A Brief Look Ahead To 2026

We can all agree that 2025 felt like 5 years smashed into 1, right?

While I don’t expect things to drastically shift in 2026, I do hope we see more passion projects get funded and come to life. This year felt like an onslaught of AI news, most of which I find to be wildly unhelpful to the podcast industry (and every other creative industry).

We don’t need slop podcasts that are just being churned out to generate ad revenue. We don’t need people taking the human touch out of shows just to “streamline” the process.

My hope is that in 2026 people will realize how unenjoyable AI content is and we’ll start to swing back away from it. It might be wishful thinking, but in a year where so many terrible things happened, I’m refusing to think AI content is what people will actually consume and enjoy.

Some of my personal goals in 2026 are to reevaluate what shows I’m saying yes to working on. I’ve been known to just say yes to pretty much everything. But after losing 5 podcasts this year and quitting another, I’ve come to the realization that I need to start considering myself more in my decisions. We won’t do the math, but I do still have several podcasts that I work on, which means I have to work on way too many just to make a decent living. And I use the term decent lightly.

My hope for all of you is that you make the podcasts that you want to make in 2026 and that we all continue to create and foster a supportive podcast community.

I know I sure liked the industry better when it wasn’t flooded with celebrity podcasts. I get it, though, famous people bring an audience with them. I’d be willing to bet it’s not as big of an audience as these companies make it seem to justify the deals (this is pure speculation on my part and I’ll save my full rant about this for another day).

There’s no doubt that we’ll still continue to see more of a shift to video in 2026. I know I have some more video projects lined up, some of which I’m even hesitant to call podcasts, but to each their own.

All this said, I’ll leave you with one of the biggest lessons that I learned this year:

Podcasts can be amazing and fun, but bending over backwards to make a podcast at the expense of yourself and your health is never worth the price.

And here’s a look at what you can expect from the newsletter in 2026:

• Series! I have a lot of ideas rolling around, many of which can’t be put into one issue of the newsletter, so expect some series on editing, marketing, etc.

• Conversations with smart industry people! I’m not sure I’ll bring the podcast portion of this back, but I will talk to more people to bring you even more tips on how to make a great podcast.

• Rants! Let’s be honest, sometimes we just need to yell about what we want to see change in the industry.

• Recommendations! I’ll continue recommending podcasts that I think are doing unique things that we can all learn from.

Happy holidays everyone! I hope you all get to enjoy a break from the insanity of this year.

The Podcast Life will return on January 11, 2026.