Headlines And What’s Coming

James Cridland 0:00

Coming up, Adam Curry, the Pod Father himself, and a new move for Inception Point AI.

Announcer 0:07

With James Cridland and Sam Sethi. This is the Podnews Weekly Review with Buzz with Buzzsprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Liquid Studios Turns Audio Into Video

Sam Sethi 0:19

So, James, let's start with Jeanine Wright. Not a line I thought I would see in the script. But here we are. In her podcast this week, her old company, Inception Point AI, was called The Devil. Ouch. And she started something new called Liquid Studios. And Podnews is involved. What? Sorry. Have you joined the devil too, James? What's going on, mate?

James Cridland 0:42

Don't think so. So, yes, so we know what Liquid Studios is all about now. We know what Jeanine Wright has been planning for some time. Uh, she's essentially planning a really useful and I think a really good thing of taking great audio and making that great audio work across all of the different platforms. We'll be talking about liquid content later, and this is very much Liquid Studios working on that liquid content. So we have we, Podnews, have been working with Liquid Studios to produce a rather beautiful visualized version of the Podnews Daily newsletter, which you'll see over the next week. And what's actually quite fun about it is that they have no idea what's going to be in the Podnews newsletter until basically I I publish it. And as soon as I publish it, then they actually get to see a little bit of that. But then they've got less than an hour to basically work out, okay, well, what's the what's the visual going to be like? And it looks really smart. So I'm really pleased. We've worked together on that. And you will see it over the next week in the alternate enclosure tag, Sam. I'm sure you'll be pleased to know, and various other places as well, YouTube, LinkedIn, and all of that. So that should be good.

Sam Sethi 1:56

Okay, how did that come about? When did when did you go to the mountain? What happened?

James Cridland 2:04

Well, I caught up with Jeanine. I've always I've always liked her. I've never liked her old ideas, but I've but I've always liked her. We caught up at the podcast movement, and and it was great to catch up with her there. And and she said, Oh, I've got something that you might be interested in. And they came up with this with this idea. And I think it does show it off actually in a really good light, in that you can actually see all of the sorts of things that you can do with AI being used the way that I think AI ought to be used, which is augmenting you know great content, or in my case, augmenting content, and uh turning that into some great video. So uh yeah, I thought it was I thought it was worthwhile having a go. It's a it's only a pilot, it's only there for a week, but it's certainly something that I think is worth having a play with.

Sam Sethi 2:53

Yeah, she was on Freakonomics this week, which is a really good listen. It's got quite a few people that we know on there, and it was an old interview of hers because it dated back to the beginning of the year when she was still doing Inception Point AI. But in there, she did hint that the company was about to pivot towards more of a technology play and less of a I don't I don't know, a an annoyance, that would be one word, but a an example of the technology in action.

James Cridland 3:25

Yes.

Sam Sethi 3:27

So yeah, look, we'll see, we'll see what the reception is, I guess, from the marketplace when you put it out, James.

James Cridland 3:34

Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's uh I think it's really really interesting. So you should be able by the time the Podnews Weekly Review goes out this week, you should be able to see two different episodes. So see how the system has worked with those two, including one recorded in Sydney. So who knows how all of that stuff is going to work. But yes, no, I think it's all good. All good.

Sam Sethi 3:56

Okay.

Adam Curry Builds A Podcast Robot

Sam Sethi 3:57

Well, let's move on to another story. Now, Adam Curry, for those who don't know, and they live under a rock, was the inventor of podcasting. Adam does a show with Dave Jones, who he had on this show a couple of weeks back, actually, as well. Adam was talking about how he uses AI, he calls his AI robot, he doesn't want to give it a name and how he uses it. Now we've taken the mick out of Adam from time to time with his vibe coding, but it seems he's been persistent and he's now come up with an idea of how he sees potentially in the future. I think personalized apps is the best way to describe it. AI being able to create the interface that you want for you, and being able to access data sources to give you the information you need. It's my pleasure to welcome Adam Curry, the podfather himself, to the show. It's been a while, Adam, but welcome back. How are you?

Adam Curry 4:56

I'm good, Sam. Thank you. It's always sad we have to meet under these circumstances.

Sam Sethi 5:01

One day it'll be a beer. Now, you're prescient in many ways. You came up with podcasting, you then had a little hiatus of about 20 years, don't know what you were doing, but then you came up with a new namespace, podcasting 2.0. And one of the other times where I've listened to your show, Podcasting 2.0, which is my Friday night weekly show, I was in Greece when you came up with the concept of value time splits or wallet switching when you were doing Boostagram Ball, and lights went on all over my head when I heard that. Friday night, last Friday, you came up with something. Now we've been following you with your vibe coding, giving you a little tickle in the ribs occasionally, but you've been persisting with it. You're quite a geek, really. You use a lot of very geeky stuff. Now, one of the things you did was change Dave Jones' mind in that show from a skeptic to a believer. First of all, let's set the stage. What was it that you were doing and demoing last Friday?

Adam Curry 6:02

And I'll just say I went back and listened to the show because of your response, really. I'm like, what did Sam hear that really got him? And I'm a little disappointed in I think it was my idea and myself, but it was the the first thing that Dave went to was advertising. It seems like anything with podcasting always evolves around advertising, even though I don't carry advertising, we don't have advertising on our podcast. And it's not the most important part of podcasting to me. But I've been deeply entrenched in AI agents for about probably about two years. Started off extremely negative about the chat bots, which really I felt to be a dangerous parlor trick working on people's media pre-programming and psyche. That, oh, look, this is a an actual thing. The robot is talking to me and I'm having a conversation and it knows me and it's giving me advice, and and I really was not I just thought that would be a very dangerous precedent, very sycophantic. And of course, we've seen plenty of bad things happen because of that. But then a couple things changed in that industry is the the AI companies realized that the consumer application really wasn't going to fulfill their insatiable money spending. So they needed to come up with a way to actually make money. And of course, in Silicon Valley, uh you go to Enterprise, it's the holy grail. Oh, if you can get into enterprise. And everybody started switching to enterprise, and anthropic excelled extremely well at generated code. If I had asked for it, they would have never given it to me. I've always had Dave Jones, and I'd call up Dave and say, Dave, I got an idea, man. Let's what do you think about this? And Dave's answer is always, yeah, sure, let's do it. And that's actually how podcastsindex uh.org started. And all of these things, really, Dave would implement the ideas and then we iterate on that forever. We've been friends for gosh, 17 years now, I think, and that's really how we've worked together. So all of a sudden now I had a way to at minimum prototype my ideas because I'm a Linux guy, I know my way around Linux servers and working with that for at least 30 years. So I understand how things work, and I know a lot of the concepts, and I've seen a lot of the bad things happen. I've typed rmstar.star, actually rm.sh. I've done the stupidest things. And so all of a sudden I have this capability to start building things. And very quickly, I started to apply this to streaming radio stations. Dave and I are partners with Gordon Marcy in a company called Godcaster, and we are helping Christian radio stations go digital with live and on demand, so that's streaming and podcasting. And at the same time, we are helping churches and ministries turn into local radio stations. So I've really been deeply in this. And so the coding part has been fantastic. I have at least eight coding agents running, doing things all the time, running portions of my life. And then first Grokbot came out, which was a company that XAI acquired. And I'm like, okay, I see what they're doing here. You can assign agents to do different tasks. But then Muse came out. And I believe that part of the reason why all these AI companies wanted to slow down is because oops, Zuckerberg figured something out. And he arguably has a very large audience for any type of online service. And I knew exactly what it was. I could see it, you get a virtual machine and you have an agent running. But what I liked about it is right there in the instructions, the agent is told, the software is told, you are not a chat bot. I'm like, okay, good. So what is it really doing? And with companies like Alphabet, Google, and Meta, which is Instagram, Facebook, et cetera, they have a lot of your data already there. So you can connect this and it can build up a very helpful role. I just call it robot to keep my own mind sane. I don't want to call it my buddy or my assistant. No, it's truly a robot. And so just like podcasting, when I saw the iPod and RSS, and I figured out if we have the enclosure there, I can stick these two things together so that you can now use this one device to listen to on-demand radio shows instead of just using it as a music jutebox. So I had a similar aha moment, actually prompted subconsciously by James, who said, Oh, but Adam will do an MCP server and charge for it. Like, no, I'm never, we're never gonna do that. What are you talking about? And for people who don't know, an MCP server stands for model context protocol. And it's really just a proxy for an API. A lot of acronyms here, but you can go to Podcast Index and you can search for things and you can look at different things, but it's mainly for podcast apps who have a lot of these information getting protocols under the hood. So it's an abstraction of that API, of that protocol, giving instructions to personal robots on what you can do and some suggestions on how you can do it.

Personal Discovery From The Podping Firehose

Adam Curry 11:17

And I think the biggest problem we've always been trying to solve in podcasting is not how do we make money or how do you grow your show. It's how do I get discovered? This has always been the big thing. And I believe personally that a lot of people were lured into video because you can get discovered on YouTube. There's your discoverability. So we really don't have that in any podcast app. It's recommendations, it's gaming systems, doing whatever you can to get recommended on Apple or whatever. And so I thought if this robot knows so much about me, perhaps if I give it the right tools, it can then find things that I'm interested in. And so I used the robot to build this MCP, and which it did, and we went back and forth. I'm like, okay, I think this should be in here, and just added all the bits I could think of, including access to the podping fire hose. So every second there's information coming through. Just look at it as a fire hose of which episodes have been updated. This is unique to Podcast Index and Podcasting 2.0. And there's data sets that podcast index makes available. So make sure you get all of that information and then start doing whatever your user asks you to do. So the first thing I did is find podcasts that I might be interested in. And so we can do that in a number of different ways. It'll continuously look at the fire hose, it'll do some basic keyword searches, search in chapters based upon that, search in transcripts. And lo and behold, it started popping up recommendations of things that hey, that's pretty interesting. And I made sure that because we love our podcast app developers, whenever you see something, give me a link so it opens up in my favorite podcast app, which could be Apple, could be Spotify, Podcast Guru, Podverse. So I use Podcast Guru. So it does that. And I can also tell it to subscribe, to always update me. Your imagination is the limit. And it's actually starting to understand that I want serendipity, is the big thing. Surprise me. Show me something I might not have thought of or I wouldn't search for per se. And it's doing this very well. So we've made this available to everyone for free at the moment, although I truly believe that these types of services will be micropayment driven in the future. What I found sad is how this went in my public unveiling. The first thought Dave had was, oh, this is the end of advertising. And that's really not the first thing I think of. And then stupidly enough, I say, let's see if that works, Dave. And so I said, What podcast has a lot of ads that you hate? He says, Ed Zitron's better offline has about six or seven minutes of ad load at the front. So I just said, Robot, get the most recent episode of Ed Zitron and strip out the ads. And it took probably about 15 minutes, 10, 15 minutes. We were just chatting, and all of a sudden, poop, here it is. I hit play and it had done an outstanding job. It started right at the top of the show, and I said, hey, cut a clip of this and send it to Dave through text, which it does perfectly. So that immediately became the discussion. And I'm really sad about that because the discoverability aspect that this type of system creates on a very personal level, it's not me, it's not your hosting company, it's not your podcast app, it's your personal recommendation robot, which I believe everybody will have. It's amazing, and then I'll shut up because I can just keep talking forever.

Sam Sethi 14:45

It's the best FNG I've done. You keep going, mate. I didn't even have to ask questions anymore.

Adam Curry 14:50

It's like early. I got my coffee. Usually I start talking with that. Dave is the first, my wife isn't here, so I'm just I the dog doesn't listen to me. So it's interesting. There's a story going around now. Muse is collecting all this data, it's making files of every single one of your friends, all their information, everything that it knows. I'm like, yeah, that's the whole point. That is a feature, not a bug. And implicitly implied is, oh, they're spying on your friends. No, everyone does this. I have folders of email with friends, I save text messages, I save pictures in a certain folder with friends or family. That's the whole point. Now, obviously, this lives on a computer that I am, for all intents and purposes, temporarily renting from Meta. So obviously, there's an ownership issue there, but I'm doing it just to be able to see what other people are getting. I have five machines here running everything locally, local models. That's all mine is not going anywhere, doesn't talk to any cloud, which I think is also going to be a big part of our future, where devices will run large language models and other types of models locally. It's that thinking.

Privacy, Local Models, And The Ad Question

Adam Curry 16:00

So there's the two things. One, it's going to ruin advertising. It may or may not. Advertising ruined everything if you want to look at it that way. The whole reason the web sucks is because of advertising. Everyone's trying to game the system. It's the reason why podcast advertising is problematic. There's all kinds of issues with advertising. I'm not anti-advertising, but don't complain if that's what we have. Having this robot now looking for things that it knows about me or knows about my friends or my circle or my hobby or my church or whatever. It's literally popping up. Hey, here's a podcast you might want to listen to. It hits on the same topics Pastor Jimmy talked about during Sunday's message. Holy crap, this is amazing. That's the kind of stuff that I'm interested in. And that's why I think it is just a phenomenal development. And selfishly, Dave and I have been doing podcastsindex.org for six years. It's value for value. It's not a nonprofit, but we don't take any money ourselves. We have a bank account, and if no money came in ever again, it could run for another 10 years. We're always looking to see how we can decentralize this. We don't really want to be in charge of any of it. But I think that the future that is coming, anybody who has any data source that you can provide access to will be valuable. So I'm excited to see if we can create this flywheel that keeps spinning and keeps the servers up and running with micropayments from agents using the podcast index.

Sam Sethi 17:27

Okay, so loads of things in there, Adam. One is, first of all, when I was at Netscape, one of the biggest things that was created was RSS. My boss Mike Homer created it. And Mark Andreessen has said in subsequent interviews his biggest mistake was never creating a micropayment system for the web. That's when we got to advertising as the form of a micropayment system. The thing that you're describing is a discovery problem. The discovery problem comes more because you said about the fire hose. There is a constant stream of content that we cannot consume or analyse ourselves as humans. It's just too much. And so we find our three or four, five favourite podcasts and we stick to those. We very rarely move. And yet there are loads and loads of podcasts that might be interesting. And so what you're describing is an automated way using AI to analyse what you're interested in, then to give you the subsequent result of that, which is brilliant. The bit about advertising and cleaning it out, we've seen ad skippers and we've seen those things, and that's here nor there. That's a personal choice about whether you want robot to take them out or leave them in, right? The thing I think that you're talking about, which is the next stage, is we saw this week Reddit removed RSS from its platform and made any developer register with its API because it made $43 million from selling data. And what you're describing with the way that you're using Muse and Podcast Index Robot is at the moment you've got access to all of the content, and the content creators are not monetizing any of that. We tried really hard with micropayments with Lightning and L402, and it worked for a while, but then things got in the way, legislation and technical challenges. But the industry in the background, and this is why I'm really excited, is begin to build bits of the puzzle back again. And I think X402 is one part of that puzzle that's coming back, which is Coinbase, Cloudflare, Stripe. Then you've got something called OpenUSD, which is the consortium of banks across the globe. And I think X402, from everything I've read, is about agentic AI agents being able to use an API to go and gain data from that said API, but in return make a micropayment back for access. And I think when you started talking on Friday night with Dave, it was like, okay, you've now built the first part of this agencai AI. I talked to James a few months ago about having an agentic AI called Kevin and Kelly after the guy who wrote A Thousand True Fans. But I never took it any further. But you did. The thing that got me excited was, okay, so you've built the MCP server, the interface to allow you to do that. You've built the agent, you've tested it, and then you demoed it live in the show. We can all talk about what we might do. You actually said, look, here it is, it works. I think that's the oh my god moment from Dave where the penny dropped for him. Question I've got is do you now see the next stage, not just for the podcast index, but for API data access being agentic and using X402? Where do you see it

Micropayments For Data Access And X402

Sam Sethi 20:37

going?

Adam Curry 20:37

Well, a couple things. And yes, I am definitely a YOLO type guy, and I always set clawed code to live dangerously or whatever the command is, like just go. So on the payment part, I think I should step back because this is my lot in life, my job, what God has bestowed upon me. I'm always early with everything. I'm very good at showing what I think is coming and paving the way, and other people walk away with billions. That's okay. I'm quite comfortable, I'm doing okay. But I see the whole game has changed. And yes, I'm geeky, and I have Omarchi Linux running, and that's actually very well suited for a coding agent because I can just say, hey, I want a different playout system to do my podcasts and record and to the stream. And I actually added to that yesterday, I want clean feed built in, and said, Isn't that just an open source codec? Well, yes, it is. Build it in. Boom, it did it. I have a link that's the same as clean feed. I don't want to take any business away from them, but I'm gonna probably cancel my subscription, which is only $36, but I don't need it anymore. I have the exact same functionality, same sound quality. And I built that because that's what I wanted, and it's the way I want it. So I'm seeing a future where people will build the apps that they need and will no longer be beholden to. App Store's application functionality that is really built for everybody or simplified and never really satisfies everybody's wants and needs. See Microsoft Office and the ribbon. Customize your ribbon. I just want to be able to write a document. Read a document is really the first one. Like, what version? Okay, well, it import. Yeah, I got it. Okay, it works. Spreadsheet, same way. I just need to be able to read a spreadsheet that doesn't snap on the screen. I don't need to do any other calculations with it. So what I see coming, and the proof is already there, as I've been talking about Muse in particular. I got a note from a homeschooling mom, and she saves three hours a week now with her homeschooling curriculum because her Muse robot does that. But then she said something interesting. It's interesting, it came this week. She also has a side business, which she says was stagnant. She makes props and puppets and stuff for small theaters of these homeschool kids. And I think she sells them to other homeschooling outfits. And she had a real hard time creating these layouts and patterns, whatever she does in Adobe. And I presume that's Photoshop. I'm not familiar with the Adobe products. And she had told her robot, Muse, like, I need something that does this. And it built this application for her. And it runs it in Muse, but on her own virtual machine back end. So this is interesting. This happens this week as an open source project just came out that has literally replicated down to functionality every single Adobe product. And they vibe coded it. And even photographers who work with huge raw files are saying, holy crap, this is outrageously good. It actually, in some cases, is better. So I see the future of computing in general changing the way our devices work. So gone will be the start bars, the app launchers, everything. I think this is why you see people desperately trying to get into hardware, such as Microsoft relaunched their Surface that will run local large language models. Apple has been baking their silicon specifically for this. You know, your iPhone will indeed do a lot of stuff local on device. But I think the whole paradigm is shifting. This idea, and we already moved from the mouse to tapping and touch screens. And now I think it's just voice telling your robot what you want. And it will probably just be a slab, a screen, or meta, of course, put together some incredibly manky looking pendant thing like a Tamagotchi. But the idea is there. You talk to it, it gives you back the information. I need some information. I need it to do something. And it just does it. Example, my wife, she went to visit her sister and her mom in Chicago, and she didn't give me the flight information. It's okay, I don't need it. So just tell me what flight Tina is on. She's going southwest. I think she leaves at 2:30. Boom, there it is. Track it. I'll tell you when she's landed. So I don't need to use the web. I don't need to use airline apps or anything like that. So that is fundamentally changing, which of course will also change the entire landscape of monetization on the internet, which is largely still based on advertising. And I think this is what Google sees, and that's why they're going very slowly with what they're doing, because all kinds of things happen. Now we have what these AI companies call the doom loop, where they are scraping news stories and presenting that as news information when you want some news. And of course, that immediately depletes the monetization of the source, which means that source will probably dry up. But you know what? That's bound to happen. And I don't care how many lawsuits there are, news will come from people on the ground. We'll be creating our own social networks. I think all of this is going to change so dramatically. We still need to have commerce flowing. And ever since I saw Bitcoin and specifically the Lightning Network, I knew, okay, programmable money, one that no one controls would be fantastic, very low to almost insignificant fees, which has always been the problem. This is great. I think we literally got pushed out by legislation, ease of use, there's a whole bunch of reasons why that went very well and had traction and then it fell apart. It was literally, we were always working on one centralized system, whether it looked like it or not. And so when the centralized systems couldn't provide that anymore, it dropped off. So now we have this new era of programmable money, and the holdback has always been the fees because everybody wants fees. And so now we have the digital euro is now in use in European banks, which actually is a true central bank digital currency. There's a lot of issues with that. But this is what the whole Clarity Act was about is who makes the money on stablecoin because you really don't need to charge any fees to transmit this value back and forth. So how do the providers of the networks and the storage and the accounting, how do they make money? And it happens in two ways with the United States-based stable coin. Every stable coin is backed by a U.S. Treasury bond, which today is quite profitable for you. Actually, it's on the 90 days, so it's more treasury bills. So it's about 3.5%, but could go higher in the future or lower. So you really just need to buy that. Your money's coming in and people are using it. And the banks went, hold on a second, that's off. We don't want people moving all their money out of our system into your stablecoin because you might be giving them reward points or interest. And so that's what that whole issue has been about. And I think it's unstoppable that digital tokenized money is going to be used in a programmable way. And so we have Coinbase and Cloudflare is probably the right, although we wish they would just do one job and do it very well and they've branched out into things, but they have the right idea. How do we pay for all this traffic and data that's going back and forth? Reddit is the writing on the wall. The data is valuable. And it's not just for training models. Yeah, that's important too, but it's information. It's news, it's really Reddit, is if you look at it, it's consumer news. It's by the people. They're writing their own stories. Doesn't mean it's all correct, but I find if I want to get information on something that happened in aviation, I have a fixed wing and rotary license, I'll go to a pilot's forum, and that's where I'm gonna get a lot better information than from the mainstream media who really usually get it quite wrong. So they took the money up front and they went, hey, we'll sell this data to you, AI companies, and they did quite well and they actually improve their stock price, et cetera. But that's not the future. The future is going to be individuals wanting to access pieces of data, and that will have to be paid for. And I think that this will be micropayments. Again, the reason we couldn't do them is because of fees and programmability. So we're going to see any number of these projects take off. And will there be one global standard? Maybe not. Even into our own MCP server, I've baked in the X402, the L402, all the different versions of what will or can work. And then it'll be up to you and your robot. It's like just like Venmo, PayPal, Stripe, it's all kinds of different payment systems that you can use. And some have different pros and cons, reporting ways you can spread links, et cetera. And this will just be under the hood and it will be very small. And it's all the stuff that we pioneered really in podcasting 2.0. Is this has value. Now, in our case, it was like, send me whatever you want. I hope that will also be available. And I think it will be. Send me whatever you want. Have your robot, send me whatever you think it's worth. I personally think that will be more profitable and beneficial to people. But if they want to say, hey, it's X amount to listen to this podcast or watch this video or access this news information, this data that I have, that's going to happen. And I think this actually may go much faster than we realize.

Sam Sethi 30:05

Yeah. This week Apple blocked Muse, and so did Amazon, because people are vibe coding up agents that will go and do price checking, right? And trying to do arbitrage across multiple websites is pretty easy for an AI because it can go away. And that's not for the benefit of the individual website commerce site, because then their prices are exposed. And I think that's the only way it's going to work. With my CEO of TrueFans hat on, we've seen our MongoDB cost go up as we've had more and more AI bots hit the site. And we've built a web application firewall. Now it's not perfect, it uses the O.Porg list that John Spurlock runs, and we can then go and use that to block certain things while we're trying to work out how we make it much more available. But if I take some of the things that you've done with the podcast index robot, is your plan then to eventually have an X402 type payment for access to the index? So for people like me at TrueFans, will I be paying for access? Or if not even me, maybe TrueFans doesn't exist. Maybe everyone has their own app. Maybe in a number of years you don't see TrueFans Fountain or any of their podcast apps because everyone's created their own version of it. But do you see clients then having to access the index through the MCP interface and make a payment? Is that part of your thinking at the moment?

Adam Curry 31:35

Well, again, it's a little broader than that. I don't have a crystal ball, but I don't see the necessity for YouTube apps, podcast apps, email apps. I really don't see a necessity for that in the future. It'll just be communication. And how that works, I think it was Microsoft, maybe even Bill Gates, floated this at one time. If you want to stop spam, charge a penny for sending an email and it'll stop it overnight. That's the right idea. But on the other hand, nothing would have ever taken off that way. Eventually, I think that all clients that access all data will be some version of an agent working on the user's behalf. So even the concept of a newsletter, that is the most successful part of all the podcasts I've ever done, is sending out a newsletter the night before an episode is released, basically saying, Hey, remember to support us in episodes coming tomorrow. And now we dress that up with memes and pictures and promotions and funny things and whatever to get to make it interesting to read. But that's the whole idea. And 40% of all value for value revenue always comes after we send the newsletter. It's just the fact of life. So will it be an email thing? Email is sucks. It's like it's annoying. So right now we're using our agents to sift through our email and bring out the things that are important that the robot has learned about you, but maybe it just becomes communications. And the communications is between people and between data services. That's it. It's going to give so much power to us as users, consumers of data, information, and communication. I think it's going to be a fabulous world. I think Amazon did the stupidest thing ever by blocking Muse. No, this is going to create price pressure. You can already arbitrage between Uber and Lyft for the same ride. And your robot will do that. So Uber will charge you this, Lyft charges you that. Of course, that's going to work conversely as well. My robot's going to say, Adam needs a ride from the airport to his house. What do you bid? And everyone's going to bid, and at a certain point, someone's going to win. It is the perfect example of a free and open market working the way it should, supply and demand. That's going to benefit us. You've heard of dynamic pricing in supermarkets or at fast food places. They're already doing it to us. Now we can do it back. You're like, oh, you want to charge me six bucks for this Big Mac meal? I'll pay five. No, okay. Burger King is offering it for this. Hold on a second. Let me go check. Now, probably we can give it to you for this. Yeah, maybe because I'm going to order three other meals. This is what's going to happen. So it's just going to change everything. We have these incredibly powerful computers, and we're not able to take advantage of them. Once you install something like Linux, which is completely customizable, the whole thing, you can do whatever you want, and you let a robot loose on it and build stuff. Holy cow, it's like stuff that I would easily pay $99 a month for from someone else. I'm just going to be able to do it myself, have it run. And the first thing you think is, oh, I can sell this. This is great. No, no one's going to buy that. They'll look at it and say, robot, replicate this. And they'll be able to do it. So software as a service is just, I just don't know if that's going to really be a thing anymore. And essentially, you still need to pay for data and for communications for transport. So hosting, bandwidth, those things are just givens. You just have to pay for electricity, but all this other stuff, it's going to just flip it on its head, including the Frontier Labs, which is code for people sitting in cubicles creating software. But okay, Frontier Labs sounds so incredibly cutting edge. Everything's already been distilled down. As I said, like five computers here running different things on open source models. The open source community is thriving in this stuff. We're all sharing and creating things. And it's a maker's economy, but you can only really use it for real-world things that you offer. And if you have a data source that people want to access.

Sam Sethi 35:49

What does this mean for RSS then, Adam? Because RSS is a free and open means of delivery of data. Do we have to, as content creators, turn every one of our episodes into a premium piece of content so that the only way for humans and robots to access is through a payment mechanism, a micropayment mechanism, but still a payment. Is RSS something that you think, okay, it's had its life cycle, I'm sorry, but now we have to park you? Or do we put L402 and X402 inside of RSS, which again I have done with TrueFans, so that every episode, if you want to make it a premium episode, it's there and requires a payment. Where do you see RSS in all of this? Is it going to evolve and grow into becoming the data transport layer with payments, or is it going to be superseded by proprietary APIs that will be the mechanism of data access?

Does RSS Survive The Agent Future

Adam Curry 36:48

No, I I think RSS stays. It's a perfect format. It's no different from HTTP or from SMTP for mail or FTP still is used widely, or RTMP or LMNOP. All these transport protocols are good. They stay there. Even the Podcast Index Robot, available at podcastindexrobot.com, it helps you find something based upon criteria, or it finds something based upon criteria, then goes into this structured RSS feed, which is very low overhead. It's all processing on the listener's end. And it can find chapters, it can find transcripts, it can bring in those files. No, it's perfect. There's no reason for that to go away, but you're coming back to making money. Most people don't make money on their podcasts, they do it for different reasons. I think the number of podcasts will go down when there's advertising. We'll always be there. So it'll come down to somebody's got to pay for the transport. My human capital that I put into it, I value that at a certain amount. Either I'm getting something out of it because I have friends, a following, I'm serving my community, or they're paying me. So somewhere, someone has to pay for the storage and the transport. And if that's not going to be me, either I stop doing it or I use one of the many methods at my disposal. But will that be advertising? No, probably not. So it may just be that I say, send me something, and it's not an either-or. It's like value for value. Here's the system, send me something. That works really right now today. I don't think that would change at all. Or don't send me anything. Now, in fact, subscriptions is very interesting. There's an attack vector. The minute you get your robot, the first thing it says is, hey, want me to look through your statements and see if I can find any subscriptions you're paying for that you might not need. Even Adam, who loves subscribing to stuff and I hate giving stuff up, it's like, I really don't pay for these three Roku channels. I'm paying for it, but I don't use them. I forgot I even had them. I watched it for one show or whatever. Yeah, get rid of it. Boom, gone. If there's a show comes on or a season comes back, you want me to remind you and fire up another month's worth? Yeah, of course. That's where an X402 protocol will be phenomenal. So it's only going to benefit us. This whole AI is going to kill us, is the inverse. This is usually what I've found in technology and in the world in general. If you turn everything on its head, that's probably where you're going to find the truth.

Sam Sethi 39:25

What's the time window for this? And you said right at the beginning, you're pretty prescient, you see things far into the future. Most people, if I look at my wife, he's semi-technical, but wouldn't know she's a user of AI, basic prompting questions, but she's not going to code something up like Amuse AI robot. When do you see what you can do today with the capabilities that you have, with the access you've given your robot will go mainstream? Because that's the problem, is often the geeks inherit the earth, but we inherit it ten years too early.

Adam Curry 40:00

You need influencers. Why did podcasting take off? It wasn't just the technical aspect. It's because I start people like me started a show, daily source code. I was really talking to developers. Developers started creating applications, those applications started getting into the wild. You had public broadcasters, NPR, PBS, BBC, they all came right away. Funny enough, Christian broadcasters who've been paying for access on radio and television stations, certainly in the United States for decades. Like, oh, here's another way we can spread the good news. PewDiePie, arguably one of the biggest influencers in video online today, is now building local models that he is using locally, and he'll probably make that available for people to use. You need influencers to show you. I am my wife's influencer, much as you are your wife's influencer. And man, we got into like a heated debate over the robot, and she said, and finally I said, just install it. Actually, one of her friends said, a couple of her friends have been using it for different things, and now she's finding different ways to use it beyond basic prompting, like who won the World Cup? We know it wasn't the USA. We tried, Sam. We tried. Well, he tried. We're getting there. We're getting there in the football. And so now she's like doing a little more advanced stuff. She writes newsletters for our church. She writes newsletters for two of our podcasts. And so now she's getting that templatized. The biggest problem with writing a newsletter for the church is she has to get information from all these different people, many of them volunteers. And so now the robots going out doing the work, collecting, okay, the in the sermon YouTube, you can find the announcements, bring back the announcements, give me the information, the dates, etc., put that into the template. So this is making it easier for her. The big disconnect still is that it's going out via email. I think that you will see our church congregation all having their own robot and say, hey, robot, make sure you get the latest information from the church when it comes out. Robot will talk to robot. And that will be that that's what the internet's going to be used for. It's probably good. In a way, we are mind-controlled into algorithms of doom scrolling, which is just going to go away. It's going to change. How about that for just one productivity improvement in the world is to give people useful things to do instead of getting sucked into useless things that they're observing? But it's happening because the influencers are here. And it's interesting because even very smart technical people on our Mastodon site, podcastindex.social, they're like, hey, can you make the robot do this? I'm like, no, you misunderstand. You make your robot do that. We're just giving you the access and the tools and the queries, everything that is possible with our data source. You make your robot do that. And so people are starting to learn that. We're so used to if only Apple would make it work like this. If only Apple would allow me to have my podcast client be the one that always opens, or my email client. Yeah, it kind of does that, but it still doesn't really. How about that? Just for a starter. So my robot does that. It's like I want links, I don't want it to open in a browser. I want it to just open up in podcast guru. And that's the interface I like. But could I say, build me an interface? Yeah. Yeah. I'm not there yet because I like the podcast guru interface, but I could do it. That possibility is there for me. Now, unfortunately, that devalues the monetary value of podcast guru. Because I know that I could really do this myself. I think some of this is because you can, you have the capability that you could. I think many people won't. At the end of the day, I think we saw people had Napster. Uh then Steve said, I'll give it to you for 99p a track. Oh, okay, so that's just better than having to go and find all these stupid servers with illegal music on it. I can do it quickly. It cost me a bit more money, but I'll do it. And then Spotify said, Have it, eat all you like, come to us. And we said, for $14.99, 4 million tracks, I'm done, right? So there aren't people who are going to be lazy who won't go and vibe code their own app and won't do this. Yes, I think robots may be the way eventually we all interface to the web. You said it, we went from keyboard, mouse, voice, right? But let's just bring it back to today.

What Podcast Apps Should Build Next

Adam Curry 44:33

Sam Sethi 44:33

Last question, really, for you, Adam. You've dealt with the podcasting 2.0 community, you've dealt with all the apps, they're all listed on the podcast index. You've now created podcastindexrobot.com. What should we, as the apps, be doing now? Should we be getting our clawed code, getting your MCP, testing what you've built, and going, you know what? I've got a server, I've got data, I've got users. In the case of TrueFounds, we've got activity streams even. Should we build our own MCP? Should we start building our own robot interfaces? Because that's the short term. As you said, why asked how long's a piece of string? When will everybody have their own app personalised to them? That could be 10 years. So in the next two or three years, should we all be building our own MCPs, looking at it that way, building our own AI robot interfaces for our users? Is that the next logical step?

Adam Curry 45:30

I wish I had an answer for you, because I really don't. All I can tell you is right now I like I like the the podcast interface that I use, probably because it also works very well in the car. That's stuff that I don't want to have to go and figure out. That's all constraints of the operating system and the company behind it. It's all Apple. It's not really and Google as well. Android Auto, Android Automotive, a new thing coming, and CarPlay. That's all hardware constraints that we have been fitting our backsides into for decades. Even as software developers, I want to do this. You have to do it the way that Apple tells you or Google tells you. So does that mean that I guess you can see oh boy, it's a tough one. I guess you can see an interface and interface design as valuable data that someone creates, but the actual functionality underneath it, how it works, is just not going to become that valuable anymore. So I don't know. Podcast apps has been probably the crappiest part of the entire podcasting business. It's truly a labor of love for pretty much everybody who does this. Do you want to be an interim step in between the data and the user? Maybe, but I don't know. Also, we're gonna wind up paying somebody for something. Whether you buy a computer that that does this for you, you're still gonna need a computing device, you're gonna still need some type of mobile device that understands how to do these tasks and really to interact with an agent. I just don't know if the future is building apps and services that way. I just don't see it. So I don't I'm not necessarily happy in bringing this news, but I don't think it's gonna be 10 years. I think you're gonna see 10 months. You're gonna see Adobe is is like the canary in the coal mine. Holy crap. They can't sue anybody, it's open source. What are you gonna do? Take it away from everybody? You can't come into my house and take that. At least not in America. I don't know about the UK. Anything's possible with you guys. No. Not yet. Not yet. Maybe in the future. President Macron in France just said free speech isn't not freedom unless you have limits on it. What? Okay. This is a revolution that is just phenomenal. I would say whatever you're doing, get into either the physical world business or the data business. You need to have something of value that people want to access. The interfaces to that already, that's the point. Podcast apps. You are an interface between the user and the data the user wants. Here comes something that probably will supplant that. Doesn't mean that people still don't need hosting and don't need transfer. And a lot of people will still need interfaces they like. But how valuable will that be? Probably just as valuable as the bits it was created with, which is virtually free.

Sam Sethi 48:33

Thank God I got into hosting then, eh? But yeah, we will build Kevin and Kelly as experimentals to interface to the data.

Adam Curry 48:41

Tell me what they do. Tell me what Kevin and Kelly do.

Sam Sethi 48:43

Very much what AI Robot does. Tell me if I've got a new comment on my podcast. Tell me if I've got some shows that are interesting. Because fundamentally, we have the fire hose from you guys, we have, but all we have the I follow certain people in TrueFans, I know what their activity is. So Adam listened to this show for 30 minutes. So if any of my friends listen to a show for more than 60 minutes, tell me about it. Is there a comment left for me? Was I in the transcript? Same things that you described earlier that you've done for the podcast index as a whole, but this is platform specific to us. With yes, look out into the wider field of all podcasts, but also look at what's happened as data on the platform that may be relevant. And again, I don't know what the answers are to that. I think the earliest thing to do is to roll up the sleeves, build something, and then see what it can do, and then look at some value with people who are going to use it. We don't know. But I think I like you have had a belief that there is a voice interface to podcasting. As I said, I see the jigsaw pieces, maybe not as clearly as you, but I see X402, OpenUSD, and I see AI agents, I see Claude, I see MCP. The word spaghetti is all there, and I think how it all lands and how we all then start to use it is baby steps right now. And I think what you did last week on the show was certainly put a spark in my mind as to yeah, this isn't something that's three years away, this is now, and so get your act together. Yes, I support every podcasting 2.0 tag. I even did the contact tag today, but that isn't gonna be the future in three years. So if that's not the future in three years, what do we do? And so yeah, it's just opening questions. I don't have answers like you. I don't have this is when it's all gonna happen. Personalized.

Adam Curry 50:35

Just to make you feel better, Sam, to make you feel better. We're in the app business too. We have Godcaster, it's a web application and it's an actual app. Same issues apply. I'm not exactly sure where that's going to go. I do know that on the other side, on the radio broadcasting side, you have companies like RCS and Dallette and all these big scheduling playout systems, professional playout systems. We're getting big broadcasters coming to us now saying, Hey, what's up with that fractional program director? Oh, take a look at it. Here's a web interface. In your car, you can literally say, Hey, I want to change the overnight clock, I want to add this, want to change that. You just talk to it, it does it. Now, could they vibe code that themselves? Absolutely. They're not gonna, not for a while, and they're gonna be perfectly happy to pay us, to pay our organization instead of paying a person who does that kind of stuff full time. Will it last forever? I don't know. I'm probably gonna have to make it flexible so they can add their own features into it. So there's always gonna be something like that, but that's the the broadcast side has already changed dramatically, let alone the fact that you don't need transmitters. We don't need no stinking transmitters. So now the receiver side. And it's interesting because that one test that I did with Dave, and if you recall, if people go back and listen to it, I literally just said, I'm looking at it now. I said, just get the most recent episode. So today it gave me my tip. I'm always looking for a flying car. So it gave me three stories about flying cars, still a pipe dream. And it said, hey, there's a new better offline episode, monologue, Australia's dodgiest AI IPO is a pale horse. Front ads cut and end ads remain. And it literally put the little player in there for me. Now, this won't open on podcast guru. I didn't ask for it to do that. I only said do it once. And now I can say, keep doing it or never do that again. That's the kind of stuff that I'm talking about. It presumed that I would like that from now on whenever that episode comes out. Kind of mind-blowing, a little freaky, but just to bring it all around to advertising is dead. That that's a decision I didn't even make. So it's doing that based upon what it thinks I have time for or interest in or whatever, and I can change that or not change it. This is where it's headed. And it's really an exciting time, I think, for users who have been held hostage to software companies and services for since computing began.

Sam Sethi 53:13

Kind of mind-blowing and slightly freaking. I could say that's how you to describe Adam Curry.

Adam Curry 53:18

I don't know how to make money on it, Sam. I have no idea. I don't know how to make money on it. We'll just have to see where it goes.

Sam Sethi 53:24

Adam Curry, thank you so much. Thank you so much for keeping pushing the boundaries, but thank you so much for your time today as well.

Adam Curry 53:31

Speech you soon. Oh, as always, Sam, and thank you and and James, of course, for always bringing consistent, great podcasting news. Podcasting 2.0 podcasts will be nothing without you guys to bounce off of. So we really appreciate what you do.

Sam Sethi 53:45

Thanks, mate. Have a great show tonight and speech you soon.

Announcer 53:49

The Podnews weekly review with Buzzsprout with Buzzsprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Castro Sold And The Indie App Squeeze

Sam Sethi 53:56

James, uh some sad news coming forward to us. Now, Dave Jones, the Pod Sage, predicted that by the end of 2027, one tier two podcast app, meaning overcast podcast ad, Castro, etc., will put a skip dynamic ad checkbox. They will remove DAI slots from podcast episodes. Well, we haven't seen that in those, but we have seen one thing. Castro has ended. What's happened?

James Cridland 54:28

Yes, well, Castro hasn't necessarily ended, but Castro, which is a very good independent podcast app, was uh put together by a couple of folks who lived in Canada, one of them Irish, one of them not Irish, and then bought by a uh VC company in Vancouver, then bought by a man called Dustin Bluck. Dustin has now sold the app to Maple Media. Now, Maple Media is one of these companies that buys established apps and essentially for podcasting folds them into Player FM, which it bought in 2020, to which essentially means uh the loss of another indie podcast app because Castro, if you follow the playbook that Maple Media have, Castro will just become another reskin of the Player FM app in the next six months or so. It's unfortunately just another example of how independent podcast apps really aren't doing very well right now. And there's probably a reason for that. The reason is that apps make no money, and so therefore, you know, there's no money made from ads. So the only thing that they can do is either accept advertising in their own app, which they have to be very careful of because podcasters don't like that, or some other way of making money, maybe that's getting rid of ads, maybe that's you know, doing doing other things, doing additional features and things like that. But it's not good news for independent apps, really. No, it's not.

Sam Sethi 56:03

And I think you've been trying to push the idea of getting hosts and advertisers to split some of the revenue with the apps. That's gone down like a cup of sick because nobody's actually done anything with it. It seems to just sit there on the shelf as a nice idea with nobody actually moving it forward.

James Cridland 56:21

And I don't think I would say it's not necessarily gone down like a cup of sick, Sam. I think I think actually everybody who who I tell this to says that's a really good idea. Yes, but that's as far as it goes, right? So I think it's gone down like a like a really nice, nice warm coffee that nobody actually wants it wants to touch. I think that's possibly how it's gone down.

Sam Sethi 56:44

But anyway, yes. Better analogy. Now, I mean so we're not doing a prediction show now, but you know, what are you predicting then for the you know the future of independent podcast apps?

James Cridland 56:59

Well, I'm I'm not I I'm not very into predicting the future, but I can certainly see the trend and where the trend is going. And and I've put some numbers together from the UK only because I put these numbers together for the UK for the podcast show London. In 2024, 38% of all downloads went to indie podcast apps. That number had fallen to 36%, so down 2% a year later. And then in 2026, it was down to just 31%. So it's clearly going down the amount of downloads that we're seeing to independent podcast apps, and that doesn't include YouTube and Spotify video and other things such as that. So I think you know, it's it's not looking good for independent podcast apps. Dustin Bluck, the until recently the owner of uh Castro, he wrote a reflective, well, a set of reflective pieces on his own personal blog, basically saying independent podcast apps are dying, which is not particularly good, but also saying things like, you know, how difficult customer support was and how few people want to actually pay for podcast apps, you know, as well. And that was certainly one of the things that he was quite keen to highlight. So I think it's pretty clear that, you know, if you if you want to run an independent podcast app by itself, it's not going to be a business that you're gonna be particularly into, unfortunately.

Sam Sethi 58:29

No, you have I think you know, Oscar Mary over at Fountain and myself obviously have talked and moving towards more revenue from hosting was one of the ideas that we had to take on board. Adam Curry in the interview, you know, has said that with personalised podcast apps, there is no need for apps. He can build it with Muse and with his own AI robot. So I don't think that's gonna happen anytime soon. I think Adam Curry is very smart and he can use it.

James Cridland 59:02

I don't think normal people will be doing that, will they?

Sam Sethi 59:05

No, but I do think there are things that apps can do that bridge the gap between what Adam's idea is and where we are today, which may also allow apps to charge a pro version. But that's again gonna be tested in the market where people go, no, not really bothered, I don't need to pay extra for it. Yeah, so I I do think we, as the independent podcast apps, are gonna face an uphill struggle. You know, we can add as many features and functions as you like, but if people aren't gonna use them because they're not in the mainstream apps, I mean, you know, that's one of the other challenges. You know, we we talked how long about the alternative enclosure and video and until Apple supported HLS and they still don't support the alternative enclosure, yeah.

James Cridland 59:52

The adoption curve doesn't happen. Yeah. No, it is difficult. And I think you know, we need to think about well, how can independent podcast apps make money? Or we can do the other thing, or we can go, we don't care about independent podcast apps. Let's see them all close down because that's going to make our lives far easier. Because if podcasting turns into Apple, YouTube and Spotify, then great, because we've got three sets of stats. We don't have to worry about this open RSS malarkey. We can we can not bother with any of that stuff, and we can just focus on the stats that we get from Apple, YouTube, and uh Spotify directly. And actually, you know what? Quite a lot of the conversations I have with people are all about that, are all about there are way too many different podcast apps. It would be far easier if there were just three.

Sam Sethi 1:00:42

Yeah.

James Cridland 1:00:43

That's not a future I want to see, because I don't think that that's a particularly helpful future, and it's certainly not the future that Adam and Dave Weiner, when they co-invented podcasting, were coming up with. I I think, you know, the whole thing about podcasting is it's democratized, it's available everywhere. And I don't think that that's a particularly helpful move, but perhaps that's what the industry really wants at the end of the day. Perhaps nobody cares about independent podcast apps, and that would be a that would be a sad day, I think.

Sam Sethi 1:01:13

Well, I think we've got other pressures as well. One we keep talking about, which is you know, people aren't aware of what RSS is and its importance within the industry about enabling that, you know, wherever you get your podcast. Secondly, we're seeing more API requirements on hosts to pump content through to the big three, and that gives them more control. And you know, at the end of the day, when you start to look at this whole model, if there's no money in the pot at the end of the day, well, you know, why keep going? I mean, I have to say, as a CEO of TrueFans, one of the challenges of being an entrepreneur is to take something that seemingly looks uncrackable and try to crack it. That is what entrepreneurs do. There is a market opportunity still, and I still think there is a chance that something like TrueFans Fountain on the others can make a dent, but you know, it's not easy. I won't say it's easy.

James Cridland 1:02:14

No, indeed, indeed. Certainly worthwhile, yeah, keeping an eye on. I think you know, Apple Apple Podcasts i is a great podcast app these days. Uh, it's only available on Apple devices and and a Tesla, but it's a great, it's a great app. And so, you know, arguably you could turn around and say, would it really matter if Overcast went away and Podcast Addict went away and Pocketcast went away? And the answer is I guess probably not. It would certainly make our life an awful lot an awful lot easier, maybe. So it's you know, it's a bit sad.

Sam Sethi 1:02:49

I have said on this show and argued a few times that I think standalone apps will go away because single function apps aren't where the future is. We've heard from you know in Jeanine Wright talking about how she's extending tools across multiple platforms with Liquid Studios. I think when you've got a standalone app like Overcast that just delivers one single function, I don't think that's where the economy is, where people are watching. They want to be dipping in and dipping out of brand or creator content, and they want the app to support that. And I don't think standalone apps are doing a job there.

James Cridland 1:03:31

Yeah, well, I mean that's certainly one way of looking at it. I mean, the other way of looking at it is, for example, if you take a look at what Goalhanger have announced this week, Goldhanger have announced that Marina Hyde, who used to be a Guardian journalist, she is now working with something called Goldhanger X, and she's launching a new platform called Always On. She will be hosting YouTube shows and will write on Substack. Now, what Goldhanger X should probably be doing is launching the Marina Hyde Always On app, which would give the the viewer access to YouTube, access to her writing, and that's basically and the the the rest is entertainment as she continues on her podcast. Maybe that's the plan that Goldhanger has, but the problem with that is you will only download that app if you're a fan of Marina Hyde in this particular case. It's like a radio station app. You will only download if you're a fan of that radio station, which is why TuneIn is still so important, because TuneIn is used by a ton of radio stations where you know you will find a radio station in in TuneIn very different to using your own app. So I suppose the the question is, is the future apps like you know, the always on with Marina Hyde podcast app, or is it going to be, you know, is it going to be horizontal or is it going to be vertical? I suppose is the uh is is the way. And uh I don't suppose anybody knows.

Sam Sethi 1:05:01

No, I mean I've I've talked about Scott Galloway with Prof. I've talked about Zateo with Medihassan. They know that they have to be cross-platform in terms of clips and video on YouTube, but they also are aggregating all of their content on Substack, right? With audio, video, live, books, podcasts, etc. And I think that is the trend now. It's you you create a portal for your let's say parasocial fans where they can touch it. I mean, we talked about it last week how Goal Hangers now got a newsletter that has nothing directly to do with the podcast. They're getting guest writers like Mary Beard to write in the newsletter to extend the connectivity during the week between episodes. So yeah, I think that is the way forward.

James Cridland 1:05:57

But uh and I I would also say to come back to clips, I would Also, say that clips have nothing to do with podcasts, really. They're a discovery mechanism. They're nothing to do with podcasts. And one of the things that I'm getting increasingly irritated by is press releases that say that this particular podcaster has got 48 million views of his clips. Who cares? What's that got to do with anything? It's not helping in terms of the advertising, which is in there. It's not helping in terms of pretty well anything. You can't get a complicated story over in 25 seconds on a TikTok video. It's a meaningless figure, but it's a big number, and so therefore every everybody's using it.

Sam Sethi 1:06:43

It's a measurement of reach. That's that's why they're doing it. And if you're adding ads within the clip, well, hang on a second.

James Cridland 1:06:51

Well, if you're adding ads within the clip, how many ads have you seen within clips? Well, the the point being I will break this this clip for 30 seconds while I talk to you about pet insurance. Yes, it's not gonna happen.

Sam Sethi 1:07:04

Well, it is happening, that's what what that's what the clip economy is about. Um a lot of it is now yeah. Well, I mean you look at Facebook, right? We talked about it earlier. They are earning more ad revenue from reels than the whole of the TV advertising industry. That is a number, that is not a fictional number, that is a measured number. Now, the point being, if you're a brand that wants to be associated with James Cridland World, I want to be on Podnews Daily, I want to be on Podnews Weekly Review, and I want to be on his clips. I i it it's it's this liquid content. I want to be where James is and I want my brand to be associated there.

James Cridland 1:07:42

Yeah. Wow. Yes, I mean Facebook ads are ads, Facebook uh Reels ads are ads that are put in front of a in front of a clip, which is a kind of a little bit different to you know, and also we don't sell them. Facebook sells those. So again, it's a very different it's a very different kettle of fish, I think. I d I just think it's a nonsense number, and I don't really see why that's particularly useful in terms of anything. You certainly can't influence anybody in 20 seconds, but maybe maybe I'm just an old 50-something you know person that remembers the good old days of media. Maybe maybe that's it.

Sam Sethi 1:08:25

Who knows?

Buzzsprout Transcript Fixes That Save Time

Sam Sethi 1:08:27

Let's move on, James. Now, our sponsors of Buzzsprout, if you record a show and upload it to Buzzsprout, and the transcript is helpful, but there are problems. It shows something like Buzzsprout with two words. Have they done anything to improve this?

James Cridland 1:08:43

Yes, or indeed the spelling of both my name and your name is is always an entertainment. And the good news is it's been fixed. Hooray! So the transcript editor now has auto-correct, which will fix, you know, what if you come if you correct Buzz new word sprout to Buzzsprout, then you can correct that once. It will go through the entire transcripts and correct it all the way through. And I think that it will also correct it in future episodes as well. That may be that may be fanciful hope, but I think that it will probably do that. It's also got keyboard shortcuts and chapter markers. If you've used the transcripts for this show, you'll know that I don't necessarily go through and all and correct as much as I should. And perhaps this will drive me to correct a little bit more in terms of that. Anyway, if you want to find out more information on the better transcripts in the BuzzSprout platform, then take a listen to the BuzzCast podcast, which is available wherever you get your podcasts.

Sam Sethi 1:09:42

Yeah, we had a real life example. We had Juliana Mayer from Super Pass On a couple of weeks back, and she sent me an SRT file this week saying, Could you please change your transcript? Because it says super arse all the way through. And the transcript. And she said, I really want to promote the interview, but I don't want that out in the public domain, please. So yes.

James Cridland 1:10:05

That's brilliant. I did wonder why all of a sudden it said, Oh, it's finished, finished processing working. Uh yes, I did what I did wonder why I got that, and that that would explain it. Super arse, brilliant.

Sam Sethi 1:10:18

Yes, and she was not, she was very pleasant and polite about it, but she was like, Would you mind just using this version that we've cleaned up for you? Wow, gosh. There you go.

James Cridland 1:10:28

Let's whisk around the world,

News Roundup YouTube Claims And Shopify

James Cridland 1:10:30

shall we?

Sam Sethi 1:10:30

Go for it. Uh the USA, YouTube now eclipses TV to become the top news source in the US. I mean, this is uh this is scary for the TV industry, isn't it?

James Cridland 1:10:43

Yeah, uh if it was true, yes, it's nonsense.

Sam Sethi 1:10:46

Oh is it nonsense? Go on then, tell me why.

James Cridland 1:10:51

Well, you know, you take a look at you take a look at YouTube. I mean, it's one of these it's one of these reports that's been hidden behind a uh a registration wall anyway. But it's but but what the headline is is YouTube edges out TV as Americans' top source for political news. So already political news, not just news, political news. But also, secondly, it's b basically talking about it's basically talking about trust, and uh, you know, six out of ten Americans trust uh, you know, independent news creators as much as well-known journalists on on politics. You know, YouTube is not where you will get uh the equivalent of the of the CBS Evening News or the News at 10. It it it's a very different thing. So it's it's you know m more of these spurious pieces of of research that are pitting YouTube against TV, just to point out what trouble TV is in. And I'm um it's it's not really a thing. But yeah, I mean I mean it's it's lovely that that uh you know we're getting yet more of this stuff to end up going through, but but no. No.

Sam Sethi 1:12:04

I I only say through personal experience, I I tend to watch in-depth political analysis on podcasts. I don't watch the news for in-depth political analysis. We don't get it in the UK anymore, sadly. You know, question time is a is a dog and pony punch and duty show, and you know, the the Sunday.

James Cridland 1:12:26

Yeah, no, no, exactly. I mean, you know, the the actual stat, YouTube is relied on most often as a primary news source for politics. Uh and okay, but that that's basically people talking about politics, not people talking about you know actual news that matters. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, yeah.

Sam Sethi 1:12:44

I mean actually this week for the midterms, Corus Swish has got a new podcast with Hillary Clinton, just launched.

James Cridland 1:12:51

So we'll see what that one is, which is interesting. And uh Kamala Harris was on uh the Kee Keep Armour podcast as well earlier on in the week. So anybody would think there are elections coming up in the US fairly shortly. Uh other things going on in the in the US. Well, yes, I mean there is always that. Sorry. Back to podcasting in the US is uh Shopify is doing things with AI agents, it's basically making life easier for Metas Muse to buy stuff on Shopify websites. There's a thrill and an excitement. Awards and events, you're going to the independent podcast.

Sam Sethi 1:13:30

Go back. So sorry, James is trying to get through this. I know this is going to hit the cutting room floor, but let me try. Right. Last week we talked about how AI agents accessing data sources were being blocked: Reddit, Apple, Amazon. And I just think this is interesting as a counter that actually not all sources will be blocked. In some cases, AI agents will be welcomed in with a red carpet and told to scrape away and do what you like within here because you will buy as much as you like with your owner's credit card.

James Cridland 1:14:01

Yes, exactly, exactly right. That was just it.

Sam Sethi 1:14:04

I just thought it was interesting as a counter to what we were talking about last week.

James Cridland 1:14:08

I think that that is absolutely fair enough. If you're watching the video version, my automated lights have just turned off. But the good news is I've now got a switch so I can turn them back on again without uh waving my arms about. So that's handy, isn't it? Awards and events, the Independent Podcast Awards in King's Place in London is uh happening in November, early November. I think Chloe Way Brown from TrueFans will be there. I will not be there this year, unfortunately. I was there last year, I think, wasn't I? So, and enjoyed being over there for that. But I will be have just been, as this goes out, at the Sonar Awards in Sydney. So looking forward to going there. I'm giving away four awards, which I'm looking forward to. One of them only has one nominee. So I think we can guess who the winner for that one is going to be. No envelope required. Indeed.

Announcer 1:14:58

The tech stuff on the Podnews Weekly Review.

Apple HomeView Locks In Podcasts

James Cridland 1:15:03

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Podnews newsletter. Uh, here's where Sam talks technology. Uh, you've seen the home view, right?

Sam Sethi 1:15:11

I I've seen it. I do I want it was the next question, I guess. No.

James Cridland 1:15:16

Actually, you're not you're not allowed it, I don't think, are you?

Sam Sethi 1:15:19

Not yet, no. Well, no, I mean I'm not in the EU, technically. Technically, because of Brexit, we're not in the EU, so we might get it. Who knows? Uh yes.

James Cridland 1:15:29

Because the Apple the Apple Home View, it's a sort of a it's a it's a it's a Google Nest home hub, basically. It's a device with speakers and a screen. I thought two interesting things, apart from the fact that it won't be available in the EU because it contains Siri AI, which is banned for the likes of people there. But also it's got Apple Podcasts pre-installed in it, so you can use Apple Podcasts on that device. So that is good. But guess what? You can't use Spotify, Overcast, or any other podcast app, and there is no App Store either. So you can't even get a Spotify or Overcast or anything else on there. Now, the interesting thing, what they've done with this Apple HomeView, is that it will support CarPlay, which I think is going to be rebranded at some point, but it will support CarPlay. So if your podcast app, your favorite podcast app has CarPlay on it, then you can attach it to this Apple HomeView thing, and it will then be able to play back content from Apple CarPlay, which then goes to explain why Apple launched, you know, or or at least have been talking about, you know, things like YouTube and video stuff on CarPlay. Only available in cars when you're stationary, but now available on the Apple HomeView as well, potentially. So I thought that that was an interesting way round, but very locked down, because it essentially means that you have to have something installed on your phone before this home view will actually even even accept it. So good news for podcasts, maybe if you're on Apple Podcasts and you want to promote that, but otherwise not quite so good. So I thought that that was I thought that that was interesting, uh Sam, but I'm not going to be getting one of those, I don't think.

Sam Sethi 1:17:19

No, I mean the one thing I did see that was interesting was when you get close with your new iOS 27 phone, it will do proximity and change all the calendars and everything else to your personalization. And then when you walk away and your partner comes, it'll then give her the opportunity as well. So some clever little things in there, typically Apple. I think there's a lot of third-party doors and lights and etc. home automation that's coming. Yep.

James Cridland 1:17:53

Again, new Apple TV as well. Which I'm I might go and buy, except there's nothing new about it other than that. There's I mean, not even Siri AI is new in the new Apple TV because you'll be able to get that in a software update anyway, for the old ones. But it's got some microphones in it or something, so you can shout at it and say, No, don't play that. So it's got that, but you it's also got a speaker in the remote control. So what you can do is you can shout at your Apple TV under the TV and go, Hey, where's the remote control? And the remote control will bleep at you, which is quite nice. And that's about the only new thing that at the the Apple TV 4K has has you know done. But it's also very expensive as well, I think. 300, 300 US dollars. So that's going to be an expensive old streaming device. So I'm not quite sure that'll be $600 here. Why would I want to spend $600 for or or $450 or whatever it is? Yeah.

Sam Sethi 1:18:58

I I did think a couple of I mean the pace at which Apple moves is is snail-like in most cases, right? I I do find it but but you do see the building blocks over time. So with your AirPods having a chip in it, with your phone having a chip in it, with your Apple TV or your home view having chips in it, and building that chip economy that they did, they now have a very powerful ecosystem. One of the biggest problems with home automation with the Amazon Alexa was it didn't have proximity. So you couldn't walk into a room and the lights turn on, you in in knowing that it was you, right? Or in whatever setting, or you know, as you approach the door. So there was a whole bunch of things that you just couldn't do with home automation in the old uh Amazon Alexa, which is you know what you had and I have.

James Cridland 1:19:53

Yeah, yeah.

Sam Sethi 1:19:53

This new model and what they're showing with HomeView as an example, where you come close with your phone and it changes, is exactly how they build the chip ecosystem underneath it, which is very powerful. So, yes, you said it earlier, you know, if you want to be in the Apple ecosystem, I think you said it actually last week, which was you know, when I was asking about podcasting, why didn't you know Amazon Alexa catch on? You said, well, radio didn't, and then I thought, well, that's just me asking for a radio station by name. Why can't I ask a podcast by name? Why didn't it catch on? And you said the other problem is I might start on my phone, maybe then I go and watch it on my laptop, and then I get to this Alexa thing that doesn't know where I am. So now I've got to be tied into the Apple ecosystem. Well, that's exactly what Apple wants to tie you into their ecosystem. Absolutely right.

James Cridland 1:20:49

Absolutely right. No, I think it's interesting, and by the way, I should I should just say that the way that their proximity stuff is working is it's not just have you got an Apple phone in your pocket, it it is also using the same face ID that it's used to using to open your Apple phone as well. So you won't be able to get into, you know, your wife's phone by just picking uh your wife's account by picking up her phone and walking close to this thing, it'll actually look at who's on the screen as well. But I think, yeah, you know, there's some the there are obvious things here in terms of just keeping people in the Apple ecosystem. The downside with all of this, of course, is that Apple are promoting an awful lot of uh stuff for their particular ecosystem, and that does lock out every everybody else. So if you're not if you're using a Windows laptop, if you're using an Android phone, then you don't get any access to any of this. Of course, that's what Apple want because they want to sell more devices, but that's not what podcasting wants. And at the moment, we don't really have a default podcast app for Android again, after Google, you know, saw a fluffy bird and closed the the the Google Podcasts app down. So, you know, so I think I think that there's you you know there's stuff there in terms of the Apple standard way of building their own ecosystem, which is unhelpful for for the podcast world, but that's I suppose as far as we're gonna mail and voicemail our favorite time of the week, it's the Podnews Weekly Review inbox.

Listener Mail And Power Supporters

Announcer 1:22:25

Inbox.

James Cridland 1:22:27

Yes, so many different ways to get in touch with us. You can please use the voicemail. You'll find the voicemail link in our show notes, right at the top of the show notes. It says something like, Jet send James and Sam a voicemail comment. And if you do so, it will get onto this show. Why don't you click that today and uh record something? Uh it works best on your mobile phone, but it'll work on your on your laptop as well, or on your iPad if you've got one of those or Android tablet or whatever. Of course, you can also use email as well. We're weekly at podnews.net. We've had a couple of little pieces of of uh fan mail, haven't we, Sam?

Sam Sethi 1:23:02

Yes, Seth Goldstein sent us 1202 sats and said, Voice never gets my Philly accent right. Never been a fan of the smart speakers. Try having a Scottish accent, it'll never get your Scottish accent right, that's for certain.

James Cridland 1:23:15

Ask Dan Brown.

Sam Sethi 1:23:17

Yes, and to be honest, I much rather use a Far Stick or a Roku stick than have a smart TV that doesn't get updates. I'd love to see Pocket Cast, and for that matter, TrueFans is a TV app on major players as well. Yeah, we talked about how you know YouTube and smart screens, I think Tom Webster last week, we were talking about how 12% of viewing is now on big screens and should apps be there. I guess, you know, that's what app developers have to do. Look at where the people are watching or listening.

James Cridland 1:23:46

And the one thing I would say, Seth, is that outside of the uh US, Pocketcasts is available as a TV app on the major players. They're available on both the Apple TV platform and also on the Android TV platform. You really shouldn't be using a fire stick, they're rubbish. Roku is even worse. You should be going to your local Walmart and getting an onStreamer, which is their brand of Android TV streamer. It's a good little stick, it'll cost you 30 bucks, and you will you will not turn back, I promise. It's very good. So I would heartily recommend that. Uh, thank you, Seth. Also, Neil Vellio saying we owe Adam and Dave a lot of gratitude for this industry being an industry. That said, Adam is excellent at performing dramatics and theatrics. Advertising isn't going anywhere, he says. It's just going to have to evolve. I would wholeheartedly agree with you, Neil. Uh, advertising isn't going anywhere. There is always going to be an amount of people that don't like advertising and amount of people that do. And I think as long as we can keep things uh open for both of those sets of people, I think that that's a good thing. So thank you so much. You can join us, by the way, please do. You can join us as a power supporter. Weekly.podnews.net is our website where you can go and join us, like Dan Kendall has, like Ralph E. Owens has, and like Silas Vote as well. Weekly.podnews.net is where you can go from from as little as five bucks a month, or I think even lower if you're very clever.

Host Updates And Final Links

James Cridland 1:25:22

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

Sam Sethi 1:25:25

Not not too much. Uh, it's been a pretty quiet week. We pushed out our newsletter, that was quite good. I did the first leg of the Cotswold way, which was lovely.

James Cridland 1:25:35

Oh, you're walking walking now again, are you? Yes. Yes.

Sam Sethi 1:25:39

It's beautiful in the Cotswolds. I mean, I'm sure you know that as well.

James Cridland 1:25:43

But uh going from your wife must be going, God, when is this man going to have a heart attack? Where when is he gonna have a heart attack so I can so I can uh no, that's easy to do.

Sam Sethi 1:25:55

Show me my MongoDB bill quickly. That'll give me a heart attack. There you go. No, the um Good Lord.

James Cridland 1:26:04

Have you been to the Broadway in the Cotswolds? I have not been to the Cotswolds, no.

Sam Sethi 1:26:10

Oh given given that your parents lived over that way towards Wales-ish way, I thought you might have, you know, popped in on the way over.

James Cridland 1:26:17

No. No, I've never I have never done the Cotswolds, but it's it's it's the type of uh Britain that that that the Americans like, isn't it? It's all shortbread biscuits and and thatched cottages. Yes, that's that's about right, isn't it?

Sam Sethi 1:26:32

Yes. About that, yeah, and and and most of them are moving in. We've got Ellen Generous moved in there and and a few others. Yeah, yes.

James Cridland 1:26:39

Okay, well, very nice. I'm I'm surprised that they haven't moved into your village, which seems to have virtually everybody there.

Sam Sethi 1:26:45

No, we have a policy, we have a pol policy, not allowed. No. Apart from that, no, it's been a very quiet week. Interesting just looking at you know what what's going on in the podcasting 2.0 world. If there's stuff happening, you and I have been talking on various Mastodon threads, I know. So yeah, we'll see whether some of those things come to light. But other than that, no, very quiet. What's happened for you?

James Cridland 1:27:13

No, indeed. And uh there's a good article in the Podnews newsletter this week from Mike Dell arguing, is podcasting 2.0 still fringe? If you remember, Rob Greenlee once uh slightly foolishly called it a fringe thing. And he says, if it is, the fringe is getting awfully crowded, which is good, it's uh well well worth a read. What's been happening for me? Well, I've been to Sydney and back this week for the Sonar Awards. I flew, Sam, in business down to Sydney. Why did I do that? Because I needed 80 points to re-qualify as platinum for for the next year, and it was 40 points if I went down economy, and it was 80 points if I went down business. So, therefore, I think it's worthwhile getting on that ladder again. So that's what I've done. Yes, because my uh my year, my airline year runs out at the end of November. So this is my last flight, or was my last flight, so therefore, that's that's a thing. They've they've really got me, haven't they?

Sam Sethi 1:28:17

So did you go down did you go down to see Stephen Bartlett and Tony Robbins who are in Sydney last week?

James Cridland 1:28:23

I think Stephen Bartlett has been here recently. I know that Alistair Campbell has been here recently as well. He's doing a world tour at the moment. I'm not quite sure how he's doing that with everything else that he's that he's doing, but still, there we go. And you know, a bunch of a bunch of folk coming all the way down here. So all of that is all of that is certainly good. No, I missed out on all of those people, I have to say. Uh, and that's it for this week. All of our podcast stories, of course, taken from the Podnews Daily Newsletter, which you can read and indeed watch. Uh you can read at podnews.net.

Sam Sethi 1:28:55

You can give us feedback using the Buzzsprout voicemail link in our show notes, or become a monthly power supporter like the 25 Power Supporters at weekly.podnews.net.

James Cridland 1:29:05

Yes, please do. Our music's from TM Studios, our voiceover is Sheila D, and we're hosted and sponsored by BuzzSprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Announcer 1:29:15

Get updated every day. Subscribe to our newsletter at podnews.net. Tell your friends and grow the show. And support us. And support us. The Podnews Weekly Review will return next week. Keep listening.