Sowing Confusion: X App Satire Ad - The Story and Challenges that Come with Producing a Podcast Months in Advance

X branding logo

When the idea for this podcast officially came to life almost one year ago, I was seeking full time work and networking through various virtual and traditional methods.

There is an app called Lunchclub that I found and one of the individuals I matched up with recommended the approach of recording several podcast episodes until you had a few in the can and then release the product. They mentioned podcast work is intensive so you want to have a runway of episodes in reserve to keep going year-round.

I actually decided to go that route. Right now I am sticking with a seasonal approach but that is still subject to change between now and the start of January.

I started recording little bumpers and promos in February. Our premiere episode was recorded in March and did not debut until October 29th. I just finished this week a bonus holiday episode around 2AM Tuesday Morning that was recorded in the past month. That show is an exception to the rule because I spent hours getting it done ahead of a December 22nd launch date.

We taped the AI episode in April/May of this year and i went with X for the parody piece because I thought it fit in nicely having just done an AI episode. However, what you heard was a totally different production from the original piece as national news caused me to have to totally redo the whole bit between May and November.

The inspiration

While most of my humor is when I do advocacy, or has been in multimedia, i have attempted some standup comedy on occasion. The Twitter/X app piece was taking some old stand up material and remolding it to what has happened with X.

I did a stand up routine at my previous work where I did some dad jokes about twitter. At the time Twitter just increased the number of allowable characters in a tweet from 140 to 280. Part of my act mentioned how it was great that Twitter increased the number of characters but it was still way too low as I asked the audience, have you been on Twitter? Do you see what is posted on there? I have to ask myself does being on Twitter make me a twit???

So if you listen to the ad, you hear those lines about characters being increased to 280 but not going higher because of the upcoming initial public offering and Jack Dorsey liking the name Twitter because of the reference to the users being Twits those are nods to my old standup bit and taking those jokes and reinventing them for this script.

The Original Version

When I originally wrote this ad, I was going to have the voice AI actress be the actual CEO of Twitter Linda Yacarino. My ad was produced with Spruce introducing her and she even introduced herself to the audience as the CEO. I used a female Chat GPT female AI voice. The female Chat GPT voice that was originally used is important because of some challenges in producing the ad and inconsistencies with what Chat GPT will voice over for satire.

However, between May and December, an issue happened with Elon Musk's Grok AI system spewing Nazi hate speech. It was so bad, the CEO of X, resigned from the company resulting in the original produced ad not able to be used anymore. I learned a hard lesson that day. If you tape a podcast months in advance, you probably need to do the bit with a made up lower executive, which is how Jessica Stevenson the chief brand officer was born.

The original bit was written from the voice of the CEO, so while key jokes and elements were still the same, the script had to be written to fit the chief brand officer character.

The Writing Aspect

Over the years, we kept hearing for months and years about people getting "canceled" or doxed. A certain political side kept wringing their hands and saying "the Twitter mob canceled me", "I was put in Twitter jail", and "I was doxxed by Twitter." There were people who entered the limelight and when their old Tweets came to light, they claimed someone hacked into their system or some weird creature changed their tweet. It was all bizarre. There is a great "Black Mirror" Episode called "Hated in the Nation" that actually dealt with this topic and it is one of my favorite "Black Mirror" episodes.

With this in mind, and the name Twitter, the recent buy out, the "characters" on Twitter, people claiming old tweets were not theirs, the name change, and users lack refusing to take responsibility for prior bad choices, it was too good to not write a comical ad of how I felt about all of this.

When I originally wrote it, I wanted it to be as accurate historically as possible so i went and did a deep dive on the history of Twitter. I read up on when it was founded, a background on Twitter, and what the current Elon Musk leadership envisions the new rebranded X to be. Once i did that, I could then write some of that historic dialogue with made up satirical flourishes into it.

As mentioned, I originally wrote the script with the ad being Twitter/X's CEO talking to the audience about their history over almost 20 years, and how they are so different now, you should come back and rejoin the X family. I utilized actual terms like "the everything platform", key dates, and then added some made up stuff like capping the characters at 280 even though they knew they had thousands more from looking at the tweets people posted and the platform being called Twitter because posters were Twits.

When I wrote the original ad, I used all chat GPT voices. There was a problem getting my "Linda Yacarino" character to read the script. One of the punchlines in the ad is when you post something stupid, now you can say it was your X that did it or you can blame it on your x. Well, when it came time to coach Linda and i was telling her AI voice what to say, she would say, "I am sorry, I can't say that, it is against my terms and conditions." This ticked me off because the week before on our previous episode if you listen to Spruce's final thought, he says call the police.

Spruce's Call the Police Line from the AI Episode

I mentioned this previously, but outside of our all-inclusive holiday special, all of our episodes were taped in the order they air. In the AI episode, on Spruce's final thought, he begs the podcast audience to call the police. When I was engaging with him and gave him his lines, he stopped me and asked me if that was meant to be in jest? I said yes, it is a joke and he said okay I can say that.

Female Chat GPT Issue

If Spruce can clarify that it is in jest why couldn't the Linda character? The standards are inconsistent. What ended up happening is because she could say x app, I had to do some major surgery where I had to take individual words and patchwork quilt them together to have her say those phrases. You could tell it was choppily edited.

CEO Quits: A Blessing in Disguise

When Linda resigned from X, I then had to throw my arms up in the air and redo whole portions of the ad. There were small bits I was able to keep. The section where Spruce is talking in a little faster pace giving the disclaimer that they are not responsible for kerfuffles, that was able to be left alone. However, the female voice for Linda Yacarino no longer existed on Chat GPT. This resulted in a literal blessing in disguise.

As a result, I went to Eleven Labs and made a new female created voice. I came up with a character I named Jessica Stevenson who is the chief brand officer of X formerly Twitter. In Eleven Labs, when you create a voice character you can write up a description of who that voice character is and what they do. So I described Jessica as a public relations branding person who is speaking to old clientele who had left as well potential new customers who are looking for a social media channel to communicate their thoughts to the world. She is talking to the media, the audience and the public about Twitter/X, it's history, and why they should come be a part of X.

When the voices generated, it gave me three to choose from and i was blown away by the choices. The best part was when I wrote my script, there were no issues or elements where the Ai voice said, I cannot say that, it is against my terms and conditions. The Linda voice that was lost was the best thing that happened because I ended up with a different platform that did not censor itself from my script.

Key Takeaways

When writing a satire piece about something that is part of the current conversation, never get too specific in your satire like having the character be the actual CEO, especially if a podcast is pre-taped months ahead of time. This could result in hours of extra work due to staffing changes and/or corporate shake-ups.

Finally, be aware of the different AI platforms and their positives and negatives for producing skits. I had the pleasure of being at Neurodivergence 2025 and meeting Karla Starr. She is very knowledgable of AI systems and gave a great breakdown of the AI platforms at that conference. She can be found at kstarr.com. She is a very creative, quirky, and innovative person who is very bright in the field and was very helpful when I was producing this first season of the podcast as her charts helped me in a lot of ways get really good at my show as the season went on!