Screaming in the Cloud - AI, Authenticity, and the Future of Podcasting with Chris Hill

Episode Date: February 19, 2026

This week on Screaming in the Cloud, Corey sits down with Chris Hill, CEO of Humble Pod, to talk about the messy, nuanced reality of AI in media. From secretly cloning Corey’s voice for an ad using ElevenLabs (and almost getting away with it) to the growing tension between polished production and authentic content, they unpack what AI can actually do versus what it claims to do.They explore the shifting economics of podcasting, the rise of video-first formats, Netflix’s entrance into the space, and why “good enough” production often beats expensive studio perfection. It’s a candid conversation about trust, automation, creative integrity, and why sometimes the most dangerous AI use case is the one no one notices.Show Highlights:(00:00) The AI Voice Clone Ad Nobody Noticed(00:44) 700 Episodes In: Catching Up with Humble Pod’s Chris Hill(01:16) New Studio, New Vibes: Building a Podcast Space in Tennessee(01:51) AI in Podcasting Workflows: Riverside, Editing Promises & Human Judgment(07:50) Authenticity vs Production Value + Duckbill Hiring & Product Shift(14:05) Renewals, churn, and why point solutions fail(14:15) The Doc Tools saga: building the wrong thing (and Disney lawyers)(15:15) Bahamas studio build: consulting where quality really matters(16:34) Gear talk & pro tips: teleprompters, cameras, and looking at the lens(18:50) Podcasting goes video-first: clips, discovery, TikTok, and the wrap-upAbout Chris Hill: Chris Hill is a Knoxville, TN native and founder of Humble Pod, where he helps brands, startups, and thought leaders develop, launch, and grow podcasts across the U.S. and beyond. He works with clients ranging from local Knoxville businesses to entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and around the world.Chris is the co-host and producer of Our Humble Beer Podcast and lectures on podcasting and marketing at the University of Tennessee. He earned his undergraduate degree in Marketing & Entrepreneurship from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and later received his MBA from King University.He currently serves as President of the American Marketing Association Knoxville chapter and enjoys supporting the local craft beer community, traveling internationally, and exploring the outdoors.Links: Humblepod: https://www.humblepod.com/Sponsored by: duckbillhq.com

We had gotten into a situation where we were in a pinch to get an ad recorded. You were too busy to do it. We just went and had AI. I think it was traveling at the time. Yeah, you were traveling at the time. And we had AI actually, you know, like emulate your voice based on things, 11, 11 labs. And we used them to create your whole script. And then we cut it down to size.

We got it ready to go. And we got it out there. And nobody ever noticed. And to me, looking back on that ad, because I went back and listened to it like in the last year or two. and I remember going, that was bad. How did nobody catch that? One person did and emailed me and asked if I had a cold. It's insane.

Yeah. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. It has been a month of Sunday since I've talked to today's guest, Chris Hill. You are the CEO slash owner of HumblePod, the production company that has been producing this podcast nearly since the beginning, now that we're 700 and however many episodes in, it feels almost like a fever dream. How have you been? Been good, man. It's been living the fever dream, if you will. So what are you up to these days? What's new? What's different? What's exciting? Oh, man, so much is new and different and

exciting for us right now. We finally have physical studio space here in Tennessee, which is pretty awesome. We have an office, which I'm calling you from, you know, which is extra awesome too. In fact, half of today I was hoping to be able to get into the studio, but long story short, didn't work out. We have an amazing studio we don't use. You'll have to go and watch my podcast. We built this brand to see some of the studio interviews we've done there. I see some of them on TikTok in the evenings as I'm scrolling through. You're generally wearing a dinosaur onesie?

That's actually our un-podcasts that we're doing just to kind of market and promote the company. So I have to ask, it's sort of the way of the world these days. AI. It's on everyone's tongue, mostly because big companies won't shut the hell up about it. any given opportunity. How has it impacted you folks, your workflows, how you've been addressing these things, if at all? At every turn, I feel like for what we're doing with AI, I mean, we're on Riverside recording this right now. And I think that's a great example of where podcasting is with AI. Riverside wants to do everything for you, down to the editing now. It says, hey, let us edit your

podcast. Let us give you all these highlighted clips. Let us do all these things. And the minute you go, okay and let it do that, it just, it doesn't work. It doesn't work well. It'll do it. It'll give you half of an episode or it'll give you most of what you need, but it's, it's not 100% of the way there. And not that we would ever rely on an AI editor to begin with, but just the fact that it's, it's there and it's trying to push it forward. It just feels like AI is being forced into everything, and this is just another example of that for us. So, I mean, I hate to be cynical about it, but for us, it's like, yeah, we use it in some places, transcripts that's really helpful, with. It is helpful to source, you know, when you're looking up a lot of content to promote,

it's nice to be able to pull things a little faster, but we still find ourselves almost every time going back and relying on the human at the end of the connection to actually make the executive decisions on things. I find that there's a spectrum of jobs that have gone the way of being largely automated. My brother, for example, is at the absolute top of the list. because for a decade, among other things, he has been a freelance translator. He picks up languages the way that some people pick up JavaScript frameworks. It is insane. And it went from all kinds of work all the time to only very specific, very sensitive legal issues

where a misplaced comma will have consequences. So it has to be pristine and precise. But for everything else, like if I want to send a love note to my wife in Swedish, some god-forsaken reason, AI can do a decent enough job of that because the consequences, presumably are not catastrophic. Can't wait to bork, bork, bork, bork, it'll be great. Sorry, I just got the bork, bork, bork reference. There we go. Sesame Street has haunted us all for folks of a certain age. Oh, yes. Yeah. I mean, I'm a Muppets lover for life. But yeah, with every time I see something new

that says, AI can do this now? And it's like, can it? And you go and try it. It's like, not really. It can get you so far, but it can't get you all the way. Yeah, because the other side of it is, like the other end of the extreme end of that spectrum, of things you think AI could do, legal work. Because, yeah, it can absolutely spit out a boilerplate NDA. Terrific. Awesome. Great.

And I showed one of these to my wife. And it was, a picture of someone doesn't know how to code came up to an engineer. It was with Baby's first website. Like, that's great. Now, here's what the challenges with this are and so on and so forth. or someone, in your case, someone who records their first podcast over a walkie-talkie. Same approach. Okay, it's a start.

Let's go deeper. How does this get interpreted? What are the actual things you're looking to defend against? What is your theory of mind of how this is going to play out? What is the risk you were attempting to mitigate? How do you view this? There are a lot of nuances on these things. Watching lawyers go back and forth with red lines with each other.

They are speaking a form of their own language. There's a reason that legalese is a thing. There are terms of art that have explicit interpretive meanings on this. And as someone who sits in the cheap seats of the legal world, I spent years moderating the legal advice subreddit, if that should give you some idea, basically telling people, no, you can't sue a dog. But watching, like, there's a lot that goes into that.

I've learned that pro se or pro per, which means self-representation, is a Latin phrase that literally means you're about to see some bullshit. And judges generally tend to give those folks a wide degree of latitude. Because they're obviously not lawyers. They don't know how this stuff works. But the things that they come up with are just insane. They're absolutely insane.

It is the wrong side of the Dunning-Kroger curve, where most of us who are not in the legal field don't know what we don't know to the point where it seems objectively nuts. Something I have found has been that, I, people started accusing me on a relatively regular basis now of having used AI to write things. And I did some checking. And I have blog posts that are dripping, dripping with AI signed, except for the minor part that I wrote them in 2019. And if I had a functioning LLM of that quality back then, why am I not a billionaire?

Is that excellent question? No, I'm a professional writer. And these things learn from us. And I'm not going to stop using M dashes just because everyone thinks robots did it. But someone did ask me. And you'll answer to this one. When are you going to start using AI to record parts of your podcast, which I always chuckle at because only one person ever noticed. Tell the story.

Oh, man. That was an ad. If I'm thinking of the right story here. You are. We had gotten into a situation where someone was, well, we were in a pinch to get an ad recorded. You were too busy to do it. We just went and had AI. I think it was traveling at the time.

Yeah, you were traveling at the time. we had AI actually, you know, like emulate your voice based on things, 11, 11 labs. And we, we used them to create your whole script. And then we cut it down the size. We got it ready to go. And we got it out there. And nobody ever noticed. And to me, looking back on that ad, because I went back and listened to it like in the last year or two.

And I remember going, that was bad. How did nobody catch that? One person did. And emailed me and asked if I had a cold. It's insane. Yeah. AI used right can be very subtle and can be very useful and can be very dangerous by that same point. Because like you said, years ago, someone called and said, hey, that was a cold.

But today, I mean, with that new technology, even with 11 labs where it's at now, the dialogue that it's able to sample and what it's able to do is even more convincing and more effective than what it used to be. That's a scary thing. We can't believe that we see or hear anymore. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the reasons why what we're seeing right now with a lot of the digital media trends is actually a, almost like a devolving of content creation, where you're looking for content that looks homemade, you're looking for content that has a lower fidelity quality to it,

because people want to see that you did this at home, that you really did the content, the way it was expected to be, versus, you know, in a professional studio where that professional studio could have been drawn up by AI and, you know, manipulated in any number of ways because it looks too polished. And people are really starting to suss that out. I think that's one of the things that we're learning to balance over this next year with podcast content and with other media content is creating it in a way that feels authentic to people and not just the best quality, best camera, best equipment that we can come out with.

Does it matter and does it help to have high quality stuff? Absolutely. But once you get to a certain level at it, you know, people are going to start noticing if it sounds too polished. This starts to sound a little weird. In fact, I've said this for years that people over index on production value. If your content is good, and I do strive to have good content, people will crawl over broken glass to listen to it on some level. Like, okay, you record it into an iPhone in your car. Great.

People will do that. Whereas if the content is not good, it does not matter. It does not matter how many hundreds of thousands of dollars you put into a studio build out. No one's going to care. Because at that point, what's the value? Attention is the currency that people care about here. And then there's a point of, yeah, there's diminishing returns. Like, is this the best microphone in the universe?

No, but to upgrade meaningfully from this, I've got to do a whole build-a-studio build-out here. And at this point, people can understand what I'm saying. They are wincing through crackling and cutouts and whatnot to hear what I'm saying. It is good enough. Yeah, and I think that good enough is kind of the balance of what most people are looking for is what is good enough to be good enough, but not still be bad. And, you know, after a while, you know, quality can get so bad that people will stop listening.

But, again, it comes down to the content. And that's where we really try to focus on HumblePod with our customers is making sure that they're creating good content first. Because if you don't have that mission, if you don't have that vision for what you're going to do, if you don't have a message, you want to spend time sharing with people and you don't have engaging content to begin with, people are just going to turn it off, stop listening and not care to begin with. So, yeah, that becomes the really hard thing. And what drives really authentic, effective content is just that, people being authentic. And creating stuff that people want to listen to is hard. Yeah. Our processes have changed, too.

We don't do add insertions anymore because it took me two years to get off of it. But we don't have sponsors at this point other than my own company, which speak of the devil. If you're looking to do something a bit different that isn't dripping with AI in every sense, but still understands how it works. We're hiring software engineers in San Francisco at Duckbill. You can find out more at Duckbillhq.com. Click on the careers page. It's listed clearly at the bottom. If you can't find that, I'm predicting some challenges with the rest of the software engineering process.

And also that I don't know off the top of my head, what the slug is because we just redid our website, which looks glorious and has 80% less platypus now, which I am coming to terms with. We are building software to help companies manage their complex cloud estates. It's a special kind of problem for special kind of people. If that's you, please reach out. See, now I'm doing ads real time. I never felt I could do that before because if I I don't know this is sponsored by Tinder for Pets date a dog and like or whatever company is and then somewhat the guest is like oh I used them before it was shitty like I'm going to have a problem whereas now it's like oh if you're going to have

a problem with the thing that I'm building okay let's dance I'm thrilled to have that conversation and I'm not going to have to deal with an angry phone call from a sponsor that what the hell with that. But honestly, it feels like an overblown concern because I always had a vetting process for sponsors where the two rules were basic. You aren't allowed to lie to the audience and you have to convince me that used as directed for the right problem. It would not make customers' situation worse. Because I don't want to be Billy Mays. I don't want to be pitching things that change every week that I don't know anything about that get people in trouble. I don't want to be a spokesperson.

Yeah. Yeah. But for my own stuff, I have to be. And, you know, that's the job. I mean, we have to be shills for our own businesses. I mean, that's just part of it. Yeah, but he can't do it compellingly instead of sounding like, well, here's the word someone wrote for me to put in my mouth.

And all right, great. Like, I just think off the top I had it contemporaneously. What are we trying to do this week? Oh, yeah, we're hiring. That's our big thing. Let's talk about that aspect. And that's exciting, too, because you've got, y'all have quite the business change and shift over there too. Have you talked about that on the podcast at all? Or I'm curious if anybody

knows what the big duckbill shift is. Mike and I have recorded a launch video that goes in depth about this and you folks are editing. But as of this recording, it has not yet gone out, which I believe it will before this goes out, but sometimes cart before horse, welcome to the joys of media content scheduling. Yeah, we can cut this out if we need to. I will say that. No, we don't. Oh, please. We talk about it more, not less. We have Skyway, the product. When we started doing this, we were consulting services only, and the industry has evolved, the things that we focused on, hey, I can lower your AWS bill. First, that is not as hard as it used to be. People have gotten better at this. The tooling that cloud providers offer themselves is better. And two, optimization is a shitty software

business to be in because, wow, we brought you in and you blew 40% off of our AWS bill by not putting our credentials on GitHub anymore. Cool. What have you done for us lately? It's the renewal story and the churn that becomes a serious problem. It's a point solution. It doesn't solve the larger problem that customers have. We made an attempt at this a few years ago with Duck Tools. And it turns out we can build the wrong thing for several months without talking to customers. And, well, that didn't work.

And our amazing journey has come to an end. Back to services we went. We kept toying at the idea and talking to customers. And, well, people are buying it now, which is nice of them. And by the way, I love the marketing behind Duck Tools, especially, I mean, again, going back to childhood things, ducktails and the branding that you all did with that on the initial launch was great. Yeah, it was fun to play with, and we only really went into it on our amazing journey has come to an end blog post because it turns out that speaking of lawyers and Chachipity doing legal work, Disney's entertainment lawyers have absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever. Really? I didn't know that was a part of it.

No, imagine that. Wow. I'm not surprised, but, I mean, it's Disney's notorious for a, anything. Oh, you thought of a mouse. Seasoned Assist hits your desk before they finish the thought. So what are you working on these days? What do you have to show? Well, next week, I am off to the Bahamas. Wonderful. Yeah. My nanny is currently the Bahamas today. So yeah, popular season to go there. Yeah, I'll be working though. So we've got a client in the Bahamas and we're really excited about this one because we have been helping consult and help them build out a studio for themselves. And so we've been consulting on that, talking about quality and everything.

This is where quality matters. You know, you've got a client that comes in and wants to have, you know, to bring podcasts from all over the world to their Bahamas resort. And we've helped them create a studio. And I'm going down to sign off on it. Make sure everything's working right. Well, now I want to get myself on that podcast, whatever it might be, just so I can have an excuse to be there and then go diving. Oh, well, all you've got to do is book the studio. Seriously, book some interviews down there.

and you're good to go. But yeah, they're going to have a studio down there for people to come and record and film and produce and they're doing some big names. And it's been a really cool product to be, not product, project to be a part of. And yeah, we're excited for Humblepod too because this is our first big foray into this level of studio consulting.

Prior to this, it was helping you get everything ready. Remember back, we were one of your first, I think we were your first customer. Where it was fun because you were ramping up. and it felt like you were upgrading the equipment we had almost at a quarterly basis. And at some point, it's like I had an entire closet full of equipment long since donated of like Gen 1, Gen 2, Gen 3, and now we're on Gen 4, at which point it's like, okay, uncle, we're good, we're good. And there have been small piecemeal iterations here and there, but nothing egregious, nothing

completely redoing it because at some point the story becomes, okay, I don't make the content better, rather than the rest. Like even now, the camera I have, it looks great, but it is a piece of shit to manage. I would do so many different things with the camera. But at some point, it's like, okay, I am so far down the well now. Does this thing work? Have we gotten it to work right? Great.

We're just going to stay here for the time being. And a lot of the hardware hasn't changed that much. I mean, the microphone that you're using now, I mean, that thing is at least in design and in production, probably 40 or 50 years old. Yeah. There's no need to buy something new unless you really have a good, you know, business case for it. The one that did change that has been transformative and is so much less finicky than the old janky setup I had with a studio monitor and metal nonsense. The El Gato

teleprompter that I'm using right now is spectacular. It just acts as an extra monitor. Everything is just seem, it is lightweight. It is all self-contained. It is not eight pounds of metal on a relatively thin frame, it hangs off the front lens of the camera. It is so light and it doesn't break the camera. It is well done. Like one of my pro tips when it comes to doing these types of interviews is always make the screen as small as possible around the camera. So if you've got, if you've got a camera like mine is kind of in the middle of my monitor right now, put it, put the screen around there and look into that that way you're always looking forward and through it. So you don't always need a, you know, a teleprompter to make it look good. But the small you can make

it, the more you're going to be focused on that dot where you've got your camera light coming on. Honestly, in my case, the problem I have and the reason I want a bigger teleprompter is I'm a gentleman of a certain age, and my eyes are not what they once were. And looking like Mr. Magoo into the camera is not the most appealing visual thing here. And so I do want to ask you about this incidentally, since you see a lot of this. I started this as a podcast. I don't view myself as a YouTuber, even though we put the things on YouTube. I'm certainly not a streamer, though I think there is a way I can hook this up so people could listen in live if they wanted to.

But I think of this is primarily an audio first format. The fact that I have a camera on just means, oh, right, I should remember to put a shirt and pants on first. Is the media of podcasting shifting to embrace video in ways it previously had not? Yes. And that is one of the interesting pivots right now that we're seeing within podcasting is more and more content is going to video first. What that really means, especially for smaller shows that don't have a big audience,

is you need to make sure that you're creating short clips, short form content that promotes your show and get your name out there because that's how most people are going to discover you and engage with you. If I can, I'll make a note here for my writer. This will go in the show notes, basically. There's a great graphic that comes from one of the Podtrack. and Podtrack actually shows you the breakdown of views, not just by downloads, but by views on YouTube, and by the actual social media content number of views of the top, like, 10 or 20 podcast in the world. And it's really fascinating because some of them, like Joe Rogan, huge, heavy on audio video, right?

And mostly on audio, some on video, and very little on social media. And then, like Amy Poehler, who just won the first Golden Globe for podcasting. She won it for her podcast good hang. Most of her data is it's all social media views. And it's very little on the download side. Now, total downloads are still pretty big. So you've got to take that into account when you look at the graph. It's just fascinating to me how much visual elements are really starting to grow.

Speaking of things I'm going to do here in the next few weeks, I'm also headed to the on-air fest in New York. So when I'm there, if anybody's, if anybody hears this and happens to be there, come say hi. But one of the big things that they're talking about and one of the exciting things it's going to be there is Netflix. Netflix is getting into podcasting now. And if you look at the way that media is growing and shifting with that, it's because they're finding that people are listening passively or they're watching passively and they need more content that people can not necessarily put their eyeballs on to pay attention, you know, to hear in the background when, you know, they're looking for entertainment and they're looking for things to do. So if Netflix can provide a podcast, they're going to do that.

And so it's just wild, the shift that's coming to the industry in that regard. One thing I have noticed is that I, in the evenings, I will pull up TikTok to either mindlessly scroll or also curate funny videos to show my children because I'm not letting them on TikTok directly. It has a bit of an inappropriate problem. And I'm not talking like the sex stuff. I don't care truly. I don't, I feel like I'm out of step with America in that I do not give a crap if my children see naked people. compared to how much I care if they see just casual violence. And it is, but one of those things is banned and regulated heavily on these things.

And the other is like, he, he got shot in the face. Like, what the, am I the one who's nuts? Am I two European for that? I was about to say that's a very European perspective. But yeah, I think we do a lot of times. We're too prudish on the one side without even thinking about the amount of violence that we're showing our kids on the other. I mean, there have been times.

You know, I've got two young ones, and I've been raising them in a way that's like, oh, wow, that's too violent. Like things I used to watch as a kid, I'm like, that's too violent for them. I'm not going to show them, yeah. Let's watch Paw Patrol. It's safer. Oh, God. Oh, God. I have political opinions about Paw Patrol because when your kid wants to watch the same an end show 15 times, like, oh, you're going to build up a whole backstory on it.

Turns out I'm not alone in this. There's a subreddit for this, our slash Daniel Tiger conspiracy. Oh, I'm on there. It's amazing. But the reason I bring up TikTok is I, well, When I'm scrolling through and trying to find this fun stuff, and someone's like, I'm going to teach you how to use a database. I think is, no, you're not.

Flip. And I look at something more entertaining and light. But I do periodically watch excerpts from podcasts on it, the short form curated thing that is well done. And then it was, oh, I need to track that whole thing down and see what's going on. I experimented very briefly with it. But I don't, from my perspective, and it's probably one of me, my age position and a certain demographic, I inhabit it.

where I have a hard time seeing a sponsor story for TikTok content that makes sense for anything even remotely approaching enterprise software. Okay, great. You're selling T-shirts. I'm sure it does real well. But this is something else. Yeah. TikTok is its own, like, in TikTok is this way, YouTube is a little less this way now

when it comes to short form content, but they're very insular. They want you to stay on their platform, which is why you just said, oh, I saw that and then I'm interested, so then I go find it. Like, that is a process. You have to build up an audience and a following around those short form pieces of content to get people to the point where they're motivated enough to leave the platform that they're addicted to to find your show or to, you know, leave it just long enough to hit subscribe on Apple Podcasts or whatever they're listening on. Even with the sale to the TikTok shop, for example, I see things periodically I think are great, but I also know how this game works. And if I go and I buy the dumb thing on the TikTok shop,

it's going to haunt me around the internet for the rest of whatever. But what I'll do is I'll punch in the, whatever it is I'm looking for. Amazon always, always has the thing for less money than TikTok does. And that's single click. And then like you listen carefully and you hear a dude like squealing tires burning rubber around the corner as he like pulls a 720 spin into your front yard to hand you your package.

It's like, well, boy, are you at Amazon? on package because you came so quickly. I'm worried something truly messed up is happening behind the seeds. Yeah, same story. We recently started getting Amazon trucks around here, so I know what you're talking about. Here in San Francisco, we've had them for a while. Some places are doing with drones now, which is great. We had to smack into a building recently somewhere and they had to stop the thing. It's like, wow, Amazon drone strike. Genius. Yeah, around here they get shot, shot out of the sky by shotguns, I'm sure. I'm not at all surprised. It's like, have you heard of rednecks? They're everywhere.

So you're doing a fair bit of stuff of the podcast now. People want to go to learn more about what you're doing, how your process is. Get your advice on this stuff. Because I used to answer questions that people would say, oh, what gear should I use them? Like, up, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, talk to Chris. It's the right answer. I know it works for me. I am not you.

Great. I have different constraints. Talk to Chris. Where should they go to talk to Chris? Check out Humblepod.com. If you want to learn more about what we do, how we help people and get directly in touch with me, you can also find me on LinkedIn. I'm Chris Hill.

I'm one of a million, which is all. Always awesome. You can find me there and just about anywhere else online at Christophiles or HumblePod at HumblePod on all the major platforms outside of the one formerly known as Twitter. I'd forgotten I'd done that. So when I finished recording a weekly last week in AWS podcast, I have to let you know that it's been uploaded. So I built a custom Slack app. So I hit a button and it sends a notification off. And that Slack app is of course called Humble Prad, which I think is just awesome. And I did that without comment. And you're like, did you did. Did you? You just think, yes, I did. I loved it. I thought it was great.

You can't have fun with people's names because people are very sensitive about that, but company names are generally fair game. Oh, yeah, we use humble. Yeah, I'll use humble whatever. Like, if I can have an excuse to have a humble blog or, you know, some other humble thing, I will try and put humble behind it. The problem is there's already humble bundle and other companies out there using Humble a lot. baking combination, make a crumble pod.

Yeah, there we go. There we go. Thank you, Chris. It is always a pleasure to talk to you. Absolutely, Corey. Same to you. Chris Hill. CEO and owner of Humblepot, I'm cloud economist Gori Quinn, and this is screaming in the cloud.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please, leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry, insulting comment, and then we'll have Chris remove that particular platform from distribution.