An adblocking podcast app; and AI-powered podcasting with Superproducer AI

James talks with Micah Engle-Eshleman, who is building an adblocking podcast app that supports the podcast creators. Good thing? Dreadful idea? We'd be interested in your comments, via fanmail or a boostagram.

Plus, Manan Bhalodia from SuperProducer.ai talks to us about "Quickie", his company's AI-generated newsaggregation podcast, and what the future might bring; and Daniel Ek talks about the future of podcasting on Spotify.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

It's Friday, the 26th of July 2024.

Speaker 2: 0:04

The last word in podcasting news. This is the Pod News Weekly Review with James Cridland and Sam Sethi.

Speaker 4: 0:13

Yes, I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod News, and I'm Sam Sethi, off wine tasting in France by the time you hear this. So au revoir, mon ami.

Speaker 1: 0:22

Ah bientôt. In the chapters today, captivate achieves an IAB podcast measurement certification for version 2.2, which is a world first. We also talk about how many active podcasts there are really, why podcast ranker data differs so much and podcasters switching hosts, but who are the winners and who are the losers?

Speaker 5: 0:45

Plus. Hey, my name is Micah, and a little later we'll be talking about my new podcast app and how it skips ads and gives back to the podcasting community.

Speaker 6: 0:54

I'm Manon Belodia. I am the CEO and co-founder of superproducerai and I'm going to be hopping on later to talk about our new product called Quickie.

Speaker 1: 1:01

Yes, they will, and this podcast is sponsored by Buzzsprout, with the tools, support and community to make sure you keep podcasting, start podcasting, keep podcasting with Buzzsprout. From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

Speaker 4: 1:16

Okay, James strappy and this could be a long one, as they say. Spotify subscriber base grew by 7 million and they increased their profits to a record high. What's been going on at Spotify, James?

Speaker 1: 1:29

Yes, they seem to be doing very well. Improved podcast profitability, which is always nice to see Driven, they say, by growth in impressions sold across original and licensed podcasts and the Spotify audience network. The company says that it's now got more than 6 million podcasts in there. More than 6 million podcasts.

Speaker 4: 1:48

So, yes, they seem to be doing pretty well, I think, daniel seems very bullish, though on video, which is something that I haven't heard him say before in any of his financial quarterly information results.

Speaker 1: 2:02

Yes, that's right. He's talking about podcasting on video, which he reckons is the future. He was responding to a question in the earnings call Justin Patterson on podcasting.

Speaker 7: 2:14

Now that major podcasters are largely non-exclusive, how has podcast engagement changed on Spotify as more of the industry shifts to video podcasts? How do you attract more creators and grow engagement versus a platform like YouTube?

Speaker 8: 2:28

First and foremost, we are seeing very healthy engagement on podcasts. That has not changed. Where we do have video, podcast engagement is even higher than what we've seen when it's audio only, which is a really sort of positive testament, and I think this is also what organically creates a bit of a word of mouth with creators. So we're seeing more and more creators now uploading video content too. It's growing really nicely. We have about a quarter of a million already.

Speaker 8: 2:55

Consumers of today don't really care too much about format.

Speaker 8: 2:59

They're actually moving in between of audio video and even reading things very effortlessly, especially younger consumers, and so creators will obviously respond to that and should make their content available in as many formats as possible.

Speaker 8: 3:15

The way we attract more creators is kind of a bucket of three things.

Speaker 8: 3:19

So I think that the first bucket is things that are native to the Spotify platform, so things like podcasters already, like musicians those are sort of a prime bucket to convert and add more things, because they'll see higher engagement and thereby higher monetization.

Speaker 8: 3:35

Then I think there's a second bucket, which is if you're already uploading video to other platforms today, you've taken most of your costs already, so it makes a lot of sense for you to try to amortize that cost against as many platforms as possible, and you see this already, where a lot of people on the short side are uploading not just to one platform, but are uploading to many platforms, and we're starting to see some of that behavior happening on Spotify too. And then I think, lastly, there's things that will perform a lot better on the Spotify platform than perhaps on other platforms. For instance, longer form content tends to do really well on Spotify on the video side, because people back history as a platform goes. So overall it's looking very nicely and with lots of improvement, of course, and more and more creators are coming to the platform for each and every day.

Speaker 1: 4:35

So I thought that was interesting. He talks about engagement being higher on video podcasts, primarily because people go back and forth between backgrounding and foregrounding, which is interesting jargon. Do you think that that makes sense, and how different is that to YouTube, I wonder?

Speaker 4: 4:55

I don't know how different it is to YouTube. I think we've said in the past that you know the way that my daughters who are probably their demographic target tend to watch the video versions of podcasts they like while cooking or just while they're sat down. They don't have. This is the oddity of the generation, right, we went for big screens, you know 60-inch screens, and they've gone for watching stuff on their iPhones and laptops quite happily. I think, yeah, they are going for the generation that likes to watch video podcasts just as much as they like to listen to audio podcasts.

Speaker 1: 5:35

He also talks about if you're already uploading video to other platforms today, you've taken most of your costs already, so it makes sense for you to try and amortise that cost against as many platforms as possible. He is very much pointing the guns at YouTube, isn't he there? I think in terms of this.

Speaker 4: 5:51

Well, I wonder sometimes whether you have to read between the lines. Is this him saying right to the market, we are in the video market as well. Don't count us out. We are there, so don't you know? Drop the share price and de-risk us in any way? We are competing hand on hand with YouTube, because it seems this overemphasis on video is new and it can only be because of the YouTube effect.

Speaker 1: 6:18

Yes, and I would also imagine that at some point, spotify will start selling video advertising, and, of course, video advertising you can earn more from than just pure audio advertising, so perhaps that's part of the thinking there as well. I think one of the things that Spotify has failed on is their monthly active users, which, yes, they've grown 14% year on year, but they've actually missed what Spotify said would be by 5 million. And so Daniel X promising all kinds of things, a deluxe version of Spotify with hi-fi audio coming soon how many days is that now, sam?

Speaker 4: 7:00

So far. I'm counting 1,250 days, james, so over three years so far.

Speaker 1: 7:05

I'm counting 1,250 days, james. So over three years, yeah, wow. So there's a thing. X says that the add-on will bring Spotify's monthly subscription to around $17 or $18 in the US, aside from better audio, which no one cares about, by the way, no one cares about better audio, but apart from that, customers can expect a lot more control. He says Headphone sound quality optimisation not quite sure what that is. They just announced an AI DJ in Spanish to go alongside the one that they've got in English, so, you know, hopefully trying to woo some more people in, but they've got an awful lot of competition, what with YouTube music and also with Apple Music as well, and certainly Apple Music is cheaper. So there is that as well, I think we've talked about the price elasticity of Spotify.

Speaker 4: 7:58

Can they go up the tree in value without losing more and more users over to the other players like, as you said, amazon and Apple? So what I would say is, though all these features are great and they are hitting the numbers. They are on a velocity. They now have turned the corner from a loss-making business to a profit-making business and now they're seeing some real velocity in their returns. I think the price increase won't affect them at all. I don't think people will switch.

Speaker 1: 8:29

No, indeed. I mean, I wonder how much of the profit is actually because they have now claimed that they're a bundling service and so therefore they have to pay less on music. I don't know whether that's sort of part of their thinking there, but however, it works it's. Yeah, there are some interesting numbers, some good numbers coming out of Spotify, so well done to them. Also, by the way, some good numbers coming out of Audioboom as well, who've also published their 2024 results for the first half of the year Revenue up 7% in total. They're still in profit, which is nice. Their effective cost per thousand so that's their revenue per 1,000 downloads is up 38% in quarter two as well. One of the interesting things that Audioboom said is that the changes in Apple's iOS update cost them $9 million in revenue. So we've already heard that Acast reckon that it cost them $7.2 million. Well, audioboom now turning around and saying that it cost them $9 million in revenue. So there's some quite significant money that was lost by those iOS 17 changes.

Speaker 4: 9:43

Now, james, with the podcasting 2.0 community. When will they start to support video? When will they start to use the alternative enclosure? When will they start to compete with Spotify?

Speaker 1: 9:55

Well, I think all of that comes down to when will they start supporting video? And most podcast hosts out there don't support video because it's very expensive and they can't work out how to make that work in terms of revenue, you know, in terms of actually earning money. So I don't know. That's an interesting one. Certainly, apple Podcasts simply isn't talking about video. Perhaps if Apple Podcasts was to start talking about the fact that the Apple Podcasts app supports video, then we would see more people talking about video, but at the moment, we're not seeing that and I guess, therefore, that most people are going actually no, we can't afford to do video, so we'll just leave Spotify and YouTube to it.

Speaker 4: 10:38

So one of the things we turned on last week was super feeds and the idea of leaving the audio enclosure with the host but adding any tags you like and publishing to the index. One of the features on our roadmap is to add video. Now we've been working with julie costello and zach at indie hub on the new videos for ainsley costello and for joe martin that are going to be at nashville and we're going to be hosting those in the future now, and I'm just going to bring that Nashville and we're going to be hosting those in the future now, and I'm just going to bring that feature forward because I just think we are crazy in not using the alternative enclosure and we are crazy not competing and just seeding the market to Spotify. So True Fans is going to turn on hosting for video in the coming weeks.

Speaker 1: 11:21

Yes, I think that's a wise move and I think, you know, the more that we can do to help podcasters understand that video can be done through OpenRSS, then the better. I think that that would be a wise idea and I would take that. I'd take that chainsaw sound that I can hear in the background. I would take that to some of these podcast hosts who say that they won't do video because their business is going to be cut in the future. See what I did there.

Speaker 4: 11:49

Oh, nicely, nicely segmented. Now, talking of hosts and podcasts, James, you put out a report about how many active podcasts there are. You said there were 322,000 active podcasts and then you did some interesting numbers looking back over a few years. Tell me more.

Speaker 1: 12:11

Yeah, so this is data from the podcast index. So it does come with that caveat, because the podcast index of course has its own rules in terms of what's in and what's out. But yeah, it was interesting to see. So the numbers are down 6.2% year on year. So 6.2% in terms of new episodes being made, or rather podcasts with new episodes over a month, that's not a particularly bad drop. And I have heard other people saying that the number of active podcasts is down 50%, which is just not true. It's down 6%. We can see the numbers here, so that's useful to end up seeing.

Speaker 1: 12:52

But what I thought is also interesting is there are some real ebbs and flows through the year, because I've got 18 months worth of data and you can see that the low point is pretty well always the 21st of January. That is the holiday period, of course. That's the 30 days worth of holiday, including the Christmas break and the New Year break and so on and so forth. So you'll kind of expect the low point to be there, but there is always a very consistent high point of the 22nd of March and I was trying to work out why that might be and so far nobody can really give me any answer as to why the high point for active podcasts is the 22nd of March, other than when it's the beginning of a financial year. So more people have started podcasts.

Speaker 1: 13:43

Perhaps there's a New Year's resolution thing, perhaps people weren't launching podcasts in the December month and so therefore all of those have moved into January as well, but that wouldn't necessarily explain the March hike. But yeah, so I just thought that's really interesting. There is very clearly, if you are going to, if you run a podcast host and you want to promote yourselves, promote yourself in early January, because that seems to be when people are making a decision on when to launch a new show, and they seem to all be launching new shows in the end of February, beginning of March. So I thought that was a really interesting thing there. There is also a little dip at the end of the Northern Hemisphere's summer, on the 31st of August, so we're doubtless going to see that little dip happening again. But yes, just really interesting looking back at the trends there.

Speaker 4: 14:42

Beware the Ides of March, as they say in Roman times. Now one of the things I looked at, because you've got this data going back over a number of years have we hit a ceiling of growth as well? I mean, we're not seeing a decline, as most people see. There's a minimal decline over the period, but equally we're not seeing a growth. So are we at peak podcast?

Speaker 1: 15:06

Well, we may be at peak podcast creation. Of course, this is open RSS only, and so perhaps we're seeing some of the new podcasts just being produced for YouTube and Spotify. There is always that, just to bear in mind. But of course, what we're not seeing is a peak in consumption just to bear in mind. But of course, what we're not seeing is a peak in consumption. Consumption figures continue to go up.

Speaker 1: 15:27

Whoever you talk to and I think from that point of view, it's good news for podcasting you don't really want a ton more shows because they're expensive to make. What you really want is a ton more listeners, and that's what we're certainly getting. So, yeah, it's interesting. Perhaps we are still really recalibrating from the pandemic a couple of years ago and perhaps that's really what's going on. And some of those shows are pod fading and you know and all that's going on. And of course, you know the media market has not been particularly kind and generous over the last year or so, so perhaps there's a little bit of that in there as well. Yeah, so we spot when a podcast has changed RSS feed and where they've come from and where they've gone to. So there's a bunch of nice numbers out of this. But essentially you end up with a story that Megaphone, spotify for Podcasters and Acast are all the winners. They are doing tremendously well in terms of attracting switching podcasts.

Speaker 1: 16:53

The big losers Spreaker, soundcloud and Libsyn. Those are the three big losers in terms of people moving away from them. I think you can understand SoundCloud. It's not a, you know, it's not a particularly good platform. It's not a very supported platform, so you can kind of understand why the people are walking away from there. They've added virtually none, so you know that's always worthwhile spotting as well. The other two are interesting. So Spreaker, spotting as well. The other two are interesting. So Spreaker, I'm not quite sure why we're seeing a fair amount of attrition from that platform. I think Libsyn is possibly a little bit more explainable just in terms of the lack of new platform, of new features on that platform. But yeah, it's just an interesting number and it's interesting. Just to take a quick peek at. Buzzsprout's. Figures are down slightly, but only slightly. They've added 37 shows. They lost 48 shows in the 30 days that we've looked at. So it's not particularly bad for them. But again, just worthwhile taking a look at and seeing who the winners and losers are.

Speaker 4: 18:12

Now, you had a really interesting interview this week, james with a new platform that does ad blocking for podcasts a bit like the ad blockers for websites, tell me more.

Speaker 1: 18:24

Yes, this was really interesting, so I actually reported on this a while back, but today PodNews covered this new app. It's called Adblock Podcasts. The app automatically skips the ads in shows, but it's got some quite interesting tech and interesting tech choices behind it. Most importantly, it promises to share the revenue with podcasters. I thought I would learn a little bit more about the tool, so I asked Micah, who's the founder of the app, how it works.

Speaker 5: 19:00

I do some just basic audio analysis to look for ads. The way I do that kind of varies depending on if the ads are dynamic or if they're like kind of static for all regions, like right is the podcast you're reading the ad or is it something that's kind of just like tacked on after the fact. So some different ways to do it kind of depending on that situation. But either way, I'm just essentially sending the user a list of like timings like you know, 13 minutes to 13 and a half minutes there is an ad here and then just recording if they actually skip the ad and charging them for that.

Speaker 1: 19:33

So it's downloading the full audio from the initial podcast host.

Speaker 5: 19:38

Oh, actually that would be a little different. So I'm downloading the audio and then serving all users the same version of the audio. So that is a difference. Oh, okay, so if you have users using this app, you would be seeing fewer downloads, but you'd be compensated for that.

Speaker 1: 19:54

And actually that kind of means that there's no fraud going on, there's no ads being played that actually aren't being played. So from that point of view you can see certainly your thought there. Does it work on sponsorship messages as well, or is it just purely 30-second ads?

Speaker 5: 20:11

It's kind of a mishmash right now. It really comes down to me listening to so many ads over the last few years and just being like this really feels like an ad versus like this doesn't feel like an ad and then training based on that. So it's pretty ad hoc at the moment.

Speaker 1: 20:27

Oh, that's interesting. Well, this podcast is sponsored by Buzzsprout. Let's see what happens there.

Speaker 5: 20:33

Yeah, it'll probably catch that.

Speaker 1: 20:36

Yeah, well, I guess there's some text-to-speech in there, or rather speech-to-text in there, to work out what the words are as well as maybe some does it spot, uh, differences in voices or the a-cast noise, or I'm guessing all of these things. You don't want to tell me exactly how the thing?

Speaker 5: 20:58

it's not rocket science, it took. I would say you could get a lot of the way there with chat, gpt today, yeah, but I have some kind of relatively clever ways of just bucketing things out and doing it kind of the cheapest possible so that it's not like just costing a certain amount of money to do it.

Speaker 1: 21:16

You mentioned that you work out whether the user has skipped and then charge them. So how does the charging mechanism work?

Speaker 5: 21:25

So you sign up and you get a couple of free ad skips and then after that you have to subscribe. So just like a standard software as a service subscription it's $4 a month, gets you 50 ad skips and then $2 of that gets kind of set aside for podcasters. That's $2 for 50 ad skips, which comes out to $0.04 an ad skip, and then there's about $0.50 a credit card processing fees in there or Apple's taking their cut, or Google, whoever you know, and then I'm getting about $1.50 of that per user per month. Is how it works.

Speaker 1: 22:01

And so you say that you share the money with the podcasters. How do you do that then?

Speaker 5: 22:06

for privacy reasons, I don't track exactly what episode you're skipping or when, but I do track what the podcast was, how many credits you used, and then tally those up and I just have kind of a running tally per podcast, um, and then through the, the itunes, api or I mean, I can just google it too.

Speaker 5: 22:25

I know, like, what company is behind this podcast. So, to give you an example, uh, three most listened to podcasts by far are the ones that I listen to, which are all from the New York Times. So I just paid the New York Times twenty dollars, right, and I think I owed them a total of twelve dollars in some sense as of today. But what I'm going to do on the website is just have a tally of like here are podcasts that are maybe in total have been owed more than a dollar, and how much they've been paid. So there's some pretty transparent way of being like you can see, like is your podcast even listened to? And if it is like, how many ad skips have been skipped, how much have you been paid, that sort of thing this opens all kinds of questions.

Speaker 1: 23:06

Um, I suppose one of, suppose one of the easy questions is how can we in the industry make it easier for you, easier to get paid, more than anything else.

Speaker 5: 23:16

That's a great question. It would be awesome if in the RSS feed there was a standard tag, and I think there is actually a funding tag. I don't know if anyone uses that right now. I was like, oh, maybe I could use this and then realize that all my top podcasts are missing this tag. I don't know if anyone uses that right now. I was like, oh, maybe I could use this and then realize that all my top podcasts are missing this tag. But if that tag exists, that would make it easy. Obviously, that'd probably just take you to a website, so it'd be nice if there was some sort of protocol or something. I think, at the end of the day, there's not a great micropayments model for the web and if there was, then podcasts could use that.

Speaker 1: 23:49

You covered your app very quietly at the beginning of this year. You said that you got hate mail.

Speaker 5: 23:55

The word hate mail was probably too strong. I got one email that was rather nasty. I got quite a few folks being like what is this? Are you trying to screw over the podcasting industry? Which is fair, right, and at that point it was very much just like I. It was a work in progress. I was building it out.

Speaker 1: 24:15

I was the sole, sole user, so I hadn't put a lot of time into marketing. Yeah, yeah, do you? Do you understand where they're coming from? Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 5: 24:20

I mean, I think if you're a creator and your livelihood depends on this, then anything that could cut that out is a big deal. I think I'm also like very aware of just like what's happened to journalism and the whole like cat and mouse game of website ad blockers right, so like that's a huge deal, everything. You have to have a paywall now or you don't make any money, which is bad for the web, bad for users generally, unless you can pay for a bunch of subscriptions, and I honestly think, like with AI getting cheaper and cheaper, that will eventually be the reality for podcasts as well. So my hope is that this can be a bit of an alternate model where, like, people who at least are willing to pay can pay in a way that's convenient and that doesn't require, like having a five dollar subscription to 10 different podcasts to listen to occasionally. So that's my hope.

Speaker 5: 25:15

Do I think this app will survive for years? No, I don't. Why not? I don't know where it'll go, but it's a bit of an adventure right now and that's fine. It's fun to build something that people want and, uh, I've never built an app before, so it's been a fun experience for me, this learning experience.

Speaker 1: 25:31

Why do you not think it'll be here in a few years?

Speaker 5: 25:34

Oh, I'm not a venture-backed startup. I have not only do I not have a lawyer, I have no desire to ever pay a lawyer, right. And so I think if this ever took off and a couple of large companies like New York Times or even just smaller companies were like, hey, you know, send me cease and desist, and I had to do this their podcast, then that wouldn't provide much value and it wouldn't be worth all of my time trying to make it work. So I think that's one possible future here and I kind of made my peace with that years ago when I started building this thing. So, yeah, it would also be kind of successful to be like well, I got to the point where, like people actually like this enough that people actually cared about it. So most apps never made it that far, never make it that far.

Speaker 1: 26:14

You know. You're absolutely right. There are some people who would say that what you're doing here is accelerating the death of open rss, and if you were to, you know, make sure that shows were only available in Spotify or only available in YouTube, then tools like yours can't exist. Do you think that's a fair summation?

Speaker 5: 26:36

Interesting. So the idea being that if you expose your audio publicly instead of in a closed ecosystem, then you're at risk? Yeah, no, I mean, that's a fair critique. I hadn't honestly thought much about that particular particular use case or whatever I think. I mean, I think if you go that route, I don't see what I'm. What I'm doing is particularly different than the Spotify or doing it through YouTube or some other provider Like. Either way, you have some intermediary that's guaranteeing you revenue and preventing abuse, right? Obviously, I am a tiny fish and they could give you much better guarantees about that than I can. I don't know. I think we're a long ways away from that. Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 5: 27:34

I think, at the end of the day, in media in particular, like, you want to have a product that people are willing to pay for, and so a lot of what you need is a service that makes it easy to get paid, and that is almost more important than, like, restricting your content a ton. I think a lot of the tricky bit is, like most podcast apps, like, you can put links in there, but there's no real structure to like incentivize users to pay. One thing I was playing with and I think this could be pretty impactful is I'd love to have like some sort of like tipping feature in the app. I think it'd be huge. I think I've listened to a lot of podcasts over the last years where I'm like, wow, that was awesome, I would.

Speaker 5: 28:16

I don't really want a new subscription, but like I'd love to tip two dollars, you know, or something like that, and that scale that could be a really big deal. I'd be way more impactful than the four cents you know I'm setting aside, and so I think there'd be things you could do in here that preserve the kind of openness. It's just standard RSS. Anyone can get their podcast in without any particular hoops, you know, as long as you go through the standard iTunes submission process, and there's still a great revenue share. So I think it could be a win-win. Obviously, I don't expect everyone to see it that way, but I'm happy to chat. If people want to email me, I'm happy to talk to you about it.

Speaker 1: 28:53

What's the easiest way of doing that?

Speaker 5: 28:55

Yeah, so on the website there's a couple places you can find the email address, but just adblockpodcasts at gmailcom nothing too fancy.

Speaker 1: 29:09

The website is adblockpodcastcom. From my point of view, you sound like somebody that wants to help. You sound like somebody that doesn't want to rip anybody off. You sound like someone who is trying to do the very best that they can possibly do. I think you know, if people are concerned about what you're doing, the very least they could do is contact you and have a chat. So I think that would be a good start. So best of luck with that. Micah, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.

Speaker 5: 29:33

Yeah, for sure. Thanks a lot, James.

Speaker 1: 29:35

Micah from Adblock Podcasts. There's a longer version of that interview in the Pod News Extra feed this week. Sam, what do you reckon to all of that?

Speaker 4: 29:45

Well, I thought it was interesting One. I liked the idea that it was only taking a single audio download, so it wasn't causing any fraudulent numbers.

Speaker 1: 29:54

Yeah, I thought that was a really interesting choice of his. Yeah.

Speaker 4: 29:56

And then the other part was pay to skip. I mean, most people skip ads anyway, so is the pay to skip just me feeling guilty about skipping an ad and then going well, I really want to support this podcast, so let me give you some shekels for it. Or is it a case of you think this is the way that people are going to go anyway? So here's a tool that can at least remunerate the podcaster in some way.

Speaker 1: 30:23

Yeah, I mean, I think you know Micah was saying that you know that people, you know this is a product that people want and you can certainly see. You know he was mentioning ad blockers on the web and all of that. You can certainly see that there is something there. He did use the tip word, which I'm sure has delighted Adam Curry no end, but no, I just found it really interesting. I mean, he is, you know, his eyes are wide open as he walks into this. He's partially built this as a bit of fun to understand how things work, but he's he seemed quite sincere and genuine in his ambition to help shows. But you know, I mean, how long would you give him before he gets an angry lawyer's letter?

Speaker 4: 31:10

I'm surprised he hasn't got one already. But I think what he's done is he's recognised what users are doing by their very own nature. Right, they are naturally skipping. So he's thinking OK, how can I still give the podcaster back some money? Okay, how can I still give the podcaster back some money?

Speaker 4: 31:27

Now I think this is a nice idea, but I think he's actually I was trying to think is this the reverse of what we're doing in podcasting 2.0?

Speaker 4: 31:39

Because he was very confused in the interview about whether there was a micropayment digital system, and I don't think he's heard much about podcasting 2.0 and the value value stuff that we talk about. He was looking at the funding tag and wasn't quite sure how or what was going on there. But I think when you look at what we push forward in Podcasting 2.0, we say look, you can get a free podcast to listen to on Apple, as I keep saying, as I keep saying, but if you choose and you want to stop pod fade or you want to support your favourite podcasters, you can give them some micro payments. So are we having that same discussion. He's saying I'm going to give some money if you skip ads and we're saying you can have some money because we want to support you and in both cases it's a model that's looking to support the podcaster because, fundamentally, advertising for the long tail doesn't really work.

Speaker 1: 32:31

Yeah, I mean, you know I did go in and if you listen to the full interview you'll hear me talking a little bit more about the value for value side of it and the streaming sats side. So I did talk about that and he was very intrigued at the idea of pay what you want. So at the moment you know it's that $4 a month and so he has $2, which he splits in between all of the podcasts that you skip, and that's lovely. But I said, well, what happens if I love podcasts and I would rather spend $20 a month? And you know the idea of tips and everything else? I think that there's definitely something there. But I, you know he's probably looking at this from a developer's point of view and he's gone.

Speaker 1: 33:17

Even the funding tag isn't supported by the majority of large shows out there. It's mostly independent shows, it's mostly the types of shows that you have on Buzz Brown, not the types of shows that you have on Megaphone or you know those enterprise hosts. So you know I can kind of see his point of view that that doesn't work for the majority of shows, for the big shows that are being listened to. So you know, I just think it's interesting. He's really wanting to move forward on this sort of tool, but he clearly doesn't see there being a solution right now, and so this is his solution Now.

Speaker 1: 34:02

I don't know, by the way, even, whether or not this is legal in terms of keeping people's money and then, you know, sending it to other shows. Does that turn him into a banker? I don't know, but I, you know, I just thought it was a really interesting conversation of somebody that is, you know, genuine, whatever we might think of him, whatever we might think of his comparison between his app and Spotify and YouTube, where, of course, if you're a creator, you have chosen to go onto Spotify and YouTube to earn some money. So, you know, but I just found it a really interesting conversation. Somebody who I expected not to like very much. Actually, you know, I thought that he was a decent bloke.

Speaker 4: 34:51

And then we came across like that, and I think what he's doing is saying I'm using some AI, I'm using some clever tech, I'm a developer and this is just a way of switching the model and seeing what will come out of it. As you said, it's probably a lawyer letter away from closing down. Let's see. Now moving on to ai generated podcasts james, you had a report, uh, from adopter media, um, I think, last week, which said that using ai to read a personal endorsement, unless done for accessibility purposes, both in disingenuous and unethical. I think they were trying to re-emphasise the idea that podcasting is a very human, relatable medium and that people should not use AI to automate stuff.

Speaker 1: 35:38

Yeah, I mean I think that AI generated content. In the specific case that Adopter Media is talking about, where you have an AI cloned voice saying I've tried this amazing new hair dye and it's fantastic, I mean that to me is entirely wrong, because it's very obvious that you know a piece of AI, even if it is a cloned voice, hasn't necessarily tried that hair dye and doesn't necessarily you know. I mean that's sort of an honesty thing. But there was another company not so long ago who was basically saying we should all sign up to say no AI at all unless it's very clearly flagged, and from my point of view, I think that that's possibly going too far.

Speaker 1: 36:33

I think that there are benefits of AI. There's benefits of AI to, for example, if you misspeak and I've got a cloned version of your voice and you said 18 million when you meant to say 18 billion or whatever that thing is, and so either I can edit you in saying billion from something else that I've got where you said billion, or I can use an AI clone voice to make you say 18 billion. I don't think that that is a dishonest thing. If you meant to say 18 billion in the first place, you know what I mean. So I think, I think it's not quite as cut and dry as as it might be in a previous episode we talked about Mamma Mia, though, james, do you remember?

Speaker 4: 37:15

yeah, actually aggregating all of the voices of their hosts into a AI cloned voice, and they were using that for advertising. So is that good or bad? I mean, I think at the time we said that was quite amazing, but I think now we're saying that's not going to be a great thing. Where are we on it?

Speaker 1: 37:32

I think I'm saying I'm still saying that that's that, that's amazing. Um, it's when that voice starts giving a personal endorsement. I think that's the difference there. And so by all means say you know, you can still enter the Asian Podcast Awards and you know you've only got until Friday. That's fine if you've got an AI clone voice doing that. What becomes dishonest and you probably shouldn't do anything with is if that AI clone voice says I've entered the Asian Podcast Awards for the last three years and I think it's brilliant and now it's time, you know, because all of a sudden you're saying things that you know, I don't know. It just sounds wrong from that point of view. You're claiming something of that voice. So I think that there's a little bit of a difference there in personal endorsements versus just advertising copy. But you know it's a fuzzy thing and it'll only get more fuzzy when the voices get better, which of course, is another thing.

Speaker 4: 38:44

So at Podcast Movement this year, I met up with Manan Balodia, who's the CEO of Super Producer AI, and he had a tool that he showed me, which was a AI generated daily podcast, which was available on Spotify, which I subscribed to as a test, and it was just aggregating different sources into one podcast to produce a daily podcast.

Speaker 4: 39:06

I thought that was quite neat. The AI voices were cloned voices and, although it wasn't something I could comfortably listen to for a long period, it was in short periods, it was okay. Manon then contacted me and saying that he's released a new product called Quickies, which was the upgraded version of it, I guess, where he had now 50 or 60 different sources so everything from the New York Times to TechCrunch, to Engadget, to whatever and he was now allowing you to create your own Quickie, which was basically choose the sources you want, we will then aggregate that into a podcast for you with a couple of speakers which were AI generated voices, and you get one every day. So I asked Manon, tell me first of all how you came up with the idea of startups.

Speaker 6: 40:00

So Startups Daily was a traditional podcast with an RSS feed that you can access through Apple Podcasts Spotify, with an RSS feed that you can access through Apple Podcasts Spotify. But what was unique about that podcast is that there were no humans running it, so it was three AI-generated people One of them was a copy of me and so they were discussing the latest startup news Every day, without fail. There would be an episode every morning at 8am, which you could still find if you search up Startups Daily.

Speaker 4: 40:31

I still get mine. I still get mine every day through Spotify.

Speaker 6: 40:35

We started Startups Daily me and my co-founder because we were wanting to create a daily podcast about startups every day. That was taking up way too much time for us, given it was a daily podcast. We both had jobs outside of podcasting, and so we ended up giving up on it, like most podcasts do. Unfortunately, what ended up happening was what I explained, which is we automated that, and now our expectations weren't really much of anything. It was for us to listen to and our current followers that we had to keep them up to date on the latest startup news. What we found was really interesting was that people were sharing it with their following and the audience kept growing. Now there's these non-human voices that have their own personalities that are driving growth of this real world podcast, and so we took that idea of Startups Daily and we decided to allow anyone to make their own style of podcasts to get the information that they need, and so we came up with the app called Quickie. Quickie allows you to create daily podcasts that are super personal to you and you only.

Speaker 4: 41:46

I've actually created a quickie for myself, so the process was fairly simple. I went in, I choose various categories, various media publications, and that's it pretty much. You then generate me, five minutes later, a very personalized podcast that I can listen to, based on the topics I've chosen, and then now every day I get an update of that. How do you go about building something like that, I mean with AI? Are you using a well-known chat, gpt type LLMs, or have you built something yourself? How are you building these quickies?

Speaker 6: 42:20

So there's a bunch of components that go into this. We call it an engine and so we spent the first six months building out this engine. And this engine has a bunch of components. So we connect to a third-party data provider that has a bunch of licensed content that we can pull from and, like you said, you go ahead and you enter what topics that you're interested in. So now the engine will actually determine what content that you will find relevant and interesting to you, and so once it gets those articles, it'll parse it through and understand what exactly it should talk about for you to get your news as quick as possible, because a certain quickie might mention eight things, 10 things maybe.

Speaker 6: 43:04

If there's not enough information, it might only do two or three things, but if it does two or three things, it'll talk very detailed to get to that five or eight minute mark. And so getting the information, processing it and then actually coming up with an engaging script that these two AI generated personalities named Ryan and Casey, and they will talk back and forth within the podcast. And so it'll create the script, this engine, and then we tap into a couple of different audio providers and it will generate the audio with the engine. So in terms of the actual LLMs, which LLMs we use, we can't just stick with one. We tried GPT-4 of it's great summarization, etc. But when it comes to creativity and script writing, we choose to go to other LLMs. So we're testing out Llama, mistral, claude. Some of them, like Claude for example, are very expensive. So we decide to basically fine tune Mistral to get it to what we want.

Speaker 4: 44:07

Nice. It's good that you've also tested against the other ones and then made that final. Well, maybe it's not final, it's the current decision. Maybe with funding, you'll move to Claude. You never know Now who is the audience to think for this type of podcast.

Speaker 6: 44:24

So the two types of people that listen to podcasts are the people that want to. Maybe they just listen to it on their like, in the background while they're doing work or whatever it is. And two, the people that need to. The reason why they would need to is because they don't have enough time throughout the rest of the day to get maybe it's news. So they'll listen to a lot of daily news podcasts and it becomes a need after a certain point because that is literally how they get their information. So that is the same user base or listener base that we are aiming for building at Quickie, which is basically busy professionals, people who need to get their information as fast as possible and they have a bunch of stuff going on and they're not able to scan through or read through 10 different news articles go to five different podcasts because they have a lot of interests and hobbies but they don't have enough time.

Speaker 4: 45:17

I remember when I first got an automatic car and I had a manual car and it was like I know how to drive, drive, I know how to get the best performance out of this car. Probably didn't, but you know, being male, you probably think you can I know best. Why would I give the running of my car over to an automatic? And what we learn to do is we learn to trust the car will do it better than we will, or at least as good as we will, and I call it the creepy line. So, for example, when I first had a, an automatic, it was pretty rubbish, and now I've got a state of the art car and the automatic's brilliant and I don't think twice about wanting to go back to a manual.

Speaker 4: 45:58

What I'm trying to say is, with the service that you're offering, the quickie, you're scanning the content repositories that I would normally scan as a human, and you're saying we're going to do this just as well as you, or maybe even better, and give you that in a much more succinct way. And so I think that's the first part. It's an element of trust, and I think, if I can compare what the output of the quickie is to what I would naturally produce myself, and if the two become one, or you do a better job than I do, then I think I can see that. The second part of the question, then, that I was going to pose is people are, I suppose, not quite comfortable yet with AI voices. So have you got over that creepy line? Do you think the voices that you're providing in the quickie now would pass what I'd call the Turing test? Would they pass the? It's a human, not a computer.

Speaker 6: 46:55

First of all, that example that you gave with the automated versus manual car. That was an amazing example. I mean I can steal that one. But so, continuing on that example, when you got an automatic car, they didn't just get rid of a bunch of things that were on a manual car. You still have your RPM gauge, even though it's automatic and it's not. You can't change the gears, but the reason why they have that RPM gauge in the first place is such that you can have more faith in the car and understand that it's switching gears at the right time. When you have a manual, you're looking at that gauge as well to determine when you need to switch gears. So, in the same way, a lot of AI products that are coming out and that are going to be successful including ours will need to have that RPM gauge still. So what that means is for us we've gone ahead and actually allow users to read through these articles themselves and see for yourself whether or not what we're spitting out is accurate, and we're able to do that very easily through these quickie links is what we call it which are basically links back to the articles that we've pulled from in the content. Now, that's something that a lot of traditional podcasts don't even do so. They don't cite their sources or anything like that, because they don't need to, but given the space we're in, we found that was very necessary. So that was a great example.

Speaker 6: 48:16

On to that second part of your question, which was how good are these voices they're not 100% there yet. In all honesty, do I listen to these podcasts every day? Yes, and do I see that sometimes it does sound robotic. So in the podcast, sometimes the laugh I don't know if you've heard that yet and it'll be such a robotic laugh Sometimes it'll be like ah, things like that. You can tell it's a robot, but I have full confidence that in the way we're moving right now, with AI in the next year, I'm going to say that you will not be able to tell we're already there in a lot of ways.

Speaker 6: 48:55

Openai has released the next version of their text-to-speech model, but they're not releasing it because they claim it's too good. So there's going to be a lot of these private companies that are going to come up and they're going to create better models, and so will it pass your Turing test? After you listen to maybe a few episodes, you'll realize that, yeah, it's a little robotic, but we plan to get around that with our audio engine very soon.

Speaker 4: 49:19

Lastly, then, if somebody wants to try the app, where would they go? And if somebody wants to contact you, how would they do it?

Speaker 6: 49:24

So if you want to go ahead and try the app, please do. It's called Quickie. That's Q-U-I-C-K-I-E. I've seen it spelled with a Y, so it's I-E at the end, and then, if you want to contact me, it's mananats superproducerai.

Speaker 4: 49:43

Manon, thank you so much and thank you for showing me Quickie.

Speaker 1: 49:47

Speak to you soon, mate.

Speaker 6: 49:48

Awesome, sam, thank you.

Speaker 1: 49:53

And there's a longer version of that interview if you want to hear more in the Pod News Extra podcast, which you can find wherever you found this one Really interesting, sam, in case nobody's heard the Quickie yet, this is a very short clip of the quickie. This seems as if it's four and a half million years ago, but it was only a couple of weeks ago where he got his voices to talk about the last presidential debate.

Speaker 3: 50:17

Hey everyone, Welcome back to another episode of 2024 Election. I'm Casey, your go-to for breaking down the nitty-gritty of all things political.

Speaker 9: 50:26

And I'm, ryan, here to keep things lively while we dive deep into the chaos that is the 2024 presidential race. You excited to talk about last night's circus, I mean debate.

Speaker 3: 50:37

Oh, absolutely, Ryan. This was a wild one. We're talking Biden versus Trump Round. What are we on now? Six, Seven. Feels like we're in a never-ending loop of political drama.

Speaker 1: 50:47

I love the fact that one of those voices says here to keep things lively, yeah.

Speaker 4: 50:54

I think they need to speed up those voices a little bit. They are a little bit slow.

Speaker 1: 50:58

Just a little bit. But no, yeah, you see, it was good and it was interesting to hear him. But no, yeah, it was good and it was interesting to hear him basically saying look, you know, there are better voices, even better voices available now, and they're not even releasing them yet.

Speaker 4: 51:11

Yeah, here's a couple of questions for you. You produce content on a daily basis and it's high for the newsletter, the podcast daily. Would you license somebody like Super Producer the feed data from pod news daily?

Speaker 1: 51:28

yes, I mean, I would have thought that if, if it was going into something that was more than that, then yes, absolutely I think, because the question is, how do you so?

Speaker 4: 51:38

the only way you make money is licensing your content, I mean, but then are you bastardizing your audience. Are the audience then going? I don't need to go to James because I'll get everything in this quickie, because James is part of the sources.

Speaker 1: 51:51

Yeah, I mean, I think that that's going to be. I mean, that's one of the questions around do you syndicate content? Anyway, my theory is, you know? So I've got a few agreements with other people and they can syndicate something like up to 40% of the newsletter, as long as they are clear where it's from and they don't syndicate everything, and so I think that that's probably fair. But yeah, I mean, the devil is in the detail of those sorts of deals, I think.

Speaker 4: 52:26

And taking your PodNews daily hat off. James, just as a user, would you create a quickie? Would you go and pick the five or 10 different sources of content that you wanted and have someone deliver you an AI-generated daily podcast?

Speaker 1: 52:42

I think you know, I've looked at some of these tools in the past and I've always thought to myself this would be really good if they weren't just American, if they actually had more international content, if there was an Australian version. You know, if there was something that I mean you know. So, frankly, I'm a bit of a weird, of a weird one, because I would like Australian news, but I would also like UK news as well, because my family is based in the UK, I'm from there, I would like to keep up to date with what the new government is doing and all of that kind of stuff. That would be quite nice. All of the tools that I've seen so far appear just to be focused on the US, and that's fine, but of course that comes with, you know, issues for something, as I would like. But if you're doing something, I mean you know, potentially it could be a competitor to PodNews in the future, because you could put in you know all of the RSS feeds that I use and pull stuff out of that and you would get probably 75% of the stories that I cover. But you wouldn't get the other 25, which are my secret source, which are the stuff that you know people contact me with and the stuff that I report. So I think that's where the difference comes. Hopefully anybody that reads the Pod News Daily is aware of you know that actually a bit of humour in there, a bit of taking sides in there is actually, you know, makes it much more interesting than just an aggregated set of RSS feeds, and I think actually that's you know. On the other side, you know it's something that necessarily AI probably can't actually make. The thing that I would say about AI is it will be better than a useless journalist, but it won't be better than a good one, and so theoretically it should replace the right people and not replace the wrong ones. But we'll see A couple of other things going on.

Speaker 1: 54:53

Captivate has been the first podcast company in the world to achieve IAB version 2.2 certification. Congratulations to them. Basically, version 2.2 requires you to havea detection system for people who are spamming your tools and everything else, and also requires a little bit more support for IP version 6. So many congratulations to Mark and to Kieran and everybody else doing that. Version 2.2 only came out in May, so they've done particularly well there. And also Dan Carlin, very interesting interview in a magazine called Reason talking about his podcast, which he's been doing for years and years and years, and they ask him what do you know about your audience? And he says well, I don't really know very much, and I would like to keep it that way. He said I feel like their privacy is valuable to them, like mine is to me, and what the podcast services give us is enough and I would heartily agree. So congratulations, dan Carlin.

Speaker 4: 56:02

Now quick whiz around the world, james. In France, production company Paradiso Media has started bankruptcy proceedings.

Speaker 1: 56:09

Trouble in Paradiso. I was very proud of that headline. They've started bankruptcy proceedings in a French court and I linked to the very beautiful, stylish French PDF. Even their bankruptcy proceedings are stylish, the French, how do they manage it? But yeah, Paradiso Media, I mean, they raised $5.9 million in investment in September 2021. They theoretically acquired Competitor Binge Audio, although it turns out that they haven't acquired Competitor Binge Audio because that is still a separate company and they are still continuing their operations unaffected, apparently. So I'm not quite sure how that bit works. But yeah, 170 shows, 50 employees based in Paris, LA and New York. It's a big deal. And, yes, and they're going through their bankruptcies right now.

Speaker 4: 56:58

I couldn't work this out. How do you spend $ million dollars roughly in three years? I mean, true, fans cost me around 3k a month to run. Um, okay, that's low, but we, we are going to add more staff and marketing costs will increase. So even if we spent 10x that 30k a month, even let's stretch that to 50k a month, that's still only 500 600 000 dollars a year over three years. That's still less than $2 million. Where's that $4 million gone? I just don't get it For a company I've never heard of so clearly their marketing isn't reaching out. Where has the money gone? The Tech Stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

Speaker 1: 57:39

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter. Here's where Sam talks technology. What have we got, Sam?

Speaker 4: 57:44

Well, friends of the show Todd Cochrane at Blueberry, they've launched their AI-generated clip highlights tool. I did ask Todd if these clips were included in the RSS feed using the soundbite tag and he said no, which I thought was a missed opportunity, personally, because I think if you're creating these clips anyway, like we do with Buzz Brown from time to time, then adding them to the soundbite tag means apps can then also show those clips within the podcast page within the app. So, yes, you want to use it to get people outside in social media to see the clip and then come and listen to your podcast. But actually, if somebody's just searching around in an app and looking at various different podcasts and wondering, yes, there's the trailer, but actually these soundbites would be great to actually include so that I can just listen to two or three bits of soundbites. Yeah, actually I will go and listen to this full podcast.

Speaker 1: 58:39

Then Audacity has released version 3.6, which just makes it slightly better. If you're a fan of sending the information of your podcast editing back to a weird company, half in Cyprus and half in St Petersburg, then go for it. Also, Google has abandoned plans to kill third party cookies. If you prefer a bit more privacy in your web browser, then use Safari or Firefox and stop using Chrome. That would be a clever plan. Talking about Google, they have also done something Brace yourself, Sam. They've actually done something in YouTube Music about podcasting. Yes, YouTube Music has added the ability to mark a podcast as played. Who'd have thought it? You can also. I noticed that here in Australia we've not had one of these before, but now there is actually a button that says podcasts at the top of the screen, which is very good. You can now auto download shows. It's much easier to do that, and there are also ways of filtering episode lists to only show, for example, unplayed shows. So YouTube Music continues to very, very slowly add new features and not tell anybody about it.

Speaker 2: 59:54

Boostergram, boostergram, corner, corner, corner On the Pod News Weekly Review.

Speaker 4: 1:00:00

Boostergrams, James. What have we got?

Speaker 1: 1:00:07

Yes, we've got two Boostergrams. What's the?

Speaker 4: 1:00:08

first one we've got. Uh, sam, yeah, god puts on the tin helmet and then reads it out um, I'm not cross, sam, just disappointed. Yes, I have been a naughty boy, as in, I worked very closely, uh to help. Uh, somebody put together a podcast of which I really wanted to do, which was a uh introduction to how podcasting and podcast tags work, and we worked. Um, they've been to marlo, uh, we've met up at the london podcast show and all sorts, and, and I got a list of intros to make and I haven't made those intros.

Speaker 4: 1:00:40

So, um, slap on hand, uh I will be making those intros as as we speak. Um, yeah, uh, it's, it's a great idea and I'm fully supportive of it. So, uh, bad, bad sam.

Speaker 1: 1:00:53

So apologies there yes, although you do, you do have four kisses at the end of this boost and also a kiss emoji. So, uh, you, so you're not completely in the bad book. And also 10,000 sats from Adam Curry, who says in America we call the end address microphone a hawk tour. Mike, are you familiar with this? I?

Speaker 4: 1:01:19

am James? I'm not sure.

Speaker 1: 1:01:21

Have you seen the?

Speaker 4: 1:01:22

meme that's gone round. What this, what's one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time, oh you gotta give him that huck too and spit on that thing yes, thank you, adam, for educating me moving it swiftly on

Speaker 1: 1:01:35

uh power supporters. Thank you um to our uh six power supporters who are all uh spending uh actual money with us every single month, and those people are Rachel Corbett, dave Jackson, mike Hamilton, matt Medeiros, marshall Brown and Cameron Moll. Rachel Corbett, I did say thank you very much, that's very kind. And Rachel said I really appreciate the work you do. I'm a regular listener of the show and, obviously, follower of the newsletter. I find the pod oh dear. She just called it a pod. I find the pod A great way to keep on top of everything, especially if my inbox is heaving and I'm behind on email. So a big shout out to you and Sam for all the work you do keeping us on top of everything that's going on in the industry. Thank you, rachel Corbett. That's very kind.

Speaker 4: 1:02:24

To be in Rachel's defence. Australians shorten every word, so it doesn't surprise me the pod Pod.

Speaker 1: 1:02:31

So what's happened for you this week, Sam?

Speaker 4: 1:02:39

Well, we've launched, as of the time of this going out, the new TrueFans wallet and TrueFans tokens, which are basically sats we are deprecating the word down a little bit. Whether we call them streaming attention tokens, eventually, I have no idea. But yeah, we've basically created a two-click onboarding to create a TrueFans wallet and that will then allow you to have it in both the US and globally, and then we do payments through the Albi hub. Still so, we are still working with our partner, albie um, we are testing that now and, yeah, so far so good.

Speaker 1: 1:03:11

Very, good, what else has gone on? You've been on a podcast which I've been on, I think, recently indeed.

Speaker 4: 1:03:17

yes, I was on a podcast called continuing studies for higher education podcast with with jennifer lee and neil great. Thank you very much for inviting me as a guest. And yeah, I listened back to your one as well, james, so that was really interesting. So, yes, I think they are fully advocates now of podcasting 2.0.

Speaker 1: 1:03:35

Excellent, and Neil from Podium Podcasts is a speaker I can exclusively reveal is a speaker at the Podcast Day Asia in Kuala Lumpur in early September, so looking forward to hearing him talk about how that company works in terms of monetisation and other things.

Speaker 4: 1:03:54

Now, the last thing I haven't put in here is I had lunch yesterday with my daughter at the Hand in Flowers in Malo, which is a three-star Michelin restaurant. I don't normally take my daughter to a three-star Michelin restaurant. I don't normally take my daughter to a three-star Michelin restaurant. James, I used to add nice, but one of your antipodean colleagues was in the restaurant yesterday and she was desperate to see her, so we had lunch on the table next to Margot Robbie oh, there you go, there you go, very nice, very nice who is heavily pregnant.

Speaker 4: 1:04:22

I don't know if that's in public domain, but she's heavily pregnant and yeah. So she was very nice and gave my daughter a photo as well. So thank you, margot.

Speaker 1: 1:04:31

You do know, everybody, don't you?

Speaker 4: 1:04:36

No, I know the maitre d' at the Hand in Flowers who gave us the tip and that was how we got there. Yes, I do know them. Of course you do. James what's happened for you this week, my friend?

Speaker 1: 1:04:47

I have had a very quiet week, which has been nice. I've been rather boringly trying to understand how the Australian health system works and seeing doctors for tests and all kinds of entertaining things. There's nothing going wrong, but just doing that sort of thing that a man in his fifties has to do. So that's been entertaining. But accepting that yes or not, case may be, but no, apart from that, just looking forward to podcast movement in a few weeks time.

Speaker 1: 1:05:20

I've put my upgrade requests in for the flights. So one of the things that I'm not looking forward to is I've got an overnighter from LA to Washington DC. So I land in Washington DC in one of the two airports, can't remember which, but I land at 5.40 in the morning and it turns out that the hotel is only 20 minutes away by Uber. So therefore, how am I going to get into the hotel and basically go? Is there a chance for an early check-in? What? Six in the morning? That's not going to happen, is it? So, yeah, we'll see quite how that works. We'll be sitting in the lobby at eight in the morning with coffee, writing the next day's newsletter, just simply because I can't actually get into the room.

Speaker 4: 1:06:11

Well, use the time wisely, might as well. Well, yes, exactly.

Speaker 1: 1:06:15

And that's it for this week. If you enjoy the podcast, the newsletter's better Find it at podnewsnet and the Pod News Daily, wherever you get your podcasts, and there are longer interviews in the pod news extra podcast as well you can support this show with such.

Speaker 4: 1:06:29

You can give us feedback using fan mail in the link in our show notes, or you can send us a booster gram our music is from studio dragonfly.

Speaker 1: 1:06:36

Our voiceover is sheila d. We use clean feed for this excellent audio. Uh, including the chainsaw. We never asked about what the chainsaw was doing.

Speaker 4: 1:06:48

What's the chainsaw doing, Sam? I've got the tree surgeon in the garden chopping down various trees and hedges for me. Yes.

Speaker 1: 1:06:52

It's your tree surgeon for your grounds, is it?

Speaker 4: 1:06:56

It's half an acre, it's not that big, but yes, it's big enough. So I can't quite reach the top of the tree myself yet.

Speaker 1: 1:07:03

Yes, in your 100-acre wood, very nice, anyway. So thank you to Clean Feed for allowing us to hear that all the way through this, and we are hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting, get updated every day. Subscribe to our newsletter at podnewsnet.

Speaker 3: 1:07:24

Tell your friends and grow the show and support us, and support us. The Pod News Weekly. Review will return next week. Keep listening.