James Cridland: 0:00

It's Friday, the 25th of October 2024.

Speaker 2: 0:04

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

James Cridland: 0:13

Yes, I'm James Cridland, here in Copenhagen in Denmark. Sam Sethi has just sent me a little message. He said that he is swimming in the sea. It's his daughter's idea, apparently. It's 13 Celsius here in Copenh sea. It's his daughter's idea. Apparently. It's 13 Celsius here in Copenhagen. That's 55 Fahrenheit. He's here, but he's doing family things this week, so therefore will not be on this show. So we've got a special show for you and in the chapters today.

Jack Sylvester: 0:38

Hello, I'm Jack Sylvester, Executive Director at Flight Studio and Executive Director also of DiverSEO, and I'll be on later to talk about all things DiverSEO, innovations we're doing, new formats we're trying out and everything in between.

James Cridland: 0:51

He will. It's a great interview. It's up next. This podcast is sponsored by Buzzsprout, with the tools, support and community to ensure you keep podcasting, start podcasting, keep podcasting with Buzzsproutcom.

Speaker 2: 1:05

From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland: 1:10

Yes, it's a special today because, well, this is a very interesting interview. The man who is in charge of a diary of a CEO, the man who is also looking after a number of Stephen Bartlett's things. In this interview, he talks about longer format shows, shows that are video first. He talks about using data for Diary of a CEO as well, and what's next for Diary of a CEO as well as their brand new launches, Flight Studio and Flight Books. The man's called Jack Sylvester Sam Sethi explains who he is Jack is the executive director of Flight Studio.

Sam Sethi: 1:52

He also worked with Stephen Bartlett at the beginning of Diary of a CEO, which is one of the world's number one podcasts.

Jack Sylvester: 2:00

Jack hello. How are you? Hello, good, yeah, thank you for having me on.

Sam Sethi: 2:04

Now, jack, you a couple of weeks ago were talking to Ashley Carman, friend of Pod News Weekly, about longer form podcasts. Now I was surprised because I thought everyone was telling us that short form 45 minute podcast, 30 minute podcast, short clips was the way forward. And yet here you are talking to Ashley about longer form podcasts. You were doing nine-hour podcast, lex Friedman's been doing longer ones, joe Rogan's been doing longer ones. So let's start off with. Why have you decided that longer form podcasts may be a better strategy for Diary of a CEO going forward?

Jack Sylvester: 2:41

Yeah, so it's not a super intentional strategy. If I'm honest, I would love to say that there's a huge strategization meeting that goes on, but really what it comes down to is the content. Great. Is what we're recording? Do people want to hear it? And if they do, then it kind of goes out. So it's not a case of let's make these super long because that's what we're seeing in the data, like, if the content's really good, people will stick around.

Jack Sylvester: 3:07

And you mentioned that there's these clips that you think people are more geared towards shorter content when, in actual fact, I think there's an audience for both and it's a behavior thing, right? So if you're walking around and over the weekend I actually moved house, so I had a podcast on just doing everything and I probably listened to like four or five hours of podcasts whilst moving stuff around but this morning I was having my breakfast and I'm just scrolling and I'm not in the mood for listening to longer form and I'm there for short form. So I think they both have their place, but for us it's just is the conversation good? Is our audience going to enjoy it? Does it bring value for them?

Sam Sethi: 3:43

and if it does, it stays in yeah, I think the thing that really struck home for me was when I came to the flight studio launch last week. Steven was talking about on stage was how you structure your shows, how you pick your guests, how you determine your clips. I didn't realize that it was such a data-driven way that you guys were producing podcasts. Now, what I'd like to do is break some of those down. So, first of all, can you talk about how you go around picking your guests, cause that was quite interesting the way that you use data to find the right people.

Jack Sylvester: 4:17

Yeah, so this is not like a hundred percent my area, but I will talk on it as much as I can. Jemima and her guest booking team do a fantastic job here, so that's kind of their remit more than mine. But the general strategy is it's a three part formula, I guess. And it is Stephen interested in the topic, is the guest the expert on a certain topic and can they speak on it? Well, and then do the audience want to know about this topic? And if it hits two, it doesn't go through. It has to hit all three. So if Stephen's interested and they're the expert in their field, but the audience don't want it, it just doesn't go through.

Jack Sylvester: 4:55

And then another strategy they also have is they look at outliers because we want to try and be the first interview. I think the person that Steve used on stage was Dr Tara Swart. She is a proper outlier and all her interviews do quite well, but she's not a really well-known name. So we've started establishing this software and our own kind of tool about how we find guests like that, ones that not necessarily have a huge audience but the podcast they do go on. They outperform any other interviews on that channel and it's a really complex strategy that steve and jem have made themselves. But yeah, it's, everything we do is fully data driven, for sure the other thing that was interesting as well was post-production.

Sam Sethi: 5:47

So let's say you've got a long form video and you've produced it. You don't just push that out straight away, you put that to a panel of people. So can you tell us more about how you use that panel?

Jack Sylvester: 5:59

Yeah, so this is super interesting. I think we actually developed this. Last Christmas we had this guy, rox, who is this amazing developer that me and steve met maybe three years ago. He used to work for mr beast, basically coding and making tools for him, and we've got chatting and we eventually flew him over to london and him and his friend ian basically built this tool for us. That essentially is a platform. So we have a pool of I think it's about 300 people that are nd aid, so they know what they're getting themselves into and it's an episode that we haven't released so we need to make sure that it's secure in that instance. But they get sent to a platform.

Jack Sylvester: 6:39

This platform is super plain. You wouldn't get distracted by anything else. The main focus is the video. So it's not like youtube where you have kind of suggested and all of that kind of stuff to distract you, but it shows them the video and at the bottom it has a little button that says interesting and you can go through the video and if you find it interesting you can hit the space bar and it basically will give us on the back end a spike and it shows, say, 10 people watched it. It shows that six out of those 10 people found this particular section at 1 hour 40 super interesting. So on our side we'll look at that and we'll determine.

Jack Sylvester: 7:16

Obviously, like you, can't use it fully, a lot of the stuff that we do here is the data informs us, our decisions.

Jack Sylvester: 7:21

It doesn't dictate the decisions, because a lot of stuff that people might find interesting or people don't find a certain section interesting, you can't just get rid of that because it might lack context for a section they do find interesting.

Jack Sylvester: 7:33

So we ran that experiment with the interesting button for a bit and then we sort of realized well, maybe they're just actually listening to it and they're not watching it in a certain sense, maybe they're just coming in and every time they hear an interesting bit they do it. So then we further develop the tool. With their permission, we use their webcam. It's a pop-up that says gives them a full description of why we want their webcam, what we're going to use it for, and you just press allow and that webcam tracks their eyes so it sees if their eyes are looking at the screen and fully engaged or if they're off doing something else. So we have a green line that goes along the screen and a red line and you can see. It's a bit like a retention graph on what you'd see on maybe YouTube or Megaphone or any kind of stats where you have a long form episode. But yeah, that will show us basically a retention graph of full attention on the episode or not on the episode.

Sam Sethi: 8:27

Wow, okay, and, as you said, it informs your decisions. Has that also informed your decision about longer form? Then, going back to my original question, did that say oh, people were engaged quite a long way through each podcast. Our retention was really high, engaged quite a long way through each podcast, our attention was really high. Actually, we can extend this further because actually the attention that they're giving us is not dropping off as quickly as we thought it might do yeah, for sure it is very episode dependent.

Jack Sylvester: 8:56

Like you, you have someone I think this piece that I spoke to ashley about was the andrewuberman episode and he is just someone that can.

Jack Sylvester: 9:05

Just he knows his breadth of knowledge is insane and he can talk on it really well, really clearly, and he has an audience and people just respect him and want to listen to him. So it's very guest dependent in that instance. But from the pre-watch data that we got and then also when we put it out on youtube, we are seeing a constant trend of people sticking around and actually we haven't put anything out with like a really bad guest, like we wouldn't put out like a raw episode where it's maybe three hour long episodes and it's condensed down to maybe an hour, like we've never done that. So actually we don't have the data to know if people would stick around anyway, but from what we are seeing is that the episodes we are thinking are valuable and people will find interesting. Yeah, the data is showing us that people are sticking around and they want to see the longer form content from those individuals like andrew huberman, like andy galpin, like dr k, and they will stick around and there's no sign of it slowing down.

Sam Sethi: 10:06

Really, yeah, I think one of the things I'm beginning to realise looking at my 20-year-old children I say children, young adults is they use it as a modern day form of radio. So they will have long form video podcasts running in the background and listening. The minute that there's something interesting that they really want to lean into, they'll turn into the video and look at it, but they'll turn away and get on with other tasks and it describes what you were just saying. You were moving boxes around yesterday and you had a long form podcast in the background and that's what we used to do in the old days. We'd just leave the radio on in the background for company, for noise, but also occasionally there'll be something interesting to dip into. So I think maybe that's where long-form podcasting is Now. One of the things Stephen talked about and you and I mentioned briefly when we met was maybe a change up of the format for 2025. Can you tell us what your thoughts might be if you're going to make a difference to the Diary of a CEO?

Jack Sylvester: 11:07

Yeah. So this is something we're obsessing about at the moment is is what we're doing correct and are people going to stick around with us forever, or do we need to basically adjust our strategy and see if people are interested in something else? And I think we would be super naive to think that people are going to stick around with us forever. So it's something we always obsess about, not only in the formats, but everything we do is just constant experimentation and seeing if people are liking the current way we're doing things or is there something we can do better? Because, let's be honest, like everyone can always do stuff better.

Jack Sylvester: 11:41

And we look at your big podcasters, like your humans, your joe rogans, and they've just done the same thing for years and it's working really well. But then we also think, like is there a 18, 20 year old in their bedroom right now creating something that we haven't thought about? Those guys haven't thought about? In two to three years time, it's just going to completely overtake us. And and we're just the analogy of the the horses in the cars I don't know if you've heard that one where people put all their thoughts into horses and kind of disregarded this car because it was a expensive thing. They didn't think about it, and then the car overtook all the horses. So it's that kind of thing that we think about. It's, I think the book's the innovators dilemma, oh yeah, that's what I was going to say.

Sam Sethi: 12:23

You're facing the innovators dilemma, which is stick or twist. Stick with what works, twist, twist. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but you're right. It was Henry Ford who said you know, if I asked people what they wanted, they'd say faster horses. They wouldn't say they want a car. So what are you thinking then? What are some of the experiments that you're thinking about that you might want to produce for Diary of a CEO.

Jack Sylvester: 12:46

So some of the things we're thinking about more and we've actually started implementing in a less dramatic way is B-roll. Obviously, that's more geared towards the video side of things, but just using B-roll more to give context to a certain topic or a certain story that someone might be talking about. And the Ross Cook episode that we put out a few months ago. We used a lot of his footage from his YouTube channel and that just gives a lot of color and a lot of context to him in those moments and those instances that he's referring to in the podcast. Another thing and actually it's an episode coming out on Thursday we've got an episode with Anne McKee, who is a brain surgeon, neuroscientist, and she deals with people that have CTE and with hers. We're thinking about incorporating more clips and potentially even some sort of music to elevate it.

Jack Sylvester: 13:37

A lot of the old podcasters they always use sound design and music and they don't necessarily lean to the b-roll because video wasn't such a thing back then.

Jack Sylvester: 13:45

But yeah, that's something that we're really thinking about and will who runs our behind the diary? We're working with him on potentially readjusting the podcast to follow more of a documentary style format, so completely readjusting the structure of the conversation, adding going like really flat out, going completely far away. I think one of the things we don't want to do too much of is go so far left field that it's just not what people signed up for, because that is something you see as behaviors of people. They go to a channel because they know what they're getting and if you completely flip that on its head, it might disrupt the status quo a little bit. That's not something that I think we could experiment with massively, but it's something that we could slowly ease into. So, yeah, those are a few things that are top of mind for all of us. Me and my team are working in the background to see how we can develop that even further.

Sam Sethi: 14:42

Yeah, stephen talked about this thing called the 1%, which feels like what you're doing here is can we make incremental change, a 1% change that will increase the audience? I think he mentioned about chairs and he mentioned about the CO2 in the room. Can you tell me what he means by the chairs and the CO2?

Jack Sylvester: 15:00

Yeah, so I'm actually sitting in one of the chairs now in the DAAC studio. But we've gone through a few iterations and we build the set. Every time we go to LA and New York we build a replica set, and the first time we did it the chairs that we have here weren't available in the States. So I went and bought chairs and they had arms on them and we realized that what the guest was doing was slouching down into the chair a lot more, leaning on the side and kind of just relaxing a bit too much. And one it didn't look great on camera, but two you could just feel their demeanor changing and the feeling of the conversation changing. So we changed it and we went back to chairs without arms and the whole conversation just changed. Everyone's upright, they're fully engaged, they're not slouching and thinking about something else. Potentially. So when they say we had hours, it was probably hours upon hours upon hours debating these chairs between me, steve, georgie and jem. We just were obsessing about which chairs we could use, why a certain chair would lend itself to the conversation, why another one wouldn't. So that was the general crux of the the chair conversation.

Jack Sylvester: 16:05

The co2 one came after we had james Nestor on the podcast, who wrote the book Breath. We're in this room here I'm in now. We've soundproofed it, so we have these soundproof doors that we shut and after two or three hours it does get quite hot in here and you can feel the air's a little bit clammy. And then when James Nestor came on, he brought this little CO2 monitor with him and he brought it out in the middle of the podcast and he was like I'm going to measure the co2 levels in this room and he left it on the side and actually you can see on the episode just put it down in the bottom right hand corner so people can see it but then proceeded to talk about how the co2 buildup in the air and the lack of oxygen coming into the room, your cognitive function starts slowing down a little bit. You get a little bit more sluggish, your thoughts aren't flowing as well.

Jack Sylvester: 16:55

So we realized that we needed to find a way to filter the air in the room. So now we run the air conditioning, and as low as possible, because it's not great for microphones, but I think there's a nice balance to have between the two and that just filters the air and you can literally feel. After the James Neistat conversation. We did it and the air is just fresher, you feel sharper. So, yeah, those are the two things that Steve was referring to on stage and I think it probably sounds a bit weird that we would think about like CO2 and chairs, but after I've just explained it, I'm sure you can see how much of an impact it would have on the conversation and the episode as as a whole now you mentioned Davina and Paul.

Sam Sethi: 17:36

That's Flight Studio, and Flight Studio, I think, needs to be explained, because Diary of a CEO was a standalone podcast that you worked with Stephen on, but now you've brought Georgie Holt and Christiana B and and they've come in to start Flight Studio. So just give me what is Flight Studio and what are some of the new podcasts that you guys are working on?

Jack Sylvester: 17:57

Yeah, so Flight Studio is at its essence.

Jack Sylvester: 18:00

It's a podcast growth platform that we've started building and it's taking the tools that we've used to build DiverSEO, the knowledge we've used to build Daira's CEO, the knowledge we've used to build Daira's CEO and the philosophy as well that we've used, and a little bit that I've touched on previously, and we are bringing that across these other shows and, similar to the data conversation, we are using hosts that have been outperformers on the Daira's CEO.

Jack Sylvester: 18:26

So we've got Dina McCool, paul Brunson, tara Swart, africa Brook and Kristen Holmes, and each one of those has been an outperformer. They can speak really well in their field and they're just got an audience that respect and want to hear about their opinion. So we're bringing those guys in and we started with Paul. He was a bit of a guinea pig for us and he's the perfect guinea pig because he's just the most relaxed, malleable, chilled out guy, so lovely. So he was our first podcast that we released with lauren goodger and that did really well. And, yes, it's using everything that we've learned over the past four or five years of diarist co and implementing it into the other shows in their own tailored way.

Sam Sethi: 19:11

And so I guess that's what flight studio is it's taking your format, using your tools and then enabling that growth for other people.

Jack Sylvester: 19:19

Yeah, but I would say that one thing we did realize with Paul Brunson's we Need to Talk is taking the format, the exact format, the exact way we do things, and putting it into another host doesn't quite work, as you would sort of expect, because he's a different person. In hindsight it's very obvious, but he's a different person. He has his own way of working. He has his own thoughts and feelings about how he wants to run the show. So that is one big lesson for us. It's not just a case of copying and pasting the format and you do have to make slight adjustments as the host comes in, and we started developing more tools and more strategies to try and build on that. But yeah, it's been a huge learning curve and super interesting.

Sam Sethi: 20:05

Now talking of guests, because you've been with Stephen from the beginning, who's been your favourite guest.

Jack Sylvester: 20:12

Yeah, so it kind of does change and each one of them is amazing in their own individual ways. I've got two and I've got two different answers and I think one might be quite shocking, but the first one that always pops into my mind is Mo Gowdat, episode 101, the first time he came on, and he came on to talk about his book, scary Smart, which is AI, and Steve didn't really want to talk about it at the time, so he changed it to his first book, which is about happiness, and he had a son that was a kind of Buddhist monk and he wanted to try and make the world a happier place and his son died in a routine operation. And at the time Mo was working at Google X, which is the innovation department of Google, and he decided to quit his corporate job and carry on his son's work. And that episode it was just so impactful, like the responses we got from it. He approaches happiness from a very analytical and engineering perspective from his time at Google X and, yeah, that one really sticks in my mind.

Jack Sylvester: 21:11

We've had him on three times since and now we've actually spoken about Scary Smart, the AI one, which is quite interesting because at the time we were like no one really cares about AI. And then two years later or a year later, he came back and talked about it and that one did better than the first one. So years later or a year later, he came back and talked about it and that one did better than the first one. So they're like timings, everything right.

Jack Sylvester: 21:32

And then the second answer is actually matt hancock, and not because the conversation and not because the guest as a whole, but it's what that conversation did for us as a platform. It shifted us from a podcast, where we kind of have conversations, to a place where the conversations that people want to hear happen, and since then we've had boris johnson on and the matt hancock one really sticks in my mind as as one that shifted us in the public eye from just a podcast to a place where conversations happen. So, yeah, those are my two answers, and I could probably talk forever on certain episodes to why they're my favorite, but those are the two I always go back to I think the first one is whenever anyone talks about happiness, I always ask the question.

Sam Sethi: 22:11

The founding fathers of america said life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness right it wasn't money, and I think that's the thing that people seem to sometimes forget that happiness is such a goal to strive for, rather than just a pure pursuit of money, and so I will go back and listen to that episode.

Jack Sylvester: 22:33

I was just going to say like it's such an interesting word, happiness, because everyone has such a weird perception of what it means and how you get happy, and everyone has a different answer to what makes you happy, because it's always like the little things or it's stuff that happens in life, but mo just encapsulates it in a really tangible way and he has this like formula and it all basically comes down to expectations. He talks about how if your expectations aren't met, then you're unhappy. So if you kind of reduce your expectations and just take life as it is, then everyone will be much more satisfied I read a book many years ago which I highly recommend to everybody to read.

Sam Sethi: 23:13

It's a short form book by victor frankel. It's called in search of meaning. Um, read that book and you will put your expectations at a certain point for yourself. It is one of the most amazing books I've ever read. Anyway, we digress. The Matt Hancock thing. I think it's really interesting because, with the US presidential election going on, you're seeing Trump and you're seeing Kamala Harris now going on to podcast shows, and Obama was seen as a social media president. You know he reached out to social media and Trump and Harris are now using podcasting as a vehicle to get to different generations of people. I could imagine that Diary of a CEO going forward will have, as you said, you've had Boris, you've had others. I can see that sort of evolution of where people who want to reach wide audiences aren't going to what we used to call mainstream media, because mainstream media now is becoming the podcast.

Jack Sylvester: 24:09

So again, I can see why the hancock one would be such a significant one as a change in the perception of what people think of you yeah, it's probably also worth noting that when we brought him on he had just resigned as health secretary during covid, so it was a very pivotal moment. It was someone that was front and center basically telling us to what hands face space. I think was what he kept saying on tv. And then he was caught having a relationship with his I think I was his pa or something like that. So basically he's going against all his own rules. So it was at a time when everyone in media wanted to talk to him and he particularly picked us because we're there to listen, we're there to ask him the hard questions and what happened with Boris as well we're there to ask the questions, but we're not going to get got you questions, like the mainstream media seem to do, and catch you out and try and make you look foolish.

Sam Sethi: 25:05

We kind of just try and let them speak as much as possible yeah, I think that is often the right way to do it, because I think if you are there just to get that gotcha clip which they know that if you go to mainstream news outlets, they have to get that clip, because I've only got 30 seconds of tv to throw that out, and so they're hunting for that gotcha moment, whereas in the long form, even if you do say something stupid within the context of a longer podcast, it probably is okay. Now a couple of other things I wanted to catch up on, which was flight books. Now, that was at the announcement. I was totally left fielded on that. Why flight books? Why are you getting into book publication?

Jack Sylvester: 25:47

So I think the feeling around flight books is Steve's released his first book, happy, sexy Millionaire and I know he hates that title because it's basically just like everything that he set out to to achieve and he got all of those things, things and I guess the sexy one's a bit subjective, but he achieved all those things and I realized that it like wasn't it, and the whole book's kind of about that.

Jack Sylvester: 26:11

But when going through that process and then he also released another one, the diary of a CEO, and it's all of the lessons he's learned from diary of a CEO but going through the process of creating a book, he realized that book publishing is just very outdated and it's a really horrible process to go through the marketing they want to do around it, the reason they pick a cover. He just couldn't get over how sluggish the whole industry is and how it's not innovated or changed in however many years it's been running. So he just wanted to disrupt that space and he wanted to bring a new approach to the industry that's not being taken on by anyone else and the thinking is, if he makes it easier for people and less of a sluggish process, then we might get better books I don't disagree that the book industry needs to be reinvented.

Jack Sylvester: 27:01

I was just surprised, given that you are a podcast production company, that you didn't go through and just say look, we're not going to produce hardbacks or paperbacks, we're just going to produce audiobooks yeah, well, it's still going to be a huge thing for us, the audiobook side of things but it does seem that people still like to buy books and people use it as a bit of a trophy.

Jack Sylvester: 27:22

I think, from what we have semi-discovered is that the title means a lot and having the book on your bookshelf with that title Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson that Steve always refers to. But it just says something about you and I think people still quite like that. I think people also want to come away from media as much and still have something quite tangible. So we're going to lean into both. We're not going to complete disregard audio, but I think we probably have a stronger stance on audio, to be honest, because that's kind of where we are at. But the physical book still has a place in the market and we want to maintain that and potentially disrupt and make it better.

Sam Sethi: 28:04

I've got a lot of friends who've produced books and often they say it's their business calling card, because once you've produced a book it feels like you're a much more of a grown up person. People take you more seriously at speaker events Not that I think Stephen needs a book to do that, but I think it's interesting the psyche of having I think it's also the same with podcasts when you say you've got a podcast and it's got longevity, people then have that gravitas towards you that says, oh yeah, actually I'd like to come on your podcast, or yeah, I've seen other people and therefore I'll come with you. So I think it's interesting. The psyche of books. I'm not a big book reader. I don't actually read books, I just listen to audio books because I just don't have the time. But we'll see, We'll see, yeah.

Jack Sylvester: 28:47

I'm exactly the same.

Sam Sethi: 28:55

Yeah, I just don't know when I would find time to sit down for four or five hours to get into a book, but my wife does. She reads tons of books, so maybe, maybe there is a market for it Now. Lastly, talking about disruption thing that steven talked about was flight cast as a new element of the group. So can you tell me more about what flight cast is and what you're doing with spotify?

Jack Sylvester: 29:13

yeah, so flight cast is a podcast distribution platform similar to what megaphone anchor? There's hundreds. So it's that, basically, and for anyone that doesn't know, I'm sure everyone who listens to this probably does know. This platform takes an rss feed and you upload your episode to that with the title and description and everything you want to show, and that distributes it to places like spotify, apple, amazon music, everywhere. You can kind of listen to podcasts, but every single one we've used I think since I've been here we've changed four times and each one just like hasn't been it and it doesn't have the data. They're not really leaning into video the way that we feel like they should be, and all of our efforts are really geared towards YouTube because the data is there. You can see why your audiences are listening, where they're coming from, how long they're listening for, if they're getting into the suggested, and there's just so much data there that it's just a treasure trove of data and information that helps us build on the next episode and then the next episode, and it just keeps going. It's just not the same in audio, so we decided to build our own and Rox, who I mentioned at the beginning, who built the tracking software, he is with his team in in San Francisco. He's got a little team around it and he's building that out. I don't want to say it's like a full replica, but it's kind of trying to get to the point of what YouTube data is showing you, and we want to make sure that you can get the same data and audio that you can on YouTube, because it can just develop your show so much better.

Jack Sylvester: 30:43

And one of the big things that the other platforms don't do and I think the only one that does it is Anchor and Megaphone. It's not called Anchor anymore, it's called Spotify for podcasters, but they are the only ones as far as I'm aware. I think when we spoke before, that Apple also do this, but they distribute video on their platform. Apple sounds like it's not as widely known, but it's something that we're trying to lean into and the only way we could do it was getting in touch with Spotify. So Steve texted Daniel Ek and was just like we're doing this thing. We really need your help to develop it further because we've hit a little bit of a roadblock and he was up for it and he says I've seen how you guys build things, I see how you guys are developing the podcasting space and we want to try and help you develop your product and we'll work with you as best we can. So, yeah, they've basically given rocks all the details but the back end of how to deliver the video on spotify and we're rolling with it.

Jack Sylvester: 31:39

And it's also got loads of other tools, like an ai bot. So if you're someone that doesn't really know what you're looking at in terms of data, you can go on on your AI bot and go. It's a bit like a chat GPT, I guess, but you can go on and go. Hey, I saw a massive spike in January and then a massive dip in February. Could you tell me why that is? And one of the examples they might say well, you released loads of health episodes in January and everyone wants to rethink their health and start of a new year new year, new me type thing. So everyone was leaning in and then you started producing I don't know neuroscience podcasts in February. So people started dropping off and you can just start asking it questions to try and determine why your data is looking a certain way and it will also give you suggestions. And we're also looking at doing ab testing tools as well, which youtube had just brought out on their platform.

Sam Sethi: 32:29

You've been able to do it for years on external platforms, but we're looking to try and bring that into audio so you can ab test titles and descriptions and stuff like that yeah, I mean, look, the use of ai is very interesting and there are several hosts who've begun to use it Captivate with Spark, ai and Buzzsprout and Usha and Blueberry so I think AI is good. I think becoming a host will be interesting. I think that's an audio initiative. I mean, obviously, the integration with Spotify, because Spotify the way that it works now that I understand is that it allows you to manually update any video to your existing RSS feed, but it only plays back through Spotify, so it's not adding it to your RSS feed and redistributing it to other platforms. So I guess with Flightcast, what you'll be doing is adding the video element as a hosting element, but also one click to Spotify, which is cool. I guess you will also continue to add one click to YouTube. It won't be just for Spotify.

Jack Sylvester: 33:31

Well, we're probably just keeping separate. Yeah, we'll continue doing what we're doing on YouTube, and it's interesting because when I talked to Rox about what he's developing, I see lots of potential for it. I think people could start using it as a different sort of platform to what we might intend it to be, because you've got a lot of content on YouTube and that's where people only post stuff. But what if you had a similar sort of interface that you could post that would also go on Spotify, where people start using it that aren't in the podcasting space.

Sam Sethi: 34:02

So, yeah, that's something that I'm wondering as well, and the interesting thing is, what you're talking about is what we call first-party data. So when you're inside of YouTube, you can get that first-party data as the creator, because you have a backend access that gives you the retention rates. It gives you all sorts of other bits and pieces of data. You get that within spotify and within apple, but they're all disparate right now, and there is a third-party company called bumper that is creating what I've called an attention dashboard the ability to aggregate all of that into one place. It'll be interesting to see how you're going to be able to get that first party data when you're a host, because the first party data is owned by the app, not by the host. So it'll be interesting to see what your plans are and how you manage to get that data back, unless you have a deal with spotify that says they will give you that data back and therefore you can aggregate that yeah, that's something I'm not fully clued up on.

Jack Sylvester: 35:02

I'm afraid that I'll have to. Uh, you have to interview Rox for that one.

Sam Sethi: 35:06

Look, jack. Thank you so much. It sounds really exciting. What's going on at Flight Group, I mean with Flight Studio, flight Books, flight Cast. I'm sure there'll be other flights coming down the road as well. When will this new Diary of a CEO format start to roll out? When would be the first episode that we might see with something like that?

Jack Sylvester: 35:28

so we're already kind of developing it. But the first one incorporating a lot b-roll will be on thursday the 24th and that's just using a bit more b-roll and we've actually started doing our own animations in it as well and using clips and stuff like that. So that'd be geared much more towards the video side of things. But in the next sort of few months we're actually going to start releasing a new episode actually of diariseo which is going back to the roots a bit more of diariseo. We'll start incorporating a new format on that and that will be audio only to start with oh okay, yeah, in the next month, so very imminent, exciting, jack sylvester.

Jack Sylvester: 36:04

Thank you so much.

Sam Sethi: 36:04

Congratulations on all the success of to start with oh okay, but yeah, in the next month, so very imminent. Exciting Jack Sylvester, thank you so much. Congratulations on all the success of Dire Vici. I bet four years ago, when Stephen first knocked on your door and said, hey, do you want to do this with me? I doubt you thought you would be where you are today, but congratulations, it's been a ride, I'm sure.

Jack Sylvester: 36:22

Yeah, it's been a ride home, I'm sure, yeah, it's been a proper journey and no, definitely wasn't expecting to sort of be where we are now, but it's been super amazing. And I actually remember sitting with Steve in this kitchen I think we'd done like two, two or three episodes and just looked at me and was like we've got something here. You know, we've got something here, and I always remember that moment because it was just so, like casually said, but we really believed in it at the time and we had no one listening and not that's really changed how we feel about about the podcast, but it's amazing to see how many people it impacts and how many people it touches jack sylvester.

Sam Sethi: 36:56

Thanks so much. Take care, mate.

Speaker 2: 36:58

Thank you so much the pod news weekly review. With buzzsprout podcast Podcast hosting made easy.

James Cridland: 37:06

Just a quick shout out to our magnificent 11, neil Velio, rocky Thomas, jim James, david Marzell, si Jobling, rachel Corbett, dave Jackson, mike of the Road Media Network, matt Medeiros, marshall Brown and Cameron Moll. It's very good to meet Neil Velio for the first time. On Wednesday I was at the Independent Podcast Awards. No, we didn't win anything. We were nominated but we didn't win anything. But, yes, very good to see Neil there and indeed everybody else. Just as a reminder, if you do support the show, then it goes to Sam and me. It doesn't go to any other part of the Pod News empire. So you can either hit that boost button and give us some of your lovely sats or give us some of your lovely money through your MasterCard or your Visa card that would be lovely or indeed, american Express is also accepted and EuroCard, which apparently is still a thing. Anyway, go to weeklypodnewsnet for that.

James Cridland: 38:02

My week, in case you're wondering, has been an awful lot of travel, an awful lot of travel going all over the place Norway, sweden, here in Denmark and in London as well. Yesterday I met the folks from Hindenburg Hindenburg Journalist Pro as it was called, hindenburg Pro as it is now called and they were talking about their plans for the future. But unfortunately it was done with a beer or two or three and that means that I can't talk about it. But it was very good to meet them. So excellent to meet both Preben and Nick. So Skoll to you both and hopefully we will see you soon. And that's it for this week.

James Cridland: 38:45

All of the stories covered in this podcast were taken from the Pod News daily newsletter. I mean, not that we really covered any stories, not quite sure why. I've read that bit. Anyway, you can subscribe to the newsletter at podnewsnet. Longer interviews, normally in the Pod News Extra podcast. You'll also find me in Swedish this week. You can find those wherever you get your podcasts. You can support the show by streaming sites. You can give us feedback using the Buzzsprout fan mail link in our show notes. You can send us a boostergram or become a power supporter, like the Magnificent Eleven at weeklypodnewsnet. Our music's from Studio Dragonfly, our voiceover is Sheila Dee and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Speaker 2: 39:24

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Jack Sylvester: 39:29

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Speaker 2: 39:34

Weekly Review will return next week. Keep listening.