What Liquid Content Really Means

James Cridland 0:00

Coming up, podcasters collaborating with other podcasters and the podcast that earned more than a quarter of a million dollars on Kickstarter.

Announcer 0:08

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

Sam Sethi 0:20

James, so let's kick off the show. We've been talking about a concept called Liquid Content, or Stephen Goldstein's been talking about a concept called Liquid Content. He was on the show a couple of weeks ago, episode 43, if you want to go back and listen to the interview. Now it seems that that concept of liquid content's catching on. A new study into audio consumption in France by Audion is saying that uh the French are now using the concept of liquid content. Tell me more.

James Cridland 0:50

I think your uh your French teacher, Mr. Campbell, will be very happy with that.

Sam Sethi 0:55

Turning in his grave right now.

James Cridland 0:58

Yes, exactly. Yes, so this was a new study uh done by Audion and UGov, and yes, digital audio is now a mass market medium, which presumably means that more than 50% of the of people use it. But the point really around this around liquid content is that 58% of people in the country say that they've started content on one platform and finished it on another. That's the whole point of liquid content, after all. So you can really see that that sort of thing is happening in France. It's also happening in Australia as well, with Podpol 26 releasing this week that 72% of Aussies move between the two, between audio and video. Interestingly, they say that both men and women prefer to listen in podcasts. I think they're the only research company that have actually bothered to ask which you prefer rather than which you have done. And I quite like that as a question. So hurrah for them. But yes, there is definitely something going on in terms of liquid content, or certainly in terms of making sure that your content is multi-platform and appears on a number of different platforms all over all over the place. So hurrah for

Algorithms And The Death Of Following

James Cridland 2:06

them.

Sam Sethi 2:06

Now, one of the other topics we covered from Stephen Goldstein was a poster he wrote called The Death of the Follower, due to he said, algorithmic discovery of podcasts and content. And Adam Curry's been talking about agentic AI discovery as well. Now, I don't really want to go into too much detail because you again we talked uh we talked to death about this last week. But every major platform, according to Adam Massiri, has had to lean into recommendations. He says post from accounts you don't happen to follow to stay relevant. Going back to following only feeds would quickly mean a smaller Instagram. He's saying basically that the death of the follower is now coming to Instagram, James.

James Cridland 2:51

Well, I think what he's trying to say is he's looking at Australia, as many people do, why I really don't know, for online safety, because Australia has pledged a new law which will force social media companies to at least offer a version of their products without algorithms in them. Because our politicians know nothing about how the internet works. But Rupert Murdoch clearly wants to harm Instagram, and so that's what he's asking for. And all of the spineless politicians here are going, yes, Mr. Murdoch, whatever you like. He's still alive. I I suspect he is still alive, yes. Just about him and Mitch McConnell. They're both still alive, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise. So Adam Maseri, of course, is the CEO of Instagram, in case you wondered who who he was. So uh yes, he will be there going, we don't want a smaller Instagram. We don't therefore want the Australian government to be telling us that we shouldn't be doing algorithms. So I suspect that that's sort of part of it. I'm not so sure, I'm not so sure that there is the death of the follower. I think that, you know, when I go onto LinkedIn, I'm looking on LinkedIn at lots of very useful bits of information about the podcast industry, and LinkedIn is showing me that because I'm following a fair amount of people in the podcast industry, but not following all of them. But LinkedIn knows what sort of industry I'm interested in and gives me more news on that. So I think from that point of view, I think algorithms can be quite useful. And yeah, you know, I think it's probably a good thing.

Instagram Pays For Talent Again

Sam Sethi 4:27

Now, sticking with Instagram, then one of the things that Adam said was Adam Shiri, not Adam Curry, was that they would not be paying for exclusives for full content podcasts on their platform. And lo and behold, this week, they are paying for full content. So Instagram isn't just chasing YouTube's TV watch time and ad revenue, it's chasing its talent too. The Metarone platform has offered to pay some YouTubers up to $500,000 to post videos. Did you get the offer, James? Because I'm quite happy to take it.

James Cridland 4:59

Yeah, I mean, I would be very happy to take that. I mean, it would mean an end to our sponsorship with BuzzSprout. Well, they might counter. They might counter. They might counter with, I mean, you know, 600,000 would be fine, BuzzSprout. I mean, let's call it 750. But yeah, no, weirdly that has not actually happened. But Meta have agreed that they are going to be doing this. I mean, uh but there again, it's Meta. And what we've seen from Meta is we've seen Facebook, of course, if you remember, they got very excited about podcasting. They did lots of exciting things about podcasting. They then reverse ferreted about six months after they started. Uh, it was only launched in the uh US, and so therefore it was all a bit of a waste of time. And and I suspect that this may well happen again, who knows, in terms of Instagram. I mean, even Muse, apparently, we learned this week, is launching its own automated AI-driven podcasts, according to John Spurlock, friend of the show, and also a power supporter. And yes, that you can get the education across the states show, which is AI generated by a Muse bot, by a Muse robot, and the audio and the thumbnail image is hosted on Muse.ai slash podcast, which is interesting. Muse haven't said anything about that. So yeah, I I find I find what Meta are doing quite fascinating, but

AI Agents Buying Audio Ads

James Cridland 6:25

I'm not sure necessarily that it's a keeper.

Sam Sethi 6:28

So talking of things where AI doesn't need a human, it seems that Triton is now building AI to deliver what it calls the first AI to AI audio ad buy. What's this one, James?

James Cridland 6:42

Yeah, this was this was very interesting. So this was something in Inside Audio Marketing, which is owned by iHeart. It was a story about Triton Digital, which is owned by iHeart. And apparently Triton has completed its first fully automated advertising buy using artificial agents to handle everything from identifying available inventory and negotiating terms to booking the campaign in an ad server, which means that the next audio advertising deal may be negotiated and booked without a human ever touching the transaction. Which is interesting, is it not? I would imagine that we're going to see a fair amount of this. I mean, Muse's whole advertising at the moment, which I keep on seeing, is we will we will buy stuff for you, we will find the cheapest price for you, we will cancel the subscriptions or renegotiate the subscriptions that you're no longer using. All of this kind of stuff is part of what Muse is doing. And so I I guess, of course, that moves into the into the B2B space as well.

Sam Sethi 7:48

Look, I think one of the things they said was it took minutes rather than days to be required to coordinate an advertising by. This is where agentic to agentic AI is actually very useful. I think. You know, I I've got my little thing about X402, which is the the payment element designed specifically for agentic AI payments. And so I think you are gonna see more of this. This is where productivity gains could be made by AI. I think this is where it is a useful tool, but I don't think it's useful when you have it as a host of a podcast. Listen up muse. But but this is where I do think it is useful. And you know, I'm sure others are looking at it, I'm sure ACAS will look at it, I'm sure AdSwiz will look at it and think, ooh, okay, yeah, this could be interesting.

James Cridland 8:37

Yeah, I mean this should really be Amazon, you know, Amazon ads looking at it, putting an MP MPC MCP server, not an MPC server, that's uh that's something completely different. Putting one of those in and and yeah, and opening the floodgates. The one thing that I would say is I hope that the AI tools are good enough to manage yield and to make sure that podcast ads are begin to be more expensive, not less expensive, because of this. You know, if we're managing to cut costs, cut staffing costs down like this, then actually what we should be doing is pushing the price up of podcasts to make it more more expensive to buy. Why do I say that? Because otherwise we'll just be flooded with even more podcasts ads in our shows. And I don't think that anybody really wants that. So hopefully that that should mean that we can charge a little bit more for all of these because presumably the AI tools are going to do a more thorough job in terms of finding shows few to record in, few to advertise in, and and so on and so forth. So hopefully that is a good thing. I mean, and it and it's interesting, I I was there is a lot on on Mastodon, there is a lot of people who are very anti-AI coding. And I was thinking about this the other day, and I was thinking, I think there's a big difference between generative AI replacing the work

When AI Helps And When It Hurts

James Cridland 10:05

of human beings in terms of a creative endeavour. So hosting a podcast, for example, by all means AI could host a three-minute long show with what's happening in Cookum Dean, where you live, Sam, because it'll just be, you know, oh Chris Evans has bought a new car. Oh, you know, now we have the traitors living in the village now. And Sam, well, there you go. So, you know, it'll be it'll be it'll be full of that, but it'll be a very short, a very short show. I think that's probably fine, but anything more than that, anything which is which is replacing a a proper human being is a bad thing. But in terms of AI coding, I'm quite relaxed about AI coding. I don't know how much AI coding you're using in TrueFans. Uh tons.

SPEAKER_05 10:49

Yeah, tons.

Sam Sethi 10:50

We our productivity goes up much faster. I mean, Mo was very anti it to begin with. He was like, what are you saying about my coding? What are you saying? And now you very much, I mean, you listen to the guys at Pod Home, you listen to the guys at Pod2, you listen to even Kevin over at Buzzsprout. I mean, everyone's using, you know, Claude code and it's it's it's basically helping. I mean, we we did a a thing the other day, we we had uh a page that was loading slowly, and I just simply went, okay, Claude, go and analyze this page and tell me what's causing the load. Told me it was something to do with Cloudflare. We made a quick change, boom, worked. And those are the reasons why we use it. It works really well.

James Cridland 11:34

Yeah, it's it's it's something that I mean I'm using it more and more for just things like this SQL query. Can you make it also do this? And you know, because I'm comfortable about doing that, I still understand what the SQL query is. I'm just not confident enough with SQL to basically go, oh, you know, I actually uh all I needed was another union here. That that's where it gets a little bit too complicated for me. So all of that stuff I'm I'm quite I'm quite comfortable with. And and I think that there is a big difference between that and you know a creative piece of work. And I'm afraid for all of the programmers out there, coding isn't a creative piece of work. The UX around it, yes, absolutely is, by the way. And the UX is a really is a really important thing. And I d don't really like AI producing the UX on websites, and I find them all very, very cookie-cutter. But the code underneath, the code that runs the APIs and stuff, knock yourself out, as far as I'm concerned. But yeah, I mean I mean my brother is a computer coder by trade, and he is using AI all the time now. And he's not using it because his bosses have told him to, he's using it because he's told himself to. So yeah, no, I think it's really interesting.

The Real Cost Of AI Tools

Sam Sethi 12:56

But a couple of interesting stories related to that. Microsoft have removed all other AI from use only copilot now, removed because of the cost. JP Morgan have removed it, and several banks have removed it because of reduced productivity and increased costs. And again, Revolute have actually decided to remove all use of Claude and third-party open AI. They've built their own NVIDIA servers and built their own LLMs. And again, it's really interesting to see people I think are realizing the cost of tokens is going up and up and up, and they can't afford it. And we know that the inshitification of AI is coming. So this is the cheapest AI will be because they want to give us crack cocaine marketing, get us in, hook us on it, and then when we're all hooked and totally reliant, boom, then comes the profit margins, and then it's a hundred pounds, not 20 pounds, and then it's X tokens will cost you so much more. So we've got to be weary.

James Cridland 13:58

Or yes, or we all do what Adam does and Adam Curry does, and run a uh run a massive LLM in his house. I'm not quite sure so sure that's the right thing. So what Revolute are doing fundamentally, yeah. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly, exactly. And and you can well uh see that. By the way, uh I did get a press release which I forwarded on to Adam, but you may find it interesting here as well. There is a new AI chat bot which is faith-based. The only information that it has in it is the word of God. So it's just been trained on the King James version of the Bible, and so therefore anything anything that it comes out from, I don't know which revision it doesn't say, but anything that that it comes out with will be biblical. So it's a full ecosystem that full being the word, yeah. In their that bridges that bridges the invisible gap between the pews and the pulpit in real time. Anyway, it's the sort of thing that I thought that uh Adam might find might find interesting, but probably not right for the Podnews newsletter.

Health Podcast Library And Curation

Sam Sethi 15:11

Talking of agent to agent, just one of the companies that have been featured here on Podnews is SpotsNow. They've created something called SuperAgent. What's this one?

James Cridland 15:22

SuperAgent. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's super agent. It is a new free AI agent which they have launched. It is basically, I would imagine, either their own LLM or something quite similar. Uh, they launched uh MCP server a couple of a couple of months ago, but they now have their own agent on there as well. So basically you can go on there and you can say, give me the top 100 shows for people who are interested in buying a car, and it will come back and give you that kind of information. Or it can even build a full service campaign plan on its own as well. It works for sellers and buyers, it's quite neat. So yeah, I I expect that we will see much more of this AI stuff in the future. So yeah, all seems sensible to me.

Sam Sethi 16:12

Let's move on, James, then. Uh we've been talking about well, nobody's been talking about actually, if I'm honest, publisher feeds apart from me. Uh I was gonna say, we've been talking about publisher feeds, but then I went, no, no one else. Yeah, and I think they're great, but anyway, one day people are catch on, one day. They are basically like pod roles, but for publishers, they allow your publisher to aggregate all of the shows they have in one feed and add it to your RSS feed. Anyway, network feeds are another idea, which are the basic aggregation and collaboration of podcasters together, the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. And the idea is that the network, like a publisher feed, is an aggregate within the RSS, and so you might have a podcast go out, and inside is the network feed, apps like TreeFans and others can then create pages of those network feeds, and people can then aggregate their listen times plays and fan base and try to get better deals. So that's where networks and publisher feeds fit in, and people are starting. Well, I say people are starting to do network feeds. Network feeds have been around for ages. There's been some good ones around, but I think this is the codification of it. But other people are now have realized that collaborating together is a good idea, and one of those is one of our power supporters, Dan Kendall. What's he been telling you, James?

James Cridland 17:39

Yes, so I caught up with Dan earlier on in the week. He used to be called the Health Podcast Network, but now he's called the Health Podcast Library, and it turns out he's changed rather more than the name.

SPEAKER_00 17:52

We actually changed a lot more than just the name. We changed our whole approach to what it is that we're doing at this intersection of healthcare and podcasting. Podcast networks are really around a lot of things around IP monetization and production services. And what we found working in the healthcare space is there are a lot of people who are already working on those areas over front and they don't want them. They're not looking to monetize their Johns Hopkins podcast or their Mayo Clinic or University of Pennsylvania. So and they've already got their own internal services for production services. And there are a lot of people who do a great job at that already for those organizations. And after we did the Health Podcast Summit last year, which you were a part of, which I'm grateful for that, is still up and available at Health PodcastSummit.com. We realized there was a lot more that people needed just for discovery tools. And we decided to reframe our entire approach to our software. And really we we chose the name Health Podcast Library because libraries for centuries have been the houses where science and knowledge has been shared with the public. And we thought that's precisely what we're trying to do through podcasts. We're trying to create a curated collection of information that can be accessed by people who are searching for science and medical and health knowledge. And we're putting that all in one place under the health podcast library umbrella.

James Cridland 19:06

Yeah, and of course, a library is a curated experience, as you so rightly say. If if you're there looking looking for health podcasts in general, you've you've discovered a health podcast on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, is is there an obvious way to know what's real and what's, you know, random, you know, quackery for for clicks?

SPEAKER_00 19:28

That's one of the big challenges right now, just broadly across all of society. Well, it doesn't matter what sector you're looking at, but really knowing whether somebody credible is behind what you're listening to, whether that's being generated by AI, whether it's being elevated to you by an algorithm, or let's face it, I'm kind of embarrassed to say that one of the chief exports from America right now is an anti-science agenda. We're seeing it all over the globe. And a lot of it is happening right here at home as we see just a pullback on international participation in a variety of clinical and scientific communities. We're seeing pullback on grants and scientific funding in the US. We're seeing the US, which used to be a destination for a lot of the best minds around the world to come and do their research and develop their products. And unfortunately, that isn't happening right now. So we've got AI algorithms and an anti-science agenda working against us, and particularly in healthcare, where again in the US, we're seeing a lot of cutbacks on rural health, we're seeing a lot of closures of hospitals, consolidation, rising costs. And it's really creating an opportunity to try to fill that information void and to say, how are we going to get this information out to the soft tissue between people's ears so that they can actually understand how to take care of themselves, how to take care of the people in their communities or take care of uh the people in their families.

James Cridland 20:46

Have you seen any any impacts from AI, you know, generative AI making, AI voiced uh podcasts, and that sort of thing?

SPEAKER_00 20:55

We have, and you and I have talked about this before with that company that almost I don't even want to mention because number one, they they don't exist anymore. Uh, but I don't even want to elevate their their sort of approach to how they were making content. But that's just one example. That was that company in particular was just one example of a rising confusion by people who are looking for information and what is actually driven by a human and what's driven by some machine. And, you know, when I talk to various healthcare organizations that are making podcasts, they say, well, we don't really need anything else because we've already, you know, we've already got our podcasts on Apple and Spotify and YouTube, and they've got huge reach. And I did an example with one particular hospital, one of the top hospitals in the world, and we did a search across those platforms, and we had their their podcasts on Health Podcast Library as well. And they did not feature in any of those three platforms when we put in the search terms that they wanted to be found for. And then we went to Health Podcast Library, they were there. And I I pointed out two things on a call, which was very similar to this on video. I shared my screen. I said, number one, you're not being Featured here. You think that Apple is helping you find and reach your audience? It's not. And I've just demonstrated that to you. And Apple, Spotify, YouTube, the same thing. And I said, number two, the reason you're creating content is because you want people to hear that before this particular hospital wanted people to hear it before they come in to seek treatment. And I said, so tell me, of the 50 shows that Apple just presented to me, which one of these do you want me to listen to before I come in and see your healthcare professionals? And of course, they couldn't give me an answer because we don't know what's there. We just know Apple has decided to put something up in the top left corner and work down through some algorithm after that. And we're not trying to keep people away from putting their podcasts on those platforms. We want people to be discovered there, but we're saying, look, let's create a separate environment where we can have a smaller set of shelves, as Stephen Goldstein sort of described on your podcast audience weekly last week, and a smaller set of shelves where we can curate the books that are there and make it easier for people to find the information that they're looking for.

James Cridland 22:58

Yeah, that's a that's a fascinating way of putting it. And I guess so you can obviously find the Health Podcast Library at healthpodcastlibrary.com. Any plans for an app or any of those sorts of things?

SPEAKER_00 23:11

That's a great question. We get asked that a lot. I'll ask you do you see a need for an app? We have designed a really powerful platform that has a wonderful mobile experience that continues playing after you close and lock the screen. And we uh my I go back and forth about whether we actually need to invest in that. I've developed apps in the medical field before. I know Google has gone through three or four iterations as they've tried to find ways to engage people. I don't know that we necessarily need an Apple or Android native experience because again, we're not trying to keep people in a walled garden. We want them to get in their car and open the app that they normally open and then find that there's something new from one of the creators that follow around diabetes or hypertension and trying to get them to a new destination that frankly is going to have single-digit uptake, you know, in terms of usage across the whole audience. I'm not sure that's the best uh allocation of our resources. I'd really focus on creating a robust community, really focusing on doing that outreach to the patients and the professionals that we want to have come and find find content here and really put our effort there.

James Cridland 24:17

I think that makes uh a bunch of sense. You you would you would assume that there was some way of taking the website that you've got and making an app version of that. But as you so rightly say, you want you want people to use the podcast app that they are comfortable with at the end of the day. You just need to help people find shows in a different way.

SPEAKER_00 24:38

Yeah, and and I think that I'm not against it entirely. I just don't know that it's something that we need to do right this minute, because right now we're at 270 shows, which is almost triple of what we ever got to when we were doing the Health Podcast Network. And frankly, we've got another hundred or so that are ready to join. And I keep finding podcasts every week that are interested in reaching the audience that we're working to curate here through the library. So I really want to put my effort there on resourcing that community so they can be the best podcasters, the best content creators, and understanding this has been part of my message to the whole healthcare community, of which I've been a part for 30 years, is to say, look, podcasts are a part of an omni-channel strategy. I know we're using the word liquid content now, but we've been using the word omni-channel in healthcare for a long time, whether it's billboards on Times Square or leaflets that get passed through your door or delivered in your mailbox, or posters that are available inside your doctor's office, or TV advertising as it's often here in the US. There are a variety of ways that people are working to get the attention of their target audience. And we're just saying, look, podcasts need to be a part of this story.

James Cridland 25:49

So what's the business model behind it? Are podcasts paying to go into the library, or how does it work from that point of view?

SPEAKER_00 25:58

Great. And it goes back to my earlier question or my earlier answer, which where I said that you know, we changed our whole model as we moved away from Health Podcast Network. Health Podcast Network, we were charging people. And that was an obstacle to try to overcome that whole explanation about why it was worth supporting something like what we were doing with Health Podcast Network. And what I realized when I wanted to focus on health podcast libraries, I had to do two things. Number one, at the center of everything we do is the person we're trying to reach. That can be patients, that can be a healthcare provider, that can be someone like me that was working in the healthcare industry that was trying to create products and services and solutions to empower hospitals and caregivers and patients in better ways. So if I want to keep the person at the center of that focus, I need to make it free for them, carte blanche. It absolutely has to be free. I cannot put a paywall in front of that listener, that perspective listener of accessing their information. And similarly, if I'm really focused on serving their interests, I can't then turn to a creator and say, I'm gonna give you access to this audience, but only if you pay me, because that undermines the first principle, which is I want to make sure that the people who are searching for information have free and open, unfettered access to the best information that will help them reach the best health that they're possible of attaining. So it's free for listeners, free for creators. So how are we actually monetizing? We're not placing ads. We are working with sponsors. We do have some paid plans. So the free version of Health Podcast Library does the same as Apple and Spotify, but more. It gives them the same sort of visibility. They don't have to change their hosting. They can pull it. We pull in the RSS feed just like another destination, gives them visibility and their episodes and their artwork. But then on the paid plans, so that's the free plan. We want to make sure everybody has access to that. And the other nice thing about what we've done is that whenever someone follows a show on Health Podcast Library, whenever that show publishes a new episode, we send them an email. And in the health community, people are not habitual podcast listeners like you and I are. So we want to make sure that we have an opportunity of after we've engaged their interest and they've said they're interesting and interested in this, we want to make sure that we're not relying on push notifications on Apple or Spotify to actually reach their attention a second time when that second episode around whatever condition or professional interest they have. So we we set up this email service. So all that's available for free. And then for the paid levels, we're developing new solutions that frankly are way overdue, I believe. You know, we in a lot of these apps, people are trying to say, well, find us wherever you find podcasts. Well, it's hard to find some of these things. A lot of them are by the same name, or you just put in a word and you end up with 50 results, and you're not sure which one was the actual one that your friend told you about or that you heard before. So we're creating more tools where people can put in custom buttons, embed their own YouTube playlists, uh, create their own bios because this is really important. Who are the people behind this? So Apple and Spotify don't really make it very easy for somebody to put in their host bio or their team bio. Who else is behind this doing research or production? And and all that's visible again on a paid plan. And then we're creating something I'm really excited about, which is playlists. This whole thing where we post on LinkedIn or Instagram and we say, here's all the places where you can find it. Go to your chosen place. It's not really very helpful when you have to post three different links. And people send me links and they'll send me a Spotify link, and I listen on Apple. So that does, I have to go then to Apple to search for it. So what we're doing on the Health Podcast Library is we're including links to whatever platforms the creators want to make available to their audience. And then on that page, it's almost like a link tree where they can go and use that. People can find it and then find the links to their favorite platforms, or they can listen right there. And we're we're also creating the ability for people to have playlists. So there's one particular creator that I'm a big fan of that I discovered when my oldest daughter was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. At the time she had less than 200 episodes, now she has over 800. And if you're newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, like my family was nine years ago, and like people in the diabetes community are happening, it's happening right now today. It's hard to go through 800 episodes and find the content that's relevant for me at my stage in the journey. So we're creating a a platform called playlists, where she's then able to take her 800 episodes and curate them into playlists to say, well, this is what you need to do if your diagnosis uh diagnosis happens as a toddler. This is what happens for uh questions around pumps or insulin or or CGMs, continuous glucose monitors. So being able to curate that content in a meaningful way and surface that back up so that when people do discover her in the library, they don't have to filter through 800 shows. They can say, well, this is where I am and I want to listen to this. And importantly, this is where the network effects come in. People can then take that playlist and share that out and say, hey, this is something that I think you should listen to. And we're having a lot of interest from healthcare professionals around that very thing as their time with patients continues to get restricted from eight to 15 minutes and seeing patients one after another. We need to give them tools to be able to say, this is how you can engage outside of the clinic setting. And this is where you can listen to this on the way home. You don't have to read anything, you don't have to watch a video and put your attention on a screen. You can literally scan this QR code on my screen and walk out and start listening to this on the drive home or the commute back and begin to get that information that's going to make you more empowered as a professional. But also, as I mentioned, it giving that information out there for patients and caregivers as well. There is there's a principle in healthcare that's taught around the rights. It's around things like the right treatment for the right patient at the right time. And both the patients need to be educated about that so they can have what's called informed consent, so they can participate in that treatment. But also, healthcare professionals, there's just a deluge of information as more science is advanced and more products come to market, but they're trying to keep up with this information or around what's available for the patients. And I talk to a lot of healthcare professionals who absolutely hate being confronted with new information and having them that be the first time that they're hearing about it. So, what we're really really focused on is how do we deliver the right podcast to the right person at the right time? So, how do we find the information that a healthcare professional needs to do their job and make it easy for them to consume it and share it with their staff, share it with their thousands of colleagues within their hospital system or within the with the person down the hall, working down the hall with them, and then also make it easy for patients to find that so they can be more informed to say the doctor mentioned this or I want to go and ask about this. You know, how do I prepare for that eight to 15 minute consultation with a doctor and be prepared with the information that's going to allow me to get out of that limited resource of that time with that professional?

James Cridland 32:49

Very cool. It's it's fascinating hearing all of these, you know, verticals for specific parts of podcasting. Of course, you know, Adam Curry working on Godcaster. We're seeing lots of other individual, individual, you know, verticals of this of this of this type. And I think you you know what you're doing for health podcasting is absolutely fascinating. Dan, thank you so much. You can find the Health Podcast Library at healthpodcastlibrary.com. And thank you for being a power supporter and for your support for Podnews as well.

SPEAKER_00 33:20

I love what you're doing, James. I've been a big fan for years, and I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you here.

James Cridland 33:25

The very excellent Dan Kendall, one of our power supporters, of course. And if you would like to become a power supporter, then please do. Weekly.podnews.net is where you can do that. Just hit the support button. We should have another power supporter next week, Sam, which is very exciting. Somebody who was asking questions about where they can sign up. Weekly.podnews.net slash support is where to go and that website, all run by our sponsor, Buzzsprout. So I was talking

Kickstarter Funded Apple History Podcast

James Cridland 33:53

to Dan about his library, lots and lots of shows in there. But also I thought it would be interesting to chat to somebody that has been running a proper podcast network for some time now.

SPEAKER_02 34:09

They he is called Mike Hurley. I'm Mike Hurley. I am an independent podcaster. I co-founded a company called uh used to be called Relay FM, we're now just relay, back in 2014. And I've been I've been podcasting since 2010, but it was a hobby. And then in 2014 it became my full-time job.

James Cridland 34:27

Yes, and you also run a an online store where I can buy a Bayro for a hundred dollars, but I'm not gonna be doing this.

SPEAKER_02 34:33

Yep, yep. I wouldn't call it a Bayro, I would call it premium sterote covered aluminium rollable pen. Uh correct. I do I have uh also have a paper and pen product business.

James Cridland 34:46

Indeed. So tell us about relay. What what's what's relay, first of all?

SPEAKER_02 34:50

Yeah, by and large, relay well, I'll say relay is a very old school podcast network. You know, like we're technology, that is world, you know, like podcasting begun mostly serving technology podcasts. That's kind of where the medium started because it was a very nerdy thing to have to get set up, and so the shows tended to be very nerdy, and we we very much remain in that world. We're not exclusively technology, but all of our shows have a technology flair to them. You know, some are more creativity, some are more focused on productivity and and like and expression, but technology is kind of a thread line that goes through all of them. I mean, and this comes down to a lot of the ways that we do things. I mean, Relay is very much a proponent of the OpenRSS standard. We are an absolutely an audio-first podcast network. We are dabbling in video, but we are doing it in a way that remains audio-first. We maintain our own publishing system. We built our own publishing system and maintain it to this day. We do all of our ads in-house. And, you know, the a lot of this comes with challenges, but I think the fact that we're still going after 12 years and we're still thriving is in part because of our fierce independence.

James Cridland 36:03

Yeah, and I think, you know, as a as somebody that self-hosts my own show as well, there are real benefits in doing that, and real benefits, of course, in playing around with new tech and being able to go, okay, well, is is this funding tag any good, for example? Uh and uh and all that kind of uh stuff. So you you kicked off a Kickstarter in early June, along with Jason Snell, to fund a new podcast about Apple's history called Designed in California. Tell me about what that show is, first of all.

SPEAKER_02 36:32

Yeah, so Design in California is an Apple history podcast. You know, Apple turned 50 this year, which is why we started the project, and I can talk more about kind of its beginnings in a moment. But essentially, we are picking stories from Apple history and telling them with huge amounts of research. They are kind of written but not scripted shows, you know, like that a lot of work has gone into them, and we're we're telling moments throughout their history in great detail. We're not doing the sh the story of Apple chronologically, we're we're kind of jumping around telling stories that are either relevant for the time or just very interesting to us. Like we're hitting just out of luck, really, for the the show's creation. We're currently publishing a series about the origins of the iPod. The iPod is 25 this week since its announcement. And then at the beginning of next year, we have 20 years of the iPhone, and so we're gonna be doing a big story about that. So, yeah, we're we're kind of going through and picking stories, we're telling parts of them, we're gonna come back to some of them later because some of the I mean, a company like Apple has had huge successes, huge failures, nearly went out of business. It's now the big, you know, biggest company in the world. There's a there is a a wealth, like a depth of stories and like a real world for us to to look at and picking things to talk about.

James Cridland 37:51

I enjoyed you talking about the origin of the iPod. Thank you for the Suzanne Vega earworm.

SPEAKER_02 37:57

Yes, I have had that in my head for a month now.

James Cridland 38:00

Yes, I was I was working in online audio in 2010, and yes, Suzanne Vega was the track that we had to listen to to work out whether or not it actually sounded halfway good. So thanks for that. Uh that's that's very kind. Um so in order for you to do this show, yeah, you chose Kickstarter, and you were looking for 40,000 US dollars to get the show up and running. Firstly, why did you choose Kickstarter? And secondly, why forty thousand dollars?

SPEAKER_02 38:29

Yeah, okay, so Jason Snell, he has been writing and recovering Apple for half of the company's existence. Uh, he was the editor-in-chief of MacWorld magazine, he's been an independent writer for nearly as long as Relay has founded, and Jason and I have have hosted a podcast together called Upgrade every week for over 10 years, and we talk about Apple News now. You know, like that is what we cover, that's our beat, and it's always been Jason's beat. So he has a lot of thoughts and a lot of knowledge and and a lot of experience with the company. And he had had an idea for doing kind of like a special series looking at a time when Apple's macOS was uh essentially failing, and then they brought in next. And he was thinking about doing this as like a as like a one one-off series thing, but was struggling to kind of kind of get it started. And then when Apple was turning 50 this year in April, we wanted to do something special to kind of mark the occasion. Uh, Jason and I, our favorite podcast is the rest is history, we adore the rest's history. If we're ever together, that is mostly what we're talking about. And we thought it would be fun to do a kind of rest is history style show or episode on how Apple was founded, and we would publish that. As we were working on it, we both fell in love with this format. And as we recorded the first episode, so as we recorded the episode that was going to be published on upgrade, as soon as we were done, we were like, How on earth can we do more of this? Like, we we really, really wanted to do more of it.

James Cridland 40:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:08

Now, what we and we started to think about how would we make that a reality? Now, it doesn't fit to make this part of the upgrade podcast. You know, like I imagine a lot of people would take the idea of great, we'll publish a second episode every week, we have an inbuilt audience, easy, easy, easy, we can just go for it. But for us, that didn't feel right because upgrade is about what is happening now and the future, and to have now episodes, a second episode of the week with Tenosaurus from the past, it it didn't make sense to us. What I have learned in the last 10 years is it's very hard to launch a new show and it's becoming harder and harder all the time for a myriad of reasons, and honestly, for reasons I don't understand, because if I did I would solve them, and no one really knows why, but it's just gotten harder and harder. There's just too many podcasts now, and breaking through is really difficult. And so we knew that if we were to launch this show as a separate endeavor, it would be very hard to build an audience, and therefore very hard to build advertising and very hard to build membership because we are a as a company, we are essentially split 50-50 now between our advertising and our membership, as kind of like the way that we make money from our shows and through our business. So I thought, well, I think that this show would be very attractive to members. Again, we looked at our favorite podcast, The Rest is History, as kind of a business model. They produce an entire series at once and release it all at once to members, and in the free feed, you go weekly. And I know that is super effective for me for signing up for the show, and I'm sure for many signing up for the show, and they have you know a great membership model. So I was like, Well, how we could do that, that would be good. But then how can we encourage membership? And so I thought, well, what if we were to sell memberships in advance? Like in that that we could fund the show that way by selling them in advance, and then I thought, well, the best mechanism for doing that is crowdfunding, which led us to Kickstarter. The $40,000 number was essentially if we're gonna do a show like this, you've got to commit to it. And that was another reason why we wanted to make sure that the bit that the show would work before we started. Either Jason or I want to launch a project and then kill it after a month because it doesn't work. So if we're in it, we're in it. And so we started thinking about how much would it cost to pay for a year of our time to produce this show. You know, we both kind of felt it was gonna be about a day a week at least of our time to produce a show. But that's because we've been successful and we're putting more into it. Um, but we felt like to do a good job, it would be at least one day of work a week. We landed on a number that was more than 40,000 to cover for both of us. Like we had like our secret goal of like if we got to 60, we would be absolutely set. Uh, we worked with a friend of ours who his name's Glenn Fleischmann he's a consultant for Kickstarters, mostly in books, and he said, You can't set your Kickstarter as the goal for what you actually need. You know, you gotta hope you'll hit more. He said, like, what is the absolute minimum that you could make? And if you did it, you could do it, and we landed on a 40,000. That that's how we got to that number.

James Cridland 43:17

I was interested that you worked with Glenn. Why why was he useful? He presumably comes with a lot of experience on how these Kickstarter campaigns work, right?

SPEAKER_02 43:27

Yeah, Glenn is a friend, so that was helpful. So we already knew we knew someone, and Kickstarter is incredibly complicated. Like, and it it has only the campaign has only become more complicated the more we've done with it. And there's just there is a lot in Kickstarter from a marketing perspective. It is its own inbuilt marketing engine. And so we wanted to work with someone who could help us understand what are the ways in which you should present the campaign, how should you make an effective video? Because we hoped, and I think this did happen. That we would actually reach people outside of our audience as well who may be interested in this project. And so we didn't want to just create something that was like, hey, you know us, you know. And so we we wanted to work with someone who could help us understand, who could encourage us, like, oh, you should do this kind of reward, that kind of reward. And there were things that he was recommending to us that to me I wasn't sure would work, but they did. Like offering discounts for our existing podcast members and all these kinds of things. Like, is that really going to make a big difference? It made a huge difference. And so it was just about, you know, we knew someone who had a lot of experience with this, and it would have been silly for us not to consult with them. Super useful.

James Cridland 44:40

Super useful. You said on Kickstarter that you were nervous about bringing it to Kickstarter. And I was just curious why the nervousness?

SPEAKER_02 44:48

Public failure. If the show didn't work, like if the Kickstarter campaign didn't work, you know, we would have put a lot, a lot of effort into this. And we had a real big kind of marketing plan that we were rolling out across the various shows that me and Jason do as a way to kind of get this project to work. And if you know if we only got $20,000 pledged, like that would hurt, you know, and that was the risk.

James Cridland 45:12

And that money goes back, doesn't it? You you don't actually even take 20,000. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:16

There are different crowdfunding systems. Like we could have, and yeah, we thought about this. Let's just put up a page on our website and do it. I knew that that would not be as effective as Kickstarter. There is like a crowd effect. But yeah, it was it was all an all-or-nothing, is how they call it.

James Cridland 45:31

So you kicked off on June the second. Yeah. You were really secretly hoping for $60,000, but you got the $40,000 that day. Yeah. And in a month, you got $311,000 from more than $3,400 backers. Why do you think it was so successful? Why do you think, firstly, people gave so much, but also secondly, that you had so many people there?

SPEAKER_02 45:57

Yeah, so we funded in an hour, and then we were at $100,000 within a day, and then it kind of went over that time. We didn't expect that. Like obviously, we did not expect that. There was a conversation Jason and I had where we were secretly whispering, what if we got to a hundred thousand? And then agreed we'd never talk about it ever again, right?

SPEAKER_05 46:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:22

Jason and I have been have been producing shows that are of high quality to a really engaged audience for over a decade. That is essentially why it happened. But there were there are a lot of things that led into why I think it got to that number, you know. Like I think there was we launched it at the exact right time. June is a very busy time in Apple's world. It's when they have their developer conference. And so it's one of the two times a year where we have the most attention, which is why we decided to do it then, even though because we are so busy, terrible time to do it, kind of like from a how we could handle it and how busy we were at that time. Similarly, we launched the show in September, which is the second busiest time of the year, but we knew that it was right for the to for getting the most kind of ears on the project. So people who have listened to Myanmar Jason's work, they knew there was no risk in us producing the show. Like we were going to deliver. And we also we released our first series in alongside the upgrade podcast for the first month. We wanted to show people like this is what it is. Apple has a a community around it, an enthusiast community that has lasted for 20 years, you know, and I'm still kind of a part of that community. I am a part of that community and have been for that for basically that entire time. That wider community, even people that don't listen to mine and Jason's show, they're aware of us, and and this was of interest to them. It was, you know, during Apple's 58th year, there was a lot of focus on it. 3,000 backers is the thing that is the most incredible to me, more than the number. Um, it is a huge amount of members to a paid podcast. It is, you know, it's up there, uh it jostles time to time, but like we've you know, we've been running memberships since uh 2020 in earnest. And design in California is like towards the top of our list now of members for for a brand new show. I mean, similarly, the the member to to free audience number is way out of whack for what we're used to. You know, you usually get a single digit percentage, but this is a big double digit percentage at this point. And we'll see how that goes over time. But it was, yeah, it was a huge surprise to us, and we were we were absolutely I still kind of can't believe it that we that we raised the amount of money that we did, but it has it's been a big validation for us that the show should exist and has absolutely helped us make it even better than we could have imagined because we have more resources available to us.

James Cridland 49:00

Yeah, yeah. W will you uh be building Kickstarter in for any new shows? I mean, I'm guessing that you don't launch new shows that often, do you?

SPEAKER_02 49:10

No, we we actually had stopped launching new shows a number of years ago. It it stopped making sense for our business and and it was adding more complexity into our company than it was bringing return. You know, like when relay started, every time we added a new show, we increased our revenue by 10 or 20 percent. Like because that it was for whatever reason. I mean, I guess you know, so yeah, for context, like relay launched a month before serial. Like that's kind of like putting us in the timeline, you know, of like where podcasting was and is. And so we had kind of felt like it it was becoming too difficult to do. And what we should do, and we had been doing, is hyper focusing on making our existing shows the best they could be, serving our audience, and you know, and I think that that has as we were starting to move more towards a membership model for our shows, has proved to really be of benefit to us and has really helped our business rather than focusing on like let's get more shows, more shows, more shows. I that there was a time when that was our mode and we'd stopped doing that. We now have a new model that we didn't know could exist for us before, which is to to pre-sell memberships to crowdfund a show. I wouldn't say we will never do it again, I wouldn't say we would do it again. I think that there were a lot of reasons why it worked for design in California that wouldn't work for a show that has two hosts that haven't worked together before, you know? Yeah. That there there is maybe something to say that if if we have another show that the existing hosts want to do, we can look at it, but we don't in anything in our business, we do not assume it will work always. Like when when when as we have added more shows of a membership component, we have looked at each one individually and we've made decisions that some shows would and some shows wouldn't work to having membership. It's we don't kind of consider everything alike.

James Cridland 51:02

Yeah, and and you know, I mean, certainly you can you can see the you know the network effect of the fact that you were both very well known, the fact that people trusted that you would produce a good high-quality product, and the fact that you clearly know what you're talking about, you know, as well. And I think it's interesting, the same month, another show called The Lovecraft Investigations, which used to be on the BBC, was dropped from there, but started as an as an indie show that got more than $500,000 in June as well from another Kickstarter, which I thought was really interesting. So, you know, the there is certainly something for a known quantity, which is then which is then available in this way. Um I'm I mean, I guess as some people would say you you you've got $311,000, you've got more than a quarter of a million dollars to make a show, but the show still has advertising in it. And some people would say that that's a bit greedy. Do you need advertising anymore?

SPEAKER_02 52:02

Well, one of the ever well the advertising in the show right now is people who back the Kickstarter. We had an advertising tier. We're gonna continue making it an avid an advertising focused show because that's part of our business. Like the the economics of this is is interesting, you know, and you see it's like ah they made 150 grand each. We absolutely did not. We have we have fees to pay to Kickstarter, right? Yeah we have we have consultancy fees, we have to pay for all the physical products that we have produced as part of the Kickstarter campaign. And then we have people to pay. You know, like we we work with video editor, we work with an audio editor, and because of the show's success, we're working, we're licensing imagery for the thumbnails because we're publishing the show on YouTube, and it's it's actually going pretty well for us. Like for us, we we've not had a lot of success on YouTube, but this show is finding an audience, and it's finding a new audience, which is why we wanted to do it. But we can tell these people are not as familiar with Jason and I, but they're enjoying the show, which has been great. But we're you know, we're paying for script and fact-checking, like we're we've added in a lot more expense to this show than we would have otherwise because we have the resources to do it. And as me and Jason have said to each other many times, if we're not going to try these things out, when are we gonna do that? And so we we have a lot of expense in the show, and that money will run out. Like, our plan is not just to do design in California for a year now, like we plan to do design in California for as long as we possibly can because we love it so much.

James Cridland 53:33

As long as you can think of story arcs.

SPEAKER_02 53:39

We have maybe five years worth of content for this show. Yeah, but so like yeah, there's a question.

James Cridland 53:45

Just one for one one for 2032, the massive failure that was the Apple home view. There they there you go. That's it. I don't think it's gonna be, James.

SPEAKER_02 53:52

I think that things are. But yes, the thing, the the great thing is history continues to be written about this company, it's not a thing that is done. You know, like there are there are stories that have happened a couple of years ago that in five years' time, if we're still doing the show, will feel like history, you know, like and like the the the the original failure of Apple Intelligence will be an interesting story to tell in in 2032. But yeah, there is we are able to invest in the show's production and we're doing that, but we're also trying to set the show up for the future, and so you know, we continue to sell memberships and we're getting new members every day, and we will make it part of advertising because relay as a company does not benefit from this money in the way that Jason, you know, the majority of the kind of what's left that goes to me and Jason to fund our time. But there is also Relay as a business has people that it needs to pay, and so that has to be continued as an ongoing kind of kind of thing.

James Cridland 54:53

So the show is called Designed in California. Have you learned new stuff about Apple from this podcast, from the work that you've been doing already?

SPEAKER_02 55:02

Yeah, actually, and we were we were wondering about this, uh, and when we were kind of looking at it, we were thinking, right, we're we're not gonna focus on original reporting so much in the show because there is so much existing stuff out there. You know, Jason has decades of magazines, like he has the magazines that he was a part of, but there's also there's lots of books, and we have books that are in print, out of print. We refer to all of this when looking at the research. But we're the the show existing is actually now bringing information to us that we didn't think would happen. So we have been very lucky that the Computer History Museum is very excited about this project and they have been engaging with us. They the the historian at the Computer History Museum, Hansen Sue, is reviewing our scripts for us. It's very exciting, and we're shouting them out in every episode. That's something they're really excited about. But also we we we send our scripts out to people who may have been around at the time, may have been at Apple or or were reporting on Apple. It's like d does the story make sense from your information. But the iPod series, somebody was able to get the script to members of the original team, and we had a major we had a large amount of comments from people who were there who worked on the iPod. And so in our uh origin of iPod series, there is information that has been confirmed or didn't really be known at the time. Not huge stuff, but there's just little bits. And we have a we have a series coming next, which is about Apple getting rid of Steve Jobs. So kind of when they they ousted him from the company. There was some information that we were trying to understand, just trying to to get a detail correct. It was a funny detail, but we wanted to see if we could get it correct. We reached out to one of the people who was involved and they gave us the information. So there is a we we we don't plan to try and do a lot of investigation with this show, but just kind of the nature of it existing is meaning we're finding out new little pieces of information, and I think that's going to keep scaling over time, and and I hope that it will.

James Cridland 57:17

And it's a really important, it's a really important thing, you know, as well, in terms of just looking at where history as where hist you know history goes. What one of the things that I've spent time doing is the history of podcasts, and particularly the history of podcasts in the UK, which has been very interesting, but also, you know, little things like talking to one of the launch engineers for the original Google podcast app, which was called Google Lytton, which was a long, long time ago, only available on the very first, you know, Android phones, and understanding what their plans were for that before in typical Google style they they decided to move on. But but I do think that you know just look uh going into the history while there are still people around to talk to is a really important thing.

SPEAKER_02 58:08

Yeah, and we hope we hope that that will be available to us. Apple, very secretive company, so sometimes it can be difficult to try and tell their history. But we hope that as we continue through this project, and and we have had conversations with Apple. They are excited that this show exists, right? Like that, you know, we've been speaking to people at Apple Podcasts and other people there in the PR teams, which we have a relationship with. They're encouraging, like they are very encouraging to us. And we hope we hope we can have a dialogue with them, but we also hope that we can have a dialogue with some people who were instrumental on certain projects and products that have since left the company. I have my eyes set on a few individuals that hopefully we'll be able to try and nail down one day, but has seems to have been hard to do so far, but but you never know. Yeah, indeed.

James Cridland 58:55

Mike, it's been uh a real pleasure talking to you. You can find your website and indeed many others wherever you find your podcasts. Thank you so much. Thanks, James.

Netflix Chases Mobile Discovery

Announcer 59:05

The Podnews Weekly Review with Buzz with Buzzsprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Sam Sethi 59:13

Mike Hurley and Danley. That was good. Um, I also recommend if you get time to listen to Captivates Elsie Escobar. She's got a really good post with Ariel Nissenblatt, Seth Resler, Steve Stewart. It's called How Can You Turn Podcast Listeners Into a Community? Again, I think it's a really good listen if you're watching.

James Cridland 59:33

And she should know. She's director of community. That that that's her job. So uh no, it's a good read. So uh well worth a read. You'll find out in the Podnews newsletter earlier on in the week. Just do a search for LC Escobar.

Sam Sethi 59:46

Now, companies getting into podcasting. Earlier the year we heard about Netflix getting into podcasting, and that was a surprise just as much as when we heard YouTube was getting into podcasting. So let's not scoff because you never know where it could end. But it seems that Netflix's next push into mobile could help for discovery. Again, we talked about algorithmic discovery, but in this case they have plans to introduce more personalized short form videos into the feed and making it easier for content to be discovered on smartphones. Now, I think of Netflix as a lean back, you know, chillax thing that they do, uh big screen. They're making a really big push into mobile, James. Why is that? I think because they're desperate.

James Cridland 1:00:33

I think that uh no, genu genuinely. I mean, I think they are they are being eaten alive by YouTube. Uh what what's very clear is that the people who are running Netflix are running it as if it was a legacy television network from ten years ago. They don't really understand what it is that they're doing, frankly. And I think that they are now flailing around and going, oh, let's add podcasts. Oh, that hasn't had that hasn't had a big effect. Let's add shorts, and but we'll call them clips. Uh and that appears to be what they're doing. I think that Netflix has utterly lost the plot. They've not had a big hit this year, which is kind of the number one thing for any uh any streamer to do. You know, they've not had a big hit. Their last big hit, big, big hit, was Stranger Things, of course, which was right at the end of last year. So they don't appear to have had now you you you can have fallow years, of course, but you know, so I think there's a problem there. But I think genuinely they are in a death flail of going, oh my god, we need something else, and they're now announcing clips is my own personal opinion. I don't use Netflix that much because nothing on it makes me particularly interested. But what do you think, Sam? I mean, obviously they're doing new features for the iPhone Duo, so you'll be happy. Come the iPhone Duo 2 when you buy that. Yeah, the one without the cracking screen.

Sam Sethi 1:01:58

Yeah, because I won't be able to see the film if it's gonna crack right through the middle of it. Um it's not very helpful, Apple. Um you think they would have tested it a bit better. They would, wouldn't they? But having said that, you know, I think you're right. I I watch less and less Netflix, but I also think they've got more and more competition coming now from other streaming platforms. They had the, you know, the whole part to themselves at one point. I think they've got the innovators' dilemma as well, because they did have such a high profit margin and they had everyone. I think now they're struggling how to keep the existing business going. We've seen that in the share price, we've seen it in the layoffs, we've seen it in other things. And these exclusive podcasts, I think, are going to be, like Spotify's exclusive podcast, I think gonna be a failure just as much as I think Instagram's full long format and exclusive will be a failure, although not called exclusives for half a million. Yeah, no, I I I I agree with you. I think Netflix is all over the place. Spotflix, here we come. Anyway.

Moving Catalogues Between YouTube And Spotify

James Cridland 1:03:03

Many you'd have kept hold of that of that domain.

Sam Sethi 1:03:06

Yeah.

James Cridland 1:03:07

Oh well, there we go. Uh no, talking about talking about power supporters, our our our fourth favourite podcast hosting company, Flightcast, has done something, has done something very good, haven't they?

Sam Sethi 1:03:20

Yeah. Upload once, publish everywhere. That's the motto. And yeah, it rocks over at Flightcast has produced a tool. And I think it's quite an interesting one, actually, because up until now it's been upload and published to Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and the cracks between them often are that people have to directly upload to YouTube. And they've got a catalogue, a back catalogue. Now, what Rox has done is said, well, hang on a minute, why don't you, with Flightcast, upload all of your YouTube catalogue to Spotify and then use Spotify's monetization to get some money from your back catalogue. And so that's what they've done. Very clever.

James Cridland 1:04:02

Yeah, I think it's a really clever plan. So if you remember a couple of years ago, uh Blueberry added vid to pod, which was a way of going into YouTube and saying you can turn this YouTube video into an audio podcast, and they would do all of that automatically for you. And this is Flightcast doing the so obvious thing it it almost hurts your head that nobody else had launched this, which is Well, no, they can't because we aren't Stephen Barclay with secret access to the Spotify API. No, they won't work all although although our sponsor has access to Spotify video, so I would imagine that uh they they could have thought about this had they only thought about this. But yes, so I think it's a very clever idea. So, and as you so rightly say, if they are big enough and they will need to be big enough on the Spotify platform as well to be eligible, but they can earn money out of the Spotify platform as well, which is probably worthwhile because it'll cost you $100 a month to turn this product on. It is not a cheap product, but it's a product that I think uh should work quite nicely.

Sam Sethi 1:05:10

I was talking to a couple of customers this week for TrueFans, and one of the things they both asked these two customers, could we integrate with Riverside and with DScript? And I was like, okay, that's you know something we can look at. And it was the customer said to me, because what's nice when they edit in DScript, they do the video and then one click publish to YouTube. And he said, I don't have to download and upload. He says it goes from DScript servers to YouTube servers. He says, it's brilliant, saves me a lot of time. And I thought, yeah, this is how we're all seeing workflows now. You know, save me time, have me have an option to click it and send it. I think we talked about Flightcast um probably three, four months ago having a super fast upload capability. And I was like, How are they doing that? And you said, Well, it's Google Drive to Google Drive, basically. So you know.

James Cridland 1:06:01

Yeah, so it never needs to it never needs to be downloaded to your incredibly slow British telecom link. Uh exactly. So I think that's probably that's probably probably a good thing. I mean, you know, so there'll be there'll be excitement at the Stephen Bartlett Corporation because of this. And also excitement because the diary of a CEO, it's official, it has become the most subscribed podcast on YouTube. It's overtaken Joe Rogan just to become the number one subscribes podcast on that platform. But what I found more interesting about that, Sam, was that actually, yes, more than one billion YouTube views so far this year. But a quarter of a million of those, sorry, a quarter of a billion of those were used using audio tracks other than English. So they produce different audio tracks. I'm not sure whether that's uh Stephen Bartlett's lot or whether that's YouTube who are producing those, but they they produce additional audio tracks which allow them, therefore, to actually be understood by people who only speak Hindi or people who only speak Arabic and so on and so forth. And that's a quarter of their plays, which is pretty big, I thought.

Sam Sethi 1:07:15

So yeah, really interesting. Yeah, we saw this with Mr. Beast actually. He he grew his platform, and one of the things he said in an interview was because of the international language options that they produced. And I think people like Joe Rogan are myopic and they will only talk to the American audience and don't think about a worldwide audience. You know, we often joke about how US companies launch in the US only or US first and they don't think about the rest of the world, or they use Australia as a test bed because they think they sound like Americans. And other than that, the the fundamentalist, yeah, congratulations. They've worked out that there is a global audience and and global audience has reach. I keep saying to friends there that a third or no half of the world is somewhere between India and China, right? And the middle class of those two countries is getting very affluent. And I think you know, people have these visions of both those countries from 60 or 70 years ago. No, they they're driving BMWs, they won't be able to.

James Cridland 1:08:26

Well frankly, from 30 years ago. But yes, it's it's it's all changed. It absolutely has all changed. Um I mean particularly China, but

Podcast Awards And Podcast Show London

James Cridland 1:08:33

India as well. You know, uh the the amount of change going on there is is phenomenal as well. So yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And and I think people just ignore that, particularly, you know, a lot of the a lot of the American podcast folk ignore that or just simply don't even think about it. Right, let's talk about awards and events. It's the final week to enter the Ambiz. Submissions close on Friday. You were at the Independent Podcast Awards in London Town earlier on this week. How was that then, Sam?

Sam Sethi 1:09:08

It was great, and congratulations to all the organisers. It was a really well done event. It was the fourth year, it was at King's Place. We had a drag artist as the compare who she was brilliant, I have to say, absolutely brilliant, kept the whole thing going, especially when you've got to Award 29. And it's like, oh my god, how can we keep the energy in the room? So well done. The highlight of the night was where Claire Wake Brown and I were there handing out awards, but the highlight for me was a 97-year-old podcaster with her podcast called War Hall, a theatre of the mind. It was all about what it was like in dance halls and stuff during the war, and it was brilliant. And congratulations, she got on stage and she got a standing ovation. That was good. There was an award that I handed out on your behalf, James, for the sports section. Obviously, well understood. I was thinking, so aligned. Yes. And the award went to a grand prix, and yes, so that was quite interesting. But the winner of the whole thing, um, very exciting for her, Maria Passingham. It was great days out on the bus from Buxton, which brilliant, brilliant, and she was so thrilled. Yeah, and she is now going to have uh a night at a hotel in London as part of the prize, and in Leicester Square, they will be putting up on the billboard her podcast cover art. And what made me laugh was the headline sponsor was YouTube, right? And when they were reading out, and the winner is, and she will be on the Spotify Billboard. And I'm like going. Did anyone not think to invite Spotify to do it instead, right?

James Cridland 1:10:59

So I guess. Maybe Spotify said no. But that's that's excellent news, and I remember covering that particular show when that was launched. So hurrah for that, and I'm glad that you had a a good a good day. Yes. Sound as if that was jolly good. Uh, the next big event, of course, happening in uh London is uh the podcast show London 2027, which tickets have just gone on sale. You can use the code PodNews10 to save on eligible passes. Uh, you'll probably save enough for a pint of beer, in which case you should give that pint of beer to us. That would be very good. Or for Sam a um a fruit-based drink. It's in London, uh, May 19th and 20th. A few new things going on. Uh, there's a larger expo space, so they've actually found some more space in that building, which I always knew existed, but nobody actually ever shows me where that uh where that space was. But there's gonna be more space in that building for uh more companies to be there, which is great, because that's actually a real part of why people go to these sorts of events in the first place, is just to wander around and go, okay, what do you do? Why should I be interested in your particular company? So I'm glad that there's gonna be more on that. There's gonna be more on networking, uh, there's gonna be more throughout the whole week, which is nice. So they're gonna be more involved with that sort of thing. And there's gonna be a stage focused on video, because of course there is, and uh a new creator economy zone, uh, which will help the industry meet the creators driving this space. Uh, it's its sixth year, and I'm very much looking forward to taking part. I believe if I play my cards right that I will be the opening speaker again, although the opening speaker doesn't mean much, it just means that um just means that I'm crowbarred before everybody else. So uh please do come along. And as I say, if you want to save on those passes, Podnews 10 is the uh code for that. You'll be there, Sam, won't you? Well, we'll have our drinks again as usual the night before.

Sam Sethi 1:12:56

So yeah, it's all good. Yeah, no, I'm very much on the show. We'll be doing a live show, I hope, as well.

James Cridland 1:13:02

Yes, that's that's written into the contract too, I'm afraid. So, yes, so you and I uh we we will be we will be there on the last session of the uh of the event as well, doing this exact show and pressing buttons that make jingles happen like this.

Announcer 1:13:16

The tech stuff on the Podnews Weekly Review.

James Cridland 1:13:20

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Podnews newsletter. Here's where Sam talks technology.

Sam Sethi 1:13:26

Yeah, a couple of things, and I think this is quite nice. Our sponsors, Buzzsprout, have launched a new podcast starter kit. It turns a few answers about your idea into name, suggestions,

Tools And Tech For Podcasters

Sam Sethi 1:13:36

a description, cover art, and categories. So, yeah, it was on BuzzCast, uh, Jordan and Albin announced it, and I should I should have a listen to that for stories. Yes, exactly. I seem to find one every week. Um maybe they should send you a press release.

James Cridland 1:13:53

That would help. Well, you know, there you go. I mean, I mean, if only I knew their head of marketing. Um RS.com. Um I'm an I'm an advisor. They've launched a learning center.

Sam Sethi 1:14:05

So you don't know anything about this story either, then?

James Cridland 1:14:07

Uh I actually don't, no. Uh, this is this is quite neat. They've launched a learning center. It's got a set of courses to cover podcasters of every stage, talking about liquid content. This is essentially content that they have taken from other stuff that they have done on the RSS website, but put it all together, done a good job of actually making it findable and all of that. It's a static website in case you're interested. But it's all free wherever you're hosted. Um, you can go and take a uh peek at that. But uh a set of courses, you even get a little a certificate uh showing that you have actually covered the courses. It's at learn.rs.com if you want to take a peek at that. And uh related, rss.com has added voicemail for their users. Oh, I wonder whether they got that idea. Uh no idea. It allows listeners to leave voicemail as feedback and sends you an email when they do. Ah, sounds a little bit like our sponsors, Buzzsprout. I host a show on RSS.com, which is all which is all about radio. It's deeply dull. And I got my first voicemail for that last week. Is that the name of the show? Deeply dull. I mean it should be, frankly. Deeply dull stuff about radio. Radioland, if you want to go and find that. Yes. And uh Parasocial.

Sam Sethi 1:15:24

What's Parasocial, Sam? It's a new podcast app playing on the word about parasocial relationships. But the good news is they've added support for video. Well done, chaps. And the app supports inline, full screen, and picture-in-picture mode. Well, yes, what don't we all? And iPhone, iPad, iPhone Duo, and macOS. No, but that's very good. So they've they've clearly gone and built native apps. So I need to go and play with that. Sounds very cool. Yes, very nice too.

James Cridland 1:15:51

Talking about Apple stuff, uh, the latest version of the Safari browser, which is built in, of course, to Apple's iPhone and Apple's Mac, uh, now blocks something called resolution infrastructure. Why should you care about that? Well, resolution infrastructure are the people in the middle of tons of uh websites that collate all of your information so that they can then go back and say, ah, this IP address uh clearly has a woman and a man who live in it because of the websites that they're looking at, and clearly also has a young child who lives in there as well. So if you're going to put any advertising in this podcast feed or in this ad banner, uh then you might want to consider that. That's all of this resolution infrastructure stuff, and the and Safari is basically blocking it, and the IEB is most upset, and the IEB suggests that the protections go beyond applicable legal requirements. Good. That's what they should be doing. Good. And it means that the websites and services that have first-party data on their users, so people like Spotify, obviously, but also Apple Podcasts to an extent, uh are likely to benefit because obviously they will know more about their users than others do.

Sam Sethi 1:17:03

I'm I'm still a Chrome user by by default, but I am finding the new Safari much faster than the Chrome version I'm using.

James Cridland 1:17:12

Yeah. No, I think Safari is a pretty good browser now. I I I kind of want to keep on using a Chrome service because that's how most people see the website that I author, and so therefore I should probably keep on using Chrome. And I also can't quite work out how to write, I have to write a security extension for the Podnews website so that I can see a version of the Podnews website that nobody else can. The way I do that is by writing an extension, and I have yet to work out how to write an extension for Safari. It's much, much more complicated. Well, I mean it might well be, yes. Or frankly, Apple Artificial Intelligence. Or should or should we call it superintelligence? Oh no, we shouldn't. So that that I think I think would be good. I would recommend, by the way, the Helium browser, which I think you'll find at helium.computer, I think is their website address. But anyway, it's basically Google Chrome with all of the Google stuff taken out, even the password manager taken out, because your browser shouldn't have a password manager in it. That's what your operating system ought to be doing. So that's one that I would um probably r recommend. But I'm using Safari now on my on my phone, so there you go.

Podcast Piracy Copies And Protection

Sam Sethi 1:18:25

Now, uh a story that you've been sort of covering for the last few weeks on Podnews Daily is about Spreca and the problem of let's say 1700 shows being copied. What's the update, James?

James Cridland 1:18:39

So there's a few things to say on this. Spreca are aware of my uh coverage and they are certainly looking into what they can do. I've given them an idea of a quick and easy way that they can essentially fix this to make it easier for uh f for everybody, you know, in terms of this. But anyway, uh where where we uh uh currently are, so so you know, Spreco is certainly working on this. I think they're more aware now of the issue than they were, and they're more aware now of why it's an issue as well. It's not just a money issue, it's also an issue in terms of charts and in church in terms of user confusion and in terms of all of that stuff. So I think that they now understand that, which is really helpful, and I've had some good conversations with them. But where we are in terms of this is that firstly, Spreaker aren't alone. There are other podcast companies where there are copies of shows. One of them is our sponsor, Buzzsprout, and one of them is RSS.com, who I'm an advisor for. So, you know, it's happening to everybody. The interesting thing that I have seen is something that Podcast Index have done. And they've produced a set of data which highlights look-alike feeds throughout its catalogue. There are CSV files that you can uh have a look at every single day, which is great. And there's also a quick overview of the overview of the top 500, more than 290 of them are in Spreaker. So, you know, take from that what you will. But Dave Jones has obviously been very busy producing something which will be very helpful for the industry if the industry takes it up, and I hope that the industry does, and I hope also that the industry takes a look at at a pr pretty simple code of practice that might actually help fix all of this. The problem, I guess, is who would be in charge of a code of practice? Because it's kind of it's not really the IB because it's not really anything to do with them. Is it the podcast standards project? Well, it is.

Sam Sethi 1:20:45

I mean, look, I think Justin's brilliant, and but I mean he's probably got work to do with Transistor, he's got other things to do.

James Cridland 1:20:55

Yes, exactly.

Sam Sethi 1:20:55

Exactly. The ski season started, he's gonna be really busy boarding. Yes. I mean, come on. I mean, you know, don't pile on the poor boy. No, I don't know. I don't know the answer. The answer to the question is I don't know. And I think we talked about the lock tag, you know, actually people honouring the lock tag and not just pretending it oh well.

James Cridland 1:21:18

And to be fair, Spreaker honour the lock tag. And if your lock tag is on, you won't be able to import into Spreaker. Now Spreaker doesn't support the lock tag if you're on Spreaker, which is possibly a mistake. But I think, you know, again, yes, you know, the lock tag certainly helps. Obviously, it doesn't stop somebody from downloading the audio files and from copying the RSS feed. Uh of course it doesn't. But it does at least put that hurdle in place which stops somebody who doesn't understand much about podcasting just going on to a service like this and saying, please copy this show. And uh you know, it can stop stop that. So I think it's useful if it's um put into place there, yeah.

Sam Sethi 1:22:03

There's also a service that started called PodProtect, I noticed that was a new goal supporter on the Podnews Daily.

James Cridland 1:22:12

Yes, which is nice. It's at PodProtect.net. It's from Lisa Lacey, and uh she has put together an entire product which is essentially monitoring your show for unauthorized copies and impersonation. There's a sign-up that you can do for a network as well as one individual show. I think it always says something when there is a company you know built to fix a problem. And so uh yeah, if you want to take a peek at that, if you're concerned about somebody stealing your work, then podprotect.net is certainly a place to go and take

Listener Mail And Power Supporters

James Cridland 1:22:47

a peek at.

Announcer 1:22:47

Fan mail mail and voicemail our favorite time of the week, it's the Podnews Weekly Review inbox.

James Cridland 1:22:56

Yes, so many different ways to get in touch with us. Voicemail by using the link in our show notes or email as well. We've got some exciting fan mail, if not some voicemail. Neil I uh Neil Vellio, who I should now call Neil. Oh, yes, I meant to send a voicemail, Velio. He has said, firstly, massively appreciate the plug from Podmastery. Thank you. Yes, indeed. And great point about the Spreaker pri piracy issue. This is this is where I wish that I could read at the at the size of the of the text that's in front of me. I've made it bigger now. He says, Great point about the Spreaker piracy issue being another point against RSS. It sucks. The issue I imagine he's talking about rather than the rather than open RSS. But thank you, Neil. What's uh Seth Goldstein said to us?

Sam Sethi 1:23:52

How is Spreaker still not getting sued? That's a good question. And I don't think RSS is dead, I think it's changing, and I agree with you, Seth. I think we are creating what I term super feeds. I think audio, video, we go back to liquid content. I think we're gonna see much more content in the feed and ownership of that feed as well. So yeah, it is changing.

James Cridland 1:24:16

Yeah, no, indeed. Well, I'm grateful to you, to you two. You're both power supporters. We've got 25 of those. They're all excellent people, uh, including Ralph E. Owens, Silas Vogt, John Spurlock, uh, mentioned him earlier, and Ralph Estepp Jr., who I saw earlier on this week, as well, along with Dave Jackson, uh, who is also a power supporter, in the Podcast Professionals Association webinar, which was good fun to end up doing from this very room, but uh early in the morning with a coffee on my desk rather than whatever it is I've got here. And yes, so excellent. If you would like to join them, please do. We share uh any money that we make through that. Some of that goes to beer and wine at uh events, and some of that just goes into our pockets because that's kind of what it's supposed to be used for. But anyway, weekly.podnews.net is the website address. That was a sell, wasn't it? Weekly.podnews.net. And you can uh start for just uh a couple of uh a couple of dollars a month, and that would be a lovely thing.

Sam Sethi 1:25:19

So we're going to lose one as well though. Cy Jobling is leaving the podcast industry, and uh you ping me to say it's not about us, it's uh it's about him.

James Cridland 1:25:29

And why leave the podcast industry? How dare he? I I know exactly why he would. So Cy, thank you very much. Much appreciated. So uh yes, no, that's a that's uh always a thing. So we need another another number 25 in that case, weekly.podnews.net. You, yes, you might wish to go and uh do that. So what's happened for you this week, uh

Creator Drama And TrueFans Updates

James Cridland 1:25:51

Sam? You obviously the there was the Independent Podcast Awards, which you uh have mentioned. What else have you what else have you been doing? Have you been upsetting anybody on online recently?

Sam Sethi 1:26:01

No, I didn't think I was upsetting anybody, but um I handed out the award to, you know, the independent podcast award to Grand Prix, and then on LinkedIn I found a total Grom Prix. He uh wrote a post about TrueFans which was totally wrong from start to finish, had no idea what we were doing, and got it wrong all over the place. But he posted it. So of course I got alerted and I went and had a look at it, and then he wrote me a war and peace email, mostly AI generated, I suspect. So I took the time, I thought, no, I'm gonna take the time, calm down, answer the question, try and correct his assumptions, and which in the most part I think I did, and he then posted my response, which again I was like, just why don't you just understand it? You're a host. So David in France, who is the president of Vodio, he decided that the fact that we have podcasts from the companies that he hosts on our app we shouldn't have because how are we getting them? And I tried to explain how RSS worked.

James Cridland 1:27:13

Has he heard of RSS?

Sam Sethi 1:27:15

Well, he says he has, but clearly he doesn't understand it. He says, No, RSS is my ownership, and we did not give you permission to put it on your app. And I went, Well, you published it to the podcast index, and then somebody searched for it on our app, and guess what? We then added it to our local index just to save time. And he said, Oh, you're making money off them and you're distributing them and you're copying. I said, No, we don't do any of that. Uh he says, You charge money, and I said, No, we don't do that either. It's free on TreeFans. You can claim your podcast, you can change your RSS, we don't change anything. The only time we change it is when we host and the user or creator has made a change, and that's the only time. And he said, Ah, you're taking money. I said, No, we have an option. It it Ask permission or ask forgiveness, which is the if I want to pay a micropayment to a creator that's not claimed their podcast, we hold that for them. We alert the creator and we say, You have got money available here. There's no cash, just claim your podcast and we'll give you the money. But if there's no email in it, we return the money and say no, I'm sorry. And after 30 days, if the person hasn't claimed it, we return the money. We know all the people who made the payments because they're all on TrueFans. So it's not that hard. He couldn't get his little head around it, bless him. And so he then said, I want all of my podcasts removed from your platform. And at one o'clock last night, I just went, you know what, screw you. And I took all 126 down. And then I went to Mo this morning blockvodio.fr. And now, James, I am getting emails from the podcasters who are hosted on Vodeo asking why their podcast is not on TrueFans. There you go. And I now got to go after this show and explain to them what's happened and waste my time even more. And the bottom of every one of those emails, I would use OSHA.fr if I was you.

unknown 1:29:10

Yes.

James Cridland 1:29:10

Yes. Link to OSHA, which is uh definitely a thing. Odile Beniflar from OSHA, by the way, who I I I think she's just spent her fifth year at the company, and they give you little sort of Lego spacemen that look a bit like you, and they put additional bricks on to show how many years you've worked for the company. Very strange, the French. They're trying to tax the internet at the moment. Oh yes, they are, aren't they? Yes, it's all it's all it's all a bit bad. They're banking. Well, apart from apart from uh apart from upsetting the French, which is a very English thing to do, um what what else have you been up to?

Sam Sethi 1:29:50

I think one of the things I've always wanted to do is have a live HLS server capability for TrueFan. So we do audio and video, and I've always wanted that. And we've talked about how the lit tag isn't really properly supported by hosts, and uh RSS did a half decent job but didn't go 100% the way. So we're trying to get that working right now, and we're adding a new live radio page. We've got all of the HLS server points, so we're gonna just create a nice little radio page, and uh it's just a fun thing for us to do. I think it's more to do with my days back at River Radio, but we'll we'll launch it up this week, so that's fun. And then I completed another leg of the Cotswolds Way, it's so beautiful over there. So we did 20 miles last weekend walking in the Cotswolds with all of the autumnal trees. It was a little bit foggy in the beginning of the day, we couldn't see a thing, but by the end it was very pretty.

James Cridland 1:30:46

Well, it's a very nice uh couple of pictures, and what's nice is that one of them has no people in there at all, and the other one has has has people looking away from the camera. So I I guess if you're watching this on the video version, you might see those beautiful pictures here. Rather than the other ones, which I wasn't going to uh I wasn't gonna show all of your family, but I think I can show these two, can't I?

Sam Sethi 1:31:09

Yeah, that's me, the wife and the dog.

James Cridland 1:31:10

Yeah. There you go. You you, the wife and the dog from the back. Gosh, there's a thing.

Sam Sethi 1:31:20

Anyway, James, what's happened for you, my friend?

AWS Headaches And E-Ink Joy

James Cridland 1:31:23

Well, well, well, I have been yes, d dealing with all kinds of all kinds of entertaining things. I got an email today from AWS, the world's friendliest compute system. So AWS has told me uh that one of my cloud front distributions, but it's not gonna tell me which, because I have 15, yeah, one of those has got up to 85% of the usage limit uh for for the the number of of requests. And so, you know, one of them we're we're not gonna tell you which one, but one of them has. So the usage uh you you might be interested in in knowing where where I've got up to. So the email says that I'm currently on 9097585 requests. So what's that, nine million requests or something? Anyway, and the usage limit is 1.0 E7. Uh biggest biggest company in the world. I mean, I mean, however shit you think you are at your job, uh you will not outshit Amazon Web Services. Just what is going on? So anyway, yes, so who knows what what it is that they're actually doing there. So I've got to deal with that later. I also managed to I put my one of my websites, not the Podnews one, but I put one of my websites onto a very expensive monthly tariff because that could theoretically at least mean that I could go on to that expensive tariff for a month, and then and then by that point I could go down to a really cheap one. So it was it was a quick go. Anyway, it turns out that no, they're counting something else, and I'll never be able to go down to the cheap one. So now I'm busy working out how I can close that website down. Uh, because that's probably gonna make rather more sense. AWS, the world's most complicated thing. But on a brighter note, I bought myself a new e-ink book reader. Right. Which I'm very excited by. It's a thing called by Books, and it's called a Pico, and it's a nice small thing that you can fit into your pocket and walk around with, and it's much the same as the cheap one that I've got. I was wondering if it was on my desk, but it isn't, from XTE Inc., which I've been using for a couple of months, and that's great, that's perfect, except it doesn't have a backlight. And I would like to read stuff in bed. So this one will be uh absolutely perfect. And literally the day after I put the order in, it's only a hundred dollars, but the day after I put that audio, that uh order in, I had an email address from somebody in China who makes e-ink readers. They'd noticed that I've written about them on my blog, and they said, Would you like one of our e-ink readers to to review? And uh so rather annoyingly, I'm going to move from having no small e-ink readers with a backlight to having two of the things. So I'm I'm I'm looking forward to learning a little bit more about both of those. That should be uh that should be fun. But uh yes, it never rains but it pours. It's very strange. I'm more worried that the Chinese are tracking your blog, but don't you worry about it. Well, I I used to be, so I used to write a lot about beer on my on my blog, and that was brilliant because I then got invited by Guinness into their headquarters in London, which is in a boring nondescript office block, but you go in there and you uh go past a couple of doors and then you open a door and you're in a pub because they've got a pub in their building, because of course they do. Wow, and the point of it was to go in and learn how to pull a perfect pint of Guinness. So I have been trained, trained by a Guinness bartender to pull the perfect pint of Guinness. It's all marketing, to pull a perfect pint of Guinness, and so yes, that that was uh that was an excellent evening with a lot of other beer bloggers, and I managed to get in because I blogged about beer quite a lot.

Sam Sethi 1:35:20

So can I combine e-inc with beer for you? If you go to the Guinness factory in Dublin, they will take a photo of your face and then they will put that in the cream on the top of your Guinness.

James Cridland 1:35:34

They will indeed. They will indeed, and I have done that. Uh and that's very good. And not only that, but they are now doing that in Guinness branded pubs worldwide. So you can actually go into there was one that I found in Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur when I was there, which was quite uh weird, because you know, Guinness is most certainly not not halal. Um but nevertheless uh ended up going in there and the and yes, they had one of those that those m machines as well. Fully proper, you know, branded Guinness place. But what was interesting is you could go the pub was through the shop. So they had a shop where you could buy Guinness merchandise and stuff like that, which you which you end up going going through when you leave the pub at the end of the evening. So if you want to buy yourself a little a little reminder, then you can buy

Guinness Talk And Final Goodbyes

James Cridland 1:36:25

yourself a Guinness t-shirt or something. Very strange.

Sam Sethi 1:36:27

I'm gonna look up now is Guinness Zero Halal. Not that I'm a Muslim, but who cares?

James Cridland 1:36:32

Anyway. Well, uh, and I can uh and I can boringly answer that for you because when I was in when I was in Saudi Arabia, I went there for a conference. I don't normally talk about it, but heck, you know, there we are. And so I went to Saudi Arabia for a conference, and the hotel was right next to a shopping centre, which included a carfour, a big, big supermarket. And of course it didn't sell beer, but it sold things that looked and tasted a bit like beer, which is more than you could get from the hotel bar at the time. So I thought, great, well, I will sample all of these not beers. And there was a Guinness in there. Yeah, there was a Guinness. No, it's it wasn't a Guinness 0%, because I don't there are some of these alcohol-free beers that aren't alcohol free. They've got like 0.25% or something. They're really, really, really low, but they don't count as alcohol free. I think Guinness 0% is alcohol free, I think. Yeah. And so but there was an alternative.

Sam Sethi 1:37:30

At least that's what I told the officer.

James Cridland 1:37:33

But there was a there was a different Guinness in there, which was which was a little bit different. So maybe Guinness Zero hasn't made it to Saudi Arabia. I think there was a Budweiser as well from memory, which they were selling as well. So yeah. And they tasted fine. You know, I wouldn't I wouldn't go out of my way, but there's alcohol-free wine as well, isn't there?

Sam Sethi 1:37:56

Uh don't get me started on that. That is just ribena. It is rubbish. Friend of mine, Lucy, she she has that.

James Cridland 1:38:05

Surely you should be you should be selling it. It's the it's the it's the it's the growing it's the growing thing, alcohol-free drinks.

Sam Sethi 1:38:13

Yeah, it is. The younger generation.

James Cridland 1:38:15

You could be rich, you could you could fund fund TrueFans with your wine business.

Sam Sethi 1:38:20

No cross fertilization. No, not allowed. Oh, okay. No, orange wine is currently in vogue. I'm sorry, what?

James Cridland 1:38:30

Orange wine.

Sam Sethi 1:38:31

Orange wine, yes. So they um the fermentation process, they don't quite go and leave it red or go all the way to rose or white, they go to an orange colour now, and that suddenly became trendy because all these Michelin-style restaurants started storing or selling orange wine, yes.

James Cridland 1:38:50

It became trendy until November the third, and then after that, of course, nobody's interested. But uh, you know, blueberry wine, I'm sure, will be uh the thing now. I'm sure that the Finns are already making that, aren't they? Blueberry wine. I'm sure. Yes. Yes, I'm sure they are. Uh anyway, uh all after that bombshell, uh that's it for this week. All of our podcast stories, of course, taken from the Podnews Daily Newsletter. Please subscribe to that. You'll find it at Podnews.net.

Sam Sethi 1:39:16

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James Cridland 1:39:31

Our music's from TM Studios. Our voiceover is Sheila D, and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

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