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WP Will Page On Freakonomics Radio

“Let's imagine an AI automated show produced in real time. It could be a tragedy or a big event in the news. It happens so you can knock out that podcast before any human can get to market. Let's say it gets just 200 plays, okay? And you've got a $20 CPM on those 200 plays. That means you've earned … $4. And let's just slap a marginal cost down there of $3 in production costs. So that means you've made a dollar profit. And it's the ability to flood the market because plays mean money.”

Freakonomics Radio · Ideas & Essays · October 2026

“Let's imagine an AI automated show produced in real time. It could be a tragedy or a big event in the news. It happens so you can knock out that podcast before any human can get to market. Let's say it gets just 200 plays, okay? And you've got a $20 CPM on those 200 plays. That means you've earned … $4. And let's just slap a marginal cost down there of $3 in production costs. So that means you've made a dollar profit. And it's the ability to flood the market because plays mean money.” — Will Page, Freakonomics Radio

Page, introduced on the show as a former chief economist at Spotify, working through why AI-generated podcasts are flooding the directories. Each one earns almost nothing, but it costs even less to make, so the money is in volume. As he puts it right after, it has nothing to do with whether anyone keeps listening.

Freakonomics Radio · 2026-10-09 Listen to the episode → More from Will Page → More Ideas & Essays quotes →

Transcript

Freakonomics Radio Around 41:13 into the episode
Speaker 3

Meta, we don't just build here, we invest here. Learn more at meta.com/slash buildingohio.

Stephen J. Dubner

Over the past year, the podcast ecosystem has been flooded with AI-generated content. Here again is Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify.

Speaker 4

It was already easy to get to market as humans. It’s Show much easier to get to market with so much more volume when you're just AI slop, when there's no human in the mix. So let's imagine an AI automated show produced in real time. It could be a tragedy or a big event in the news. It happens so you can knock out that podcast before any human can get to market. Let's say it gets just 200 plays, okay? And you've got a $20 CPM on those 200 plays. That means you've earned mathematics here, $4. And let's just slap a marginal cost down there of $3 in production costs. So that means you've made a dollar profit. And it's the ability to flood the market because plays mean money. It's got nothing to do with retention.

Stephen J. Dubner

So is this a substitute or a complement to human-made podcasts then?

Speaker 4

So this is where it gets quite spicy. Dilution theory is real. A song lasts for four minutes of my time. A podcast asks for 40. AI slot podcast if it asks for 40 is 40 minutes that I can't give a human-created podcast as well. So it has real effects in terms of dilution because it's competing for…

Stephen J. Dubner

My name is Janine Wright. I am the co-founder and CEO of a company called Inception Point AI. We

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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