James Cridland: 0:00

It's Friday, the 22nd of December 2023.

: 0:04

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

James Cridland: 0:14

Yes, I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod News.

Sam Sethi: 0:17

Happy Christmas from me and I'm Sam Suthey, the CEO of Truefans and a happy Christmas from him In the chapters today.

James Cridland: 0:24

How many sats per minute should you pay? Is your podcast bigger than a Netflix show? Mailchimp does some monkey business with the unions and Ainsley Castello's first live concert using podcasting 2.0 apps and two and a half grand.

Oscar Merry: 0:41

Plus Oscar Meri here, and I'll be on later to talk about Fountain 1.0. It's our biggest update ever and I can't wait for everybody to try it out.

Edward Brawer: 0:51

Hey, it's Edward Brower here, CEO of Podcast AI. I'll be on later to talk about our platform.

Jason Hudgens: 0:56

This is Jason Hudgens from Podcast Guru. I'll be on later to talk about our Android and iOS apps for podcasting 2.0.

James Cridland: 1:03

They will. This podcast is sponsored by Buzzsprouts. Last week, 2,696 people Started a podcast with Buzzsprout. Podcast hosting made easy with powerful tools, free learning materials and remarkable customer support. From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

Sam Sethi: 1:23

So, last show of the year, James, here we go.

James Cridland: 1:27

Nearly last show of the year. We've got another one next week, of course.

Sam Sethi: 1:33

Yes, that's true, gosh. Nearly last show of the year, james, there we go.

James Cridland: 1:37

Now, that'll be fine. After I've edited it, that'll be fine, nobody will know.

Sam Sethi: 1:41

Nobody will know. Now I've always wondered when we do value for value and when we do sat payments, what should be a minimum payment? It's always been a bugbear of mine that podcasts are the poor digital partner. Everyone pays for films, music, books, but they don't pay for podcasts, and it's always been. You know why won't you do it? And there was a report out by Tailor Town, which I don't know, but it was a very interesting report I saw on analyzing the dollar per hour for other mediums and they calculated for things like the New York Times, spotify, netflix, hulu, youtube, and they came up with a sort of average of about 53.

James Cridland: 2:26

Yeah, 53 US cents or so, 50 or so US cents per hour. That's essentially what people are paying. If you take, you know how long you watch Netflix and how much Netflix costs, for example, netflix you'll spend 43 hours a month watching, apparently, which then works it out to about half a dollar per hour. Is what you're basically paying for. That, which is interesting, isn't it?

Sam Sethi: 2:51

Yeah. So once you've got this sort of average of consumption content payment per hour, I thought why don't I try and see what that would be in sats and what you would do for a podcast? I took a 60 minute podcast and I said, oh okay, 50 cents, that's 1163 sats, and at the top end, $2, that's 4600 sats per hour. Okay, what's the equivalent per minute? Well, strangely it was just over 20 sats. So I'm going to go 21 sats per minute would be the minimum and 77 sats per minute would be the maximum. And that would be lovely if that was the actual floor and maybe the average pricing that people would pay for podcasts.

James Cridland: 3:33

Yeah, it's nice. So I think I quite like the idea of essentially working it out as, yeah, 1200 sats essentially is just over 50 cents, which is what you're spending if you are using, for example, spotify or Hulu or Netflix or any of these other services. All of them seem to gravitate around 50 cents per hour. Youtube's slightly higher than that 56 cents an hour. So, yeah, I thought that was a really interesting number, so worthwhile, bearing in mind that probably we should be looking at about 1200 as this standard that people should be. You know, ideally paying to listen to this particular show per hour. I know that there are plenty of people who do that, but possibly a little bit less. So, yeah, I thought that that was an interesting, an interesting thing, yeah.

Sam Sethi: 4:24

Well, let's move on then. Now talking about comparing to Netflix, you had a report about comparing your podcast to Netflix. What was that one about?

James Cridland: 4:35

Yes, so Netflix published some consumption data for 18,000 of their shows from earlier on in the year, from a seven month period by the looks of things, which is seemingly a very strange thing First of January to the end of June. Anyway, we pulled that data in. We worked out how podcasts would compare to that. So I did a little bit of a little sort of page that you could type in your monthly download figures how long your show was and then it would compare that with a Netflix show.

James Cridland: 5:12

And yeah, this show is smaller than any Netflix show, I have to tell you, I know, and the pod news daily is as well. I mean, it is only four minutes long, so it's probably going to be that way. But there are plenty of shows which are very, very big. Adam no agenda, for example, seems to do pretty well. I think it's bigger than, from memory, about 47% of all Netflix shows. So it was just nice, and I think it ties in with stuff that you've been saying recently, sam, about time spent listening being the important metric for us to have a look at rather than just pure downloads.

Sam Sethi: 5:51

Yeah, exactly. Well, if you want to go and do that, James, is it on the website you said it's on your pod news daily site.

James Cridland: 5:57

It is. It's on podnewsnet and just do a quick search for Netflix and you'll find that really easily. It's worth a play and even if you're not big enough to be in that list, it still gives you a nice interesting number that you can go away and wow your friends with.

Sam Sethi: 6:14

Okay, now James, talking about downloads, those Apple podcast changes. In September, apple released a new version of Apple Podcasts which seems to have had a real effect on the industry. Tell me more.

James Cridland: 6:26

Yeah, loads of people reporting that their main podcast numbers are down, and we talked about Buzzsprouts numbers last week. That was work that I did with Buzzsprouts numbers, but it's the turn of Libsyn this week to have their say, and the feed is a great podcast worth a listen to. They reckon that Apple's changes could mean 30% fewer downloads for your show come January. From the feed, here's Rob Walsh.

Rob Walch: 6:55

If shows have over 300 episodes, they could and should expect to see their total weekly downloads at the end of November be greater than a 25% drop below where their weekly numbers were in early September.

James Cridland: 7:09

I mean that's quite a big, big drop, and just because of the Apple Podcasts thing, I think Rob is very clever in pointing out that this is really only affecting podcasts that have lots of back catalog. So if you're doing new shows, new episodes, it's probably not affecting you as much as the big back catalog which was affected by. You know the fault in Apple Podcasts. He does go on to say, though it doesn't mean fewer people are listening to your show.

Rob Walch: 7:37

Here's the thing, and I want people to remember this your audience size did not change those numbers. That was extra downloads that were happening to your back catalog weren't being listened to. It's just right sizing your downloads, your monthly and weekly downloads, to what's more realistic and what's really happening.

James Cridland: 7:57

I think it's a really good point. It's well worth the listen. There's a tons more of talk about Apple Podcasts, downloads and stuff like that. It's the feed. The official Libsyn podcast is what you need to be searching for, and he also mentions that Spotify's numbers are down as well, which is something that I've spotted from other platforms as well, so I think it's one to watch for.

Sam Sethi: 8:18

next, year, but I like the fact that it isn't changing your current users. It's the back catalog, so I mean not as big an issue as it first seemed to be. Well, hopefully, hopefully. Now MailChimp, it's up to some monkey business, I think, james, with the unions. I took your title and I ran with it. Now, what are they doing? I know I haven't used MailChimp in years, but it's that email mass sending out platform. What are they up to?

James Cridland: 8:47

Well, they were doing some work with Odyssey on a new podcast and then, all of a sudden, apparently, the contract comes through and it says by the way, MailChimp doesn't want anybody working in a union working on this show, which I just find really weird. That is a really strange request. Why would you ask for that? That makes no sense whatsoever. Anyway, the Verge reported this and they said that the contract required all work on the series to be performed by non-union workers. And yeah, the WGAE, the Writers Guild of America East, has a website to contact MailChimp and to say what are you playing around with? That's a very strange choice of MailChimp's.

Sam Sethi: 9:40

Yeah, I can't quite pick my head out of it. They're now owned by Intuit and Intuit basically spends millions getting the government to make filing taxes difficult. I don't know, maybe it's just something to do with Intuit, I don't know. It's a weird one. I mean it's a weird one.

James Cridland: 9:59

Yeah, it could be an Intuit thing, it could be what they firmly believe that unions are a bad idea. But yeah, I mean, it's a pretty horrible company as Intuit. Pod News has never used MailChimp and frankly, I don't believe. If you are working in the podcast industry, I don't think you should be using MailChimp either. So there are plenty of good people to go with instead. If you like what MailChimp does, then you'll probably like what EmailOctopus does. I love the way that they've called themselves EmailOctopus Another word for Mail, another word for Chimp EmailOctopus. That's really funny. But yeah, so there's that, or the sendee, which we use, or there's all kinds of other tools as well. But yeah, what a strange thing. No idea what all of that is about. Doubtless somebody might want to send us a boostergram and explain the issues that this company has with unions, because I'd love to know about it.

Sam Sethi: 11:01

Now one of these cases that's been rattling around for a while. It's SiriusXM. Have been in court from the suing by the National Association of the Deaf and we thought we were going to get a judgment. It seems it's not going to be a judgment right now. What's going on, james?

James Cridland: 11:19

No, we were due. I mean, this has been going for two years and we were due a judgment in December. That was then pushed back to the end of January because they were apparently having some good conversations the National Association of the Deaf and SiriusXM. The whole thing is because there's no transcripts from the Stitcher app and of course, the Stitcher app no longer exists. But the SiriusXM app certainly does, and there won't be full transcripts baked into the app, which is probably worthwhile mentioning. But according to the National Association of the Deaf, or rather their lawyers, they have said in a letter to the judge that SiriusXM is not willing to engage in meaningful settlement discussions at this time. So Can you?

Sam Sethi: 12:10

do that. Just tell the judge, not bothered, I'm not coming to court.

James Cridland: 12:13

Well, you know, yeah, I mean, I don't know Maybe they're telling the judge that so that the judge ends up making a ruling against them without them being in court. I don't know. I suppose that there are two things that have happened over the last two years. One thing is that the podcasting 2.0, the new podcast namespace, includes transcripts and that's not used by by many of the big podcast publishers yet, but hopefully will be in the future. But also there's the other sort of side of it, which is actually, if you own an iPhone, if you own a Pixel phone, if you use Chrome to listen to podcasts, as many people do, all of those three things have live captions on them anyway now. So you can actually turn them on on your phone and you can have a listen to the audio and it will automatically turn that into a live caption for you and that's now built into the phone. That wasn't the case two years ago, particularly for iPhone. So perhaps what Sirius XM are doing and I don't know is that they may be just sort of dragging their heels a little bit just to point out that actually the technology is now built into your phone and you don't need to worry about live captions, which is a slightly different thing to transcripts on mobile phones. So perhaps that's their game. I really don't know. But yeah, that seems to be going on and on and on.

James Cridland: 13:48

It's not the only thing that Sirius XM is in trouble with at the moment, because they've just been taken to court by New York. The city of New York, or rather the US state of New York, has sued Sirius XM this week because it's almost impossible, they say, to cancel a Sirius XM paid subscription if you have that in your car, and so they're basically suing them for that. This is a city where, of course, the New York Times. It's always been the case that you've not been able to cancel the New York Times without ringing somebody up and talking to them. So not quite sure why they're looking at Sirius XM rather than the New York Times, but still, there we go. So more fun in court for Sirius XM, I'm sure.

Sam Sethi: 14:38

Okay, james, moving on, we covered a story, or let's say, you covered a story about a company called Podcast AI that received $25,000 from Jason Calacanis and a further $100,000 as well. I thought that that was a really interesting thing, because we haven't seen many podcasting companies getting funded, certainly not through an accelerator as well known as launch, so I thought I'd catch up with him and find out, a what is podcast AI doing, what's so unique about them? And, b how do they actually get their funding, because they have a very unique way that they approach Jason Calacanis.

Edward Brawer: 15:13

Podcast AI is a platform to automate your podcast. So if you thought of podcasting as buckets, production, post-production, promotion and then profit, we would be right now in the post-production and promotion buckets and cool. So yeah, so post-production is obviously generating all that metadata that goes along with actually putting your podcast out. We also do in terms of distribution. For YouTubers that use us for that metadata, we actually make it so that we generate a feed for them. They can submit those to the platforms. So, essentially, they use us, they get a beautiful website generated, they get that feed automatically and they get all that metadata and promotion stuff that they use for their channel.

Sam Sethi: 15:58

Okay. So basically, if I've got this right, I've recorded my show, I've got an audio or video, I come to podcast AI, I create my account, I upload it to you guys and in that process, what happens next? Talk me through it.

Edward Brawer: 16:13

So, essentially, you upload the file and then you have a few steps that are automated so transcription, generation of chapters, generation of key points, identification of the speakers in the chapters. It'll generate the description of the episode, the title, even, if you want and then, once you have all of that, there's a step called memorization. The reason for memorization is that we put every single paragraph in the episode into a vector database. What that means is that not only does the show website that we generate have an amazing search function and by amazing I mean you could search for Netflix, and if all you spoke about in the episode was streaming services and you never even said Netflix, that would still come up as a top result, because it's conceptually the same thing and also, when you're setting up your show, you're actually also creating the hosts as AI hosts. You're uploading a sample of the voice as well, and what happens is those AI hosts become available for AI chat with the episode. Post episode is Q&A and the AI hosts actually respond in their voice to any audience questions that you type in. And the AI hosts actually have access to all those memories, quote unquote, of every past episode. So you can imagine how powerful that is. It is your podcast archivists. We have shows that have over 1800 episodes, notably Jason's, and that just becomes super powerful over time. So podcast AI has that archive essentially of your show, because you're memorizing, and then at that point it's really all the promotion aspects, so you can actually go to the promotion tab, generate a list of the top 10 viral moments, quote unquote.

Edward Brawer: 18:01

What that means is the parts, the snippets of the episode that would do best as vertical YouTube short or TikTok style videos. Our intent is actually to generate those pretty soon, but we had customers we were talking to who. When I demoed this, they said hey, can you deploy this like right now, because if I could just copy the timestamps or download the audio, even just that would save my editor like an unbelievable amount of time. So we would put that out. And we're also working with podcast agencies and a lot of what they do is doing social posting. So they gave us an idea like a recording of how they do their entire process. We're turning it into a product so you can actually pick any one of those viral moments, generate a social post out of it and you have the LinkedIn copy, instagram, youtube short, tiktok and Twitter slash X thread that would go along with that viral video, and in the future we'll be integrating that with your social accounts, so even the posting will be automated.

Sam Sethi: 19:02

Sweet. I like that. Now, in terms of this is a single episode by single episode. Would you ever envisage just taking my RSS feed the whole of my episodes and just sucking that in, and then, obviously the first time it'll be taking everything backwardly. That might take a bit of time, but going forward, every new published episode that I put into my host comes through my RSS feed, goes into your platform and then boom, it produces all of the chapters, the transcripts, the notes, everything I need, plus my social assets, and then I can use it from your platform. Is that something you might consider?

Edward Brawer: 19:41

Yeah. So right now, for a lot of our customers we've actually gone back. We have tools that will automatically take in all their past episodes and we'll take care of that for them. So usually what customers will do from that point on start using us as the first ingest point and they would use the metadata generated to go into, let's say, they were using Buzz, Sprout or whatever as their podcast hosting platform. They would put that in there and for the people that started with us for their feed, that's obviously not a problem and we've moved a few feeds to us. So, yeah, I think we essentially want to cover all the workflows so that, no matter which of those buckets of how podcasting works, A to Z, whichever of those you want to use podcast AI for if not all of them that'll work.

Sam Sethi: 20:28

Okay, let's take a step back before you started podcast AI. What's your background in AI or programming, or in this space?

Edward Brawer: 20:37

Well, I've been my whole life. I've been doing websites, software for Mac, ios and those even really everything Did a lot of consulting medical software apps and my co-founder and I, sean Duncombe. We started a company late 2019, it was in the creator space, more of like a YouTube Patreon hybrid. We learned a lot on our first startup together. That was like learning network effects and the power of those and a lot of other lessons, obviously, but when everything started happening with AI. So it's funny. It's like it started very slowly and then very rapidly.

Edward Brawer: 21:17

And I remember looking at all the current AI tech a few years ago and the interesting thing is back then I was looking at it for transcription was kind of interesting, but also, for example, generate here's an example of three YouTube titles and generate seven more. That's the kind of thing that was possible. But with chat GBT, really the incredible thing was it wasn't a technical change, it was actually just two realizations. Which was these LLMs? They just autocomplete one word at a time or one token, really, but one word, let's say, and they're just continuing the story so that it's coherent, and it turns out that if you just start the story with, you are an advanced AI agent helping a human. Here's the human's first question. What is your response? It'll continue that story on that premise, auto completing one word at a time.

Sam Sethi: 22:08

What prompt engineering is going to be about, right? Exactly Creating that first part of the story.

Edward Brawer: 22:13

Yeah, the second realization was if every time you prompt it, you say, by the way, here's the back and forth of the conversation until now, that becomes part of the story, and so it's actually continuing that conversation now. So it's just those two things, and, based on how fast things were happening and the kinds of things we realized were possible, we just realized, my God, this is just a pivotal moment. This is like 25, 30 years ago, when the internet was happening and Sean and I were too young by this much to participate, but amazing companies were formed and we realized we really had to go all in on this and everything that we wish we could do is now actually possible. And that's sort of how we got into AI just very quickly. It's amazing how fast it is to create things that are just mind blowing.

Sam Sethi: 23:04

Yeah, I'm just thinking of the other things you create. Just my brain's going now in terms of cover art from the actual episode, so chapter art. Would you do that as well, possibly taking the transcript and producing a summary of that total transcript down to like a small paragraph? There's so much you could do with it because obviously I've used chat, gbt and some of the AI stability programs and some of that and Dali, ian, so suddenly, when you've got all of that with that content, you can create so much of the, as you said, the metadata, post production stuff and then the promotion stuff. You also mentioned that obviously you're connecting that to eventually to your existing accounts. Will you be able to? Because, what's really interesting, I've seen also taking prompts from AI and it generates video from that. So even if you're coming from an audio with a transcript, you can create a video. It's not a hallucination, but in effect it is because that video didn't even exist. It's a production, produced video by the AI, rather than any real video that you're actually asking it to edit or manipulate.

Edward Brawer: 24:12

Yeah, that's actually some part of the original vision and we can talk sort of about how we actually got into all this, but yeah, part of it was us generating a parody of the All In podcast and we generated even video of it. So, for example, there was one segment where Elon Musk was a guest on the podcast and it was full video with his mouth moving to the words that we generated. So, essentially, part of what we're building with those AI hosts that have the memories based on all past transcripts is the ability to generate unique content in the future. It's not for every kind of podcast. Obviously. In some content, the value is the fact that it's the real people and it's extemporaneous, but what we're going to be able to do is just outright amazing.

Sam Sethi: 24:58

Yeah, I mean, as you say, probably just scratching the surface. Now, looking forward, I mean you talked about being able to generate advertising and voice cloning and from the actual creators, the voice hosts. Talk to me a little bit more about that.

Edward Brawer: 25:15

Yeah. So the process right now with podcast AI is you sign up, you pick your plan and then you create your show. And you don't just create the show, you create the host. And by create the host that means you actually create, first of all, profile for the host with their socials, their bio and also display picture and finally a voice sample. The voice sample essentially gives us the ability to generate audio in the host's voice and we have a few features that work based on that. So that would be the AI chat, for example, on the show website. That lets the audience actually have a back and forth with AI versions of the host, again trained on past transcripts. And also it gives us the ability to have tools like, for example, we have an ad regenerator.

Edward Brawer: 26:03

So if you're a producer and it's really hard to get your host, get them in the chair doing those ad reads, you have to give it very little, you just give it. You know what the sponsor name is, kind of the very basic idea. We call it base copy. You could put full copy if somebody wanted a very literal ad read, but you just put that base copy with a call to action very short, and then you just say how many seconds you want 60 seconds, let's say and you pick the reader, which is the host, and hit generate. It will add lib automatically, the entire copy. It's excellent and you also get an MP3 of the host the AI host performing it, and you actually just insert that into your podcast.

Sam Sethi: 26:45

So I've used this before in a different platform. I've used Descript when, originally, when they bought their voice cloning capability, they bought a Canadian company called Lime and then they brought that in house. When I first trained my voice, it was 30 minutes of reading and now I believe they literally do it, like you said, from a base voice or from from previous transcripts that they've got of you on audio transcripts. So with this voice cloning and creating the ads, you did this. I think it's brilliant. You did this when you went to the racial funding round. You did it for the actual investor, didn't you?

Edward Brawer: 27:23

Yeah, it was. It was a very kind of accidental thing. So the backstory is I was so my fiance at the time. I was on the weekend going over her house. I realized I needed a much more powerful laptop to actually be able to do my work. So I bought one of those new Apple laptops that are super powerful and I just found myself sitting there and I used one of those text to speech voices to make David Sacks start talking from the online podcast and I realized immediately wow, I could do a parody of this.

Edward Brawer: 27:57

So they had ended an episode I think it was like 117, they had no, they had started it joking about oh, you're going to get replaced with an AI. No, the AI, you. I know what it's going to talk about. And so the start of the parody, the premise was the four of them got turned into AI's, so the parody was a 10 minute AI version of the all in podcast and it was exactly their voices and scripted by me. So and a fan, so I know how they talk and how those interactions work. I tweeted it and Jason retweeted, the all in account retweeted, david Sacks retweeted. It just went viral.

Edward Brawer: 28:40

From there we did in total six episodes and they were getting hundreds of thousands of views. One of them, we went all video using all the latest AI tools that actually allow us to do that, including Elon Musk as sort of a guest in one of those and people were messaging me like, is this real? There are two buckets of people that thought it was real and people that were like, oh, this is obviously scripted by a person. And the people that thought it was real they were like give us the GitHub repo and stuff like this. And Sean and I, we realized, my God, we have to do something with us. We actually could make this real, actually. And that's how we started looking and we found podcastaicom incorporated and joined. Joined founder you, which is Jason's on ramp to the accelerator.

Sam Sethi: 29:30

Yeah, and so did he come to you and say hey, by the way, guys, what do you need to come and join me, or did you? Okay, we can do this, let's go and join him. Which, who reached out to who it was?

Edward Brawer: 29:41

Well, it was us reaching out in terms of creating that. But press from the from founder you he had actually DMed me. We got so many DMs from prominent people that were just enjoying and just saying, wow, this is amazing. And fresh had sent me one of those notes and I saw he was talking about founder university, was posting about it because if he runs it. And so I messaged him like hey, like could we apply? And he was like yeah, apply, like go for it please. And and yeah, we became part of that group and it was just an amazing experience.

Sam Sethi: 30:17

And then you moved on to Jason's accelerator launch and raise a further 100,000. So what are you planning on doing with all this money now I mean, there's two of you, I'm sure it's pretty light what are you planning on doing?

Edward Brawer: 30:32

Well, yeah, so we in the, in the in founder you. Towards the end they picked 10% of the companies to get that 25k check and then in September we got invited into the accelerator and that was another 100k check. Our burn is extremely low. We're, in fact, the revenue right now is, and we started getting our first customers just in September. The revenue is beyond the burn. So one of the things we actually the biggest expenditure we had so far is applying for one visa is for Sean and I to move to the states, to California, because we realized, with everything happening with AI, you really have to have ground game, be where everything's happening with AI, where all the engineers are and just have a presence. And, for example, a few months ago, having access to GPT four was a big advantage and having access early on to GPT four was a question of who you knew and how much right had. So that's super.

Sam Sethi: 31:28

So are you going to expand the team? When are you moving? What's the timeline?

Edward Brawer: 31:33

So application process for a ones is pretty fast. So right now the bottleneck is we just have to finish up a little bit of pre paperwork. So hopefully we'll have that done pretty soon I would say very early in the new year. We should be going down there and yeah in terms of growing the team.

Sam Sethi: 31:50

Is that an immediate requirement, or just the two of you can keep going for a while? What's it look like?

Edward Brawer: 31:55

We'd like to grow the team to be able to do. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's amazing what we're able to do just as that small a team to people. But yeah, having more people is going to let us do more, obviously, and I think that's going to help us grow even faster. We're actually we're on in the process of onboarding somebody right now more in sales, so an SDR basically reaching out to people and saying, hey, like here's what we can do with your show. Would you like to see more? So I think that's been important also in growing so fast early on.

Sam Sethi: 32:29

Yeah, and I think if you can cherry pick a few people and get them as case studies, that's always a good thing. Last sort of area, then given what you've done, you're currently what I'd see as a B2C SaaS platform. Right, so, pick your plan, come on board, create your content. Thank you very much. Do you plan on doing a B2B API element to what you're doing?

Edward Brawer: 32:51

So yeah, like there's different ways to classify stuff. So for us, B2B is really if it's us to most podcasters are businesses really, if they're okay yeah, that would be doing yeah.

Sam Sethi: 33:04

Yeah, I see what you say. I guess for me what I. Okay, let me re refine that question. B2c I mean because I see your customer is the podcaster right, or is the YouTuber or is that content creator right? What I mean by B2B is companies like Buzzsprout licensed their AI from a third party and integrated into their platform through the API, and I can see many other podcast hosts or podcast apps or other players in the market going, hey, love what you're doing, not going to be able to replicate what you're doing, but we'd love to have an AI interface into it so that we would send you the audio directly. It would then bring it back and we then, based on the API, we could then put the transcription here, then we can do all the other bits, bank and then that gets fed out. So that's what I meant by B2B. Would you be a solution provider to other application providers?

Edward Brawer: 34:02

Yeah, so that that could happen. It would really depend on if somebody asked for it. We would evaluate at that time. Certainly not difficult for us to do. But you know, just like there's all those aspects of the pipeline for actually producing an episode. In terms of the sort of marketplace, what we see is customer slash retail would be people using podcast players and we do want to create a product eventually for that.

Edward Brawer: 34:27

And then the B2B and there's shades of B2B, right. Obviously the most basic one is us to a host or a producer, and then the more enterprisey contracts for us would be agencies or networks. So that would be the bigger version of B2B for us. So, yeah, for example, our show portal or show website that we generate automatically. So that's like a beautiful, beautiful website that'll work for most people. But, for example, we were just at Sequoia in the past couple days and they have a really nicely designed website for their podcast. We could totally actually make it so that website could be powered by the API to even automate that website. I'm sure it's a lot of work maintaining it. So there's a lot of things we can do in terms of API to add capabilities to other companies or bigger podcasts and that works out there. And then on the customer side, we have some ideas in terms of things that we think would be extremely interesting, based on the technology that we have, that nobody else does.

Sam Sethi: 35:35

Edward, thank you so much. Podcast AI sounds amazing. I'm going to go and have a little play with it myself after this. I might even try and see if we can put an episode of Pod News Weekly into it and see what comes out. That'll be it. Maybe I can get a voice clone of James. That'll be even funnier. I can then use it anywhere else. No, I'm only joking, james, don't worry, I won't use it. Edward, thank you so much. Tell everyone again. If they want to go and have a play and have a look about podcast AI, where do they go?

Edward Brawer: 36:03

So it's podcastaicom.

Sam Sethi: 36:06

Nice. And last question is with all of this, are you looking to, as I said, grow beyond? Would you do pre-production work as well in any way?

Edward Brawer: 36:18

Yeah. So that's kind of interesting Talking to so many customers and I already knew this, but it's kind of amazing. Everybody has their Excel spreadsheet or air table or Google Sheet for guest scheduling and sponsor scheduling, and everybody showed me their workflow for guest research. That is something that AI can obviously help with tremendously and that is something that we do want to build. It's funny, like in the SaaS space. So this is I believe it's a David Sacks saying, but he says the next great SaaS platform is somebody's Excel spreadsheet. So I think, pre-production, I think that's something that's super interesting and something we'd love to do.

Sam Sethi: 37:00

Edward, thank you so much. Congratulations on what you've achieved so far. I look forward to seeing what you achieve in the future.

James Cridland: 37:06

Thank you, pleasure Edward Brower from Podcast AI. Super interesting and super interesting as well is the fact that we have a page you can have a look at this very podcast. You'll find that at podnewsweeklyreviewonpodcastaicom, which is quite a nice address, isn't it? Podnewsweeklyreviewonpodcastaicom. One of the things that it's got in there is it's got speaking durations and whether or not I've spoken longer than you have, and all of that might seem to talk more than you, although on November, the 24th, the guest spoke longest. Was that the really, really, really long one? I think so. Yes, but yeah, so that's pretty cool, so you can go and check that out and give that a go.

Sam Sethi: 37:56

Now we've also got a couple of other platforms that are doing something very similar to podcast AI. You talked about one called Athos, an AI audio platform that's launched a new tool to create fully produced audio ads from a picture.

James Cridland: 38:14

From a picture. Yes, it's just like bizarre. Yeah, the company's called Athos. I think they're German, but they have this tool where you just take a photograph of maybe it's your press ad, maybe it's an ad, maybe it's a billboard, for example, maybe it's just even just a photograph of your store, and it goes away and makes a fully produced audio ad from it. Somehow it seems to work quite nicely, though. So, yeah, that was quite nice. So, yes, there's a company called Athos. I'll actually be showing that off Radio Days Europe in Munich in March and looking forward to having a play with that live on stage. Good luck, it could go wrong.

James Cridland: 39:01

Yeah, and there's also one called Snipped, which allows you to summarize your favorite podcast with AI. It's just got selected as breakout of the year in the 2023 Milly Awards, which is all very smart, and it'd be interesting to get them on Sam.

Sam Sethi: 39:21

Yes, yeah. Well, I thought it was an interesting product they're out of Switzerland, actually and so I peamed Kevin and said would you come on for the 12th of January show? And he said yes, so we'll have them in the new year, Excellent.

James Cridland: 39:32

Well, you've heard it here first Spotify doing some interesting things around books.

Sam Sethi: 39:37

Well, they have been. I mean, it sort of came on our radar, didn't it, when they first announced that they're doing audiobooks, and we know that that's been something that they've looked for as a third revenue stream or fourth or whatever. And but the interesting thing is, none of the deal structure has been made public. Now Bloomberg have managed to get a hold of the deal structure and it's very odd. It says if an audiobook is 100 minutes long, a full listen can be achieved by either one Spotify subscriber listening to the full 100 minutes or five customers listening to 20 minutes each. So you have to fundamentally roll up a number of minutes in order to get a payment or a credit against your book. Again, it's streaming, basically payments, as opposed to a one off payment, and this is what we were talking about before. Is Spotify getting into streaming payments? That's the key.

James Cridland: 40:33

Yeah, and it is a streaming payments very similar to streaming satts, isn't it? Except they're not using satts. So, yes, under the terms given to Macmillan, which may be different to other terms, but new listener minutes for every title will be tallied up each month to come up with total number consumed, and then they basically work out the payment from that. It's probably a good way. I mean, the way that Spotify works in terms of music is I seem to be paying for Taylor Swift.

James Cridland: 41:03

Even though I never pay for I never listened to Taylor Swift, I still seem to be paying for Taylor Swift because of the way that it works. It's essentially they throw everything into a big bucket and then they have a look at the total plays across the platform and give the record companies money based on that, rather than. You know, if the only, if the only artist that I listened to on Spotify for a month was the Beatles, for example, then I mean, theoretically, it wouldn't it be nice if the Beatles got all of my money? But it doesn't work that way and anyway the Beatles are mostly dead, so I don't suppose they care.

Sam Sethi: 41:45

I think there's two of them, but anyway they're close, there are two of them. Yes, yes, half dead. I was going to say that's 50% of the Beatles. That's not fully dead yet. Yes, exactly, let's talk about some nice things. Yes, let's talk about some nice things instead. Kate Cocker, friend of the show, has just gone past 2000th episode on basically December the 22nd, so today with her show called Everyday Positivity. So congratulations, kate.

James Cridland: 42:12

Yes, congratulations, kate, friend of the show. 2000 episodes is a pretty big thing. The podcast is doing some nice things for charity, which is a nice plan, the proceeds going to UNICEF, which is of course a global organization committed to improving the lives of children around the world. So that's a good thing. So many congratulations, kate. Also, we got a nice thing from Pacific Content. We got an audio podcast Christmas card. This was a relatively simple thing to do. A piece of audio with just a little automated pre-roll was just for us at the start of it, but I thought it was quite a nice idea. It's a little parody of the most wonderful podcast this year. Here's a clip. So that's lovely, isn't it? So yeah, so that was a nice thing to get hold of.

Sam Sethi: 43:26

Well done to them. Now quick zip around the world. Adalicious, the UK podcast production company, is now going to be represented for ad sales in the USA by Realm. That's a big announcement, I think.

James Cridland: 43:38

Yes, indeed, also. Uk Sports Podcast Network, sports Social, has hit 10 million downloads a month, which is a nice big number, and has welcomed 100 new shows this year.

Sam Sethi: 43:49

Over to Germany. Acast's average podcast advertiser increased their spend by 34%. These are the things I love. We see the various reports telling us everything's going up, up, up, and then we see downloads going down, down, down. So who knows?

James Cridland: 44:04

Yeah, indeed, because that is nice and positive. There's another nice, positive story from ACAST in the US as well. 66% of US listeners say it's easier to concentrate on a podcast than an audiobook, which I think makes a bit of sense. They've also published a roundup of trends for 2023 as well.

Sam Sethi: 44:24

Talk House, which is a production podcast network, saw an increase of 148% in listeners. Unique reach also increased by 148%. I often wonder, when you see numbers like that, that they say but anyway, that's what they said. So there you go.

James Cridland: 44:42

Indeed, and an interesting thing from Germany that Stefan spotted there's a German community radio website which basically gives you an RSS feed, but you can choose what shows and what content you want within the RSS feed, so you can basically fix it just for the stuff that you want and nothing else. It's much easier for them to do that rather than to offer 60, 70 different feeds available in Apple Podcasts, which would just confuse everybody.

Sam Sethi: 45:14

So I thought that that was quite a nice plan and Pottibot, the wonderful company out of Denmark who has an audiobook subscription service, have done their look back for 2023, James.

James Cridland: 45:30

Yes, they have. They ended up doing. I mean, it's much the same as Spotify, unwrapped, except it looks at what subscribers listened to in 2023. But from that they ended up with details saying that true crime in Finland and Norway is becoming less popular, which is interesting. News and politics, if you're in Spain and the Netherlands, is becoming more popular, which again is interesting. And erotic podcasts are becoming much more popular in Germany, those German, those German yes, filthy, filthy Germans, and also Podema, of course, out of Copenhagen, but they're in a number of different countries. Iwux, out of Spain, has also done something that they've called the Iwux Rewind 2023. And that's again listeners, summaries of the year, and again we see some data coming out of that as well. So, podcasts that made buzz, whatever that means Planet Occulto is the number one there and the most listened to podcast, Diaz Extranios out of out of fluent there you go Out of.

James Cridland: 46:49

You're fluent in that.

Sam Sethi: 46:50

Yes, natural Spanish speaker.

James Cridland: 46:53

Indeed, let's talk people news, shall we Natural? News on the Pod News Weekly Review Indeed.

Sam Sethi: 47:00

The man who's had more jobs than I've had hot dinners. Rob Greenley has joined the business development team at InSounds.

James Cridland: 47:08

Yes, I'm not sure it's necessarily a job. I think it's a. I think he's working there as a consultant and in fact, the press release is very clear he's working there under contract. But yeah, it's an interesting tool. I'm learning more about it because I'm doing some keynotes about AI and that sort of thing next year, and so I'll be chatting with Rob in the new year. But the company produces an AI powered tool that enhances sound quality for podcast production, but it appears to do that in a live stream fashion as well, if I've understood it correctly. So I'm looking forward to learning a little bit more about that from Rob when we chat next year.

Sam Sethi: 47:50

Jackie Moss is a new VP of audio at Canadian Broadcaster Chorus. She starts on January the 1st.

James Cridland: 47:58

Yes, there is an Aussie doing that job at the moment, a man called Ronnie Stanton, who is a larger than life chap who has a lot of Hawaiian shirts. He lives here in Queensland in Australia. He's on planes a lot and apparently he has a new opportunity which he will be telling us about anytime soon. So I'm looking forward to that. And then quickly going through a couple of other things here. Aj Feliciano is a good man from the Roost. He's now VP of the Roost, which is a good promotion for him.

James Cridland: 48:32

Andy Rogers is starting a new position, a senior director of partnerships and publishers at Libsyn, which is nice to see some new jobs going at Libsyn. And Tom Conorton I hope I've pronounced his name right. I don't really know whether or not I have. Anyway, he is quite senior at Spotify. He's managing director of UK and Ireland for the company and he's been there for six years, but he has said on LinkedIn that his time as managing director of Spotify UK and Ireland has come to an end. That was about a week after the announcements of 1500 job losses, so one can assume it's one of those. But yeah, some interesting big changes therefore going on in in Spotify. Right now We've not heard of any other big you know big, big names who have left yet as a result of that 1500. But you would assume that there's going to be more larger names in there too.

Sam Sethi: 49:34

Mm-hmm, and I assume they're gonna have to replace him somehow, so you can't have a rudderless UK operation.

: 49:39

No, no indeed podcast events on the pod news weekly review.

Sam Sethi: 49:46

Events James, let's crack on.

James Cridland: 49:48

Yes, let's talk about events and many Congratulations. We're recording this on Thursday morning for you, so we're right in the middle of the two shows from Ainsley Costello and the numbers are in from her first live show, I believe.

Sam Sethi: 50:07

yeah, I mean we all stayed up till one o'clock in the morning for the start of the show and went to bed at three, which might Describe why my brain's a little foggy. But I have that said. It was very well done. Congratulations to dovey das and the team at RSS blue. It all went very smoothly. All the apps fountain, podverse, true fans, podcast, guru were all on stage, sats were flowing, lots of big numbers were flowing through it. There is a person who may have put a million sats I think I'll be may have blocked it. Are we not quite sure? We're waiting on some auditing of that one, but it fundamentally lots of hundred thousand sats, lots of two hundred thousand sats. So it went very well. And, yeah, there's another show on Thursday, so the day of the recording today of our show, and hopefully she'll go through another five million plus and I think that show is going to be much bigger than the one that we saw last night.

James Cridland: 51:06

So yeah, congratulations.

James Cridland: 51:07

Ainsley interesting to see so many. Congratulations, ainsley on that. A couple of other announcements in terms of Events are the on-air fest in Brooklyn, which is happening February the 28th to March. The first. That includes a hot pod session. It's the main hot pod conference, and I've been.

James Cridland: 51:32

I've been Invited with a free ticket, which is lovely, but it's in New York. It's very expensive to get to New York free flight with that one. Then I'm not yet. I'm not sure. No free flight, no free hotel, right? I'm not sure, necessarily that that is a thing that I can quite manage. I mean, I would love to do that, but yeah, I don't think I can quite manage that. But Looking forward, though, to the podcast show in London which is in May, where you and I will both be, and they have vacancies as well. They're looking for a head of conference programming Not quite sure what that means for Tom, so might find out about that and an Exhibition marketing executive as well. More details Pod news net slash jobs. And there are more events, both paid for and free a pod news, virtual events or events in a place with People. If you're organizing something, tell the world about it. It's free to be listed. Pod news net slash events. The tech stuff. Text on the pod news weekly review.

James Cridland: 52:34

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the pod news newsletter here we. Here is where we do all of the tech talk and crikey. Yes, we've got a bit of it, haven't we?

Sam Sethi: 52:44

well, we have a little bit, but it's actually just very quick. Highlights music of 3d verse is a new place for musicians to post their songs as an RSS feed. It uses peer tube, which is the open source equivalent to YouTube. Others in this space, of course, our RSS blue, who did the event for Ainsley and then be some way of like. So look lots and lots of new Directories appearing for musicians. How, how they'll all compete, what they will do to differentiate, time will tell indeed 95 Google.

James Cridland: 53:18

It has taken a look at how the Google Podcasts migration process to YouTube music looks like. It's not something that we can see here, either in Australia or in the UK, but it is something which is going on in the US right now. Interestingly, they have reported that a feature called mark as played will be coming shortly to the YouTube podcasts app or other YouTube music app, which I had actually heard about. So it's nice that they have also heard about that and they have reported it. And they've also added something. They, being at YouTube music, have also apparently added a feature which is called podcast recommendations. Now, I've just checked. I have this on on YouTube music and I've been listening to a few podcasts in YouTube music, so I'm looking forward to Seeing some notifications about podcasts that I might want to listen to. Not quite sure how that works. Wouldn't it be lovely if they were using the pod roll, but I don't think that they're going to. But yeah, something to something to keep an eye on though.

Sam Sethi: 54:29

Well, I think you'll get that Indonesian podcast out of Australia as one of your first recommendations, james.

James Cridland: 54:34

Yes, yes, quite possibly I would have. I would have thought.

Sam Sethi: 54:39

Now pod news you're on mustard on. Tell me more.

James Cridland: 54:44

Yes, so you can follow pod news on master on. If you just do a search for pod news, then you'll find us updates at social dot pod news net, and what I posted last week within pod news is we would like to encourage you to follow us there. Follow the hashtag podcasting as well. Hashtag podcasting is a good one, because you find an awful lot of people who are also involved in podcasting as well. And as of last week, and there's a, there's a strategy or there's a campaign called x last, and what that campaign is is it's basically saying you know, x is a pretty or Twitter is a pretty bad place to be if you are a brand owner right now. Yet we all feel that we kind of have to be there anyway.

James Cridland: 55:33

So one of the ways that we can hopefully pull people away from Twitter and the toxic conversations which are going on there is to Deliberately post on Twitter last. So, as of last week, we post on Twitter 30 minutes after we post everywhere else, and that has cost me Sam one subscriber who's who'd sent me an angry email by. Who sent me an angry email saying I Realized that you do not share the same. You do not share the the same views that I do, so I'm unsubscribing and I thought to myself oh okay, so you want to be on somewhere which is anti-Semitic and anti-trans and basically a horrible place to be? Okay, fine. So I think I replied and I said, okay, cool.

Sam Sethi: 56:30

So there we are. Don't let the barn door hit you on the way.

James Cridland: 56:33

No, exactly exactly. But you know good, good of them to email, good of them to email now Sovereign feeds. I was going to say, talking about talking about activity pub though, sam, are you, are you doing? Is true fans doing anything? And we should just mention, by the way, in case you missed the big announcement last week, pod fans is no longer. It's now called true fans, because it does more than just podcasting. Is true fans doing any exciting things around activity pub? It seems like a Something that you might be into.

Sam Sethi: 57:11

Yeah, we we came up with. If you look in activity pub, in your profile you can put a statement called really calls me Very simple way to verify who you are on masterdom by pointing to another site that you have control over. That will then say, yeah, you are now verified. So every true fans profile has a really calls me in it and every masterdom Account that you add has one of those as well. So you then get a lovely verified tick. So that's the first thing we did.

Sam Sethi: 57:42

Obviously, the underlying structure of true fans uses something called activity streams, which is James listened to podcast 2.0. So that's active verb object and that's the structure of an activity stream, which is the basis of where eventually became activity pub. So what we do is we have that full structure in place and it just dawned on me that we can actually, in your profile, turn true fans into an activity pub client. So it's just an inbox outbox. So, yeah, we were already beginning to put at messaging like a DM strike message. So you might say I want to just at the creator, I don't want to send a boost or I don't want to do anything else. So we were beginning to look at that and it just dawned on me that actually we could just turn the whole of true fans very quickly Into an activity pub client. So that's one of the things we will do in 2024 very nice.

James Cridland: 58:39

It's worthwhile yeah, it's worthwhile giving that a go, and, of course, your that that sort of rel equals me thing. It's very clever because, firstly, it allows you to prove that you are that person on other podcast you know, on on other websites and things like that, but also it means that you're quite cleverly, you know, encouraging people to link to that from the rest of the internet as well, which, of course, has good news For SEO and all that kind of stuff on there as well. So, yeah, I think that that's quite a you know, quite a smart plan.

Sam Sethi: 59:22

Well, we could see hosts add really cause me to your podcast. So, for example, you could have a host add a really cause me statement to your podcast page and then we could link to that podcast page and then we could verify that you are the owner of that podcast. We get around all of that verify tag and all the Oauth jumping around.

James Cridland: 59:43

It'd be a very quick and simple way to do. Yes, indeed, that's a smart thing. Other things going on Blueberry says it will add support for VTS. What's VTS value? Time splits, of course value time.

Sam Sethi: 59:56

So it's all wallet switching.

James Cridland: 59:58

Yes, yes that's coming magic wallets switching capability. Libsyn says that it will support podcasting 2.0 in In 2024, according to Dave Jackson. Now Dave works at Libsyn, at least part-time, so that sounds good. Do we know which bit of podcasting 2.0? It's going to support?

Sam Sethi: 1:00:19

No, it's listening to the future of podcasting with Dave and Daniel and, yeah, they just reiterated or Dave reiterated that in several internal meetings that they are committing to supporting podcasting 2.0. So I thought, yeah, that's great, well done.

James Cridland: 1:00:33

Well, that's pretty good. Sovereignfeeds also now supporting the alternate enclosure to enable video like Truefan, so that's a good thing too. There's a new version of Wave Lake which is coming soon. It'd be nice to get Sam Means back on, but exciting things happening with Fountain as well.

Sam Sethi: 1:00:52

Yeah, fountain. As of this recording, have just dropped version 1.0 of Fountain, which has been approved by Apple. They're already in the Google Play Store and I thought I'd catch up with Oscar to find out what's new in Fountain 1.0.

Oscar Merry: 1:01:08

Yeah, really exciting.

Oscar Merry: 1:01:10

We've been working incredibly hard over the past three or four months now, working on a complete redesign of the Fountain mobile app for our Fountain 1.0 release.

Oscar Merry: 1:01:23

So we've really tried to focus heavily on user experience, design and just general usability and performance for our 1.0 release. I think Fountain's been around for about two years now and I think we've done a really amazing job with kind of spearheading some of the new podcasting 2.0 features and that's what has enabled us to get to this point. But I think, because we were moving so quickly, we sometimes lacked on the usability front and the design front, whereas now, with this 1.0 release, we have an incredibly well designed app that feels really spacious, easy to use. All of the features that we've implemented over the last two years have been polished so they all work a lot more smoothly, a lot more intuitively, and we also have some really exciting new features that we've added to the 1.0 release as well. So, yeah, we're really excited about it. It should be live on iOS and Android now by the time this interview goes out. So, yeah, can't wait for everybody to get their hands on it and give it a try.

Sam Sethi: 1:02:35

Yeah, you've given me a sneak preview. It looks really good. You talked about some new features in it, so let's start off with what are the highlights of the new features.

Oscar Merry: 1:02:43

Yeah. So I guess to take a step back and talk about the why behind Fountain. One of our fundamental beliefs and it's why we started Fountain is that we believe that there's incredible knowledge, insight and wisdom that exists within the podcast medium, but we feel that it's often locked away in the long form format and also the mechanism of scribing to an RSS feed and seeing your episodes kind of appear in your list each day when you open the app and many of the features in Fountain and the improvements that we've added with 1.0, the goal is really to help you discover great audio content and to help you discover great podcasts. So one of the features that's been in Fountain since day one is our clipping feature so you can create clips on Fountain and with the social features that we have, you can see all of the clips from your followers when they create them. So the idea here is, let's say, you're really into a podcast on sports, but I'm not necessarily interested in that. To the level where I subscribe to the feed, there might still be an amazing clip from that podcast that I find really interesting and I might listen to that clip. That might make me listen to that episode and that's great for everybody, but it doesn't require me as a listener to actually subscribe to the full feed. So clipping is really important for us.

Oscar Merry: 1:04:09

What we've done in Fountain 1.0 around clipping is two things. The first is we have a brand new clipping tool that makes it so quick and easy to create a clip directly from the player. The second thing that we've done is we've added clip stories what we're calling clip stories on the home feed. What this means is you can very quickly see which of your followers on Fountain have created clips and you can quickly jump into those clips, browse through them really easily by swiping through the clips and having them auto play and then like or apply to the clips or view the full episode directly from the clip player. So the clipping tool and the new clip player we think are just going to take the clips experience on Fountain to a whole nother level and ultimately that clipping experience is going to drive discovery for the podcaster, which is everything what we're all about really. So yeah, clipping has had a massive revamp. Really excited about that.

Oscar Merry: 1:05:04

The second thing we've done is just improve the main player. Obviously, the main player is probably the most important screen in a podcaster because it's the one you spend the most time on and, with all of the new podcasting 2.0 features that we've introduced over the past two years, it has been quite a challenge to design the player in a way that's really important A that's really intuitive, really looks amazing but also gives you access to all of these powerful new podcast features. So our new player first off, it looks amazing but also you have very quick and kind of seamless access to all of the new podcasting 2.0 features like boosts, comments, chapters, transcripts, all of those additional features. So, yeah, the new player is looking amazing. And then the rest of the app has just had a complete redesign so our home feed is much more spacious in terms of viewing all of the activity and comments from your followers. Our library has had a complete redesign so it's even easier to find what you're looking for in your library really quickly and kind of manage your queue, manage your auto downloads, things like that.

Oscar Merry: 1:06:13

And then the final kind of new feature that we've added in 1.0 is unified playlist. So we always had clip playlist on Fountain, but now we've revamped our playlist feature to make them unified. So what this means is you can add any content type to your playlist on Fountain. This could be podcast episodes, this could be clips, this could even be music tracks and we've seen, with the introduction of the music medium tag, more and more music is appearing in podcasting and we think playlist is a great way to kind of help people discover these new music tracks. So yeah, there's an incredible amount in Fountain 1.0. Obviously we've got a full blog post that goes through all of this on our website. So obviously hopefully we'll put this in the show notes and everyone can read more about it. But yeah, it's a massive update, complete redesign and we just hope that all of the exciting new features around podcasting 2.0, people will see that we've kind of refined them in this version and kind of made them easier to use.

Sam Sethi: 1:07:15

I feel like I need to do the Adam Curry round of applause cheers, something like that, but congratulations, because I know how much work goes into creating apps and to get it right.

Oscar Merry: 1:07:26

Another thing that I didn't mention is Fountain 1.0 is way more performant than the previous version. It's snappier and everything feels faster because of some of the performance improvements we've made to the underlying architecture. So anyone who's used Fountain previously, especially on Android, will notice a massive difference there. One other thing we've actually introduced is an integration with Strike, which is the leading Bitcoin wallet in the world. I would say We've seen incredible traction with value for value and enabling listeners to support their favorite shows directly from the player with the podcasting 2.0 value tag.

Oscar Merry: 1:08:08

Obviously, one of the challenges in using the Bitcoin Lightning network to facilitate these payments is it's an onboarding issue, because many people don't own Bitcoin. There's also a stigma around it which is probably going to be there for a while. By partnering with Strike, we allow anybody to just top up their Fountain wallet from their strike account in their local currency. So essentially, from the user perspective, it's not obvious that Bitcoin is involved and it's super easy. They don't have to make a conscious decision to purchase Bitcoin and also there's no lightning invoices or anything like that. It's just literally, you connect your strike account by logging in and then you press one button to top up your Fountain wallet, so that we think will be another huge improvement in terms of adoption of value for value.

Sam Sethi: 1:08:56

Yeah, it takes it back to James Cridland's view of just call them Internet tokens or fairground tokens.

Sam Sethi: 1:09:03

I'm coming to play in the Fountain playground and I'm topping up my wallet and now in exchange for that, I get these Fountain tokens that I can use in the Fountain app.

Sam Sethi: 1:09:14

I get they're more universal, I get it, but that aspect and then when I want to exchange my tokens back to Fiat, there you go, one click and it's taken out again, and I think that again demystifies a lot of the barriers that we find, or I'm sure you find the same when I talk to some people. You open it with it's a big guide, it's a micro payment, it's a Toshiz and you just watch the glazed eyes, just come on and I think people will get it and will understand that that's what it is. But they don't need to get it from minute one, day one. And so if I put my other hat on it as true fans and I don't understand why and you may know, it's available in the US, it's available in Brazil, it's available in South Africa, uae, australia, but not Canada, not in Europe at all. Any insider news or knowledge on why that is?

Oscar Merry: 1:10:03

No particular insight, but what I would say is we've seen this before with various apps, and when there's payments involved in regulation, you can see why they take the approach of rolling out country by country, region by region.

Oscar Merry: 1:10:19

I think I have huge confidence that over the next couple of years, we will get to a state where, no matter what country you're in around the world, you will have a Eobank like app that supports Bitcoin, lightning, and that Eobank app will make it as easy as Strike is currently making it, and I think that it is a challenge right now because in countries we're both based here in the UK and there's not really that obvious option like Strike in the UK. But I think it will happen and we just need to make sure that we've built an amazing experience for when that does happen. But yeah, I think in a couple of years, this problem won't exist and everybody will understand what the lightning network is and they won't just be topping up their podcasting app to use lightning. They'll be using it in a whole bunch of other different verticals and it will just become part of normal life, like sending a bank transfer is right now.

Sam Sethi: 1:11:20

Yeah, barry from PodHome said something very similar in an interview we did, where he said when you see, as much as we may not like them, cdbc, central Bank digital currencies coming out as well, there'll be much more mass market adoption for digital currencies. That may result in a wallet that you just said would be universal, not just for podcasting, but for multiple other vertical apps as well. So Strike is something you've added. Do you still contain MoonPage? Do you have other multiple wallets then How's this working?

Oscar Merry: 1:11:52

Yeah, so we have three different ways to top up your fountain wallet now. The first is you can top up over the lightning network, like you always could with a lightning invoice, so you can top up from any lightning wallet. The second one is MoonPage, so you can actually buy Bitcoin within the app if you want to. And then this new one that we've added is Strike, which is probably the most seamless one, especially if you already have a strike account, and obviously, if you're topping up from Strike, as I mentioned, you don't have to actually buy Bitcoin, because you can just top up from your local currency balance on Strike.

Sam Sethi: 1:12:31

The other one that's coming out that I think is still interesting and hasn't come to the UK. Short is Cash App as well. Any plans to integrate that one?

Oscar Merry: 1:12:42

Not right now, but obviously Cash App is a lightning wallet so you can top up from Cash App already just by paying the lightning invoice from Cash App Right.

Sam Sethi: 1:12:53

Oscar, amazing Well done. Congratulations on Fountain1.0. Remind everyone if they want to get their hands on it, where would they go?

Oscar Merry: 1:13:03

Yeah, so we should be live by the time this interview goes out. You can download Fountain1.0 on iOS or Android. You can also just go to our website, fountainfm, to see all of the new 1.0 features explained. We've also got a brand new kind of website as well. That kind of goes over everything to do with Fountain, but also podcasting 2.0 more broadly. We also have a great section on our website specifically for podcasters. So if you're a podcaster looking to learn more about podcasting 2.0, the new features like transcripts, chapters or value for value, just go to fountainfmcom. We've got all of the information there. Yeah, we'd love everybody to download the latest update. Give it a try and if you think it's an improvement, we'd love your feedback. If you don't, we'd still love your feedback. But I think for anyone who has tried Fountain1.0, they'll see a massive, massive difference in this version and, yeah, can't wait for people to try it out.

Sam Sethi: 1:14:10

Oscar Mary, all it leaves me to say is Merry Christmas and a happy new year to you.

Oscar Merry: 1:14:14

Merry Christmas, Sam. Thanks a lot.

James Cridland: 1:14:16

Good to hear from Oscar. Mary, that wasn't the only podcast app developer who you have interviewed this week.

Sam Sethi: 1:14:25

No well, look you know, it seems like we're all bringing out our one dot Os. The CEO of podcast guru, lovely Guy, never met him before, based out of Panama, and he's got a new version out. He's also crossed platform. He's added V for V and value time splits and all sorts of clever things. So I thought we'd catch up with him and find out what podcast guru doing and what their plans are for 2024.

Jason Hudgens: 1:14:49

I would say for the last six months we've really been focused on podcasting 2.0 features and the last two or three months we've really been focused specifically on value for value and trying to dial in that experience. So I believe we're on our third iteration, but we started out very basic, just supported boosts, that we added streaming and then the live stuff came online and really we're just taking feedback from the users, trying to get the experience to be as best as we can make it. We're multi-platform, so a lot of when I say multi-platform, I mean these are different apps. We have an Android app and iOS app and they're completely separate. They don't share any code so we have to do everything twice. So it takes us a bit more time to get new features out. But we've really been focused on this last three to six months.

Sam Sethi: 1:15:46

Now, when you say we, the team is comprised of developers, designers, business devs scattered across the globe, and the company is called really bad apps. So what's all that about?

Jason Hudgens: 1:15:58

So currently there are just two developers. I'm one of them, my background is in Android, and then we have Alex, and Android and iOS Don't have a native web developer. We used to have one, and that's why the website is not that great. Now Be the first to admit it, but really it's just me and Alex doing the bulk of the work. We have a graphic designer who's also a co-founder, and he's still got a full-time job in the States and he's just pitches in on the UX whenever he can. So yeah, three.

Sam Sethi: 1:16:31

Now, as I said, Podcast Guru was one of those apps. The last couple of years, I hadn't really come across it too much, and then suddenly, as you said, you focused on Podcast 2.0 features and so you added boosts, diagrams, chapters, funding, but, more interestingly, you've gone down the road of adding things like streaming sats and live boosts and transcripts, wallet switching. So you know what was that sudden moment that said right, we really need to accelerate what we're doing here and get on the radar of everyone.

Jason Hudgens: 1:17:06

It was just exciting. So I actually discovered Podcast 2.0 through Pod News, through the newsletter, and I at the time I didn't know anything about it so I started digging into it and up to that the most podcast apps had been really stale. Nothing had changed for probably a decade. As long as podcasting exists and all these interesting features and it just got really excited about it, especially the value for value features.

Jason Hudgens: 1:17:31

And it's just been real fun to work on, so I can't say that it was more of a. It wasn't a business decision per se, it was more of like this looks really fun, let's get to work.

Sam Sethi: 1:17:43

How hard was it to implement? I mean, when you got your first idea. Ok, let's do this. What was the sort of implementation time? Was it quite quick for you or was it something that you know? Scratch the head and roll up the sleeves and we'll see what happens next.

Jason Hudgens: 1:17:58

Some of it was really easy to get off the ground the value for value stuff. Without Albie, though, I don't think we would have been able to pull it off, because I mean I would love to. But one of the hard things for a podcast app is just customer support, and we don't have a customer support staff, like when you send a support email it's coming to me or Alex and we got to answer 100%.

Sam Sethi: 1:18:19

I know 100% what you feel like that.

Jason Hudgens: 1:18:21

Right. So the idea of doing you know, someone lost $10 in Satoshi's doing that type of support just seemed like a nightmare to me. So I was really waiting for you know when Albie showed up. They're exactly what we needed, so it's a very nice division of effort. So if there's a crypto problem, they handle it. If there's a podcast app problem, we handle that. I know a lot of people are looking in to integrate in the Breeze SDK and some things like that. If we can solve the customer support problem, we might expand, but that's really where we're at right now.

Jason Hudgens: 1:18:50

The live stream stuff was hard to implement because when we did it, we basically reached out to Steven Bell, the creator, and just said, hey, tell us how this works. That was a lot of chat conversations. There was no documented spec. Things that we still have to solve as a community is really the chat features, because everybody's been using IRC. That's not going to be the easiest thing to implement in an app. It also depends on your app too. I don't want to get too deep in the weeds but because we are a native app, a lot of the really nice fun to use JavaScript libraries that other apps can use we can't touch. So there's some things that are easier for us to do, and then there's some things that are really hard. We have to build from scratch.

Sam Sethi: 1:19:28

Yeah, look, I think the expression is running with scissors, which is really what the whole industry has been doing for 2023. I think 24 will see a little bit calming down of new tags, new features and people sort of polishing the ones that are there and making them better and coming up with simpler, less complex ways of implementing. Now, given what we're all about to do, this is Wednesday, the 20th, and tonight is the first live concert through the live item tag, with wallet switching with all of it and boosting and streaming sites and everything else. How are you ready? Are you prepared as a podcast out for this tonight?

Jason Hudgens: 1:20:10

Yeah, we're ready, as ready as we can be. I remember when was it? Pudcon MX? Yeah, they did their first. We're like, oh, we hope it works in the app. And it didn't. It kind of did Audio only didn't. But when we dug into it we just simply weren't recognizing the correct MIME type. It was a one-line change to get it working Right.

Jason Hudgens: 1:20:30

So, being the nature of mobile apps, you can't just fix these things in five minutes. You have to get app store approvals and it takes time to get out in the market. So we've worked hard, as everyone has to test this two or three times, as best we can to make sure it's going to work. But still, I'm still a bit nervous. I don't know if you've dealt with podping much, but that implementation I've got it on it goes down all the time and I don't know why. It's not that the Hive network goes down, it's the loop that we're reading those events. It crashes every few days and sometimes it crashes exactly at the wrong moment, and so I'm just kind of crossing my feet and hoping that everything goes well tonight.

Sam Sethi: 1:21:12

Yeah, with my other hat on, for true fans, I'm exactly the same as you. Yeah, the tests have gone well. We had a similar problem in the first PodCon Mx. We didn't know whether it'd work or not and then we just went, ok, should we try this? And it worked. But it only worked, not because we designed it to work. It worked because we're a PWA and it just happened to be mobile supported. We got video, but there was no controls, there was no boosts, no streaming in terms of mechanism for the user to change it while they were watching the video, and stuff like that. So we've gone and redesigned. So that's been quite interesting.

Sam Sethi: 1:21:50

But when we did one of the tests, it worked no problem. And then we did another test with RSS Blue and it didn't work and we were like, why is this not working? Blah, blah, blah. And it was just a simple, like you said, a one line switch of. In our case it was adding HTTPS in front of the feed URL, which wasn't part of the feed that we'd seen, and then when they did the update, it wouldn't update. So it was like pulling your hair out and going, ah. And then it's like, oh, is that it? Is that the reason?

Jason Hudgens: 1:22:19

Yeah, yeah so, and it's really frustrating when you like, you can fix it in five minutes, but the guy at Google or Apple that's going to approve your release is going to take four days. So that's life, though.

Sam Sethi: 1:22:33

So tonight's interesting Now, one of the other things, that technical things that all of us have had to look at, is this called live wallet switching. So we've got just to reiterate we're all doing live item tag, we're all doing streams, we're all doing boosts, we're all doing post-recorded wallet switching. Now we have to jump through the last part of the hoop, which is live wallet switching using something called Socket IO. How have you got on with that one?

Jason Hudgens: 1:23:02

We've got it working. But here's the current problem with it and I'm sure it's going to impact everyone as well is it's just a stream of events and the audio stream is separate, so there's no real synchronization process. So in our app you can pause the stream, but the events are going to keep piling up Exactly and everything will get out of sync. So what you'll have to do in the app if that happens if anyone's listening is, you'll literally have to stop the stream and restart it to get everything back in sync. But that is actually the next big challenge to solve with that technology, I think. But it's running with scissors, so we'll cross our finger and hope most people have a good experience tonight.

Sam Sethi: 1:23:40

Yeah, we think we've got it working as well. We weren't known until the evening. It won't affect, actually, the first part of the show, it'll only affect when we switch wallets. So we'll find out. And then the other part is that we were umming and oaring Again. It goes back to what you said earlier, jason.

Sam Sethi: 1:23:56

Some of these technologies need to be refined, re-honed Socket IO if there are in the future successful multiple live events running with wallet switching. Socket IO won't work Because there'll be too many open socket and you just won't be able to run it. So I think we as an industry need to find a alternative mechanism for that real time switching. I spoke to Dave Jones just recently and he said podping is too slow as a mechanism to do that Because by the time the pings gone out and then everyone's adopted it, things are not happening quick enough. It might work for something like a show tonight where there's only two artists and it's a 45 minute gap between the first ping and then the next ping, and then that's not time critical. But when you're doing shows like Adam Curry's Booster Grand Ball, which is a very rapid switching of podping may not work well in live items. Anyway, we'll all come up with something, I'm sure in 24. And talking of 2024, what's in store for podcast gurus? What's Jason looking to do?

Jason Hudgens: 1:25:01

I'm just really excited about the music aspect of podcasts. So, and I know you are as well with pod fans oh sorry, True fans.

Edward Brawer: 1:25:09

With.

Jason Hudgens: 1:25:09

Rene. So we're trying. So if you use our app right now, there's not a way to discover music. That's really easy. So we're trying to kind of redesign the app. The problem I'd say that's the problem the challenge is that you end up duplicating things. So you've got podcast genres, now you're going to have music genres and you mix those together. Do you create separate areas in the app? How do you do it without things? So a lot of Vuex. That's what we're really focusing on and hopefully we'll start seeing some of that go live in the app in 2024. And it won't be a disaster.

Sam Sethi: 1:25:45

I think you're right, music is. It's really weird what I've interviewed musicians before. People are less wedded to a podcast. You might like your podcast, right. You might say that's my favorite podcast and I really miss it if it wasn't there, or but if it wasn't there I'd probably find another one. You're not worried about it going out. But when you have your favorite music artist or you discover one, there's for some reason a deeper bond to that music artist and I think when we look at people streaming sats or boosting, I think there's that wanton desire to support the musician more than there is a desire to support a podcast. I don't know if that's something you've come across as well.

Jason Hudgens: 1:26:29

Yeah, and I think value for value really makes it special, and I've heard the like the amount that you get tipped as an artist or a creator might be trivial, but you get a special feeling from it that you don't get if you were just putting your music out on a website, you know, and I think that's really exciting and I hope it continues to grow.

Sam Sethi: 1:26:48

Do you think you'll go to any other genres like video, the alternative enclosure or maybe books, anything in the planning for you there?

Jason Hudgens: 1:26:58

Books, no, but yeah, video for sure. We've supported video in the app for a long time Also, really. So there's some nerdy things that we don't make any businesses into at all, but I'm looking into them because I think they're cool. So I'm really looking into adding IPFS support that will require alternative enclosure. I'm actually prototyping some stuff now that I'm going to open source that other apps will be able to use to hopefully make that easier to get into the apps. But yeah, when I started this app, I thought I was going to be done in six months, and here I am and just on Android alone, I've got 180 items in the backlog, probably double that for the web, and then we have iOS as well. So it's like I don't think I'm ever going to finish this. It's just just continually building new stuff and having fun.

Sam Sethi: 1:27:46

Well, if Adam and David just stop adding new features, we'll all catch up. That's what I say.

Jason Hudgens: 1:27:50

Now, then you'll come along and get bored and add something cool, and everybody will have to do that.

Jason Hudgens: 1:27:54

You know, they're definitely at the heart of it, but I think this can be like that's one thing. That's really cool. This community didn't exist three years ago and I know, like a lot of indie app developers, you have, you know, spotify and everybody's coming in trying to eat our lunch and I feel like to complete that and your app, these other apps. I don't view you guys as competitors. We're all collaborators, exactly. It's been really wonderful and I think the community is just going to keep going and attracting more devs and more listeners as well.

Sam Sethi: 1:28:21

Yeah, Just before this interview I interviewed Oscar Mary about the new fountain. Oscar and I are going to meet for coffees in London in January because we have a plan to actually get cross-app comments implemented and how we would do it, and so we're going to meet up and actually share some notes together and then share that with the other apps.

Jason Hudgens: 1:28:43

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more and I think there's no reason we can't. If you throw in video, live video, like we've got going, you throw in chat once we figure out how to share that cross-app comments, I mean there's nothing that say YouTube can do that we can't do possibly better. Yeah, and I'm excited about that.

Sam Sethi: 1:29:02

Jason, thank you so much. Look, before you go, tell everyone where they can go and find more about podcast guru and how they can download the app.

Jason Hudgens: 1:29:09

The best place is just our website, podcastguruio. I would recommend getting the mobile apps and spending as little time on the web app as possible. Eventually I'll be able to hire another reactive and fix that, but Android and iOS, those are the best experiences if you want to do podcasting, to point out with our apps for sure.

Sam Sethi: 1:29:30

Jason, just leave me to say Merry Christmas to you.

James Cridland: 1:29:34

Merry Christmas to you as well. It's always struck me as an app that really looks very smart and very polished and everything else, so it's great to hear all of his plans there Now other news in this tech section.

Sam Sethi: 1:29:47

Streamyards announced support for live broadcasting to Instagram, which I thought that was interesting timing, given that last week we talked about Dojo Cat and Ice Spice doing their first effort episode on Instagram as a podcast called Close Friends Only. So clearly Instagram is trying to get into the podcasting game, james.

James Cridland: 1:30:07

Yeah, and they've got some integration with Spotify as well, which could potentially allow you to link directly to an Instagram, link directly from an Instagram post to your Spotify hosted podcast. Maybe that might be a thing as well on other platforms too. But yeah, pretty smart. Boostergram corner, corner, corner on the Pod News Weekly Review. Well, goodness me, look at all of these boostergrams. This is a fun thing, isn't it? Who do we have a boostergram from first here? Wonderful Gene Bean.

Sam Sethi: 1:30:47

He said I love the gauntlet thrown down related to OP3, James, there's a lot of people who loved your little gauntlets last week.

James Cridland: 1:30:55

Yes, yes, calling, calling, calling Todd Cochran a chicken because he doesn't want to post his his figures in public. What's the matter, todd? Yes, I have not had a response from Todd at all about that Now. There may well be a response waiting for me in the new media show this week when I go and have a listen to that. I know that Todd's also very busy as well, to be fair, but nevertheless, yes, it would be fun to hear whether or not we've managed to finally push him through or whether or not calling him a chicken last week and making a chicken noise was possibly the worst thing that you could do.

Sam Sethi: 1:31:43

So let's do it, we go. Yes. Yes, I think Adam was suggesting that if you were in Texas there may be guns at dawn, but anyway, who knows? Yes, we've had a boost in from the late bloomer actor down your way. I stream science, occasionally boost guys, because I love the concept of support. Wish it was returned. I get nothing from my listeners. My podcast, the late bloomer actor, is all outgoing, no inflow. But I'll keep doing what I do on both sides, as a listener and a podcast. I think it is still early days and I think your podcast is much more mainstream than tech and geeky, and so I think your audience hasn't quite caught up to it yet, but they will, and hopefully in 2024, you'll start to get some sats.

James Cridland: 1:32:28

Yes, indeed. So, david, thank you for dropping us that over, and you too should be turning on OP3 as well, so that you can share your numbers with the rest of the world too. Ten thousand sats? Oh no, this means that I need to play the big baller thing, and I hadn't even bothered loading it From music mama. Who is music mama?

Sam Sethi: 1:32:58

I'm taking a wild guess, but I think that's Julie Costello.

James Cridland: 1:32:59

Yes, you think yes, I would imagine. So, julie, thank you so much for the big baller boost. Super kind of you. And why have you sent? Why did she send that through?

Sam Sethi: 1:33:13

Well, she was very pleased that we changed our name to True Founds, and it's actually in longer conversations with Julie and several other musicians that pushed us over the edge to go and do it sooner than we were planning. We were thinking of changing the name later on, which said no, no, no For musicians. I think it's a great idea to have a band that has musicians. Having something like True Founds would be a much more generic than Podfans. So we did so. She's very happy that we did.

James Cridland: 1:33:40

Excellent, julie. Thank you, found it eventually. John Wilkerson, thank you for everything you do for podcasting and value for value, two thousand sats, thank you, john. Thank you for everything you do too. Pest Merck who's Pest Merck, I wonder. Anyway, some feedback about one of our interviewees last week who, yes, was a little bit echoey, wasn't he? Yes, jl, it was JL, wasn't it? Yeah, I mean, he's a music person, he's not a podcaster.

Sam Sethi: 1:34:11

Oh God, he was sat in a room and he didn't have headphones on to begin with, so we got him to get some headphones and then eventually, it was like, oh well, that's the best we're getting. Yes, as you said, a professional musician. So what can you do?

James Cridland: 1:34:24

Yeah, exactly, so, anyway, yes, so I had to fast forward through the guy in the echoey bath from 500 sats yes, agreed, thank you and two thousand two hundred and twenty-two sats. That's a row of ducks from Kyren at the mere mortals podcast and mere mortals book review and all of that kind of stuff. Viva Truefans, he says that's a pretty decent name change Captures the spirit of value for value. Nicely. Enjoy your flight and holiday, james. I wonder why they're still recording podcasting 2.0 at a later time. Oh, yes, I wonder why.

Sam Sethi: 1:34:59

Oh, I think we found the replacement for you, James.

James Cridland: 1:35:03

Oh yeah, who's the?

Sam Sethi: 1:35:05

replacement. I think it's.

James Cridland: 1:35:06

Kyren oh, do you think?

Sam Sethi: 1:35:09

Yes.

James Cridland: 1:35:10

Well, there we are. Well, we're looking forward to all catching up at some point in the new year when you come down under and pop up to Brisfagus for a day or two, if you get value from what we do. The Pod News Weekly Review is separate from Pod News. Sam and I share everything from it. We really appreciate your support so we can continue making the show. You can become a power supporter at weeklypodnewsnet with your beautiful credit card, or you can support us with your even more beautiful sats by hitting the boost button in your podcast app, and if you don't have one, podnewsnet slash. New podcast apps will help you find a new app. You could probably start by taking a look at truefansfm. So what's happened for you this week then, sam?

Sam Sethi: 1:35:56

Well, it seems it's the season 2. Unwrap your 1.0 Version. We saw Fountain and Podcast Guru. So, yes, truefans has removed the sticker All are welcome on in. The waitlist has been removed. So, yes, please come and give us a go, give us some feedback, tell us what you like, what you don't like. But, yes, happy Christmas 1.0.

James Cridland: 1:36:16

Version is out. Yes, indeed, so I think that that is all very good stuff.

Sam Sethi: 1:36:23

And sadly I have to say. I said my father-in-law's 93rd birthday was last week. Sadly, he's passed away since. So, yeah, he had a glass of champagne and a bit of cake and he had all his family around him for his birthday and that was a jolly lovely to do, but sadly, and he passed away, yes, at the beginning of this week. So there you go.

James Cridland: 1:36:49

I'm sorry to hear that and I think it's a good thing that it happened straight after a very positive thing after his 93rd birthday. So, yeah, so I hope that you're getting some feeling of joy from that, but that can't have been fun, no.

Sam Sethi: 1:37:10

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

James Cridland: 1:37:12

So this week has been very hot, very, very hot. All of a sudden it started raining now and it's going to rain for the next five days. And I don't care, because in two days' time I'm jumping on an airplane and I'm going to somewhere where it always rains the UK. So that should be all nice. So, yes, so we're looking forward to, you know, packing everything and doing all of that. We're leaving the dog here, so the dog will be being looked after, so don't worry too much about any of that. But, yes, so that's been fun.

James Cridland: 1:37:46

And, yeah, I've just been, you know, just sort of fiddling around. One of my recent projects is closing my Medium account and seeing if I can automatically redirect all of those links from Medium to my own blog, which is going to be an interesting one, given that my own blog is on a static website. But I think I've worked out a way of doing it. So hopefully, by the time that this goes out, I'll have actually worked out how to do it and everybody will be amazed at my technical prowess. Excellent, and that's it for this week. Thank you to many guests this week and if you've enjoyed this episode of Pod News Weekly Review, you can also listen to Pod News Daily. You can visit the website podnewsnet and subscribe to the newsletter there. There is much more podcasting news than we can cover in this show as well.

Sam Sethi: 1:38:39

You can give feedback to James and me by sending us a boost of gram. If your podcast app doesn't support boost, then grab a new one from podnewsnet. Forward slash new podcast apps.

James Cridland: 1:38:49

Yes, our music is from Studio Dragonfly, our voiceover is Sheila D. We use clean feed for our main audio and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout. Podcast hosting made easy. Probably wondering what am I going to do when there won't be a Pod News Weekly Review next week? Well, there will be, because next week we are asking a bunch of our friends what the future is, but we're also asking them what the what their positive things were from 2023 as well. We've got a bunch of really, really good voices for you. Nobody in an echoey bathroom either.

James Cridland: 1:39:28

So that's coming up on the 29th of December, that bit between Christmas and New Year, and then the following week, on the 5th of January. It's time for us to have a look at our predictions from last year, work out whether or not we haven't got anything right or not Slightly concerned, and to look ahead for next year as well. So that's coming out on Friday, the 5th of January. Basically, you've got a Pod News Weekly Review for the next couple of weeks and that's all good, and back with the normal show on the 12th of January. So until then, stay safe and keep listening. Get updated every day. Subscribe to our newsletter at podnewsnet.

Oscar Merry: 1:40:15

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