Announcer 0:00

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

James Cridland 0:09

I'm James Critlin, the editor of Pod News. And I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO of TrueFacts.

SPEAKER_02 0:14

What is more annoying? The ad you can skip or the ad you can't skip?

James Cridland 0:18

Most podcast listeners skip the ads. We speak to Cliff Mark from Ugov about what their data tells us.

SPEAKER_10 0:25

Podcast is allowed the freedom of different types of formats and for niche things and for true crime and some of these other things, but on news and information and entertainment, I'm not sure it's entirely different than what we were doing before. It's just coming through a different mechanism.

James Cridland 0:38

David Locke from the Locked On Podcast Network looks at 10 years of running a bunch of successful sports shows. And what is a play? As Spotify aligns with the new alliance for podcast measurement, is the podcast industry beginning to split apart? This podcast is sponsored by BuzzSprout with the tools, support, and community to ensure you keep podcasting. Start podcasting, keep podcasting with BuzzSprout.com.

Announcer 1:05

From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

Sam Sethi 1:10

James, let's kick this show off. I'm in a grumpy mood this week. It's my turn to take the grumpy card out. Oh great. Yes. We'll get to it.

James Cridland 1:18

Yes, ten in the morning for you, seven in the evening for me, and uh you're in the grumpy mood. Well, it's wet, miserable, it's the UK.

Sam Sethi 1:25

I lost a paddle, and some people on podcasting2.0 have been saying things that I'm not happy with. But anyway.

James Cridland 1:32

Oh, saying things, eh? Saying things.

Sam Sethi 1:34

Yes.

James Cridland 1:34

Well, let's start with two pieces of good news, shall we? What's the first

Locked On Podcast Network celebrates 10 years

James Cridland 1:38

one? Well, the first one is uh the Locked On Podcast Network, uh, which has been going for a while. I thought actually it's celebrating its tenth year anniversary, and uh we talk a lot about tribes or fans on this show, and uh Locked On, I think, really shows the power of the super fan. 82% of their listeners tune in every single day to their shows, which is a pretty impressive number.

Sam Sethi 2:06

That is, yeah.

James Cridland 2:06

And they've got a very interesting way of selling advertising. So they got 275 daily shows, but they actually don't sell 275 shows, they sell five instead. Uh, I thought I would um find out a little bit more. So I spoke to the founder of the Locked On Podcast Network to learn more.

SPEAKER_10 2:23

I'm David Locke. I founded the Locked On Podcast Network 10 years ago. I now I guess am president of the Locked On Podcast Network. We've grown to be the number one sports podcast network in America.

James Cridland 2:34

So, as you say, next week you celebrate 10 years of the Locked On Podcast Network. Congratulations. That is uh one of the longest networks out there, I would have thought. What was the first show that you did?

SPEAKER_10 2:44

Uh Locked On Jazz was the first show I was the host, and I also did Locked On NBA. So I was the first um of the two hosts that existed on the show. Then we got the NBA uh and the NFL loaded up and launched. I think Locked On Bowls might have been the very first show that I was not the host of, and then we added on. And by September, we had all the NFL shows, and then by uh October we had all the NBA shows.

James Cridland 3:10

Well, I was going through my emails, and I think the first email that I got from you was 2019. Okay. April 2019. Uh, what were you doing? Uh adding MLB podcasts uh into the uh into the network.

SPEAKER_10 3:24

So it's only a sad statement that I waited that what I was doing, not reaching out to you in the first three years, is probably a test to what a little how much of a non-entrepreneur I am and how much I didn't really know what I was doing.

SPEAKER_07 3:36

They're not no, no, no, not not not at all. It may well have I may well have uh actually deleted some of my email, who knows?

James Cridland 3:43

Um so locked on jazz, um, which by the way is about the Utah Jazz, uh uh rather than rather than music. Um that was the first uh why why why get into podcasting then in in the first place? What were you doing prior to uh prior to that?

SPEAKER_10 3:58

So I'm the radio announcer for the Utah Jazz, so that's my other job. I also was a program director of sports talk radio in our sports stations in the United States, and then had moved to Seattle to be just a sports talk show host. I'd been a talk show uh sports talk show program director in 1995, so very early in that realm. So I think when podcasting came, I was really looking for just a vehicle. I'd been doing talk shows for so long, I was doing the play by play, I wasn't doing a talk show anymore. I kind of didn't think as a play-by-play announcer, you could just call 82 games and call it good. I thought you probably need to communicate with your fans 365 days a year, or at least close to it in some capacity in the new world with Twitter and Facebook and all the things that were exploding at the time. But I didn't really know what I was doing. The first one's still up on YouTube. I clearly had no clue. Um, we did Google Meets for a while, we did Google Hangouts for a while. That went wrong because there's no control of who gets into Google Hangouts and people did profane things. That, if you take it back, is actually 14-15 years ago. It wasn't until 2016, is where then I'd been doing that for a few years. I'd launched Locked on MBA, and I just realized that there was there was something here. And I guess the main thing was if you go back to the program director days, is we used to have these national shows like Jim Rome and Dan Patrick. And what they would do is they would be on 65 different stations across the country, but do one ad sale. And so we flipped it and said, wait a sec, we're gonna get 30 NFL shows, but we're gonna sell it as one product. And so that's how we still sell today. We have to basically, if you're buying advertising on lockdown, you're buying one of five shows. You're buying the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball, the hockey show, or our college sports show. And so we really are selling to a client the largest NFL show on the market, and one of the largest NBA shows on the market, and probably the largest baseball show on the market, with the numbers that we have in a given day as an advertiser at this point, 10 years later. But that was the model from the beginning. That just was very different than what anyone was doing, and somehow it worked.

James Cridland 6:02

So you're doing um uh five sort of networks, if you like, but 275 daily shows.

SPEAKER_09 6:08

Yeah.

James Cridland 6:08

Um, how do you look after how do you do the quality control for 275 daily shows? You can't possibly have a listen to every single one of those, I guess.

SPEAKER_10 6:17

So frankly, AI helps us a great deal at this point. The other one I would say is we just have an incredible staff. And so as we've built this out, we now have managers of every channel and the audio and video director and talent scouting. And then the way I like, you know, our goal is to be the single most talent-friendly network in the country. I mean, I'm talent, right? That's what I have been my whole life. And so I want us to treat the talent better than anyone out there. And I think we do. I think we support them amazingly, we give them incredible resources, we coach them to get better, we have a lot of systems in place. And then on the shows themselves, we do have a model and a structure, which I think allows to foster individualism inside of that model and allows those hosts to be great. That's, I think, the quality control a little bit, is that there really is a model that's that they're following. It allows them to decorate the house how they want to and show all their expertise, but we need to know where the front door and the back door in the bathroom are.

James Cridland 7:18

Yeah, so there's a good uh there's a good format that people can work around. Uh, and and you should, I I guess, know that it's a locked-on show when you're listening, but obviously it's up to each individual person to make of that what they will, I guess.

SPEAKER_10 7:32

Yeah, if you're an audiophile geek or something of that nature, so us, um, yes, and you listen to one locked on bears, and then you turn around and listen to locked on cubs, you'll and you're paying attention, you'll you'll see it.

James Cridland 7:44

Yes, yes, both the same animal. Um, what sort of numbers uh are you are you doing uh now?

SPEAKER_10 7:51

It's funny you ask that. I I was wearing a t-shirt earlier today that was locked on, and on the back of the shirt it it said 10 million. Wow, and it was because we we crossed over 10 million, you know. On a given day, we're somewhere in the range of 1.5 to 2 million people watching or listening some piece of locked on content a day, and that doesn't count TikTok, Instagram, yeah, Twitter, or any of the other eyeballs. So that's just off YouTube and audio. We're between 1.5 and 2 million a day now on a weekday. Yeah, um, so the 10 million shirt feels a little outdated.

James Cridland 8:30

Yes, it should be should be updated to 515 million apparently for last year. Uh and this year on on pace to surpass 1 billion, uh, which is uh quite a thing. What have you learned over the last 10 years?

SPEAKER_10 8:44

People love sports. And that's really what I think I've learned.

James Cridland 8:48

But it's not just people love love sports, it's people love their sports, right?

SPEAKER_10 8:52

Yes, and I think they love their team. I've always believed you're a fan of the team, not the league. You know, there's moments and times, the NBA Finals, the Super Bowl, and things where you stop what you're doing to watch because it's a paramount event. But, you know, I'm a Utah Jazz fan. I'm also, you know, employee, but like I'm a Utah Jazz fan, that's what I was as a kid. I would listen to locked on jazz every day. That would be my way of getting my news and information and and entertainment and hopefully be attached to the hosts. So, what I think that we've learned, or that we were right about, I guess, and just have reconfirmed, is that fans are really, really passionate about their team and in their circumstance. And so, you know, giving them 30 minutes every single day, and now we've expanded to postcasts and we've expanded to squad shows and we have more things coming. People who just have an you know insatiable appetite to learn about their team and want more information about their team. And we've found a way to have our hosts become very important people in the lives of sports fans. You know, Steeler fans know who Chris Carter is, and Bills fans know who Joe Marino is, and Met fans know who Ryan Finkelstein is, and and those are their guys. And that relationship is real between the fan and the broadcaster, and that's why it also works for advertisers, frankly, is that we have that local passion on a national scale, and that's what's really been maybe the the greatest thing is just the renewal rate and the success we've had with advertisers.

James Cridland 10:12

And people coming back every single day. You you you've done some uh research relatively recently, which showed that 82% of your listeners tune in every single day, which is tremendously high for uh show. So you so you've got a tremendously high retention then.

SPEAKER_10 10:28

Yeah, I mean, I think that we kind of go back to the origins, and James, you know this better than I do, of podcasting. One of the big things that jumped out to me when it started was that everybody acted like it was a different medium. And my opinion was it was simply a different delivery mechanism. And that delivery mechanism allowed some more freedom, but it wasn't as though the average person's time to listen to audio actually increased a great deal, right? I mean, it changed during COVID, but pre-COVID, we still had the same commutes, we still have the same time period, we're still working. You know, one of the things I thought was if you look in retrospect, the biggest mistake we all made in podcasting is we fell in love with smart speakers. We should have been advertising listen in your car.

SPEAKER_09 11:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 11:11

Like that's what we should have been doing at that time. We somehow had everyone listening to us like statically, but nobody's listening statically to anything anymore. Yeah, podcasts has allowed freedom of different types of formats and for niche things and for true crime and some of these other things. But on news and information and entertainment, I'm not sure it's entirely different than what we've what we were doing before. It's just coming through a different mechanism.

James Cridland 11:32

Yeah, yeah. And and and available to somebody when they want it uh as well, which is of course the the massive uh difference there. One of one of the things that it's uh so it's interesting. I I've just been doing a lot of conference speaking. Um, I'm off now because um there is no conferences that happen in June uh or July or August because the Northern Hemisphere is all in their summer holiday mode mode. Um and I'm wondering whether there's an off-season that you see in terms of the podcasts that you do as well. When the season is off, what happens to your network then?

SPEAKER_10 12:06

So it's interesting, is if I pull over to the side and I pull our largest days of all time, most of them are around off-season events. Right. So the NFL draft is in the month leading into the NFL draft for us. There's two things I would say about the offseason, or if I could three things. One is the premise of lockdown is literally a relationship between the listener and the host about their team. Well, they still care about them all year, and they care about the host all year. So they're likely to stay, even when the news maybe gets to a trickle, there's still fun things to talk about. You're still going if you're a sports fan, you're still going to the local pub or bar and you're talking about your team with your buddies still a little bit. Like, what's coming up? And are we gonna be good next year? And do we make a right trade? Those things all still exist. But then I would also say that truly, you know, the transaction aspect of American sports, and I think soccer is and football as well, is really a huge part of sport today. And so what a team's gonna do in free agency or who they're gonna trade or what they might draft um are as big a time period, if not bigger, than sometimes what the team does on the 17th or 42nd or 132nd game of the year. So that really we don't have a great offseason. And the other thing we have found, frankly, is if you're advertising with us in what people would call the quiet season, those are the most connected fans. Right. So from an advertiser standpoint, that's actually maybe the best time to advertise because you have the most connected fans in those time periods.

James Cridland 13:35

A lot of people are saying that the future of uh podcasting is video. Uh, you you've been in video for some time. Where where do you see um uh all of this video that's going on at the moment? Apple Podcasts talking about video, um uh Netflix, uh Fire TV, Tubi. Um, where where do you see podcasting going in the video era?

SPEAKER_10 13:58

Well, I think we're doing a little bit the same thing we talked about earlier, right? We're just adding mechanisms by which you can watch, right? So if you're gonna watch on a stationary television, it's always surprising how many people it was surprising for a long time. It's not surprising anymore.

SPEAKER_09 14:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 14:09

What percentage of our audience was actually watching YouTube on a television, right?

SPEAKER_09 14:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 14:12

Um, that's always like a surprising number. You know, YouTube's done a fabulous job with its algorithm and search engines. That's why it's causing Apple and Spotify a problem. What I think's interesting on this is that Apple and Spotify's answer is to go to video to try to combat, at least in my opinion, to try to combat what YouTube's doing. I would suggest that they make their apps more searchable and easier for people to discover. Because I think what we've discovered is well, first of all, your YouTube audience is actually sometimes older than your Apple or Spotify audience. And I think it's because understanding podcasting was really intimidating for some of the older audience, and understanding YouTube is not intimidating at all. Yes, we're certainly going to video, audio will still be a large part of it. I don't know what the pieces of the pie will be. We're going to have different mechanisms by which people watch. It's going to, but we have that right now anyway. We have TV, we have your phone, you have your smart speaker, you have system in your car. We like to try to make it really black and white. I don't think it's gonna be video only. I mean, frankly, if I look at the lockdown numbers, we're actually growing in audio right now. Our our biggest growth right now, in many ways, is audio related. And we continue to have what I think is considering that we're 10 years old, uh pretty robust um audio number increase. I mean, I think in March this year we were 22% up on audio year over year. Like that, that's not we weren't adding much to to our lineup at that point.

James Cridland 15:39

Where do you where do you see live um uh fitting in here? Are any of your shows live? Or how do you, you know, how do you see that?

SPEAKER_10 15:49

You know, I think in the sports realm, sports talk radio is still really big. And um, it's the one thing left on AMFM radio stations that I think, you know, it's music stations are really struggling because of Spotify and and Apple and Sports Talk Radio is still successful and it's because it's live. So yes, I do think that has, at least in the sports realm, has a very large value. Um the games themselves have incredible value, which is you know a little bit different. I guess a concert is the equivalent in music, but in sport, I do, you know, there's not like a true crime radio station. There's and you know, Conan's come close, but there's there's not like a Conan to smartless to Dax Shepherd radio station really out there anymore, because that's where podcasting is just so superior. But in sports, where a player gets signed and you want immediate reaction and it takes us a little time to flip a podcast, that there's still we've you know tried to put in a bunch of mechanisms inside the company to be able to serve our fan immediately in those circumstances, but there's something to live immediate reaction that in those circumstances sports talk radio is still has that's very important. So I do think there's something to live in podcasting, and I think particularly in sports.

James Cridland 16:59

Where do you see the next 10 years going?

SPEAKER_10 17:04

I mean, honestly, I don't know.

SPEAKER_07 17:05

That was a long pause.

SPEAKER_10 17:07

Yeah, I mean it's funny. Well, actually, I was listening to a podcast today about business, and it was like, if you ask someone to tell you what the future is, they say I have no idea. If you tell them to ask them what the future in business is, they all act like they know what they're talking about. Yeah, yeah. Like, so I I think that's what the long pause was, and I was hearing that in my ears. I I don't actually have an I don't have a great answer. Our goal is to become the leader in team coverage across all platforms. And so that if you are a fan of the Dallas Cowboys and you want audio, we're delivering it. And if you want video, we're delivering it. And if you want a written piece, we're delivering it. And if you want something in your inbox, we're delivering it. You know, if you want a short form video, we're delivering it. And if you want text messaging from our host directly to you, so you can have a personal one-on-one relationship, we're delivering it. Are we delivering an AI recap of games that I don't that's immediate? I I don't know. Um you know, that's the that's the kind of tricky area there. Um, I do think with the rise of AI, human connection, this is very cliche, but human connection and human live events will become more important than ever before. That bodes well for locked on. Our whole premise is built on a human connection and our game and our sports are all built on humans performing live. I don't think we're going to these games if they're robots. Um, you know, last week or whatever we had the NBA Finals game where clearly you had a collective group kind of choking, right? Like I don't know what other way to say it, but that there's a human element to what happened to the San Antonio Spurs in game four of the NBA championship. They had a 29-point lead and it started to fall apart, they were on the road and the crowd was going crazy, and you could literally see them thinking to themselves, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, what is going on? How do we stop this? Well, if we have a bunch of robots playing, that's not gonna be that interesting. So that's still that human element, and I think we need community, right? I think that's I think Sebastian Junger's book Tribe has more um relevance than ever before. We want community, whether it's at a concert with fellow people in our community, whether it's frankly, you know, we're pretty zealous in all parts of the world, but particularly in America, about our political parties right now. I think that's a sign of people wanting their communities and the safe community of sports.

James Cridland 19:13

Well, 10 years of the Lockedon Podcast Network. Thank you for your your support of uh of the pod news newsletter as well. Much, much appreciated. Thank you.

SPEAKER_10 19:22

I guess the only thing I can promise you, James, is the chances of me still being around to do to do the founder being around 10 years later is fairly remarkable. Yes. The founder being around 20 years from now is absolutely impossible. So you think you'll you'll be talking to Kylie or Carl and our staff uh on the next one.

SPEAKER_07 19:43

You think well, uh uh that that that that's of course assuming that I'll still be here.

SPEAKER_10 19:47

Uh which is uh well, you've you you've you've been a leader in this for a long, long time.

SPEAKER_07 19:51

So we'll see.

SPEAKER_10 19:53

I would hope you are. And and what you know, we heard um Dan Granger, what is a podcast? Like, you know, if we can't decide that now, how do I possibly have any idea what that is 10 years from now? What is a podcast, David? Uh I think it's a form of entertainment that makes the listener that that the listener enjoys. Like that I or listener viewer enjoys. I really go to that simple.

James Cridland 20:14

Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Really good to catch up with you. Thank you.

Announcer 20:18

The pod news weekly review with Buzz with Buzz Sprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

YouGov - most listeners skip the ads

Sam Sethi 20:26

There's new data out today from Ugov, and they say what I've been saying for a while. What have they said?

SPEAKER_07 20:32

Come on. Most listeners, this is according to Ugov, so it must be true. Most listeners skip podcast ads. There you go.

Sam Sethi 20:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 20:44

52%.

Sam Sethi 20:46

You see, now I've got data to back up my theories.

James Cridland 20:48

Yes, now you've got data. Well, how hold your horses. Okay. 52% of uh people skip or tune out of podcasts, according to this uh data. Another 12% say it depends on the ad. And then there are sometimes another 16% do so sometimes. Gosh. So I thought I'd catch up with Clifton Mark, who is UGov's senior business data journalist. Very intelligent man he is. Yes. And I started by asking who youGov is.

SPEAKER_02 21:19

I am Cliff Mark. I work for Ugov, which is a big research uh data company, market research. Um, my role is business data journalist, which means basically I write surveys, ask them to thousands of people, and then report any findings I think would be of interest to businesses.

James Cridland 21:40

So you've just released the US Podcast Ads Report 2026. Firstly, how was that survey done?

SPEAKER_02 21:45

YouGov, uh, they have a big panel. We've got something like 34 million people signed up. And so we know a little bit about them demographically, and so we can sort them into representative audiences. And so 15,000 people around the world. Got an email saying, hey, you've been selected for a survey. Well, more than that got it. 15,000 answered the survey on a app or on an app on their phone. And then they were from 19 countries. And then we sort of have a giant uh number crunching machine which which sorts all out uh out all that information to a a version that I can read. Um and that's yeah, that's within the survey.

James Cridland 22:27

And is the is the data made to be representative of the uh of the population as most of these things do?

SPEAKER_02 22:35

Yes, that's right. So the panel's big enough and we have enough information that all of our surveys are nationally representative, or in a few cases where that sample isn't available, we note that it's uh representative of the urban population or the online population.

James Cridland 22:50

Yeah. So um uh one of the um one of the potential uh titles for this report, Skip Happens, um uh it is a great title. Um, and uh I think relates to the headline in the report for me, which is that most listeners skip podcast ads. What does the data actually say in that?

SPEAKER_02 23:09

Well, in America they do. So we have 52% of American podcast consumers saying they usually skip or tune out ads when they come on. And that's not including 4% who claim that they stop listening altogether, and another big chunk that says they sometimes tune out or it depends on the ad. So not all of the ads are getting through. And for a lot of listeners, they say usually they skip them.

James Cridland 23:37

Now, that this is listeners saying that they skip them rather than listeners actually skipping them, because of course your data won't know that bit, but that must mean that podcast ads are really annoying, right? And and uh and that nobody nobody really listens to any of them. Are we all doomed, Cliff?

SPEAKER_02 23:52

Well, let me ask you, what is what is more annoying? Uh the ad you can skip or the ad you can't skip?

SPEAKER_07 23:59

Correct.

SPEAKER_02 24:00

Right? Well, um, actually, our our follow-up question to uh the skipping question was which of the following ad formats do you find most annoying or disruptive? And we asked about some traditional ads like TV um or music streaming. We asked about a lot of online ads that we thought were comparable, online display ads, YouTube, um, social media ads. And podcast ads, the least number of people said it was the most annoying, right? So let's say 50% of people say online display ads are the worst. Uh 25% that said that about podcast ads.

James Cridland 24:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:41

And so people I think skipping actually helps. It helps become less irritating.

James Cridland 24:46

So people don't mind the podcast ads, but also skip them a lot. Which is uh which is a weird thing. Does does that say that essentially advertising on podcasting is a waste of time then?

SPEAKER_02 24:57

Well, I mean our data doesn't show that at all, and I'll say why, but I don't even think that uh I think finding an ad format where people are kind of find out what you're advertising, but you don't get to the point where you're irritating them, and when they start to get annoyed, they can skip it might be a good thing. We did ask about whether people took actions after hearing ads. So audio ads of all kinds, podcast ads, radio ads, streaming audio ads, and we found that podcast listeners not only take as much action as um consumers of other podcasts, but a little bit more. So even though they're skipping it, um the ones that they do here, more of them have actually acted on it.

James Cridland 25:42

That's really interesting. So so actually, podcast ads work really well. It's it's just that um there is a fair amount of uh at least people who say that they are skipping them. But certainly if people um uh are saying that they're skipping ads, we should probably um uh pay attention to that, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 25:59

Right. I mean, I think I think probably more ads get through than people admit, but uh 90% listening through the whole through the whole thing. That is surprising data to me. That's really interesting.

James Cridland 26:09

Now uh let's move away from um uh uh ad skipping. It's my um co-host Sam's uh favorite topic is ad skipping. Although this was called the uh the US uh uh survey, it's actually carried a lot of data from a lot of different countries consuming podcasts and some really varying data. So 54% of people in the US consume um podcasts. That figure rises in um uh urban Mexico to 78%, and it's even more in the UAE. Was that a surprise to you?

SPEAKER_02 26:42

That the differences were that high, yes, was a surprise. But what I found interesting in this is of course there are variations in the consumption, but the also the variations in video versus audio preference. So uh many of the countries that have a strong, like a very broad consumption, who you know, on this on on they they consume podcast video or audio of any kind. The ones with the highest range are also ones with the highest video preference in many cases, broadly speaking. Um so it may be that video formats, um, short reels, video platforms may have a bigger reach for some podcast stuff.

James Cridland 27:28

Yeah, and uh that that was fascinating. So I think Denmark really likes audio, yeah. Um which is uh which is strange. And then and then the the US is kind of in the middle, um uh but but there were real differences, weren't there, in different countries. And I wonder whether that is a cultural difference or you know, why why the differences are there?

SPEAKER_02 27:48

Well, I mean they're there are two big outliers, right? So the US, 28% prefer audio, 40% prefer video, 27% don't care. At the video end of the spectrum, 60% of respondents in the UAE prefer video, but at the audio end of the spectrum, it's 71 in Denmark who prefer audio, and the next highest one is Great Britain at 46%. So it's a real uh difference in Denmark. Um I should dig in and have a look at what if we have any other Nordic data, but in the other European countries, right, those tend to be the ones with more preference for audio. So Great Britain, Germany, Spain all favor audio more than video. Um, whereas the US has started leaning towards towards video, as well as um Mexico, Poland, Singapore, and UAE.

James Cridland 28:40

I wonder whether it's the difference between just the amount of content which is available. Um uh having spoken in the UAE a number of times, there is an awful lot of push in terms of video in that part of the world. There's an awful lot of great audio um and video which is available, you know, obviously in the Arabic language, which isn't necessarily, you know, English uh speaking. And so I do wonder whether it's just uh it's just that um, you know, there's an awful lot of video available in the US, there's less video, certainly available in places like Denmark, um, Norway, Sweden, and certainly in the UK as well.

SPEAKER_02 29:15

Right. Yeah, it may, it may, it may well be so.

James Cridland 29:18

We've been uh saying on this uh show that podcasts are something for your ears when your eyes are busy. Um what does the data actually um uh show us? Does does the data agree that actually people are consuming audio while they're doing other things?

SPEAKER_02 29:33

Well, uh yes, indeed. We asked um in which of if any of the following situations do you listen to podcasts or you know, consume podcasts? Uh and nearly half said while doing chores, 34% said while commuting, uh another 29% said while cooking or baking. Um so people are doing all kinds of things while listening to podcasts. And again, this stuff is interesting, uh, really how it varies in different markets, but also, you know, people who prefer video and audio have different contexts in which they're they're considering podcasts, obviously. I mean, yes, yeah, yeah.

James Cridland 30:14

Yeah, and and I think you know, commuting is the obvious one. You're hopefully not getting too many people who are watching a a video while while they while they commute, if they're if they're driving, if they're using a bus or a train, then that's absolutely fine, of course. But uh yeah, so I thought that that was that was really interesting to end up seeing. Um the the the the talk in the in the industry, of course, is that video um means that we can charge more for the ads because the ads will work much, much better. Is there any data in terms of how well the ads work? Um video compared to audio in your in your uh study?

SPEAKER_02 30:49

Okay, so we don't have we didn't measure distinctly whether video ads or audio ads work better. Um, but we can say that uh people who prefer video and people who prefer audio tend to act on ads at relatively the same rate. So that's the closest we have to that measure. It seems like audio does as well, even though there may be as many reasons to think, you know, as well. Yeah, that it might not, but yeah. I don't know if they are.

James Cridland 31:22

Yeah, there you go. Uh uh amazing. Audio advertising works. That's a benefit to all of us. What was the biggest surprise to you um uh once you'd put this report together? What was the biggest surprise to you in terms of um uh the the results that you saw?

SPEAKER_02 31:38

A lot of the international differences were surprising to me. Um how many people preferred video kind of shocked me because I'm a I'm an audio guy, you know, that's why I liked the I liked the medium in the first place. But what was kind of um funny to me was what a profile turned up when I started analyzing audio preferrers versus video preferrers in the United States. A lot of the things that maybe we in who are interested in podcasts think of podcast listeners, especially people who are uh onto it early on, um, may fit this profile. So people who prefer audio tend to be are much more likely to be wealthier, they're much more likely to have more than 200% of uh you know the median income in in the US. So you've got a wealthier audience, they're more likely to be millennial, they're more likely to be obviously doing uh other activities while they do it. And the kind of kicker, if you want to picture this overall like high achieving, wealthy person, is the one genre that they most over-index for compared to video watchers, is like education and self-improvement. So, you know, imagine someone out jogging, counting their heart rate, uh listening to self-improvement podcasts, and uh killing it in the corporate game, I guess. That's your audio preferrer.

James Cridland 32:57

Yeah, it's it's really, really interesting. That difference between somebody that prefers audio, somebody that prefers video. There's been studies done on that in the past, but actually being able to compare countries to countries is fascinating as well. Um the report is a free uh download. You can download it um from uh the Ugov uh website. You can also find it in the Pod News newsletter. Um, is there anywhere else where we should be going to learn more about some of these studies that UCov does?

SPEAKER_02 33:24

If you uh go to the Ugov site, you can sign on to the platform or just you know, Google Ugov reports, and we come up with new ones all the time. Uh we've got one coming up about the future of search, you know, whether AI tools and chatbots are really challenging search engines, which I'm I'm working on right now and is really interesting.

James Cridland 33:44

Any more plans to do more podcast uh reports? You've clearly got a lot of um of international information there, which would be really useful to uh to to uh share. Are you planning anything else?

SPEAKER_02 33:56

Well, we have we have the big reports, right? But we also have a constant stream of great content articles coming out. So uh we I know we'll have two or three more standalone articles based on this survey coming out relatively soon. Um, I can't say exactly when, but on our content page you'll find them. And you know, as a former podcaster myself, uh I'm always pushing these topics. So we'll definitely keep you in the loop of all our podcast research.

James Cridland 34:22

Kevin, it's been great to uh to uh catch up. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 34:25

All right, thank you.

Announcer 34:26

The pod news weekly review will return in just

Trailer Park

Announcer 34:30

a second.

SPEAKER_03 34:35

Oh hey, this is a podcast trailer for a podcast about podcast trailers. Let me explain.

SPEAKER_01 34:42

Hello, I'm Timmy Yeagis.

SPEAKER_03 34:44

And my name's Ariel Nissenblatt. We are podcast people who are obsessed with listening to and making podcasts.

SPEAKER_01 34:51

And with so many options, it's hard to find good ones.

SPEAKER_03 34:55

So we thought, what if we made a podcast that featured trailers of fantastic podcasts that have already been made, never made it to production, or have yet to be released or funded.

SPEAKER_01 35:07

Introducing the Trailer Park Podcast. The Trailer Park Podcast, or TPP, where you can listen to podcast trailers to your heart's content.

SPEAKER_03 35:20

On each episode, we'll introduce a trailer, hear some tape, or perhaps even an interview from the creator, and then send you off on your merry way to listen to or support that podcast. Or maybe it's not your cup of tea. But hey, that's the point. It's a trailer, it's low commitment.

SPEAKER_01 35:36

And if you have a trailer of your own that you want to submit, go to trailerparkpodcast.crd.co.

SPEAKER_03 35:44

Subscribe to or follow the trailer park podcast on your favorite podcast app right now.

Announcer 35:49

From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

Sam Sethi 35:56

Shall we move on then, James? Um, I'm feeling I'm feeling a bit more positive now after that story. Thank you very much. Um, there you go. No, I'm not anti-advertising, I'm anti the way that it's currently metrics. But I think we have answers to that coming up in this channel.

James Cridland 36:11

Let's let's talk measurement, shall we? Because um, yes, lots of new things coming from lots of new

Bumper Dashboard goes free

James Cridland 36:18

people.

Sam Sethi 36:18

So the first one is bumper, friends of the show, Dan Meisner, Jonas Foost, uh, lovely guys that they are. They have had this thing called the bumper dashboard. We've interviewed them several times. We've talked about it. I was at the London podcast show when they were announcing the bumper score. Um, but they've now made this available to people. What is the bumper score? Remind everyone. And equally, how do you calculate it?

James Cridland 36:43

Well, so firstly, the bumper dashboard is now available for every podcast for free. So if you want to use the bumper dashboard, then now you can. And what the bumper dashboard does is it pulls in all of your data, your verified data from places like Apple Podcasts, from Spotify, OP3 is in there. Quite a lot of podcast hosting companies are in there, and it will pull all of that data in, and um, and you can see all of that data in one place. So that's really useful stuff. There's um a ton of useful information uh in there. So that's now available free for everybody, and the tool's new bumper score is now also available. Now it's basically the company calls it a standard benchmark that compares podcast performance in context. So you can basically have a look at the bumper score for one show, compare it to another show, and it will basically show you how many people have listened to the show all the way through and how the show is uh doing in comparison to others. And um it pulls in a ton of information um uh about that. Um I would tell you what the bumper score is for this very show, but unfortunately, bumper needs uh integration with podcast hosting companies, and Buzz Sparrow is not one of those um podcast hosting companies that gives them all of the information that they might actually need. So unfortunately, it doesn't work for this show, but it does work for many others, um, particularly uh shows hosted on Transistor, I think, and uh I think uh megaphones in there, and there are uh a number of other big podcast hosting companies that it does support. Um, it's still a private uh score, uh uh having said that. So I did ask if there was an API so that I could um show the bumper score on the website. Um but of course nobody wants their uh real numbers to be out there. But nevertheless, the bumper score is available to you if you are in a supported podcast hosting company.

Sam Sethi 38:49

I mean, look, let's be clear, you you have to log into your bumper dashboard and you have to give permission to access your hosting services. So it's not an automated thing, it is actually on permission basis. Um it's cool. I I still want to know how they calculate the score, because it could be something that I could use and replicate and accredit to them uh within TrueFans, but I don't know how you calculate it. So yeah.

James Cridland 39:14

Yeah, indeed. And I think they're keeping that uh under their hat for the time being. Um and I can kind of understand why, but um, yes, it's it's um a proprietary score is one thing. It would be nice if it was a little bit more public, you know, in terms of that.

Sam Sethi 39:28

Now, at the London podcast show where Dan Meisner was talking about this, was also Steve Razors. He was the former EVP for podcasting at Paramount, and he wrote a post called Podcasting's Dirty Secret. No one wants their real numbers, which is what you were just saying, James. So, what did Steve have to say on the subject?

James Cridland 39:48

Well, so uh he was uh talking about the bumper score and saying it's a good piece of work, it's bit well built and free and independent and all of that stuff, um, which is uh nice. He was saying some very positive things uh all about that. He was, though, saying um a few things. Firstly, that nobody wants their real numbers to be published, which I don't necessarily agree with, partially because you can see my real numbers for everything I do online, because why would I want to hide those? Um and I find it odd that people do want to hide those figures, um, but uh certainly not everybody.

Sam Sethi 40:25

Because perception is reality changing. Well, yes, exactly.

James Cridland 40:29

Exactly. And you may think that um, you know, that particular shows are uh smaller or larger than they really are, probably larger than they really are. Um so uh hence why, you know, a score is quite useful because it obfuscates the actual numbers that you're actually getting. So, you know, perhaps there is um uh something there. The other thing though, but as part of this, though there was this really nice quote: standards do not get voted in. Someone imposes them, he said. I what what do you think of that uh as a as a quote?

Sam Sethi 41:05

I suppose they do. I mean, you know, if Apple suddenly says they're going to make X their standard, well, it becomes a standard, right? They're big enough to choose uh what they want to do and big enough to move the market. Um and I think that's true. So you know, bumper putting out the score, but not saying transparently how you calculate the score is not good. So therefore, I don't think it'll get adopted widely. Um which we'll talk about shortly at trying to come up with a standard. I think all these uh small groups putting their footprint on trying to make standards doesn't work. And I think it is, as Steve said, it's by adoption uh or by imposition that the standard gets set.

James Cridland 41:49

Yeah, I think so. And I think you know, it it certainly if you looked at the podcast transcripts standard, for example, um, which is a standard, um, it really became a standard because Apple turned around and said, we will support this. And as soon as that happened, as soon as Apple essentially imposed that standard on the rest of us, even though it was a podcasting 2.0 standard, I think that then meant that it was a standard. Um, and nobody voted that in. Um, somebody imposed that on us, and um, it was uh Apple that imposed it on us. It wasn't Apple's idea, but Apple imposed it on us. And so I think, yeah, I would probably agree with that. I thought I I thought that was a clever and very uh bright um thought in terms of how standards actually get there. So you do need somebody at the end of the day to wave a flag and say this is the standard that we want to go for and we're going to impose it. And so it does come down a little bit to Apple, um, you know, and those sorts of things, even if there are parts of Podcasting 2.0 who vehemently disagree with all of that.

Sam Sethi 43:00

Quick reminder um from the podcast show London, can you still go and see recorded uh sessions? Because this session that Dan and Jonas did for Bumper is worth going back to look at. They also did a really good one. Dan Meisner and Tom Webster did one as well about the download metric. Um I went to that one as well. And I think both of those, if they can be found, yeah, are worth watching again.

James Cridland 43:28

And I'm afraid they didn't record uh this year. So uh you could go back and listen to them last year. This year they you you can't um uh go back and listen, unfortunately, which is a real a real shame. Um I believe that the upcoming podcast movement is all going to be videoed. Um uh I believe that's uh the case. Uh tickets available now, by the way. Um, but uh for the London podcast show, yes, I think that that was a bit of a mistake. So uh unfortunately you can't go back and uh have a listen uh to that, unless of course. Um some of these people brought their own recording equipment in or asked very nicely. We asked very nicely and we got a recording of it. And I believe that Justin Jackson from Transistor brought his own videographer in. Why you have to have a videographer now and not just a camera person? I really don't know. But anyway, a videographer. So that was a good thing. Yeah, no, exactly.

AMP release new data - Spotify signs up

Sam Sethi 44:24

Now, talking of groups that are wanting to set standards for the industry and talking about measuring advertising, there's the Alliance for Measurement in Podcasting, aka AMP. They've announced a cross-platform alternative to the podcast download. Now, is this out yet, James? Because it's a teaser to what they're going to be doing. What are they saying now?

James Cridland 44:48

Well, so they have said they have uh four definitions of exposures. Um, you know, what's an impression and what's a listener, and all of those sorts of things. Um, but one thing that they have said quite openly is what a play is. You thought a play was 60 seconds, because that's what the IAB specs tell you, but no, uh, it's not it's not 60 seconds, it's 30 seconds. Um, so that's handy. So AMP has defined a play as 30 seconds. Um, and um Spotify um uh yesterday announced that um they were going to be supporting that. So as of right now, uh if you take a look at the Spotify for Creators dashboard, that now shows you plays as 30 seconds long. Um so all of a sudden, the exactly this standard thing is actually happening. Um someone has imposed that, which is Spotify, and they have said that 30 seconds thing is how we are going to define a play. Uh, half the length of what the IAB says is a play, but that's all okay. Um, and um so that is quite a move, I think, and shows the power of this Alliance for Measurement in Podcasting group that they've managed to get Spotify on board and Spotify to actually define um a play as um uh as uh 30 seconds now. Now, YouTube as you remember has no definition, but it's widely assumed to be 30 seconds as well. Um, Apple Podcasts Connect, though, if you log into that, then a play is the number of plays on unique devices where the play duration is greater than zero seconds. So basically, if you've listened to any of it at all, then that counts as a play. Um I'm hoping that Apple sees sense and redefines that as 30 seconds, uh, because whatever I think of 30 seconds versus 60, it's um it's a standard that would allow us to compare Spotify with Apple, with presumably YouTube. Um, and um it should be relatively easy for us as an industry, if we want to, to switch the 60 seconds that we've been working on to 30 seconds for the IB. I would be curious, if anybody's listening who is able to actually do some uh number crunching, I would be curious to see whether or not it makes much difference if you're talking about 30 seconds or 60 seconds. I can absolutely see it would if you're talking about 30 seconds and five seconds, but I would assume that the delta is going to be very, very low. But yeah, it's bit b big news that uh Spotify have uh jumped in on that.

SPEAKER_07 47:42

Oh god, right, where do I start on this one? Wow, you are in a grumpy mood. Go, yeah, go, Mr. Seffi, go, go, go.

Sam Sethi 47:52

Talk about BS. I mean, I mean the play count, why can't you just ignore it? It's like it's like, oh, the download number was really big and now the play count will be small. Oh, let's halve the play count and make it really big again, right? That's the first thing that's going through my head. And then the second thing is 30 seconds of anything's irrelevant. You know, the ad didn't get played, the the show actually didn't get consumed, nobody's really listened to the show. So, what value does 30 seconds have as a play count? I just don't see it. Dave Jones is on the same uh page with me as well. He was saying the same thing on podcasting 2.0. Why would we have a 30-second play count as a measurement? Why not just say the show was played, yeah, got it, and um, but the consumption was, you know, total listen time was X and it was 80% or 10% or whatever it might be. Get some more detailed metrics, not just 30 seconds, 20,000 plays. I mean, I don't get it.

James Cridland 48:52

Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna argue back slightly because firstly, ads are different. So they have defined an ad impression as a commercial begins playing for the user. That's an ad impression. And then they've got an ad audience, which is the number of users exposed to that ad impression. So they know, particularly with HLS, they know when a commercial starts playing, they know how many people have seen that.

Sam Sethi 49:20

And so far, it's good, yeah, agree.

James Cridland 49:22

And or or indeed heard that. And so therefore, they've got a number for ad impression, they've got a number for ad audience. Now, what you really need for a podcast is you need some form of number which says how big the podcast is, and that's where uh a play comes in. Um, and whether or not it's 30 seconds or 60 seconds is kind of immaterial, as long as we all agree what it is. And 30 seconds, I mean, as um Spotify uh says, um uh Spotify's audience behavior data shows that 30 seconds is a reliable indicator of intentional consumption, filtering out accidental starts and other low intent activity. I rather like intentional consumption. So it's very different to Apple's, if you've heard any of it, then it counts. Um, so that's quite helpful. And at least we actually now have an intentional consumption figure for a podcast. Um, whatever I might think of 30 versus 60, I don't suppose it matters too much. It it's that we've actually got a standard that at least Spotify now seems to agree with. And uh, you know, as I would say, rumour has it, YouTube does as well. Um so hopefully, if Apple Podcast comes on board, then we've actually got uh an intentional consumption figure, whatever you call it, a play, um, that we can now that we can now kind of agree with. So I I don't think it's a bad thing. I don't think it's a bad thing. Okay.

Sam Sethi 50:54

I I will defer my my grumpiness on that one for a while. Um, but look, if if we can get any if we can get equality across the board, then yeah, okay, it's a metric that can be measured, right? So that's the first part to to say. Congratulations. And I think what you defined around the advertising, using HLS as the metric, you know, it's played, number of people listening. I I think that's a good thing. And advertisers will be very happy to get that data back as well.

James Cridland 51:21

Yeah, yeah. Now I th I think that that's useful information. Uh, I mean, particularly if you're a branded podcast, you don't care about ad impressions, you care about how many plays your podcast gets. So if we've got a standard definition of what a play is, then I think that's really helpful. The devil i is really whether uh and it comes back to whether Apple are going to play. And if Apple are not going to play, no pun intended, then this is yeah, then this is going to be a little bit um a little bit dead. Um because really, well, either it's gonna be a little bit dead or Apple will seem as if it's relatively immaterial. I mean, uh Apple's the the third most popular podcast app now. So perhaps we don't even need to care about what Apple thinks if the number one and the number two are likely to um uh to recognise uh intentional consumption. But um yeah.

Sam Sethi 52:17

So here's a thought. I mean, if we got the number of plays, again, let's say it's 30 seconds, and you've got the total listen time, because we can now calculate that. Yeah, and you've got the percentage, because again, shows like Pod News Daily, three minutes, if you said it's only got five minutes listen time compared to something else, that's not showing that 100% of the show is consumed. So all three metrics are required. But I wonder, I go back to this bumper score, whether you could take plays, listen time, and percent completed and come up with a calculated score, or is that what bumper are doing to come up with their calculated score? I don't know.

James Cridland 52:53

Well, that's uh an interesting question. I mean, the the definition of a bumper score, so the bumper score is um 100 is average, 200 is excellent, and zero is below average. So you're somewhere in the middle of those uh areas, and um they have a definition on it uh that basically says how well does a show deliver ads to a verified audience. Um and so it is showing things like very uh it's it's made up using things like verified listener data, podcast delivery data, episode level retention data. So essentially um it's got a bit of all of that in it. It's got a bit of plays in there, um, it's got a bit of uh download stuff in there as well, because it kind of has to at the moment, and then it's also got the retention data built into that as well. So perhaps the bumper score is a poor man's way in uh here in terms of um in terms of how that works.

Sam Sethi 53:54

Now, the pod father himself, Adam Curry, let me say it again, Adam Curry, Adam Curry. That means he's listening to this part now, James. Um I don't think it does. Doesn't it? I thought that his little app would then find his name.

SPEAKER_07 54:06

AI will now find it, find his name.

Sam Sethi 54:08

Yeah, and he listened to Chicken Curry, chicken curry, chicken curry. No? No? Okay. Now um on podcasting 2.0 last week, Adam uh had some views about the app and then came up with his own proposal called the Podcast Data Collective. What's the podcast data collective?

James Cridland 54:27

Well, so he reckons that everybody will hate it. Um uh and so he says, Oh, we are going to use um, you know, uh the information that we have from independent apps, which I I guess includes TrueFans as well as other ones. Uh, we are going to use the data that we've got from independent apps, which will uh which we can then work out a total download score from um and so, or a total consumption score from. Um so uh there is a bit of information there in terms of completion rate, there's also a bit of information there in terms of follows, because if you're talking to podcast uh apps, then you can find that kind of information. And he reckons that he can get access to about 10% of all plays, and that is enough for you to be able to work out what the total uh figure is. Um, and so he's very excited by this. He says it's going to be available for free for a limited time, and then he's gonna start paying for it, or uh then he's gonna start charging for it. Um so that's an interesting model. Um, and what I mean, what what do you think? What what what do you think of the podcast data collective?

Sam Sethi 55:44

Okay, so I think uh two years ago I was on the podcasting 2.0 show and I was talking about uh how individuals can get a pie, a piece of the pie. So advertisers are paying out, and uh I was talking about creators getting some money and listeners getting some money. That was a model that I was working on for TrueFans. Adam was talking about the apps sharing the data, first party data collectively with the podcast index and the apps getting paid. There's there's still some stuff in my mind. The the the problem is as a true fans app, I can share that data, but actually it's not my data, it's actually the podcast user's data, right? So the listeners' data is the first part of data that we aggregate for creators, and then the creator has that data, but then we are being asked to aggregate all of the creator's data into one pot and then share that with the podcast data collective. But I have a view that that's not my data. I haven't been given permission by the listener or the creator to share that data. So, in our terms and conditions, we say to the listener, your activity will be shared with the podcast creator. So we are doing that part, we are getting permission. We have not uh set any permission standards yet or terms and conditions that says to the creator. We're gonna take your activity from your listeners and we're gonna share that with a third party on your behalf. Well, I would happily share that with a third party if I was then gonna get paid, but I would then feel I had to pay the creator some value back as well within the revenue stream, because otherwise I'm just taking their data and I'm selling it. And that feels to me a little bit wrong as well.

James Cridland 57:41

Yeah, I I mean I suppose i if you're looking at this from a aggregated data, so of all of the users on uh TrueFans or Pocket Casts or wherever it might be, um, then there are you know 47 followers for this particular show on there. There's um there's 110, you know, um uh you know uh um uh downloads um and however it works, then I don't see that there's any um identification information there. But but of course the creator um might feel a little bit unhappy that you're sharing that information with a third party, but I don't think necessarily that the listeners should worry too much about that, given that it's a totally, you know, uh it's a totally um anonymous number at the end of the day.

Sam Sethi 58:34

Well, we've covered ourselves in the T's and C's, so we we we've made that very clear. Um I I think I think there's two parts. As TrueFans the app, the standalone app, like Podverse, like Fountain, like Podcast Guru, we have listener first party data, right? And that's great. As a host, which TrueFans and Fountain are as well, along with Buzzsprout and Captivate and RSS.com, etc. We have aggregated data as well. So in TrueFans, if we host, I can see uh all the listening data from Fountain, Spotify, other platform, other apps. So we've got two sets of data that we can share because we're in that weird app and host. Um look, I I think there is something there. I'm not I'm not poo-pooing it. I think that's the worst thing to do is to take an idea that's not fully formed and just simply become, you know, oh well that doesn't work because it doesn't do this. I think there is something there that Adam's got, which is aggregating the community from the open community of podcast apps into some sort of data pool that we can go back to advertise and say, look, pay us some money and we'll give you the money back out. So I do think there is that. The bit that you often get upset with the podcasting 2.0 community is when they reinvent the wheel with a new tag or reinvent the wheel when there's something out there. And there was a bit in the show that I got really frustrated about, which is um, how will we share this data? And I'm screaming at them. There is a thing called activity streams, it's structured data, it works, we have the person, we have the time, plays, etc. It's all there.

James Cridland 1:00:15

We work Yeah, but that's but that's directly um personal data. That is um, you know, Sam listened to this show.

Sam Sethi 1:00:23

That's the user data, but we can anonymise that in to the creator as an aggregated. So 50 people played this show for 80% of the time, blah blah blah, and the total listen time was X minutes, hours, days, whatever. Right? So we can anonymise that that can still be structured data. And I the only thing I'm saying is please, Dave Jones, do not invent the wheel again. Because they were talking about coming up with CSV files or some other third-party way of doing it. I'm going, that is a structured data set, it's like RSS, it's works, yeah, we can use it, and it's simple to do. Um, please don't invent the wheel again.

James Cridland 1:01:02

Well, and the other sort of side is um, I hate to say it, but it's already been invented and it's already available. Um, so if you want to find out how many downloads this show has or how many monthly listens this show has, then there are a bunch of tools where you can go and find that out. Um one of them is called Rephonic, one of them is uh, I mean, obviously we're publishing our stuff with OP3, but one of them is Rephonic, there's Magellan AI, there's Podscribe, there's various um there's download things.

Sam Sethi 1:01:31

They're not plays and listen times.

James Cridland 1:01:33

Now, yeah, you're correct. They are downloads, they're not plays and listen times, um, but but they are at least um uh a way in to that uh data. Now uh Rephonic says that we have uh 1.4000 listeners. That's a weird way of saying 1400, isn't it? 1,400 listeners per episode, um, which is uh correct, and that we have 6.1,000 uh monthly listens, uh, which is also correct. Why do I know that this is correct? Because Rephonic has connected with OP3 and is grabbing that information. Podscribe, on the other hand, would you like to know how many uh listeners we have uh according to to Podscribe?

Sam Sethi 1:02:17

Tell me, tell me, yes.

James Cridland 1:02:18

So bear it bear in mind that our monthly listeners figure is uh 6,100. Um what does Podscribe think? 244. Brilliant downloads per month, according to this, uh according to uh Podscribes uh uh listing for us, 713. Um and there are people out there who are buying advertising in shows based on that kind of data, and they have chosen that data. I've got no idea where they've got that information from. Uh, I know that Pods that um Podscribe, like many others, um, does have relationships with um podcast apps like Castbox and others, um, because they they're already getting some information. Um but 713 downloads per month versus 6,100. Um if I was a uh if if I was of a legal bent, um then I could be emailing uh the folks at Podscribe and telling them if they don't correct this, then they will be hearing from our lawyer. Uh, but we don't sell advertising on the show anyway. And we haven't got a lawyer. And we haven't got a lawyer, so uh not anymore. Gordon Farmark.

SPEAKER_07 1:03:37

Not anymore after a podcasting lawyer sacked us uh or sacked me.

James Cridland 1:03:42

So uh yes, so um so there are these tools, and that is the concern that I would have about any of this um uh uh information. If you genuinely think that with your 10% um of um of consumption information that you can actually work out what the true figure is, then good luck to you, because that's what Podscribe thinks, and Podscribe have us wrong by 90%, 900%.

Sam Sethi 1:04:08

Well, I know I'm I'm with Adam on this one, James. No, so I just said Podscribe and Refonic. I think their data is spurious, right? Because it's a download number. Who cares? It's legacy data.

James Cridland 1:04:20

It's well, I mean it's not it's not even a download number in in in in part of this, but yes.

Sam Sethi 1:04:25

So I think what Adam is trying to say is that we've moved to a newer metric, plays. We we just talked about AMP, and we we we are now looking at listen time and percent completed, those three metrics we've banged that drum for two years plus. Thankfully, it's now getting adopted. And I think what we're seeing now is that so if we had to do our data again, how many people from those 6,000 actually played our show is the real number. Which, when you go back to what Steve Razor says, do you really want that number in the public domain? Because that's going to be a much smaller number than your download number, right? And people get very twitchy about that. So I think all the things that we're saying is your your playing count will be smaller than your download number, but it is a true number, and that number should be out in the public domain, and that's what advertisers will buy against. Now, it might take a while for the industry to re-level their sort of expectations, but that's what we want. And I think Adam's trying to say if we can get all of that data aggregated for the 10% of the market share that podcasting 2.0 apps have, then we have some leverage with advertisers to buy that data.

James Cridland 1:05:38

Yeah, I mean, possibly. But there again, you know, if you've got 10%, the one thing that I do know is that, for example, this show underperforms on Spotify significantly and seems to underperform quite significantly on Apple Podcasts as well. So, therefore, what can you actually choose? So, wouldn't it be interesting, Sam, if we could actually compare the amount of data. Downloads that we had in um uh uh uh in May to Apple Podcasts and the amount of plays that we actually got in Apple Podcasts in May. Shall we find out what that figure is?

Sam Sethi 1:06:13

How come tell me?

James Cridland 1:06:14

So uh May, 2093 downloads went to something calling itself Apple Podcasts. It might not have been Apple Podcasts, but they pretended that they were Apple Podcasts when they uh requested the the file. So 2093 uh in May, according to OP3, and according to brilliant, and according to Apple Podcasts Connect, uh we had a total of 3,200 uh plays. So 2,000 downloads to Apple Podcasts, 3,200 plays. Some of these numbers see don't seem to be making any sense.

Sam Sethi 1:06:57

Well, maybe people listen twice, you know.

James Cridland 1:06:59

Um I mean, uh well, I have heard that uh the other uh dirty secret about the play count in Apple Podcasts is it's somebody pressing the play button. Um and so if you press pause and then play, then hey presto, that's two plays. And uh if you are um uh if you're listening to us while you're driving to work and the Apple lady comes on and says, in 200 yards, turn left. Um then of course that's paused and then played. And so if you've got 20 turns on your way to work, um uh then uh then that's 21 plays for us.

Sam Sethi 1:07:37

I'm gonna go and drive around and listen to Pod Newsweekly.

James Cridland 1:07:39

And uh and also, by the way, uh if you're if you're doing that, then why do you not know the way to work by now? But anyway. So yes, that's that's fascinating, isn't it? 2093 downloads to Apple Podcasts in May, 3,200 plays in Apple Podcasts in May. That doesn't make any sense at all. So there we are. Right.

Sam Sethi 1:08:00

In my summary, I think we're moving from the old data metrics to the new data metrics. There's a an inflection point that's occurring. We we're all in a bit of a uh a tiz about where and how and what we call it and all the words and the labelling. But I think we're getting there. I think we are getting there.

James Cridland 1:08:16

Yeah, correct. Correct.

Signed user agents

Sam Sethi 1:08:18

Now you mentioned about potentially it was the Apple user agent asking for the data. User agents is a big problem right now within this room. You've highlighted this a a couple of times in the last few weeks. Uh friend of the show, Tom Rossi from BusProw has a suggestion. I know we've talked about it before, but I think it's worth going back over this because I think it's a big issue. Uh it certainly seems to be a big issue on GitHub where a lot of the apps uh and developers are talking. So James, identify the problem again, please, and then we can talk about what's being said.

James Cridland 1:08:57

Identify the problem again. Um uh well, I will do just that. So essentially, when you download a podcast, then the podcast host knows two things about you. It knows your IP address and it knows what the user agent is, so what the device has said that it is. So um typically Apple Podcasts will say, Oh, we are Apple Podcasts, and we're this version, and we're on this device. The problem is, is that uh you can just write whatever you want in that user agent tag, particularly when you look at the amount of uh apparent web browsers that are downloading our stuff, that's gone up by a factor of 400% over the last couple of years. That can't all be web browsers, it it must be other things pretending that they're web browsers because we'll never block web browsers, will we? No. So it's it's kind of important that that user agent, instead of just taking it on trust, that we actually begin to turn around and say, How can we prove that this this download which says it's coming from Overcast is really coming from Overcast, or is it coming from somebody else? And it just so happens that um we've found a prime offender, uh, and it is the Podfather Adam Curry, because he tried to uh he has a robot that listens to this show so that he doesn't have to, and um he had a little robot and it tried downloading the Pod News Weekly Review and it was blocked because it was a robot. And so he then tried again and pretended that he was overcast. And when he pretended that he was the overcast app, of course Buzzprout isn't going to block Overcast. And so of course it was downloaded, even though it was a bit of dirty AI downloading it and not the Overcast app. Sorry, I'm just going, what? Yes, yes. So we've got a prime example of the sort of thing that Marco Armand is absolutely apoplectic about that anybody would uh consider even blocking uh uh uh anything. And this is exactly what happened. Take a listen uh to the podcasting 2.0 show last week.

SPEAKER_06 1:11:12

My um my robot went to go get the pod news weekly review, and as all robots do, they just decide to do it differently today. And uh it said, Oh, I got blocked, but the overcast user agent worked literally, exactly came out of claw code.

James Cridland 1:11:28

The the other sort of side of it is that um, you know, and it's it's one more thing. Um, but the other one more thing is that um a dependable user agent, so if I know that you really are overcast or pocket casts or anything else, if it's a dependable user agent, then hey presto, that's also a billing mechanism if you want to. So, uh, and this was Adam Curry's idea that every podcast app should get a share of the advertising. Well, guess what? Apple Podcasts is already taking um a fee for the advertising that appears in the uh shows that um uh that it's going to take via HLS. Um let's just assume for now that that's one dollar cost per thousand, a tenth of a cent per ad played. It it could well be uh significantly more, it could well be significantly less. But let's just assume it's one dollar cost per thousand. Why not just turn around and say, you know what? Um it's one dollar cost per thousand for the podcast app. And any podcast app that wants to sign up can do that. And uh we'll give Apple uh the one the one dollar cost per thousand, which is by the way, a tenth of a cent per ad played. We'll give Apple that money if it's on Apple Podcasts, we'll give Overcast that money if it's played on Overcast, if it's played on PocketCast, we'll give Pocketcast a tenth of a cent. Um why don't we do that? Because then everybody stands to share in the success of podcasting. And as podcasting gets even more popular, then those podcast apps get even more popular as well, and they earn money out of it, because right now they don't. And the only way that we can do that is a dependable user agent. Um, and if we don't have a dependable user agent, then we can't do that. So um, Malud, I pass the proposal as approved.

Sam Sethi 1:13:20

Um or maybe not well, well, well, there's people who don't have uh access to their domain that are no longer used.

James Cridland 1:13:33

Ah, you're talking you're you're talking about implementation.

Sam Sethi 1:13:35

I'm not talking about implementation now, I'm just talking about No, but then we we we have to go from yes, my lord, I agree with you, to okay, what do we do next?

James Cridland 1:13:43

Yes, and then this does become implementation, which is but I don't know I don't know a way of impl uh of implementing this yet. But but the one thing that I would say is um there has to be a way. So if we if we can work out a way of doing that, then yes, absolutely, we need to fix, you know, where do the keys live, who's in charge of that? We need to fix, you know, what happens if your app doesn't actually have a domain, although that would be really weird. But what happens if your app doesn't have a domain? Um uh all of that stuff, I'm sure that we can fix all of that stuff. But that that's when we get into implementation. But right now, um, just the very concept of proving that you're really Overcast and not somebody else, and not Adam's dirty bot, just that is getting a lot of people up in arms, including Marco Armin, who runs Overcast. Um, and I think that's the wrong thing, frankly, for anybody to be thinking about.

Sam Sethi 1:14:40

So we know that there is a problem. User agents can be faked. We know there is a problem that some apps will have with it, but we have to keep talking about this till we find a real solution because more and more AI bots are scraping data, and more and more AI bots in the model well, certainly in the model that I'm proposing where we charge per megabyte stream because we've moved to a streaming model, then blocking bots that are streaming your data and costing you money is critical, and people will work out well, most people aren't aware of this right now, so there isn't a outcry. But I think when people start to see their analytics dashboard with all these bots scraping their data, they will go, hmm, I don't want to pay for bots to stream my data, thank you very much. Come and we block them, and yeah, false agents or bots will then work out, oh I've just been blocked, change the agent, now I'm okay again, and we will have the problem just down the road.

James Cridland 1:15:41

Yes, uh, yes, unless unless we fix this. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Exactly.

Sam Sethi 1:15:47

Now,

Apple WWDC

Sam Sethi 1:15:48

you talked about one more thing. Well, Apple had their worldwide developer conference, James. What did they say?

James Cridland 1:15:55

They did. They made a number of announcements. The announcements uh that are relevant for podcasting are that firstly um uh video podcasts are coming to the Apple TV. Who'd have thought it? Uh so so that's a nice thing. Um, so there's a redesigned podcast app coming on TV OS. Um uh it's very now very confusing because it's called the Apple TV, but there's also a product called Apple TV which doesn't have Apple video podcasts on it. So imagine how complicated it is to talk about. But anyway, if you own an Apple TV device, um, then you'll be getting video on there, which by the way, I would point out that means that you might want to consider 4K video because uh obviously Apple TV is capable of that, and your great big TV screen in your living room is going to be capable of that as well. And again, this is where user agents are quite useful because you might want to only give that 4K stream to the Apple TV. Um, also, uh podcasts are uh video podcasts are coming to the Mac uh as well in uh September. Um, all of uh the video uh podcasts are now going to have proper transcripts, read-along transcripts, the ability to search and seek to a specific part of the episode, all of that kind of stuff is coming to video as well, uh, which is all good. Uh there'll also be picture-in-picture support uh on uh the Mac 2. So all of that is all um very uh exciting. Typically, you can expect those to roll out in mid-September, that's when the uh the new iOS comes out, uh, but you can start playing with them. Public betas in July. Development betas are available uh already, um, but nobody can talk about those officially because otherwise Apple's people will come along and pull your arms and legs off. So um so you won't find anybody doing that. Um, although the development betas are quite nice and stable. Uh so just saying. Um, but uh yeah, so all good in terms of that.

German court case against Google

Sam Sethi 1:18:00

Moving around the world in James, Germany has just said apparently uh AI, um, you can be liable for what AI summarises. What's this one, James?

James Cridland 1:18:11

I think this is brilliant. I think this is the best news that I have seen in a long, long time. So you know that um AI thing that you get at the top of Google searches? Um the one answer. Yes, if you haven't worked out how to how to turn it off, um, there's a thing on top of Google searches where Gemini comes up with some nonsense. Now, in any other part of the media industry, published information like that would be um the uh um the responsibility of Google to check and to make sure that it is actually correct. Um in any other part of the world, but uh uh Google seems to think, as other people who use AI seem to think, that oh no, just say that it's AI, put some disclaimers around it, and that'll be absolutely fine. And the German court, now unfortunately, a very small German court, but nevertheless, a German court has turned around and said, no, uh AI summaries that are published by Google should be um uh uh you know are uh the responsibility of Google. And if there's libel in there, if there's wrong information in there, which will get people into trouble, um, if you've managed to, you know, fix it to say bad things, then that is the responsibility of Google. And I think this is a brilliant, brilliant thing. Um and again it comes back to Inception Point AI, who have been flooding the zone with all kinds of AI crap over the last um over the last six months to a year, uh, without actually listening and checking to much of that AI crap. And um and all of a sudden this um this ruling seems to say that whoever publishes it is actually going to be uh liable uh liable for that. And I think that's a very good move, personally.

Sam Sethi 1:20:03

It is, but again, I think we're now getting two different states. I mean uh Apple announced that Siri AI will not be coming to the EU because of EU laws, and it looks like if Germany are going to be doing this, then Section 230 protection is not available in Germany, but it is in the US. Are we just gonna end up with a you know internet that is basically a US internet and then the rest of the world internet?

James Cridland 1:20:31

I mean, yes, that that that could be the case, but I mean Section 230 uh uh doesn't cover this, and I think that that's the point of this. Section 230 is there for third-party material that is published on um that is, you know, generated by somebody's users. So that means that if we have a comment section on the Pod News website, for example, then uh we could turn around and say we are not liable for what people published there, um under section 230. But this isn't that. This isn't a third-party user, this is an AI, an AI tool that is in is within our control. So so I th I I think um so I think it's great personally, um uh and uh hurrah. Um but uh yes, I mean you could well say that um there will be different things available in different parts of the world, as has been the case in terms of GDPR. Um if you try and access uh insidepodcasting.com, I think, um then you'll find that you can't access that from anywhere in Europe because of the GDPR. Oh dear, what a shame. Never mind. Uh and so I think that that's um just something that we just need to be aware of, I guess.

Goalhanger news

Sam Sethi 1:21:48

Whizzing back here to the UK, then uh congratulations to Goalhanger. They've been named the fastest growing company in the UK. I mean, that's uh not just the fastest growing company for podcasting, but the fastest growing company overall. They were ranked in the Sunday Times 100 as the number one company. Well done.

James Cridland 1:22:07

Yes, 321% average annual growth in the last three years. Uh, they made uh 50.8 million US dollars uh in sales in 2025. So they are doing very, very well. So many congratulations uh to them. Of course, you'll be able to watch the rest is football uh on Netflix wherever you are in the world. Uh there is a thing.

Events

Announcer 1:22:33

Podcast events on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland 1:22:38

Awards and events. Uh, let me tell you about two of them. Uh Podcast Movement 2026. If you want to get tickets, they are now on sale. They're $199 if you want uh tickets. In previous years, uh it cost much, much more, and there was a discount code in Pod News that you could use. This year it costs much, much less, and there is no discount code anymore. Uh, everybody pays the same price, and that's all good. So um I heartily agree with that. Uh if you want to speak, then you can go to podcastmovement.com and uh find out how you can put your selection forward. I will be uh hopefully, if they accept me, doing a session about the history of podcasting, which should be fun. I've got clips and everything. Um uh so that should be good. Um so podcastmovement.com is where to get those and the Empowered Podcasting Conference announcing details of their third annual conference. Those tickets are available as well. That is in Charlotte, in North Carolina in the US, August 21st to the 23rd, uh, with Mark Ronick and Ralph Estep Jr. is also part of that as well as uh one of the um sponsors. So um that is a good looking event if you are uh really wanting to um uh get uh involved in podcasting from an independent creator

The inbox

James Cridland 1:23:59

point of view.

Announcer 1:24:00

Boostergram, boostergram, booster, super comments, zaps, fan mail, fan mail, and voicemail. Our favorite time of the week, it's the Pod News Weekly Review inbox.

James Cridland 1:24:13

Yes, there are so many different ways to get in touch with us. Fan mail by using the link in our show notes, Angry Fan mail or polite fan mail. You can send either. That's absolutely fine. Uh also boosts or email, please, by the way, send us a voicemail because we like them. And we share any money that we make uh as well. We've got some um uh comments and things on TrueFans, haven't we? We have uh the wonderful Justin Jackson, you went and had a beer with him, I think. Yes, yes, more details in a bit. Yes, uh yes, he says, uh really appreciate you bringing attention to user agent spoofing and Tom Rossi's proposal. Yes, I'm not sure that Tom Rossi um uh shares the the excitement in the attention, but still there we are. Um so thank you for that. And Seth Goldstein uh sending us a couple of messages. Um I love it when Sam and James get salty. Great job this week, as always, chaps. Well, you know, that's what happens. Seven o'clock in the morning, jet lag.

SPEAKER_07 1:25:04

Um that's what you get.

James Cridland 1:25:07

So, Sam, so Seth, uh, thank you uh uh so much for that. And thank you to our um 25 power supporters. You can become one of those, weekly.podnews.net. Um uh let's say thank you to Brian Ensminger, who is always there on the um streaming sats. Uh Star Tempest, no his real name.

unknown 1:25:25

I wouldn't have thought.

James Cridland 1:25:26

And Elias Strand as well. Uh thank you for uh your uh support. Uh you can join them weekly.podnews.net. So what's

Sam and James's week

James Cridland 1:25:34

happened with you this week, Sam? Um apart from losing a paddle.

Sam Sethi 1:25:38

Well, you know, you win some, you lose some, you can't win them all. Yeah um blame me, blame your partner. Um if if in doubt, yeah. Why did you miss that? Um yes, uh we've got our new sign up for Apple and YouTube. So we we we uh as a host, we can switch people from your existing hosts to TrueFans, that's all been working. Now we're going to be able to bring on new podcasters. So from scratch, you don't have a podcast, so you'd like to sign up and then you'd like to uh publish to the Apple directory. We already do podcast index and and also put your videos onto YouTube. We won't have Spotify, we will try and get Spotify, but hello Spotify. You know, respond to emails.

SPEAKER_07 1:26:26

Yes. I'll never respond now.

Sam Sethi 1:26:29

No, no, well um and then a really interesting thing we're doing. Um we like many developers use Claude and Claude Pro um to help with coding. It's like an assistant. And Mo, my CTO, is really enjoying doing it to the extent that we decided to rewrite the whole of the app and rewrite the whole of the back end. So I don't know how long is that gonna take? He said, well, less than three months to do it all with Claude, and we can then in less than a month rewrite the native apps as well for iOS and Android. So I reckon within by September when iOS 2427 comes out, we will have a completely new platform rewritten for the technical debt that we had, and also native apps that we can push that will be basically available with liquid glass and all the other features that um iOS 27 has. So yes, I'm very excited. Um there's a screenshot of just some of the, you know, that that's just a mock-up that you can see there, James. I mean, very quickly, and that was just like um day one, minute one, uh using Claude, rewrite our uh sign up process. So uh we're very excited.

James Cridland 1:27:42

Gosh, yes, it's looking all uh very uh fancy. I do wonder though, how many um how many websites are just going to look as if they've been built by Claude. Um there's there's a sort of there's a sort of look um of these sorts of things with the types of fonts that it uses and everything else. I'm just sort of wondering whether or not it's uh you know it's gonna be oh here's another here's another vibe vibe coded uh thing I don't know.

Sam Sethi 1:28:10

Well it's not quite vibe coding because I mean Moe is coding it right um and he can vibe debug if he wanted to as well but I mean what he's doing is he's um sorry did I say vibe debug wow okay yes welcome to podcasting 2.0 but but the main thing is um what we've found is we were going to hire iOS and Android developers to go go and build the native apps.

James Cridland 1:28:36

We don't need to now and that's the most interesting thing and the speed of execution um yeah that's well I'm I'm probably gonna find this out because uh in a week's time I will be all alone uh here um and uh I will be um uh using that time to go through a lot of the tech debt that the Pod News website has um I'm not gonna be doing a whole lot with um vibe coding but I will be using a little bit so um you know just sort of uh individual functions and things uh I'm gonna be using a little bit of that uh and rebuilding all of that so that's going to be interesting. Um but you're also doing a uh an upgrade to React 19? What does React 19 give you?

Sam Sethi 1:29:20

So React is one of the uh uh libraries that we use fundamentally with the app so the idea is that um the hardest part of being a startup is you you you're trying to build feature and function rapidly to get ahead of the market yeah to try and get some competitive advantage and so uh you you end up with technical debt and one of the biotechnical debts is that we we were on React 12, we've gone to React 13, we're trying to re-update the the underlying technology platform at the same time as building new feature and function. And one we've got limited resources and two it takes time to do that. So we realise that now's the time. So we're in the process of rebuilding TrueFans we are starting at React 19 the latest version so the idea is that we'll just skip the interims and go to a brand new platform with the latest tech built in and get some of the benefits and advantages of speed and stability. So yes that's that's the other side of it.

James Cridland 1:30:20

We're gonna remove some of that technical debt we've got as well as create a a new flashier UI or at least more polished UI yes well that's um polished UI is something that I could definitely do with um so um I will be sort of taking a look into that but I've got um two and a half weeks in which in in which time I'm hoping to at the moment the Pod News news the pod news website has a concept of a company um and then it's got another concept of a company in another part of it and then another concept of a company in another part of it. And so if true fans for example changes its logo then I've got three places to update that at the moment which is not brilliant. So we're not updating the logo you're fine no so fixing all of that stuff is um uh is going to be uh one of the uh major things um what else have I been doing um uh I was very excited by um uh yesterday that I was supposed to have had um uh a whole new solar power system uh added onto the top of my house so um a few weeks ago they replaced my roof um and now it's the turn of the solar people to come and reinstall uh solar so we're getting lots more solar panels we're getting batteries we're getting everything and um unfortunately in sunny Australia it spent the entire day raining and it turns out that a brand new roof is quite slippery and uh there's no scaffolding up there or or anything and so the guys that came to put the uh to put the uh their solar panels on onto the roof um they did go up there they did find it quite slippy and um uh after they nearly slipped to their death they decided that they were going to stop which I don't blame them to be honest so uh yes so they're coming back on Monday when it will be nice and uh bright and sunny hopefully um but I've currently got um lots of solar panels um uh in the house uh waiting to be installed uh so that's all uh so that's all fun and exciting um and I am um uh my my uh my concern now is um how the solar uh inverter is going to get its internet access because they've moved where they were going to put the solar inverter so now I've got to work out how that bit works and I don't know first world problems that you have I know I know but still but there we are um but yes um uh that is it and obviously I can't talk about installing the Apple developer beta um uh on all of my devices uh at all um but if I could I would tell you that it it's all lovely. Uh so there we are all worked yeah all works all works I think I can possibly say that but I don't think I can say anything more than that. Um but uh yes the one interesting uh uh thing just as a heads up for everybody you will have seen this in the WWDC presentations all of the logos are slightly changed and that does include the Apple Podcasts logo which has been slightly changed from the previous liquid glass version um and so we're all have to go well we're all gonna have to go through another um set of changes of the Apple Podcast logo at some point in the future um uh because uh yeah they've all they've all changed just a little bit and you can see some of those as I say in the WWDC thing so I'm not breaking any confidences there. And by the way I should also say one one other thing uh on Friday do you know what I did on Friday Sam? No go on tell me I saw the dolphins uh in Kelowna in British Columbia in Canada and the person who showed me the dolphins this is not a euphemism the person who showed me the dolphins was none other than transistors should be your blowhole as he said yes was none other than transistors Justin Jackson um we caught up it was a what a splendid afternoon it was we caught up um uh uh in his home province in Canada uh he lives about an hour or so away and so we caught up we went round some of the beer halls he was very good he only had um alcohol free beer I had the proper stuff um and uh yeah and it was and it was very good and we've put the world to rights so um so that is all did you take your skateboarding uh he did he did not take me uh take me uh skateboarding what I love what I love is um so he's he's um uh uh um he he he was there trying to find his car uh that morning um and he had to text all of his children to ask where the car was because he normally walks to work so he's so he um he owns a co-working space in the centre of uh Vernon which is where he lives and so he owns a co-working space so he walks to work every day which is lovely walks back again um and so he doesn't need to drive every day um but yes one of his kids had the car and it was uh do you want it dad why do you want it well because you know I'd like to given that I pay for it I'd like to actually use it so after do all right bring it over so that's no reason at all just because you pay for it then you can use it. Just because you pay for it. And that's it for this week all of our podcast stories taken from the Pod News daily newsletter at podnews.net.

Sam Sethi 1:35:44

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James Cridland 1:35:52

You can send us a boost or become a Power supporter like the 25Pow supporters at weekly dotnews.net good isn't it that we've gone so so long uh and now uh uh and now just now Sam's microphone is going all crackly don't know quite why but still there we are anyway our music is from TM Studios our voiceover is Sheila D. Our audio is recorded using clean feed which obviously has nothing to do with Sam's microphone going crackly we edit with Hinterburg and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzzprout start podcasting keep podcasting.

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