What's the deal with Inception Point AI? Plus, Ireland, and AudioAlways

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Announcement (00:00):
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The last word in podcastingnews.
This is the Pod News WeeklyReview with James Cridland and
Sam Sethi.

SamSethi (00:16):
I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod news.
And I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO ofTrueFans.

JeanineWright (00:22):
I'm releasing 3,000 episodes a week, and I
have eight people on my team.
There's no way we're listeningto the overwhelming majority of
our content before it'sreleased.

JamesCridland (00:29):
Jeanine Wright from Inception Point AI on those
AI-generated podcasts.

DylanHaskins (00:35):
Plus We really ought to have an award that
celebrates the industry on theisland of Ireland.

Dylan Haskins on the new All-Irish Podcast
Awards.
I say the audience cares.
Stuart Morgan from Audio alwayshas his thoughts.
This podcast is sponsored byBunsprout with the tools to
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From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly
Review.

SamSethi (01:06):
AI.
Does the AI stand for is anyoneinterested?
Because that's what it feelslike.
Tom Webbster's put out a reportthis week saying AI may be
coming to podcasting first, butno one can be made to like it.
What's he talking about?

What is he talking about?
Yes, this is new research whichwas unveiled by Sounds
Profitable this week, showingthat some parts of the
population are particularlywary, and particularly in terms
of this, is people who areslightly more educated.
I guess the worry there is ifyou do have a good education,
well perhaps that is what uh youfeel most threatened by with uh

(01:42):
AI.
But yet some good researchwhich is um which you'll find in
the sound profitable newsletterthis week.

SamSethi (01:49):
Now, last week at the end of the show, we started to
talk about AI tags and maybepeople uh self-reporting and a a
need for like the explicit tagand AI tag.
Well, a company called AdopterMedia called for an industry
standard, a majority AIdisclosure for podcasts.
It comes after Inception PointAI.

(02:10):
We're producing 3,000 episodesa week.
You were out there with them inCanada last week.
Did you have a chance to talkto them at all?

Yeah, I didn't uh chat with them particularly
around this point.
There were uh there were folksfrom Adopter Media at the event
that I was at, but not theperson that I've been talking to
here.
Yeah, I mean I think there'sabsolutely the call for an
industry standard disclosure,but not much understanding of
how they would do that.
And I've tried to get theminvolved with the uh good folks

(02:41):
at Podcasting 2.0 to see if theycan you know if we can both
work out the correct way ofdoing this.
There's lots of different waysof doing it, and it really
depends on what the advertiserswant here.
So I'm hoping that you know ifthat's a thing that people want
to do, then we should go for it.
But let's do it the right wayand do it the way that the
advertisers want to hear.

SamSethi (03:03):
There are two proposals in the podcasting 2.0
GitHub.
One is called uh the disclosuretag, and the other one is just
a standard extension to theperson tag.
So the disclosure tag, I think,is an overkill right now, where
you we, as an example, wouldhave to put disclosure, we use
WonderCraft, disclosure, we useD script, disclosure, we use

(03:25):
whatever, whatever.
I don't think anyone carespersonally how the product was
produced pre-production andpost-production.
I think the biggest uh uh Iguess pain point that people
feel is uh is this host reallyAI or is this a real person?
I think that's the only thingthat I personally care about.

I think it's more than that.
Are the words that the host isreading have they been checked
by a human being, or are theytotally the output of AI?
I think that that's actuallythe thing which is you know,
majority AI is the word here.
If i if it's uh human voiceswhich I have written that, you
know, I've got a cold this week,would I prefer that this v

(04:07):
voice was uh sounding better?
Well, maybe I'll use my AIclone.
That that that's certainly away of of of doing it, but it
was still my my own voices andmy own words.
So uh so I think it's acomplicated thing.
I think it's a nuanced thing,and I'm not sure that the people
tag cuts it, and I'm not surethat the uh disclosure tag cuts
it.
But neither of those I don'tthink actually matters.

(04:30):
I think the most importantthing here is what the
advertisers want.
And we still don't really knowwhat the advertisers are
actually wanting out there.
Adopter Media calling for adisclosure for majority AI, but
not really having any idea ofhow that disclosure might work.
So at the moment, you know,it's up to them really to work
out what that plan is.

SamSethi (04:50):
Well, uh on the last point on this, I think the
reason advertisers are callingfor it is because will people be
turned off by an AI voiced hostand therefore their ads within
it are going to therefore not beconsumed by people because they
won't listen to it.
But they may end up paying forit because it's still within the
download.
And that may be the reason whythey want better disclosure,

(05:11):
because maybe they don't want toput their ads into an AI-hosted
podcast at this time.
You know, maybe in the futurepeople get used to AI voiced
hosts and therefore it doesn'tbecome a problem.

But you're but you're suggesting that the
problem isn't AI voice, and I'msuggesting that the problem is
AI generated content.

SamSethi (05:40):
In the sense that I know there's no warmth to it.
I know that someone's trying tofool me into thinking that this
is a real human.
I think Yuri Naval said that inthe world of AI, more human
connection is better.
And I just don't want to havethat right now.
I don't want that AI voice uhinterface to what I want to
listen to.
That's just something I don'twant to do.

But there's but there's but there's a big
difference, obviously, betweenthe words that the AI voice is
reading, whether or not thoseare words which have been
through a human being and whichhave been checked to be actually
correct, and whether whether ornot they have to be able to do
that.
And I agree that that's m moreof the issue there.

SamSethi (06:17):
So look, there are some proposals.
I think this story's gonna beongoing.
So you know let's move on.
Now I I I've called thissection an inflection point in
AI because it's about InceptionPoint AI.
And maybe this is theinflection point.
So for the last few weeks we'vecovered Inception Point AI.
It's been using AI to makepodcasts.

(06:37):
So tell me more.

Yeah, uh so last week we mentioned a story on the
Australian ABC which reportedon the AI-generated podcasts
that this company has beenmaking for a presenter and
journalist and better summarizedit all by saying In researching
this and listening to so muchAI audio flag, I can't begin to
describe how unsettling it was.

LintonBesser (07:00):
A soundscape devoid of the most basic human
identity and intelligence.
And if that's the future, anaudio washing machine of
nonsense ideas and synthesizedrealities, we really are in more
trouble than perhaps we know.

Ouch.
Well, who better to interviewthis week than Janine Wright?

My name is Janine Wright, and I am the CEO of
Inception Point AI.

And what does Inception Point AI do and how do
you make shows?

Inception Point AI designs AI-generated
personalities and then launchesthem into the world as 360
creators, and we createAI-generated content on their
behalf across multiple differentplatforms.
And we've started and grown upin audio in the process.
We built what we believe to bethe world's largest independent

(07:51):
podcast company by Showcount.

From the reviews that I've seen of your work, I'm
wondering whether you're beingjudged a bit too much on the
early stuff which is there andnot necessarily uh some of the
stuff which is there now.

I mean, I think that's fair.
I mean, obviously that's partof what I said in in my piece
that we posted.
Yeah, I mean, at this point,we've created more than 160,000
episodes.
And we've been doing it formore than two years.
We were very early inexperimenting with AI.
This was early in our owncapabilities and early in AI's

(08:29):
capabilities.
And a lot of the stuff at thebeginning, I mean, frankly, it
really sucks.
You know, we go back and listento it and and we cringe.
But I understand this is a verycommon thing.
I've been working with creatorsin the podcasting space for
many years, and pretty muchwithout fail, everyone is
embarrassed about their firstepisode, their first season,

(08:51):
right?
Because it's it takes a whileto get practice and to get good.
But I've also been candid thateven some of the stuff that we
make today might not be good,right?
We still do a lot ofexperimentation.
And some of it lands and someof it doesn't.
And some of it, some of thestuff I really love, and some of

(09:12):
the stuff doesn't do it for me,but it does it for other
people.
And all of those things areokay.

I'm kind of looking at some of the ones that
you have been promotingrecently, and you know, some uh
uh the there are very fewreviews, listener reviews on
there.
Th there's one listener reviewfor Bloom and Banter, which is
hosted by Nigel Thistledown,somebody with a an accent almost
as ridiculous as mine.
And and that and that reviewisn't particularly positive,

(09:42):
shall we say?
I'm I'm wondering I'm wonderinghow many people I mean, you
know, frankly, is this an SEOplay?
Are you there flooding podcastdirectors with content and
hoping that people find thatcontent, you know, in terms of
SEO?
Or are you actually seeingpeople coming back again and

(10:02):
again?

Well, we're definitely seeing people coming
back again and again, which iswhy we're leaning into many of
our personalities.
I don't know if it's fair tosay like flooding with SEO.
There's lots of businesses thatmake content based on you know
what people are wanting andsearching for.
And perhaps that's a problemwith the way that we've been
doing podcasting in the past.

(10:22):
I mean, at some of thecompanies that I was at
previously, you would make thisbeautiful, brilliant, incredible
show and then title itsomething that nobody has ever
heard of.
And then you would have tospend huge amounts of money to
invest in telling people thatyou made this show and this is

(10:43):
the title of this show.
And then they would they wouldgo and they would have to type
in too candidly what are theselike rootementary search
directories that a lot of thesepodcast platforms have.
And you would hope and praythat they typed in exactly what
you titled this show so thatthey could try and find that.
And that was part of what droveup the content production,

(11:08):
marketing, and how it costs ofmaking content under this
traditional model, which hasresulted in I mean, really a
widespread immediately dramatic,but extinct extinction events
across our industry where we'reseeing you know, fitcher and
yellow and wondering less andyou know, Odyssey.

(11:31):
And I mean these thesecompanies that that are just not
finding sustainable businessmodels to continue to produce
original content or even youknow partner content profitably.
So yes, I mean if I'm gonnamake I know I've said this
before, if I'm gonna make apodcast about whales, we title

(11:53):
it whales because that way whenpeople are listen looking for
content on whales, they can findour content.

Yeah, it's the Max Cutler way of of of titling
a show, isn't it?
He had a he had a serialkillers uh show which was called
serial killers, and yeah,absolutely.

Exactly, yeah.
And then, you know, and then italso means because our time to
production is dramatically lessand our costs of production are
less, it means that we can surftrends much better than
traditional podcastingorganizations.
So a week ago when Charlie Kirkwas shot, we had content about

(12:30):
Charlie Kirk up, we had a livingbiography, we had a content,
and a new show about hisassassination up within an hour.
So when people typed CharlieKirk into Apple and Spotify, we
were three of the top fiveshows, even beating out the
Daily Mail.
The only one that was beatingus was the Charlie Kirk show.

(12:50):
So that means that we're ableto meet the need for content
that people want that they'relooking for in that moment.
And that's part that has notreally ever been part of the
commercial podcast businessmodel until now.
When his assassin was arrested,we had a new episode up within

(13:11):
15 minutes.

Did a human being check that first?

When we are producing political or news
related content, we weespecially when it's new shows
that we are launching, we listento the content before it
launches.
And we is part of the reasonwhy we haven't leaned into news
and politics quite yet, isbecause I think there still

(13:36):
needs to be human review and I'mnot even gonna say
editorializing, but still AI isnot so great at always capturing
the tone of the moment.
And and when you are craftingpersonalities that you want to
be complex, you have craftedinto these personalities things

(13:59):
like senses of humor and flawsand weaknesses and things.
And so sometimes they don'talways treat sensitive topics
with enough sensitivity, theydon't strike exactly the right
key cord.
And so as we think about newsand politics, we are figuring
out how do we build the rightinfrastructure that still

(14:22):
leverages AI and still isconsistent with our model, but
mitigates the risk of getting itwrong.
And that probably means that weneed to have a news, a
well-known news person who isreviewing that content before it
was released and is making surethat we're striking that we're

(14:46):
getting it right and strikingthe right tone.

Yeah.
So human review there isimportant, but human review for
a podcast about whether it'sknitting or about gardening
isn't necessarily as important.

Yeah, I mean, there's all sorts of levels of
risk, right, associated with thedifferent content.
I mean, so we we think aboutwhich ones need to be much more
curated and where we need to bemuch more careful.
And then we also really examineand stay on top of what are the
capabilities of the tools,right?

(15:19):
AI still struggles withnumbers, right?
I would not rely on AI to doyour math homework, right?
So there's when we're thinkingabout current like what are the
topics that we want to cover, welean into the things that we
know that AI is really good at,for which we are less concerned

(15:42):
about you know any any potentialdownside risk if it's giving,
you know, health and wellnessadvice.
We're gonna want to make surethat we're doing more to pull
from multiple different sourcesand mitigate against
hallucinations, and thatsomebody is involved in
listening and reviewing thecontent before it's released.

(16:03):
But yeah, I mean, I'm releasing3,000 episodes a week and I
have eight people on my team.
There's no way we're listeningto all the content.
There's no way we're listeningto the overwhelming majority of
our content before it'sreleased.

There's one podcast directory out there
removing AI-generated podcastsfrom its directory.
What's your thoughts on that?

I think that it's an antiquated thinking.
I think that in very shortamount of time, if I can make
yet another bold prediction,that'll probably cause stir.

You're not you're not going to upset more people,
are you?

That seems to be my thing lately.
I think that in a very shortamount of time, and I would
predict less than certainly lessthan 24 months and probably
less than 12, AI will become thedefault tool for creating
content.
And this conversation around isit AI or not, transparency or

(16:59):
not, will go away the same waythat this happened with you know
digital photography and photoediting, right?
I mean, no, nobody makes adisclosure like this picture was
taken with a digital camera andwas edited after the fact,
right?
Everybody knows people usedigital photography and photo
editing.
And in fact, nowadays you makea disclosure when something is

(17:22):
not captured.
You you would say, this is madeon traditional 35 millimeter
and is not edited, right?
Because that's then the thingthat's special about it.
Already there was a survey onYouTube where 92% of creators
said that they're using AI intheir creative process.
Yeah.

And I and I think that there's a difference
between using AI as part of yourcreative process and a
difference between using AI asthe only part of your creative
process.

Well, we're we're not using AI as the only part
of our creative process.
And I think that is a very,very nuanced conversation that
people don't realize.
So right now the standard is,you know, it's been related to
us and we're kind of followingas the community guidelines.
If you use AI, it is a materialportion of your content you
need to include a disclosure.

(18:11):
So we include we're AItransparent, we include
disclosures in all of ourcontent.
I know you can't.

You you didn't do that at the beginning, and now
you do.
Why why have you why did youchange your your view there?

We we were limited because we have so many
episodes, we were limited by theAPI call capacity to be able to
dynamically update all of ourcontent.
So we were not able to go backquickly to do it with all of our

(18:46):
back catalogs, but now we wereable to build out the process in
order to do that.
So now if you go through andyou see all of our show notes,
it's now in all of our content.

Yeah, but you but but you didn't when you
started, I guess is thequestion.
So why why did you change yourmind and start disclosing that
it was AI generated?

So you mean like it's two years ago when people
first started making content?
Well, I mean, to be clear, notall of the content that you hear
from two years ago is AIgenerated.
Many of it is in the voices ofpeople who are on our team.
Some of it we went back andthen replaced with synthetic
voices and personalities that wedesigned.

(19:26):
You know, I mean, at the time,I don't even think people were
thinking about how you wouldmake an AI disclosure or not.
So I mean, we've adapted andevolved as the as the industry
evolved.
And now I think we're reallyproud of the way that we're
we're leading away in intransparency.
We all of our personalities, wehave some clever prompt

(19:50):
engineering around we how wehave them do their AI disclosure
so that they say that they'reAI, but they uh do it in a way
that sells the benefit of havinga host that is an AI
personality.
And from our data, we find youknow, very little, sometimes
immeasurable drop-off uh fromour AI disclosure.

(20:12):
So our read is that if peoplelike the personality and they
like the content, they don'tcare that it's AI.

In the same way as there's an explicit tag in
podcasting where you can mark ifyou use sourcy language or or
adult discussions, some peoplehave been calling for an AI tag
to help audiences or advertisersprogrammatically filter out
majority AI content.
What what's your what's yourview on that?

I think that we're in a moment.
Well, I mean, first of all, Ithink that some people are
trying to capitalize on the feararound this conversation to
make news for themselves.
The conversation is if you havepeople who are really
thoughtfully engaging in thisconversation, I think the
conversation is much morecomplicated, right?

(21:02):
Because if you're using, youknow, Chat GPT to make a script,
but you're actually readingthat into the mic, is that
materially AI generated?
If you're, you know, actuallywrite the script but you use a
synthetic voice, is thatmaterially AI generated?
If you're doing an interviewand it's a real person that's

(21:22):
interviewing a digital person,is that AI generated, materially
AI AI generated?
It's getting to the point nowwhere it's so nuanced.
I mean, I've actually hadpeople reach out to me, some of
these people who are in thisspace making commentary that,
oh, I can't believe they'redoing this, or they need to have
disclosure, or you know, moredisclosure, advertisers aren't

(21:45):
gonna want this, right?
I have people behind the scenesemailing me saying, I work at
this company and we're using AIin our process.
Right.
And and basically every podcastthat I'm doing, some people,
you know, going for the jugular,asking me the tough questions
about controversy in this space.
And then we get off the calland then they say, How do you

(22:05):
think that I can better use AIin my process to make my process
more efficient?
Or could you all recreate myvoice?
And what would that sound like?
And maybe I could actually takea dedication sometime, right?
The creators are going to be,this is the most powerful
creative tool that the world hasever seen.
And creators are going to beleaning in to this technology

(22:30):
very quickly, and thisconversation is going to go by
the wayside.
But in the meantime, as peopleare interested in, we will we
will follow the guidelines as toas much disclosure as you want
us to have.
The reality is we've not heardany pushback from any advertiser

(22:53):
ever.
And we are not finding thatwe're missing out on audiences.

Janine Wright speaking to me a little bit
earlier this week.
I've got uh obviously opinionson what she said, but it would
be unfair to jump in after theinterview with my own thoughts
because she can't respond tothem.
But I'm really grateful to herfor her time.
I've also been sent an email,Sam, and I've been asked to read
this out.
Opinions in this podcast and inthe Pod News newsletter are not

(23:20):
the opinions of podcastmovement.
Sounds profitable, or anyassociated brands.
How delighted I am to read thatout.
Anyway, I've read it out now.
Let's move on together to atotally different story, and
this one is about corporatecensorship.

SamSethi (23:35):
Right.
I've put this story in, James,about corporate censorship
because I'm asking the questionis podcasting sex truly
censorship resistant?
Right.
In the light of uh things thathave been happening in the US
with Stephen Colbert and JimmyKimmel.
So censorship is the child offear and the father of

(23:56):
ignorance.

And I'm quoting who's that a quote from it's
it's unknown, so I don't know.

SamSethi (24:03):
I love that.
But I love the I love thesentence.
Look, Jimmy Kimmel is back.
I think that was more to dowith Disney seeing $4 billion
worth of subscriptions removed,not to do with the, oh, we think
Jimmy Kimmel should come back.
So let's be critically clear.
That is you know the reason whyhe's back now.

(24:23):
But i i I don't want to getinto the Kimmel, Cobert, ABC,
you know, Disney World.
That's that's outside of it.
I wanted to one know, will thisaffect podcasting?
Could this happen in the worldof podcasting?
Could uh the FCC, the Ofcoms ofthe world, yeah, could they

(24:44):
block, remove, ask Apple,Spotify, Podcast Index to remove
a podcast?

Yeah.
Now I know you don't want tomention Kimmel, but obviously
Kimmel is back, and podcastinggot a shout-out in his opening
monologue.

JimmyKimmell (24:57):
Should the government be allowed to
regulate which podcasts the cellphone companies and Wi-Fi
providers are allowed to let youdownload to make sure they
serve the public interest?
You think that sounds crazy?
Ten years ago this soundedcrazy.

Yes.
I looked at at all of this andyeah, I mean, the First
Amendment stops the USgovernment from doing anything
here.
So TV is a little bitdifferent, and hence why Kimmel
and to an extent Colbert isbeing talked about, because it's
public spectrum that theybroadcast on.
Cable TV can do whatever itlikes.
And the FCC only said last weekthat podcasting is the same.

(25:35):
I heard Brendan Carr from theFCC speaking on CNBC.

BrendanCarr (25:40):
Broadcast TV is different.
We're on a cable show rightnow.
You don't have an FCC license.
You don't have an obligation toserve the public interest.
Podcast don't either.

So really the US government is unlikely to stop
uh anything there.
I mean, I suppose, you know,the interesting thing from my
point of view is that the USused to have the fairness
doctrine for broadcast media,which required media to fairly
reflect differing viewpoints.
So it made it the lawessentially to present
contrasting views on air, whichis very similar to how Ofcom

(26:13):
works in the UK as well.
But that was abolished in 1987by Ronald Reagan.
And that means that essentiallythat that led to things like
Fox News, very unbalanced outputuh and to be fair, you know,
CNN, which is very unbalancedthe other way.
And so, you know, from fromthat point of view, that that's
where the US is uh going.
But you know, in terms ofpodcasting, is the podcast index

(26:37):
really censorship r resistant,you were asking?
I think it probably is, uh butI don't necessarily think it is
when it's surfaced in an app.
I mean TrueFans, presumably,you can choose which of the
shows you want to appear on uhyour app, right?

SamSethi (26:55):
100%.
Yeah.
Yeah, we have we have finalcontrol.
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.
As do we.
I mean, uh you know, Pod Newsuh, for example, has a directory
which is based both on thepodcast index and on Apple
Podcasts.
We have a blended uh resultsfor that.
There's there's one show, forexample, that if you search for
it, I've never made it into astory because I didn't want to
uh uh I didn't want to excitethe uh the lawyer too much that

(27:19):
spent three m three uh threeemails shouting at me.
But uh yeah, there is a paythere is a podcast if you search
for it, and it takes you to apage which is called this page
is not here anymore on thepodcast website.
And it basically says, look,you know, the podcast owner uh
employed a lawyer to threaten usto take it away.
And they said that the onlyplace it was available it was on

(27:40):
Apple Podcasts.
And so I just embedded theApple Podcast player to have a
look at that, right?
Yeah, and then and then stuffedthat.
But yeah, so you know, so we'vehad to do that sort of thing as
well.
So I I think the index iscensorship resistant, but uh
it's kind of up to apps andwebsites like us to work out

(28:01):
which we want to uh link to.
And I think that that goes foryou know Apple and Spotify too.

SamSethi (28:07):
Well, again, I think we will see Jimmy Kibble and
Stephen Colbow, they've hintedat starting their own podcast
network poster.

Um of course they have.
Um but but you know they couldvery easily just go on uh go
onto cable and there wouldn't beanything in terms of there
wouldn't be anything in terms ofthe SEC that would be able to
harm them.
It comes down to uh it comesdown to you know the the the
corporate stuff.
I mean I suppose you know youcould look at Apple and Spotify,
uh or indeed YouTube.
They make choices about what topromote and what not to.

(28:39):
So they're already putting athumb on the scales, I guess.
If you look in Canada, where Iwas last week, the government
there is wanting control overwhat Apple or Spotify promote.
The CRTC has basically saidthat.
So we're seeing talk of similarrules in other countries like
the UK as well, in terms of, youknow, yes, everything might be

(28:59):
available, but undue prominencefor public service broadcasting
is what they're talking about inthe UK.
So, you know, I mean I guess Iguess it's a different
conversation.
But the podcast index uh youknow the they're un very
unlikely to take shows out,although they have taken shows
out in the past, but they'revery unlikely to take shows out

(29:21):
for specific political reasonssuch as that.
So, you know, but yeah, it'sreally what happens to the to
the apps at the end of the day,isn't it?

SamSethi (29:30):
Yeah, well we we we've seen Facebook remove lots of
content based on governmentrequirement.
We've seen Elon Musk use Grocrecently to stop it reporting on
certain activities in release.
I it it's a worrying thing forme.
I I and this is not a politicalshow, so we will move on.
But I do think that uh the theway that governments, not just

(29:52):
the US, but governments aroundthe world are now uh censoring
or applying fear to media.
Companies so that they tow theline.
They might not actually saywe're banning this, but they
will make it very clear that ifX doesn't happen, Y will occur.

Yeah.

SamSethi (30:10):
And you've seen that with the you know the oligarch
text bowing down in the WhiteHouse.
And it's just, yeah, I I I doworry.
I do worry.
Which is why I raised thequestion.
Could podcasting go down thissame road?
That was all.

Yeah, uh I I think it's definitely something
just to bear in mind.
And you know, I mean, we shouldjust m bear in mind that the
reason why Jimmy Kimmel and allof that stuff came up is not
really because of the content ofJimmy Kimmel, it's really
because Nexstar, who owns alarge number of the ABC
affiliates, they're currently inthe middle of a $6.2 billion

(30:45):
takeover of Tegna.
Tegna is another rivalbroadcaster, and uh if they need
to get that takeover through,then they need a couple of laws
changing, and the FCC needs togive them the go-ahead.
And so, you know, it it's notparticularly helpful to them if
they've got one of their majortalent.

(31:06):
Although I did watch JimmyKimmel, I did find him
tremendously unfunny.
But anyway, you know, if it'snot particularly helpful to them
if one of their major talentsis very negative towards the
folks that they need to r rubberstamp that particular takeover.
So yeah, I think I think youknow this will come through
regardless of whether or not,you know, a government is

(31:26):
particularly, you know, eager ornot to ban certain things to be
uh said.
If if i if it's business at theend of the day, then I suppose
it's business at the end of theday, isn't it?

SamSethi (31:37):
Yes.
I was gonna say something aboutthe UN, but I will move on.
Right.
Um I mean comedy out thereanyway.
Moving on.
Dscript has a new CEO and somenew prices, James.
Now, the new prices wereannounced on Tuesday, and
there's a couple of things thatI find quite interesting about

(31:57):
the pricing.
They're moving to somethingcalled media minutes and AI
credits.
Have you had a look at this atall?

I've had a look at, I mean, the AI credits are
roughly how Wondercraft ischarged as well, and I think it
probably makes the most amountof sense.
You know, it's where the costsare to them.
So therefore, you know, that'sprobably the right way of uh
charging for it.
But yes, it's it's aninteresting change to how things
are are uh billed for anyway.

SamSethi (32:25):
I I like the use of media hours.
I mean, again, one of theconversations you and I have had
is about does the way hostingcharges work?
So, in the sense that today aMP3 file is fully downloaded,
and therefore it's the number ofdownloads.
So Captivate will talk aboutthe number of downloads,

(32:48):
Buzzsprat will talk about thenumber of hours uploaded, but
actually I think there's achange maybe coming, and I think
it's the number of mediaminutes that you consume or get
downloaded and streamed by youas a podcaster.
I don't know.
I'm I'm I'm fascinated by this.
I'm I'm gonna be looking atthis more closely anyway.
I thought I'd just raise it.

Yeah, it's definitely interesting in terms
of a uh charging thing.
Uh you mentioned that AndrewMason is no longer the CEO.
There is a new CEO, LauraBurkhauser, who has worked with
D scripts for a while.
She was actually named CEO atthe end of August, turns out,
and Andrew Mason is nowexecutive chairman.
So there's a thing too.

(33:30):
Do we know anything more aboutLaura?

SamSethi (33:32):
Well, Laura was previously working for Twitter
and other companies, so she'sbeen very good in the product
role.
Andrew Mason said, quite quiteAndrew Mason-ish, the very short
answer is Laura's the betterCEO for D Script.
The longer answer is we are atan exciting moment in D Script,
$55 million in average annualrevenues, growing 75% year on

(33:55):
year, and we're beginning we'reat the beginning of a
transformative shift in thecompany with the launch of our
AI video editing agent.
Look, Laura's going to be onthe show next week.
I'm excited to have her.
She's going to be talking abouther new role, but also future
plans, and I will be askingEllen much more about the way
that they're charging now for uhmedia hours and AI credits.

Excellent news.
Well, I'm looking forward uh tothat.

SamSethi (34:23):
Now, one of the things that you reported in Pod News
Daily was help, I sexted myboss.
The podcast has unveiled amajor new 2026 arena tour.
What are they doing, James?

Yes, so the last tour sold 15,000 tickets in
three hours.
This time they are taking thelive show to Cardiff, Glasgow,
Manchester, and London, hostedby William Hansen and Jordan
North, of course, and producedby Audio Always.

SamSethi (34:52):
Yeah, and now one of the interesting things, Stuart
Morgan, who's the managingdirector and founder of Audio
Always, pinged us about somenews that they have in terms of
growing their team.
But I thought it was also agood time to catch up with them
because they do things such asproducing radio shows and
audiobooks.
And I think the line isblurring between what is a

(35:15):
podcast, what is a radio show,and what is an audio book.
It's content on demand.
So I started off by askingStuart to remind us who is Audio
Always?

StuartMorgan (35:25):
Yeah, so Audio Always, we are a production
company based in Manchester andLondon.
Started at Media City in 2012when the BBC started to move
some money from London toSalford with Five Live and the
various bits that moved up hereto Media City.
And over that time, we've grownfrom being a production company
that primarily worked on shortform audio, trails, station

(35:46):
sound, commercial advertisinginto a business that now spans
content in terms of radio andpodcasts and audiobooks and
studio facilities.
And we've kind of grown andevolved as the industry have as
well in terms of Manchester andgenerally the rise of
opportunities around audio andaudio content and audio
production.
We've been part of that andI've been part of it since we

(36:08):
started.

SamSethi (36:09):
Give us some of the names of the podcasts that
you've been producing.

From a podcast perspective, so we work on both
commission podcasts, so peoplewho want to pay us to make
podcasts and also original pods.
So commission pods, lots ofstuff for the BBC, so Alice
James and John Robbins, and lotsof stuff for kind of BBC
bite-size and factual stuff forRadio 4.
We had a great series calledThe Human Subject, where we
looked at the intersectionbetween inical trials and the

(36:36):
morality of it.
So lots of kind of podcasts inthe commission space.
And in the original space,podcasts like Help I Sected My
Boss, for example, get a gritwith Angela Scanlon and Vicky
Patterson, all the way throughto parenting podcasts like
Secret Rum Club and Made byMammoth, and also actively in
the storytelling and true crimespace.
So stuff like the Pitcanetrials and Carrie Jade does not

(36:58):
exist, and also always onfactual true crime like uh UK
true crime and murder mile, I'mall part of our network.
So, yeah, a wide mix of, from apodcast perspective, both
commissioned and original podsin a couple of different
verticals.

SamSethi (37:13):
So you've done something new, you've expanded
your team at Media City.
What have you done?

I think it it's reacting really to that sense of
the changing world betweencommissioned pods and and
original pods, and also justthat kind of trying to take away
some of that sense of podcastand radio.
You know, I think you speak tomost managers of audio
production companies, it'salways kind of hard to find that
balance of what do youintegrate podcasts into radio
and how do they intersect?
And what we try to do is sortof remove some of those barriers

(37:42):
between the skill sets that gointo creating some of our radio
shows, some of radio strands,bringing that experience into
podcasts, and vice versa, asthat kind of convergence between
radio podcasts and audiobookshappens across the industry.
So we've got three great newcontent directors who are
working across all of ourprojects, all of our radio
podcasts and audiobook projects,bringing a vast amount of

(38:05):
experience.
We've got Sam Davis who's beenacross Art Six Music Content for
many, many years here inSalford.
So he's looking after ourcommissioned content.
Linny, who before us was doinga great job at Folded Wing,
another fantastic indie, and doamazing stuff in that
commissioned and original space.
He's looking after commissionedand original content, and also
Ben Cartwright, who is ourcontent director specifically

(38:28):
around original content.
He's been part of the teamright since the inception of How
Bisected My Boss, which is akind of a big hit commercially
successful original podcast forus.
So he's bringing thatexperience across all of our
originals, man.

SamSethi (38:42):
I like the way that you talked about the convergence
because I had a radio stationwhere we did 40 live shows a
week, but we then automaticallyturn those into podcasts.
But you can look at radio forscheduling, for example, and
they will have a program that'spre-recorded, which you could
argue is that a podcast?
Is it dumped into the scheduleso it appears at the time?

(39:04):
So the Friday Night ComedyPodcast, for example, is not
live often, it is a pre-record.
So where is the line blurring?
For me, I always say separatethe content from the
distribution.
So the content can be thecontent, it could be a show that
you've recorded.
And then is it distributed viaFM, DAB, or is it distributed by

(39:27):
the web or an Alexa, or is itdistributed by another means?
So is the line for you assomeone who's producing for
radio and producing podcasts, isthere a difference anymore?
I mean, you talked about theskill sets transferring between
radio and podcasting.
What differences do you see?

I don't think the audience care, really.
I think you know we getobsessed with these words
because we are audio people andwe love it and we know radio, we
know podcasts, and we're in itto a listener.
They don't care how it'scategorized, they just want to,
as you say, press play whereverthey're pressing play and get
the content they want.
And you look at examples likeJames and John Robbins on Five
Live, you know, it's on FiveLive, but for most people

(40:08):
they're consuming it on soundsor on RSS feeds, and they don't
really care where they'regetting it from.
So I think the convergence froman audience perspective is sort
of happening already.
And I'd say the same withaudiobooks and podcasts.
You know, we produce audiobookshere at Audio Walways, and we
do a lot of stuff out of Solfordwith northern authors, northern
uh publishers, northernreaders.

(40:29):
But we also have podcasts whichare in effect audiobooks.
They are people telling amazingstories that, if it was written
down on a piece of paper, couldbe published.
And we're seeing that in thepodcast space that people are
pressing play on podcasts thatsound like audiobooks, and then
on Spotify they're clicking toan audiobook.
So I think that convergencefrom an audience perspective has
been happening for a long time.

(40:50):
For us, there are some kind ofinternal distinctions that you
just have to make, and I thinkpart of our thinking is yes,
there are some skills andexperience that go with
intricacies around distributionchannels and commercialising
stuff in different ways, butwe're trying to align our
production processes as much aswe can because the efficiencies
that we can make and theindustry can make in terms of

(41:12):
blowing those lines areimportant.
But there's also a lot learnedfrom radio.
You know, my before audioalways I spent my years
pre-indie sector in commercialradio, and a lot of what we are
doing now from an originalpodcast perspective is it's the
same fundamentals that we weredoing on breakfast shows in
major markets before podcastswere what they were.

SamSethi (41:34):
So coming from a commercial radio background,
here's a question for you.
Have we got the same level ofadvertising saturation within
podcasting?
So radio used to be for meevery 15 minutes you'd have a
bank of ads, and then every 15minutes there'd be the news and
whatever.
Are we going to end up withthat element of radio
commercialisation coming topodcast commercialisation?

I think a lot of that is the interpretation of
what is saturisation.
I mean, there were times radiostations I worked for where we
were on 12, 13, 14 minutes ofads an hour.
Was that having a detrimentaleffect on the audience?
Sometimes, sometimes not.
With podcasts, I think we'reexisting in an interesting world
of podcasts because I think theaudiences that are happy to

(42:19):
have that level of saturation,however it's described, come
together on RSS.
I think there are intricaciesaround paid-for models where
maybe if you are happy to getthe content and pay for it but
don't want the adverts, you canget it.
There are platforms that areoffering ad-free.
A lot of our pods are licensedon BBC Sounds and they're
ad-free.
So I think the the differencefor me is there's probably just

(42:42):
an additional level of choicethat audiences now have in terms
of where they're consumingtheir content and how willing
they are to have that level ofcommercial content.
But I always think some of thecreative stuff that we do, we
work a lot with ACAST, there aresome amazing examples across
the industry of how thatcommercial messaging and how
those revenue models can beintegrated into content in ways

(43:05):
that doesn't feel like the musicstopping and you're just
getting a load of adverts andthen it's coming back.
A lot of our revenue streamsfrom a podcast perspective come
from subscription and from livetouring.
And we've just announced a biglive arena tour for one of our
podcasts.
You know, I think that's wherehopefully podcasting won't fall
into that trap of we just needto just put adverts in between

(43:30):
songs to make it work.
But I also think it's fair tosay that commercial radio, I
feel like is doing a better jobof that as well as they look to
ways of diversifying theirmodels to make it so the
audience are not bombarded withcommercial messaging.

SamSethi (43:46):
I've always said podcasting is a digital
second-class citizen.
In that we now accept we willpay for music, we accept we will
pay for films, audiobooks andother means of content.
But the perception has alwaysbeen that podcasting is free and
is ad-supported.
I know there's a big movetowards subscription base now.
But why is audiobooks treateddifferently from podcasting when

(44:10):
I think you said earlier,fundamentally they're the same
thing in pretty much the waythat they're produced and also
distributed?

I think it's just because at the start of that
process that there were majorpublishers involved, and they
still are, that the model andthe route to get in that line,
you know, people paid for it.
That's what people expected.
You buy a book and you caneither buy it in paper or you
can buy it in your ears, andthat's just what the audience
expectation was and still is.

(44:38):
I think podcasting, thebrilliance of podcasting is that
it started as a cottageindustry, and it was people in
the bedrooms, it was peopledoing it and recording it, and
that's where that expectationhas come from.
Does it always have to be thatway?
No.
Is it good that it is reallyeasy to start one to be able to
get it?
I think it is, so I don'tnecessarily see it as I think it

(45:00):
I think it's it's it's achallenge to make a direct
comparison between those kind ofmodels for me, because you
could say the same for radio,you know, why would simply
listen to a BBC station versuscommercial when they're getting
ads on one and not the other?
I think it's a lot of it is isjust down to what people are
used to, and podcasting startedin a way that meant that it was

(45:23):
free and it was easy to kind ofpress permit.
Although, interestingly, wefind a lot of research we do is
there's still quite a largeproportion of the audience who
don't realise that podcasting isfree and you have to pay for
it.
So I think the educationaljourney that the industry has to
do as podcasting grows in thesame way that audiobooks have to
communicate to their listenersand in that audience that you

(45:44):
can get audiobooks as part of asubscription on Spotify, for
example.
This stuff will always move andchange, and I think it's on us
to be with it and help holdlisteners' hands as stuff
evolves, really.

SamSethi (45:56):
Talking about change and evolving, when are you
renaming to video always?
Will you be a video platform?
Where is audio always in thevideo discussion?

Audio always, video most of the time, but I
wish I had a crystal ball 13years ago and coming up with a
name.
I think we are, in terms of ouroriginal podcasts, you know, we
are we're video acrosseverything in visual podcast
studios.
We've got staff working acrossvideo and the same way we have
staff working across audio.
So as a business, we are verymuch delivering video in the

(46:31):
same way that a lot of ourcompetitors are and are doing a
great job.
You know, we're nominated inthe video innovation awards that
the VPA is coming up, we'reproud to be part of that.
I think the thing that we sayis though that we're not a video
company, and I think that's adistinction that we make with
our name, and what we do is thatthat kind of audio product does
come first.
We want to make sure thatthings you know sound great

(46:53):
technically, but also the routeis audio, it's it's what we do
and it's what makes usdifferent.
Video social, the stuff thatgoes around it is all about
enhancing and amplifying that.
So would we be going out andpitching for TV shows?
No, that's not in our world.
Do we want to be making aYouTube series without that kind
of audio crossoverstrategically?
No, not right now.

(47:13):
But if we have an amazing audiopodcast and we've got an
audience that we know would wantto get more of that on YouTube,
then we're absolutely behindthat.
And I think that it's wise forall of us in the industry to be
embracing all of those ways thatlisteners can consume what we
do, where they are and wherethey're you know, where they're
where they're listening,watching, and consuming that
content.

SamSethi (47:34):
Now, the other hot topic, of course, is AI.
I don't have any issue about AIin the pre-production and
post-production of podcasting asin research or editing.
But I don't know whether youcall it the creepy line or
people's dislike to the sound.
But where do you stand on usingAI for hosting?

I mean, I I don't I don't believe that audience
would want to listen to an AIhost.
You know, there are intricaciesand beautiful things that come
with human interaction that justcan't be replicated.
So I think it feels likecertainly for us, we're a long
way off that in terms of thatkind of you know, the host, you

(48:17):
know, AI in a productionprocess, we use it, it makes it
more efficient in certainplaces, but you can never get
away from that kind of humantouch, that list and how stuff
feels, and what's that mood andthat tone?
And I think that's where youknow AI isn't doing that job,
and I'm not sure it will in thenext couple of years.
I think it's more interestingfor me in that kind of audiobook
space.

(48:38):
Again, does somebody want tolisten to 8,000 audiobooks read
by AI?
Probably not.
When stuff's written, thenuances and the beautifulness of
some of the text that we workon here, you just couldn't
replicate that, especially atthe moment in AI.
But is there a longer way ofbeing able to deliver longer
form content to audiences withthe help of AI, maybe?

(49:02):
But who knows?
I think the world is movingquick, and all we can do as an
industry is be part of it and dowhat feels right, I think also
especially with what theaudience wants.
And I'm a kind of a techie geekand I love trying all these
things out, but for me it comesdown to what does that listener,
that viewer, want and how canwe best deliver that?
If it's AI, then great.

(49:23):
If it's not, then we stick tostick to what we do.

SamSethi (49:26):
And you talked about live events as a means of
merchandising and monetization.
Do you, as audio, always lookat anything to do with live
podcasting?
Again, I only mention itbecause of your background in
radio, and I'm a firm believerthat I think the lines will blur
quite quickly between what isradio when you say it's

(49:48):
distributed over FM or DAB, butwhat is radio when it's
distributed over a podcast app,because live podcasting would be
the same thing.
So, do you have any work thatyou're looking at with live
podcasting, or do you don't seeanything on your horizon right
now?

There are a couple of examples.
On Friday night, we're doing alive stream for another podcasts
on Instagram.
Is that a live podcast?
Probably yes, in the minds ofthe audience.
Are we defining it as a livepodcast?
Probably not.
Could we overthink how we'redefining this stuff and get
caught up in it?
Probably.
Back to what I said earlier.
I think if we are able to givethe audience what they want

(50:27):
where they're listening in audioform or audio and video form as
we're doing with the livestream, then it works.
I think the interesting thingas well for me is around how we
can use events and live and thatas a revenue stream whilst also
generating revenue.
We work with Drunk WomenSolving Crime as an example, and
a big part of them is residencyin terms of live.
So they will, in effect, ratherthan record their podcast in a

(50:50):
studio, they will record it infront of an audience.
And there's a f some reallyinteresting examples across the
industry of that.
And also, we did have our sexwith my boss live into cinemas
last year in the same time as wewere doing it at the Palladium.
So I think although we don'tstrategically try and do it, I
think those lines are blurred,and for us, it's about going
podcast by podcast.

(51:11):
There are some podcasts thatwork well in that space, there's
some that wouldn't work well.
It's just about making surethat we're reacting and putting
that content live pre-recordedwhere we know the audience will
be.

SamSethi (51:24):
Stuart Morgan, managing director and founder of
Audio Always.
Thank you so much.
Congratulations on the newhires and come back sooner than
two years.
I think it's been since youwere last on.
So yes, you're always welcome.

Thank you.
Thank you, having me.

The Pad News Weekly Review with Buzz Sprout
with Buzz Sprout.
Start podcasting, keeppodcasting.

All right, let's move on.
And congratulations inBarcelona.
Congratulations, Barcelona,particularly Ivoks, who has
unveiled a new brand identity,and they are celebrating their
15th anniversary.
I really like their new brandidentity.
It looks very smart.
You can see it linked from PodNews this week.
They have, of course, a bigSpanish language podcast

(52:08):
platform.
Fascinating company.
It'd be really interesting tolearn more about how they work.

SamSethi (52:12):
Yeah, gonna be in Madrid next week.
So I'm hoping that I might beable to catch up with the iVooks
team and maybe get them on hereto do an interview.

Yes, that would be that would be excellent.
See whether you can do that.
Let's go and have a quick lookat some uh jobs.
And Jonathan Mengivar has beenhired by The Guardian to produce
the Guardian's first US videopodcast.
He was with Pineapple StreetStudios but has also worked in
public media in the US as well.
Uh, Audio Boom has named CraigEastwood as Vice President

(52:45):
International.
Uh, he was uh previouslycommercial operations director
at Adolitis, uh, which uh AudioBoom acquired in July, which is
exciting.
Uh, let's have a look for someawards and events.
And the Independent PodcastAwards announced its 2025
shortlist.
The event is on October the15th in London.
Harriet Kemsley will be one ofthe big stars at the Independent

(53:08):
Podcast Awards she is uhhosting.
She, of course, not just anexcellent comedian, also an
excellent podcaster as well.
Another one of the stars givingout one of the awards is going
to be this very podcast's SamSteffi.
So that'll be exciting, won'tit?

SamSethi (53:24):
Yes, only because you're not available again.

Yes.

SamSethi (53:28):
Who said Tomto?
Right.
Yes.
There we go.
Yes.
The seven annual Afros andAudio Podcast Festivals taking
place.
It's Uniting Black Podcast.
That'll be in Baltimore,Maryland, USA on October the
16th.

Yes, and it's their final one as well.
So I wish them all of the bestfor that.
The Signal Awards has alsorevealed the finalists for this
year's awards.
They've opened voting for theListener's Choice Awards in
every category as well.
You've until October the 9th tovote, if you wish.
And the winners are given awayon October the 15th as well.
I was talking about the uhIndependent Podcast Awards and

(54:07):
how good it was that they'dmanaged to get a storefront in
the Apple Podcasts app.
And uh you you've managed toget uh storefronts for uh a
bunch of different awards inTrueFans, haven't you, Sam?

SamSethi (54:18):
Yeah, we've just launched our new awards page.
We we do it in a different way.
So each award page is adedicated page and it has a
carousel of all of the awards.
So we do it first of all, thenominees, and then we will
whittle that down to thefinalist, and then we'll whittle
it down eventually to thewinners.
So it'll be constantly edited.

(54:40):
But what's nice about it is youcan create a single playlist
from it.
So we have made it a playlistthat you can then click.
So if you just want to hear allthe award winners from, let's
say, the British Podcast Awards,you click the playlist and
it'll play one after the other,and it'll play the latest
episode as well, because it'swhat we call a dynamic playlist.

Yes, very fancy, although that's a lot of hard
work.

SamSethi (55:00):
But uh yes, yes, but you know, I think it's worth it
because what we Yeah, and Ithink it what's nice about it is
we link it back.
So when you become a nomineefor whatever award, we then put
a a logo on your podcast pagesaying that you're now a nominee
for this award and you'rewhatever.

(55:21):
So again, you know, trying tohighlight podcasts that are
doing well and and promote them.

Now, a couple of events to talk about.
Podcast Days in Spain is amonth or so away or in Madrid on
the 2nd to the 3rd of October.
Some of the uh incredibleinternational stars that you can
see there include Megan Davisfrom ACast, uh Eric Newsom from
Magnificent Noise, and Sam Sethifrom this very podcast.

(55:47):
So that should be fun.
Also, you know my intro isgonna be I'm so sorry, James
couldn't make it.
I wouldn't say that.
Uh also Squeakfest, October the10th in Houston in Texas, the
night of the living pod, afun-looking podcast conference
there.
Italy's podcasting festival hasreturned for its tenth year.

(56:07):
It's on right now.
There'll be a big global onlineevent on September the 30th.
I'm going to be one of thespeakers there.
And in Ireland, a new two-daypodcast summit has been
launched.
The event is called Soundwave.
It'll be held in November inAdair, I hope I'm pronouncing
that correctly, in CountyLimerick.
Apparently, it's Ireland'sprettiest village.

(56:29):
So that's exciting.
And included in that is the AllIreland Podcast Awards.
And head judge for that isDylan Haskins, who is also
commissioning podcasts for BBCSounds and Radio 5 Live.
And Sam, you managed to catchup with him.

So it is the inaugural year.
It's the first time we've donethis.
Um there's been various kind ofiterations of different podcast
awards in Ireland over the pastfew years that um kind of
Ireland, there was a big kind ofgaping hole there that we
thought that's crazy, and wereally ought to have an awards
that celebrates the industry onthe island of Ireland and the

(57:06):
full island rather than justkind of the Republic of Ireland.
So that's kind of why it's theAll Ireland Podcast Awards as
well.

SamSethi (57:12):
Yeah, there were an Irish podcast awards from PodPod
a few years ago.
I don't know what's happened tothose, but the event that
you've got is when and where.

The All Ireland Podcast Awards are happening
together with Sound Waves, whichis a new two-day conference
that's happening kind of on thebusiness of podcasting, music,
and sport, and kind of lookingat all three of those together.
But the awards are are on thenight of the 13th of November,
and they're happening in a dayin Limerick, which is one of the
most beautiful villages inIreland.

(57:44):
So what's happening is we havepeople coming in on the
Wednesday, and the Wednesdaynight, there'll be kind of a
small kind of music trail in thetown, which should be good fun.
Uh, and and then on the nightof the 13th, as I said, yeah.

SamSethi (57:57):
Now, what sort of categories have people been
entering for these awards?

We we kind of you know, you can kind of have an
infinite number of categories,and it's really hard to try and
pick ones that kind of thatcover enough.
So we've we've got uh there'seight at the moment.
So we've got a current affairsand politics, which kind of
covers all of your new stuff andyour more opinionated kind of
discussion about politics all inthe one.
There's an audio drama anddocumentary, so that's kind of

(58:25):
unusual, I suppose.
We we lumped the narrativestuff into this one category,
looking really at kind ofscripted and non-fiction
narrative storytelling.
There's a new category, anentertainment category, which
would be quite one of the quitebroad ones, a sport category,
business innovation,conversation, which should cover
quite a lot as well, and then akind of spotlight award, which

(58:47):
is the judge's kind ofdiscretion one that's not not
one for being kind of uh peoplesubmitting themselves for all
the other categories.
People have been able tonominate themselves for it's
been free to enter for the firstyear as well, because we want
to kind of get as many peopleinvolved as possible as well.
So we've we've had a ton ofentries.
The entries have actuallyclosed now for this year, so

(59:08):
it's too late if anyone'slistening to enter, but I hope
this will be the first year orsomething that will continue
into the future.

SamSethi (59:17):
Podcast hostel producer holds an Irish
passport.
The podcast hostel producer isa resident of Ireland, and the
podcast production takes placein Ireland.
So it's very clearly theall-Irish podcaster walls.
There is no one sneaking in onthe back of that one there.

No, and there's also there's quite a few Irish
connection or Irish perceivedpodcasts or produced podcasts
with Irish people that areproduced from the UK, for
example, something like MyTherapist Ghosts Me as well,
which is one of the biggestpodcasts in the UK.
You know, it's made for global,but it's also two Irish hosts
on it as well.
So we kind of we wanted tothink as broadly as possible

(59:50):
than just those who are inIreland at the moment as well,
because we're thinking moreabout what's listened to in
Ireland as opposed to just who'salways just based here as well,
you know.

SamSethi (01:00:00):
The event that's running alongside it,
Soundwaves, I think you'vepicked three really hot topics,
obviously podcasting, music andsport.
They seem to be the realtrendsetters.
What's the sort of discussionsyou're hoping to have around
those three topics?

DylanHaskins (01:00:14):
The one thing that's kind of common in all of
them, really, is how do you makea living from these industries
and how do you do something in away that's viable and
sustainable?
That's absolutely the case inmusic, and it's the case in
podcasts as well.
So thinking about all of thedifferent ways that you can make
a living and monetize podcastsand IP is, I think, one of the

(01:00:37):
biggest topics in the industrygenerally, but it's really
important to be thinking aboutthat in in the context of
Ireland as well.
You know, a lot of a lot of adbuys are sold by kind of bigger
networks across a range ofinventory.
Um, and that that that works inin you know in certain markets
as well.
Um, it mightn't always be theright fit though, as well.

(01:00:59):
Some people have really, reallydedicated for you know
audiences or subscriber-basedshows as well, and are doing
deals directly with brandsthemselves as well.
So there's a kind of a wholerange, and in a market that like
Ireland that's relatively smallcompared to the US and even to
the UK.
And the UK, the UK is smallrelative to the US, and Ireland
is small relative to the UKthere.

(01:01:20):
And a lot of the infrastructurethat kind of supports the Irish
market flows through the UK orthrough through European
companies as well.
So really just trying to getall of the industry together and
start talking to each other andkind of advocating for the
industry as a whole.
Um, and and also seeing what welearn from kind of comparable

(01:01:40):
industries.
Music is a really interestingone.
I've always thought about themusic industry in terms of how
you market a podcast, forexample, and thinking about how
when you've got an exciting newband, you don't necessarily want
to have a load of billboardsaround from day one because none
of the cool people will want tolisten to something if it's if
it's on billboards from day one.

(01:02:01):
So you kind of start withbuilding that fandom by seeding
it out and you grow it, and thenyou do the billboards when
you've kind of reached acritical mass, if you can at
that point.
And I've always thought aboutthat with how record labels
would have managed bands,putting a seven-inch record out
on a small kind of indie labelfirst, even if they were signed
to the major, and just thinkingabout a longer-term view of how

(01:02:23):
you grow an audience around apodcast and market it.
So that's just one example ofyou know where I've seen
parallels in the industry aswell.
But um, sometimes when you havepeople from different but
adjacent industries, you canlearn a lot from each other,
more so even than when you'rejust with people who are in
exactly the same area as you.

Monetization comes later from that.
You don't want to start day onemonetizing.
I mean, some people may be ableto do it, but most don't.

Well, actually, there's quite a lot of Irish
podcasts that do really wellwith subscribers, and it might
be, you know, three to fivethousand subscribers that is
sustaining an entire show andthe kind of team behind that as
well.
So that bit is something thatis kind of quite strong in
Ireland as well, and hopefullypeople can kind of learn from
each other about differentstrategies as well.

We have a weird point where we might have too many
podcasts.
Do we have saturation oroversaturation?
When I think of sportspodcasts, I've heard about seven
women's new sports podcastslaunching, I've heard about ten
men's rugby podcasts launching.
It seems anyone who's everplayed the game launches a
podcast.
Anyone who's ever, I don'tknow, been in the music industry

(01:03:41):
has a podcast.
You know, are we reaching apoint where there are too many
podcasts out there?

There are definitely there are definitely
a lot of podcasts out there.
But I think I think the proofis always in the audience and
the numbers, and do people wantto listen to and and also having
volume kind of raises the barfor everyone as well, because to
cut through, you need to bebetter, you need to make
something that is morecompelling than the other stuff.

(01:04:09):
And so that is I I always findthat quite an exciting
challenge.
It's gotten harder to cutthrough than it was maybe five
years ago, you know.
And in some in some areas,actually, I would say maybe in
the narrative space, it's not ashard to cut through now because
far few people are making andcommissioning big narrative
series now in the past twoyears, you know.

(01:04:29):
So actually, there actuallyisn't there isn't a saturation
in narrative series at themoment.
There is in probably thealways-on kind of conversation
series.
There's a lot, there are a lotof them, but but it's it's it's
a kind of um it's a few smallones at the top that probably
have the massive share of thelistening there, and then a lot
of a large kind of tail of ofmuch more modest listening, you

(01:04:52):
know.

Again, looking at the monetization element, is there
anything other than talkingabout advertising?
Is there any talk aboutsubscription-based models or
micropayment models?
How are you going to look atmonetization?

Yeah, well, I know that the micropayment models is
a topic close to your heart forsure.
Um it's really looking at therange of all the different ways.
So absolutely subscriptionstuff, absolutely kind of ad
sales, working with brands in amore kind of direct way, looking
at the kind of full packagearound IT.
So looking at live shows andhow you do live shows as a more
longer term rather than kind ofa one-off thing as well.

(01:05:26):
Um, and there's lots of reallygreat people who can speak to
that so well.
So, you know, the Sound Wavesconference as well.
Uh, one of the organizers on itis Joe Clark, who's one of the
managers for um uh one of thepods that he manages is the two
Johnnies, which is you know thebiggest podcast in Ireland in
terms of its listening.
They have some incrediblestuff, like three, let me just

(01:05:48):
check what it was.
Yeah, it was yeah, they hadsome incredible stuff, but it
was like three out of 10 18 to25s in Ireland would identify
the listener of the podcast.
Crazy, crazy stuff.
Um, I'll source that directlyto Joe.
Um, they actually did a Red Cpoll on that.
So um there is uh they've beenreally successful and having
someone like Joe involved who'sbeen very much behind kind of

(01:06:11):
the business side of that showas well in the awards as well,
will really kind of I thinklends kind of credibility to who
people will be hearing from inthese discussions, and there'll
be a ton of people that havebeen kind of invited in to speak
on the on the various kind ofpanel discussions as well.
And it'll be relatively small,like we're probably looking at
around 200 people for theconference.
So people should be able totalk to each other as well.

(01:06:32):
This isn't going to be a big,you know, um a massive
conference with thousands ofpeople coming coming through the
door.
It's it's relative model, andwe just want to get the all of
the kind of main people who arewho are doing doing this and
trying to make make it work inIreland together, as well as the
kind of international peoplethat they work with and the
different various differentcompanies that distribute
podcasts or host podcasts aswell.

Dylan, thank you so much.
Look, remind everyone why isthe website, where they can get
tickets.

So the website is soundwaves.ie.
It's on the 12th and 13th ofNovember.
And the tickets, there's kindof there's three different so
conference only is 75 euro, orthere's a two-night
accommodation package, which is280 euro, and there's also a 180
euro one night accommodationpackage as well.
So that's basically um, youknow, you kind of want to come

(01:07:23):
over, do the two nights, go onthe music trail, have a good
time in a dare, which has somegreat clubs and is a beautiful
village.
But also the awards, we'veclosed the entries for the for
the awards now, but I'm hopingthis is the first, this is the
first of many years.
I know with the conference it'sit's something we're hoping to
do for a few years.
The reason it's happening inLimerick is the rider cup is
coming to Limerick in 2027.

(01:07:44):
So we've had some kind offunding and support around
around that for bringing theconference to Limerick as well
from the county council and citycouncil there.
So get booking your ticket.

Kevin, thank you so much.
Good luck with it all.
Cheers, Sam.

Announcement (01:07:56):
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podnews.net.
Right then.
Back to these two guys.
The Pod News Weekly Review withBuzzStrozzrout.

JamesCridland (01:08:33):
Right, something exciting is happening in March
next year.
Uh, I will be in Riga inLatvia, possibly.
But also, pre-registrations arenow open for the fourth edition
of the charity podcastmovement, Podcast Thon.
This is a fascinating thing.
It's basically a way forpodcasters to talk about their

(01:08:54):
favourite charities, to dedicateone episode to a non-profit of
their choice.
Now, last year, 1,500podcasters from 40 countries
took part.
This year it should be evenbigger because for the first
time the event is also welcomingSpanish-speaking podcasters as
well.
It's uh worth a peek.
You can find out moreinformation just by searching

(01:09:15):
for podcastthon and finding outmore uh information about that.
And obviously, you know, takepart if you can.
That's a wonderful thing.
Uh, what else is going on?
There's a fascinating story,not very much, frankly, to do
with podcasting, but kind of is,I suppose, a fascinating
article by Ryan Farley, worth aread.
It's called The Story of HowRSS Beat Microsoft.

(01:09:38):
And uh you had a hand in uh alittle bit of that, uh, I think,
Mr.
Sethy, didn't you?

Yeah, I was involved in the uh browser wars.
They were fun, it was greattimes.
Um Microsoft did everythingthey could to kill it from
introducing ice, which was areally poor idea, introducing
ActiveX.
No, yeah, if you rememberActiveX, and also, I mean, and

(01:10:06):
it's public domain, so I'm notgonna get sued, bribing certain
corporate companies like the BBCto remove Netscape's browser
and replace it with IE becausethey had deeper pockets than
Netscape.
So yeah, Microsoft dideverything they could.
I mean, the eventual goal wasto have a closed proprietary
environment called MSN.
That was the original BillGates goal.

(01:10:27):
The walls of that came downwhen they lost, and you know,
obviously the European Union andthen the DOJ removed Microsoft
power of the IE browser.
But you know, it's afascinating history story.
Um yeah, have a look at it.

Yes, and uh there's some some wonderful
things back in the histories inthe history books.
Uh like for example, and nowhow do you pronounce this?
Zd net?
ZD Net?
I would pronounce it ZDNet, butis it really ZDNet?
Gosh, there's a thing.
Anyway, um uh a piece from 1997where somebody from Netscape,
Sam Sethi, marketing manager, uhends up being

(01:11:06):
uncharacteristically rude aboutuh uh about uh Internet
Explorer, which was made thedefault browser for the
Macintosh.
Gosh, I don't even I don't evenremember that, back in 1997.
And Sam Sethi is quoted here byas saying Microsoft was giving
away the browser and now they'repaying people to take it.
Bill probably earned that muchin his sleep last night.

(01:11:28):
Gosh.
So so there's a thing.

Yes, Apple Podcasts, the iE circle podcast.
Sorry, did I say that again?

Gosh, there's a thing.
Uh anyway, let's move on.

The tech stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday
in the Pod News newsletter.
Here's where Sam talkstechnology.

Well, maybe I shouldn't.
Right.
Pocket cast.
We've talked about how theyadded ads into the app and
there's been a backlash.
But also one stage further,James, somebody called Matthew
Brunel has done somethingdifferent.
What's he done?

Yeah, well, he has said, well, the uh the code
for the app is open source, andso therefore I can just uh pop
into the code, make a fork ofthe code, and get rid of the
call for the ads.
And hey, presto.
So I'm I'm I'm and I'm kind oflooking at that and thinking,
I'm I'm not so sure that that'sthe the the right plan.

(01:12:30):
I mean, firstly, his thepremise of what he's saying is
that uh pocketcasts have changedthe rules.
I bought this app a long, longtime ago and now I'm seeing ads
in it.
Well, my understanding is thatif you are a grandfathered paid
account, you don't get theadvertising anyway.
So, you know, they've notreally changed anything.
But also, secondly, is itreally the plan to use the fact

(01:12:52):
that pocketcasts have verycleverly made the code for their
app open source so that otherpeople can add additional
features into it?
Is the plan really to punishthem for that and get rid of the
ads?
I think, you know, I mean,really, Matthew, if you if you
if you're going to do dosomething, then either just pay
the money because it's a reallygood app, or go away and use,

(01:13:15):
you know, the Apple Podcast appif you're on iOS or AntennaPod,
which is which is the one that Iwould recommend if you're on
Android.
Those are both great apps.
They both work in much the samesort of way.
Both of those don't haveadvertising in them.
You know, I think that'sprobably a good thing.
So I'm I'm a little bit grumpy,Matthew, for doing this, but
I'm sure that he feels veryclever.

(01:13:36):
To be fair, what he has done ishe said how to change the code,
but what he hasn't done is justuploaded an APK for you to
download onto your Android phonewithout the ads, because I
think that would be a little bitcheeky.
So at the very least, you stillneed the intelligence to go in
and work out exactly how you'regoing to rebuild, you know,
recompile the app and all ofthat kind of uh thing.

(01:13:58):
But I do think that that's alittle bit cheeky.
I don't know what you thinkthere, Sam.

Uh no, I think it's I think it's just maybe throwing a
shot across the bow at podcastsaying, look, hey, think about
what you're doing, because wecan do this because you've made
it open source.
I think he's not trying toundermine Pocket Cast
completely, he's just showingit's possible.
I think your point within itthough, in the article was

(01:14:21):
podcasts do need a way to earnmoney, right?
They don't earn.
I don't believe pro accountsPocketcast put out some numbers.
I'm not sure I fully agree withthe numbers in terms of how
many people are paying for theirpro account.
I'd be surprised if the numbersare factual.
But that said, they may wellbe.

(01:14:42):
So, but I I've talked to Oscar,I've talked to other app
developers, and the number ofpeople who pay for pro accounts
is very small.
So that's not how we'regenerating our revenues.
It's gonna come from othermechanisms.
Now, if this is the way thatPocketCast thinks they can
monetize, or like YouTube andlike Spotify, put in enough

(01:15:04):
embuggerance, you know.
Oh, here's an ad, here'sanother ad, here's another ad,
I'll bugger it, I'll just paythe pro account.
Which is what I do withYouTube, right?
I I couldn't use YouTube theway it works, so I paid my
$16.99.
I'm waiting for the $7.99account, but $16.99, and it's
now a usable app.
So maybe they're doing it forthat reason.

(01:15:26):
I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I I think, you know, at
the end of it, nobody wants towork for free.
So uh either we have greatpodcast apps, or we just allow
Spotify and YouTube and Apple torun this world.
You know, I mean the excitingthing is I was I was in Canada,
for example, last week.
I did some work with OP3 todiscover that over a typical

(01:15:51):
week, I think 94 differentpodcast apps are used in Canada
alone.
Now 94 is a pretty nice largenumber.
And if we if we don't want tobenefit those podcast app
developers at all, then we willessentially uh s continue
seeding the entire industry tojust Apple Podcasts and Spotify

(01:16:16):
and YouTube, and that's not aparticularly healthy place to
go.
If podcasting is a sevenbillion dollar industry, which
apparently it is, then thatseven billion dollars uh by
making podcasts, surely we cansh share some of that with the
podcast app developers toactually to actually work on our
future there.

(01:16:36):
And and unfortunately, it's notgoing to be done with you know
streaming sats because that'snever going to hit the
mainstream.
So therefore we kind of need towork out on to work out other
things.
I mean, to me, one of thesimplest and most obvious things
is that if is is some kind ofshare in the money that

(01:16:58):
podcasters are paid byaudiences, so whether that's
your own secure RSS thing,whether that is just a simple
affiliate deal with uh sportingcast and those sorts of uh
people, or indeed, you know, Imean Apple Podcasts has its own
affiliate, but obviously it thatonly works in Apple Podcasts.
So, you know, but uh butwhether or not it's a in it it's

(01:17:21):
an affiliate deal like that oror something else, I don't
really know, but some way ofsharing in some of the revenue
would be would be good so thatpodcast app developers get money
depending on how much thepodcast app is actually used.

I I I heartily agree with what you just said.
I think if you remember, Iproposed a podcast fund when the
PSP was part of what I wasdoing.
And my thoughts there werelook, you look at Mitch Downey
at Podverse, you look at Oscarand and Nick over at Fountain
myself, you look at, you know,Jason at Podcast Gura, etc.

(01:18:00):
etc.
Podfriend is now pretty muchgone.
There's no work been done onit.
Uh, we haven't heard anythingfrom Mitch Downey.
I haven't heard anything fromFountain, actually.
Maybe other people have, but Ihaven't heard anything from
those guys for months.
I'm I'm not saying they'regoing away, but they seem very
quiet.
All of us are trying to make aliving.
We're all trying to support thepodcasting 2.0 namespace.

(01:18:23):
We are trying to make our appsmore attractive than the
mainstream apps.
And, you know, it does taketime and it does take money and
effort.
And one of the thoughts I hadwas the money currently in the
ecosystem is with the hosts.
That's where the money rresides.
The pro accounts aren't goingto work.
So and the micropayments thing,as you said, you know, isn't

(01:18:45):
going to pay the bills.
So there are two things to it.
One, hosts could, I'm notsaying they should, but they
could put a a small fundtogether that would be like a
seed fund.
Now I'm not saying give usmoney for nothing, but it could
be done on the number of tagsthat we support would mean that
we'd get an increase in theamount we get paid.

(01:19:05):
That would be an incentive.
We could give equity away backto the PSP as a fund owner, so
they would be the angel fundowner.
And, you know, if we then didgrow and sell in the future,
that money would then come backinto the PSP for the next round
of developers.
I'm just saying we need tothink differently because the

(01:19:26):
money is not going to come fromSpotify, Apple, or YouTube to
any of the podcasting 2.0 apps.
And if we all go away, and wecould, you know, we the elastic
string is not forever and a day.
That's what you will be leftwith Spotify, Apple, and
YouTube.

Yeah, no, I I I do think that there's something
worthwhile having a think about.
And it might be advertisingfunded, but I I can't really see
that.
I'm not sure that the hostshould be paying because the
host seemed to me to be right atthe bottom of the value chain
here.
Nowhere near the top, which isyou know, the money from
advertising and the money frompaid subscriptions coming in.

(01:20:04):
I mean, to m to my uh view, uhthe success here is probably
through companies like Patreon,uh, supercast, supporting cast,
and and similar ones of justokay, put a great big button in
there, use the funding tag tolink to supporting cast and

(01:20:24):
Patreon and those sorts ofthings.
Make sure that that fundingbutton is as big as you possibly
can, and we will give you thefirst month of support, for
example.
If you're a podcast app, we'llgive you the first month of
support for anybody that comesin through your app.
I mean, that to me is a reallysimple, straightforward way.
It would mean that the fundingtag would get much more

(01:20:46):
promotion anyway, which is agood new good news for
everybody, but would also meanthat money comes back in terms
of affiliate deals, which are,you know, everybody understands
how how those work.
So I mean I think that would bea a simple way.
Interestingly, one personcontacted me and said that why
don't pocketcasts just put adsin front of the in front of the

(01:21:10):
podcast?
So you press the play buttonand you hear an ad which is paid
for by pocketcasts, and thenafter that it plays the ad.
And I thought, well, that'sdreadful.
And then I thought, well, hangon a minute, YouTube does
exactly that, and we seem to befine with it on YouTube, but we
don't seem to be fine with it ina podcast app.
What what what's the dealthere?

(01:21:31):
I think that's an it's aninteresting question, isn't it?
Why is it okay for sp forYouTube to do that, and indeed
for Spotify to do somethingsimilar to that, but it's not
okay uh for a podcast app to endup uh uh doing that?

Well, that's because need and must, right?
You don't need the podcasting2.0 apps.
There are plenty of apps.
94, I think you said inCameroon alone, you were looking
at.
So so the alternative is weyeah, as truth fans, I could do
that, and then everyone goes,ah, bug bugger you.
Uh I'm gonna go and usefountain, I'm gonna use somebody
else, I'm gonna use whatever,right?
So it has to be a collective ornot at all.

(01:22:06):
Whereas when you've got a massaudience and you are a big
player, or maybe the only playerin the market like YouTube,
then you can do whatever youlike because the embuggerance of
getting to the content isenough, and and there's an
alternative, which is pay us,and then you don't get this
problem.
So I don't think we can in thepodcasting space do this.

(01:22:27):
I think the thing that youmentioned about Patreon and
Memberful, that's where I seethe biggest money for certainly
true fans with my hat on as aCEO.
That's the money I'm after.
I'm not after the advertisingmoney, I'm after the
subscription-based, regular,recurring uh revenues.
And I think at the moment, Idon't know if Patreon would do

(01:22:50):
an affiliate deal.
I you know, maybe I've got togo and knock on the door and
ask.
But I certainly believe thatsecure RSS, which is something
I'm certainly going to befocusing on for the next six
months heavily, is where I thinkthe money will be because that
is people not using the fundingtag for me as TrueFan, sending
the user across to another siteto register to then get a

(01:23:13):
private feed to then work.
I I I don't mind that wholemodel.

Yeah, indeed.
I think No, I I I can see thatthat works from a business point
of view.
I suppose the question is, youknow, you you you need you need
something that works that workseverywhere.
And I suppose that's thequestion there.

Well, does Patreon work everywhere?

With the exception of yes.
I was gonna say with theexception of uh Spotify, but no,
it works in Spotify as well.
So yes.

Yeah, well, as we've said before, I think Spotify
maybe with SOA having a look atthe revenue that it's giving
Patreon and saying, hello, whyare we doing that?
I think that's gonna be a bigchange.
But anyway, let's do that.

Anyway, I should just I should just say, by the
way, uh 94 apps uh in Canada.
I I forgot what the global uhnumber uh was.
This is just in a typical week,in a typical week, the global
number is 185 different apps arebeing used.
185.
That's a pretty impressivenumber, isn't it?
And yes, uh if you look atdownloads, Apple Podcasts and

(01:24:14):
Spotify by themselves accountfor almost two-thirds.
But that means that a third, orslightly over that, is being
used by all of the other appsout there.
And that's a and that's atremendously vibrant uh
industry.
And what we don't want to seeis that to go away.

No, I agree.
Now, uh talking of money,James, Olby have announced that
they're looking at adding bankaccounts to the Olby Hub.

Excellent.
I'm I'm sure I'm sure the twopeople that use uh the LB Hub
will be delighted.

No, okay.
Yeah, obviously True Fans does,and and it works for us.
But the bank account thing isquite interesting because the
way that we have to top up theOlby hub right now is through
Moon Pay or third-party banks,right?
And what would be nice is thatwe would have an Olby hub and an
Olby bank account, andtherefore we could set it up as

(01:25:12):
one hit, and I don't have tokeep going back in and doing KYC
to the Moonpay accounts and allthe rest of it.
So I don't know.
It's an interesting thing.
That's all I thought.
Uh yeah.
And Google has announced anagent's payments protocol,
which, sorry, I'm not reallyexcited about.
This this reminds me of theMicrosoft Ice.

(01:25:34):
It's a payment protocol thatwill allow agent-to-agent
confirmation.
So their view of the future isthat we will have agents who
will be our concierge acting onour behalf, buying or selling
stuff for us, and therefore weneed to have some protocol.
Now, Adam Curry was the one whohighlighted this to me on

(01:25:54):
Mastodon, so I thought I'd havea look at it.
I'm not sure whether this isgoing to be the replacement for
lightning.
I'm not sure whether this is areplacement for stable coins or
whether it will usemicropayments, bitcoins, and
stable coins.
It's too early.
But if you're interested, thisis the tech section.
Then it's called the agentspayment protocol AP2.

(01:26:15):
Go and have a look at it.
It's from Google.

Yes, and uh the there is something which uh may
or may not be part of that, butuh Carji, the the website that I
use as a Google replacement forsearch because it's much, much
better.
Cargi has done somethinginteresting only in the last
month or so.
In the AI answers, if you end aquery with a question mark, it

(01:26:40):
will go off and use its own AIand give you an AI uh answer,
but it gives you the referencesobviously underneath.
Now it's giving youproportional source attribution.
So it can actually say, okay, Igot 63% of the information that
I used to produce this answerfrom this website and 20% from
this website, and so on and soforth, which is interesting.

(01:27:03):
And then they added underneaththat, more importantly, this
technology paves the way downthe road for Kaji to share
profits with publishersparticipating in our AI answers.
This would happen automaticallyfor all websites with no deals
and no contracts needed.
Now I've no idea how any ofthat works, but but in terms of

(01:27:24):
the idea of okay, I've got 63%of this information from this
website, so therefore any moneythat I've earned from that
search, I should share 63% withthat website.
I think that sounds quiteinteresting.
So there's definitely somethinggoing on there.
So, you know, again, worth aworth a peek at to what the mad

(01:27:44):
fools at Kaji are doing, whichis always a good thing.

No, it's very similar to what we did with the wallet
splits.
Yeah.
The ability to, you know, havemultiple recipients in the value
tank.
It's quite interesting.
No, I think there's definitelysomething there.
What else is going on, James?
In the other news, Pod Analystis a brand new tool launched
today.
Who are they, James?

They are well, it's uh it's an interesting new
product that helps podcastersunify their analytics across
Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
It's next Odyssey exec and an XCadence13 exec, is my
understanding.
And uh, if you are a podcastwith under a thousand listeners,
you can use that product freeforever.
Well, forever until you getmore than a thousand listeners,

(01:28:29):
one would assume.
But it's it sounds like youknow, a bumper dashboard if you
can't afford a bumper dashboard.
So that looks quiteinteresting.
Also in the news, a thingcalled Clear My Voice, which
says that it'll eliminate noise,filler words, long pauses, and
mouth sounds and many more.
You get a 30-minute free trial,and the service is five dollars

(01:28:50):
for five hours, five dollarsfifty for five hours, which is
uh interesting to take a peekat.
I would also point out thatOrphonic gives you two hours
free every single month, whichis worthwhile as well.
And the conversation withJanine was uh treated with uh
Orphonic after I managed to domy usual and uh record using the

(01:29:10):
wrong microphone.
Uh so uh that was a thing.
And finally, talking about uhAI audio enhancements, here's
another one from Podsquee.
This one's uh entirely free,and uh that removes background
noise, filler words, andsilences.
You can go and uh give that aplay if you like.
You'll find it at uh on thePodSquee website.

(01:29:30):
And yeah, it looks uh it looksquite smart if you want to give
that a go too.

I I like the fact that people have done these things,
but I just go, they are justfeatures of a bigger function,
right?
Or an app.

I agree.

So I don't quite understand why you do them as
standalone things, because itjust adds more work to the
podcaster who then has to takethe content from A to B back to
A.
I mean, I call me oldfashioned.

I agree.
I mean, if you want toeliminate noise and filler words
and long pauses, then just turnon the co host feature in
BuzzSprout, because Buzzsproutwill do exactly that for you.
As soon as you upload apodcast, as soon as I upload
this one, then it automaticallydoes all of that stuff.
We either we even use it toremove filler words as well.

(01:30:13):
Uh and it does a pretty goodjob of doing that too.
So give that a go with oursponsor, or you know, obviously
there's a bunch of other uhtools doing that too.
And I would agree it worksmuch, much better if it's just
built into your podcast hosts.
It makes makes total sense.

Now, uh a couple of things that I spotted around the
web.
The European cookie law thatmade a mess of the internet
looks like Brussels wants to fixit.
If you're in Europe and you goto any web page, practically you
get a banner appearing whichsays accept or reject the
cookies, and nobody knows whythey are accepting or rejecting
it really.
So they all click accept orthey try not to, and then it

(01:30:50):
says you can't access the page.
This doesn't happen obviouslyin the US, but a lot of US
companies then withdrew theiraccess in Europe to the pages
because of it.
So it looks like the EU isconsidering removing the need
for cookie banners.
Hooray, at last, thank God.

Yes, although, you know, if if you coded your
website properly and stoppedspying on your visitors, you
wouldn't need them anyway.
Exactly.
So I don't I don't use them.
And so therefore there's nocookie banners on the Pod News
website.
That much I can tell youbecause we don't use any any
sort of tracking from that pointof view.
So yes, but uh good news forthat least.

(01:31:26):
Also, good news if you like AIvoices telling you something
that you're too lazy to read.
No, there may be a good reasonfor that.
Uh not least if you can't seevery well, or indeed if you are
currently, you know, drivingsomewhere.
Uh, if you use Chrome onAndroid phones, you can now use
a built-in feature in Chrome tolisten to an AI-powered overview

(01:31:47):
of the web page that you'rereading, which is quite uh
smart.
So you can give that a go.
That's just recently been uhrolled out.
It's essentially Notebook LM,but uh built into uh Chrome.
So that's uh an interestingthing.

Now you spotted something from Dave Weiner.
What's Rumpel Stillskin up to?

So he has produced feeds from a new
product of his.
One of the RSS feeds that he'sproducing has a thing called
source colon markdown, which isthe description element, but the
description element inMarkdown.
So Markdown, if you don't know,really easy, simple,
straightforward way to write forthe internet.
It includes links, it includes,you know, things like bold and

(01:32:30):
italic, but it doesn't includeeverything that you will get in
HTML.
And more importantly, it's uhhumanly readable as well, even
if you don't have markdown.
So that looks quite interestingbecause a current practice of
uh HTML in the descriptionfields for podcasts does
actually make it very difficultif you want to do a decent job

(01:32:51):
of showing what those show notesare in a podcast app.
And so if you just had markdownand it was simple,
straightforward markdown, thenthat would be much easier to end
up showing.
So so I thought that that wasquite interesting.
It turns out that uh NathanGathright tells me that I I I
shouldn't be excited by it.

(01:33:12):
So uh that's it.

Although it's not a good thing.
I'm gonna do like Nathanbecause you know he he did point
out that um when we weretalking about the AI tag stuff
and the person tag, he saidTreeFans has already
implemented.
I went, yes, we have.
And somebody quite nicely saidTreeFans AI already implemented.
Anyway, moving on.

Boostigram, boostergram, boostigram, super
comments, zaps, fan mail, fanmail, super chats, and email.
Our favorite time of the week,it's the pod news weekly review
inbox.

Yeah, so many different ways to get in touch
with us.
Fan mail by using the link inour show notes, super comments
on true fans, or boostseverywhere else, or email, and
we share the money that we makejust between Sam and I.
For this is a licensed productof the pod news world and not
part of PodNews itself.
So uh tons of boosts and supercomments, which is very

(01:34:09):
exciting.
One, two, three, four sats fromSilas on Linux saying, I'm
incredibly upset hearing Jameshave faster and more stable
internet on an aeroplanecompared to my crap German
internet connection at home.
Well, there you go.
Sorry about that.
That's just the way that itworks all over.
Sure.

Starlink works at home as well if you want to pay for
it, Silas.

Yeah, I mean, it was it was Nazi internet though,
so yes, you don't get it.

He's in Germany.
You can't say that.
You can't say that.

Oh no, you're uh no, you're absolutely right.
Too soon.
Too soon.
Uh a row of ducks from the uglyquacking duck.
Ah, it's nice to hear fromBruce again.
I hope that my wallet isworking again.
It is.
Keep pod news going, 73.
Thank you very much.
Yes, that it's wonderful tohear from you again and hope
that things are good.
That came in through PodcastGuru.
Uh, 1,000 uh sats from Fountainfrom RW Nash.

(01:34:59):
Go podcasting, I think.
Yes, go podcasting, exactlyright.

2,596 sats from Seth.
Happy birthday, Sam Sethy.
Thank you very much.
Yes, happy birthday to me.
Sh next year we'll talk aboutit.
This year is just a next onenumber.
Minor number.
No pension required.

Neil Vellio from something that we uh covered
earlier on in this very show.
347 sats.
Thanks, Neil.
Very generous.
Uh he says uh this wholeinception point story highlights
something that just makes mebloody angry.
Not because the tech is bad,not because AI is a bad thing
for podcasting, but Neil Velliocontinues in his own opinion.

(01:35:38):
Entitled people like Janinethink that they can make bad
product after bad product andcarry on with their self-serving
agendas, and there's nobodykeeping them accountable.
And that's why I love thisshow, Pod News, and what James
is doing to help rid ourindustry of these bad actors.

Oh, James, right.
I've I've got nothing to do.
Hello, Tonto.

Neil Velio with his own opinion there.
Uh Silas on Lilux, a row ofducks.
Months ago, James said, Visaand MasterCard are the
internet's money.
A take that I strongly dislike,even if for many areas it's
true.
There you go.
Doesn't mean it should be thatway, but because it is.
And one final set of sats,5,150 from Matt Cundle, who I

(01:36:23):
saw last week in Calgary.
Thanks for your words on ToddCochrane.
I recall there was a time whenTodd didn't see the value in
value for value.
Then he listened to a fewpeople and pivoted into being
one of its biggest supporters,agreed.
And I think that the art ofchanging your mind is a good
thing for everybody.
So I'm pleased to see that andpleased to see you recognize

(01:36:43):
that.
And it was uh excellent to seeMatt at in at Calgary last week
as well.

Can I can I just point out one observation, James,
from what you've just read out?
We got sats from Fountain,Podcast Guru, and TrueFans.
And we have not seen inprevious weeks many uh payments
from Fountain, many paymentsfrom Podcast Guru.
I think it's great that itlooks like the the SATS and the

(01:37:10):
payments are coming in frommultiple apps, not just from
TrueFans, which has been thecase uh for the last couple of
weeks.

Yes, no, it's uh really good to see all of that
money coming in.
But you're right, it's reallyis only those three apps which
are being used, but three isbetter than nothing.
Mike Dell was the last personto send us uh SATs all the way
back in July from Castomatic.
So, and I think Mike was theonly user of Castomatic to have

(01:37:38):
boosted us certainly over thelast six or so months.
And similarly, we're seeingexactly the same sort of thing
going on in terms of uh streamsas well.
So, yes, worth a peek.
You can support us that way.
You can also obviously supportus by becoming a power
supporter.
Weekly.podnews.net uh is whereto do just that.
Thank you to John Spurlock, thethe brainiest man in

(01:38:02):
podcasting, for being our 23rdsupporter.
So thank you for that.
Thank you also for othersupporters, including Rachel
Corbett, uh, Neil Vellio, andJim James for your very kind uh
support.
And uh I th I think my I Ithink Mr.
Kundle is in there as well,isn't he?
Somewhere.
Matt Cundle, yes, hidden awayin there somewhere.

(01:38:22):
I can't quite see him in frontof me.
But yes, so all of those lovelypeople, uh you can join them
too.
That would be super helpful.
And my goodness, we might needit soon.
So uh so uh see what you can dothere.
Weekly.podnews.net would bevery helpful.
So, what's happened for youthis week, Sam?

Well, I we pushed out the new dedicated awards page,
which is great.
And and yes, you said earlierthat it will take a lot of work.
What was most annoying is noneof the awards sites contain an
OPML export option.
The only site Apart from Well,as I'm going to say it, apart
from yours truly, Pod News Days.
Thank you.
Yes, well done.

Yes, we've got uh OPML exports for any list of
podcasts that we make.
The code is really simple.
If I can see more than onepodcast being linked to on this
page, make an OPML uh export,but it seems to work quite well.
It does so yes.

What's nice is we we also have an OPMX OPML import
and export on the playlist page.
So yeah.

Nice.

Well, that works.
We've added support for privatefeeds, so me harumphing about
Patreon earlier, but we have tosupport it because it's the way
that people do it right now.
But I do not like pay privatefeeds, I do not like the way
that we do things.
I think RSS has to support bothpremium and premium within the
same feed.
I believe that we do it reallywell with chapters, we do it

(01:39:45):
with transcripts, we do it withpod rolls, we would do it with
well, we do publisher feeds,nobody else doing it.
And I think adding premiumcontent or secure RSS is
something hosts should be doingbecause I think there's money in
them hills.
Why give it all to Patreon?
Why can't Buzzsprout or or youknow um RSS Blue or or any of

(01:40:07):
them, right?
Implement it and then they getthe premium content actually in
their hosting service ratherthan sending it all over to
Patreon.

I don't know why you've never mentioned this
before, so do you think I've gota little bug bear?
Maybe.
Anyway, James, what's happenedfor you this week?
Um I have flown home.
I ended up just basicallygoing, you know what, I can't be
bothered to fly all the wayhome from Calgary to Chicago to

(01:40:37):
London, then over to Singapore,and then and it was going to be
like a day and a half in aplane.
And I thought, you know what?
No.
So I ended up at the very lastminute, just buying myself a
quick flight home the quick wayround from Calgary to San
Francisco and then home fromthere, which was definitely a
good idea, even if, as you canprobably tell, I've I've caught

(01:41:00):
quite the cold.
Um, so so there we are.
But yes, and I was in the backseat of one of the big planes,
and and that was and that wasinteresting.
I've never been in the back inthe back row of a long haul
flight before.
Turns out that if you are aplatinum flyer in the back row,
you get treated like like likesome like somebody else.

(01:41:23):
It's it's amazing.
You get you get special specialtreatment all the time.
Right?
Yeah, so that was so that wasdefinitely a good thing.
If you want to read a a tripreport, some people like them,
so why not?
Uh you'll find that on mypersonal blog, james.cridlin.net
slash blog, where you can readthat and also read other tedious
things about radio and allkinds of things.

The only thing I've ever caught on a plane's COVID,
and that's coming to see you.

Well, yes, I I was genuinely thinking that this
was COVID, but uh becausebecause goodness, uh, you know,
I couldn't really do very muchyesterday.
Anyway, feeling much bettertoday, and uh both of the tests
that I've taken so far tell meit's not COVID, so that's all
right.
And that's it for this week.
All of our podcast storiestaken from the Pod News Daily

(01:42:08):
Newsletter at Podnews.net.

You can support this show by streaming SATS.
You can give us feedback usingthe Buzz Brow fan mail link in
our show notes.
You can send us a super commentor boost, or better still,
become a power supporter likethe 23andme Superfans at
weekly.podnews.net.

Our music is from TM Studios, our voiceovers,
Sheila D.
Our audio is recorded usingclean feed.
We edit with Hindenburg, andwe're hosted and sponsored by
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And that's disclosure for you.

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