but we do use their AI voice creation tool just for scratch tracks.

So that's something we use almost every day. If a producer writes the script in Descript, and then it'll just do that kind of, it's kind of a funny, weird robot voice, but you can, I think you can train it to learn your voice as well. We have a staff researcher, I think he uses Perplexity and Claude and ChatGPT to come up with different things.

I've used ChatGPT to help me with synthesizing ideas. We did do an episode with the Reid ish voice using the AI for his voiceover after we did the behind the scenes episode. We haven't used it much after that, but we do have the intention to use it selectively.

Jeff Umbro: What are you most scared of when it comes to AI in the podcast workplace?

Leital Molad: Everyone probably thinks about this as, is AI going to take my job away? And I have to say that as someone who, I started in radio at the dawn of digital editing, so I didn't, so tape cutting was just some setting. I never learned how to cut tape physically. So Pro Tools had just come out, it was like the early 2000s.

And so I'm sure the generation before me was freaked out by that, right? Where you could do an infinite number of edits and that has different, it's interesting that these tools have different creative implications, right? It can affect the product. So I would say when Descript first came out and this idea of editing audio using text rather than the actual audio file was somewhat horrifying to me.

I'm coming around to it and the value of it. It's definitely wonderful that you don't have to, when I used to have to type out transcripts of my own raw tape or logs, I'm a horrible typist. And so that was just so painful trying to read through what I'd, what I typed. So that's a beautiful thing, the fact that you can put your audio into this machine, it spits out a transcript almost instantly, and you can pick your selects.

I think that's great, but I definitely was threatened and I'm still a little bit. I, I do still make my students use Pro Tools after Descript because I don't feel like doing the fine tune editing within there is a substitute for editing it in a digital audio workstation. Like, I'm still.

Jeff Umbro: Exactly how we do it at Podglomerate.

Leital Molad: There's things like that, right? I mean, as the AI gets better and better, is it going to completely phase out the skill that I and my peers learned? That's definitely one concern.

Jeff Umbro: What are you most optimistic about when it comes to AI and podcasting?

Leital Molad: Saving time on the more tedious tasks and allowing time for bigger, more creative thinking.

I mean, I would love to get better versed in, I'm not using AI quite yet in sort of organizational or project management tools very much yet. I mean, I think those things are just starting to come out and be more commonly used, but I would love to have AI save time in more of the building production workflow or the checklists, the spreadsheets, all that kind of budgets to free up more time for creative thinking, because even when I was a younger producer, there was always that struggle of being so much in the weeds of making what you have to do today for tomorrow's deadline versus zooming out and having time to, what are the, you know, they do at Google, like the 20 percent that you need time for big ideas or going out there or, experiencing the world to come up with ideas.

I think that's so important in what we do.

Jeff Umbro: And I will say that AI is becoming kind of essential when it comes to that idea. We use four or five tools in our day to day that save us so much time, even just like a note taker on Zoom or something. There's somebody who doesn't have to take notes. It is getting better and better every day.

I do hesitate to use this sometimes because like everything else, the more efficient we get, historically speaking, the more work we do as opposed to like the more time we save.

Leital Molad: Yes, yes.

Jeff Umbro: I'm being very cognizant of that. Do you have anything that like, we should ask you about that we haven't yet?

Leital Molad: Even though I can't share details, I'd like to just give a plug that in the fall, there's going to be more news coming out of WaitWhat and I'm really excited for that moment. So this, this new show and a couple of other things up our sleeves.

Jeff Umbro: Well, thank you so much for joining us. This was awesome.

Leital Molad: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you so much to Leital Molad for joining us on the show this week. You can find her on LinkedIn at Leital Molad, L E I T A L M O L A D, or you can head over to waitwhat.com.

For more podcast related news, info, and takes, you can follow me on Twitter @JeffUmbro. Podcast Perspectives is a production of The Podglomerate.

If you're looking for help producing, marketing, or monetizing your podcast, you can find us at Podglomerate.com. Shoot us an email at listen@thepodglomerate.com or follow us on all social platforms @podglomerate or @podglomeratepods. This episode was produced by Chris Boniello, and myself, Jeff Umbro.

This episode was edited and mixed by Jose Roman. And thank you to our marketing team, Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Annabella Pena, and Vanessa Ullman. And a special thank you to Dan Christo and Tiffany Dean. Thank you for listening and I'll catch you all in two weeks.