The podcast about minivan campers!

Here’s where I cover topics from the blog and some additional thoughts on vanlife, camping, travel, and of course, DIY minivan builds.  Find me wherever you listen to podcasts!  If you don’t have a regular source for podcasts, I’ve set up a site so you can listen:

Click here for The Odyssey Camper Podcast!

You can also pick individual episodes at the bottom of this page.

The rest of the story:

Around 2018 I decided to start a podcast to interview interesting people that I had met, either in person, or on social media.  You can still find those episodes here, if you are interested.  I quickly realized that the format was not going to work because not many people had the software or equipment for online interviews.  So if I wasn’t going to be there in person, it probably wasn’t going to work.  Fast forward 6 years and someone asked me if I ever thought of starting an Odyssey Camper podcast.  I said, “No, I’m focusing on the blog writing right now.”  She then responded, “Oh, I don’t have time to read blogs, but I can listen to podcasts in the car.”   That’s when I realized that a lot of the people who were interested in the topic of minivan camping and travel, were never going to read my blog.  So, I decided to use the content on this blog as the basis for a podcast.

Enter, “AI”

As I write this in March of 2025, “AI” is a hot topic.  However, most of what people refer to as “AI” is actually some form of deep-learning or language model, not actual “artificial intelligence”.  This is what ChatGPT currently is, as is Google Notebook LM.  I use Notebook LM to digest large pieces of information at work, or to get an overview of a subject.  Basically, you can feed it videos, PDFs, and other files and it will summarize them.  A couple of neat things it can do are:

1. Use specific source material, rather than the whole of the internet.
2. Summarize the content as a simulated podcast “discussion”.

This gave me the idea to feed it one blog post at a time and have it generate a podcast for me.  The upsides were that I could quickly create a podcast to make my information accessible to a new audience, and not spend five hours a day doing it.  The downside was that it would not be ME talking in the podcast.  But, I figured that was less important, as the listeners probably wouldn’t know who I was, anyway.  So, I “converted” about ten blog posts into podcast episodes. I then shared it on Facebook and the response was…mixed.

“Where is Odyssey Camper and who is that woman?”

I got a little pushback on the fact that MY voice was not in the podcast, from my YouTube followers.  You can’t please everyone.  Even though I shared it because I thought some people might prefer to listen to my blog instead of reading it, it was a little jarring to people that already knew my voice.  So, I’ve started to create episodes as time allows, that ARE my voice.

Is this “AI generated content”?

This blog is 100% human generated, as is my YouTube channel (which should be painfully obvious to the viewer).  But what about the podcast?  Well, since the podcast “hosts” are using my blog post as the only source of information, I don’t consider it “AI generated”.  The AI is merely a tool that performs an audio translation of MY source material.

So, let’s see how this goes and I hope you find some value in MY NEW PODCAST!