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Podnews Weekly Review - Adam Curry's AI Podcast Future · KDAV Radio

• 0:00
  James Cridland: Coming up, Adam Curry, the Pod Father himself, and a new move for Inception Point AI.
• 0:07
  Announcer: With James Cridland and Sam Sethi.
• 0:10
  Announcer: This is the Podnews Weekly Review with Buzz with Buzzsprout.
• 0:15
  Announcer: Start podcasting, keep podcasting.
• 0:19
  Sam Sethi: So, James, let's start with Jeanine Wright.
• 0:21
  Sam Sethi: Not a line I thought I would see in the script.
• 0:24
  Sam Sethi: But here we are.
• 0:25
  Sam Sethi: In her podcast this week, her old company, Inception Point AI, was called The Devil.
• 0:30
  Sam Sethi: Ouch.
• 0:31
  Sam Sethi: And she started something new called Liquid Studios.
• 0:34
  Sam Sethi: And Podnews is involved.
• 0:36
  Sam Sethi: What?
• 0:37
  Sam Sethi: Sorry.
• 0:38
  Sam Sethi: Have you joined the devil too, James?
• 0:40
  Sam Sethi: What's going on, mate?
• 0:42
  James Cridland: Don't think so.
• 0:43
  James Cridland: So, yes, so we know what Liquid Studios is all about now.
• 0:46
  James Cridland: We know what Jeanine Wright has been planning for some time.
• 0:50
  James Cridland: Uh, she's essentially planning a really useful and I think a really good thing of taking great audio and making that great audio work across all of the different platforms.
• 1:02
  James Cridland: We'll be talking about liquid content later, and this is very much Liquid Studios working on that liquid content.
• 1:09
  James Cridland: So we have we, Podnews, have been working with Liquid Studios to produce a rather beautiful visualized version of the Podnews Daily newsletter, which you'll see over the next week.
• 1:22
  James Cridland: And what's actually quite fun about it is that they have no idea what's going to be in the Podnews newsletter until basically I I publish it.
• 1:30
  James Cridland: And as soon as I publish it, then they actually get to see a little bit of that.
• 1:35
  James Cridland: But then they've got less than an hour to basically work out, okay, well, what's the what's the visual going to be like?
• 1:42
  James Cridland: And it looks really smart.
• 1:43
  James Cridland: So I'm really pleased.
• 1:44
  James Cridland: We've worked together on that.
• 1:46
  James Cridland: And you will see it over the next week in the alternate enclosure tag, Sam.
• 1:50
  James Cridland: I'm sure you'll be pleased to know, and various other places as well, YouTube, LinkedIn, and all of that.
• 1:55
  James Cridland: So that should be good.
• 1:56
  Sam Sethi: Okay, how did that come about?
• 1:58
  Sam Sethi: When did when did you go to the mountain?
• 2:02
  Sam Sethi: What happened?
• 2:04
  James Cridland: Well, I caught up with Jeanine.
• 2:07
  James Cridland: I've always I've always liked her.
• 2:08
  James Cridland: I've never liked her old ideas, but I've but I've always liked her.
• 2:13
  James Cridland: We caught up at the podcast movement, and and it was great to catch up with her there.
• 2:18
  James Cridland: And and she said, Oh, I've got something that you might be interested in.
• 2:21
  James Cridland: And they came up with this with this idea.
• 2:24
  James Cridland: And I think it does show it off actually in a really good light, in that you can actually see all of the sorts of things that you can do with AI being used the way that I think AI ought to be used, which is augmenting you know great content, or in my case, augmenting content, and uh turning that into some great video.
• 2:44
  James Cridland: So uh yeah, I thought it was I thought it was worthwhile having a go.
• 2:48
  James Cridland: It's a it's only a pilot, it's only there for a week, but it's certainly something that I think is worth having a play with.
• 2:53
  Sam Sethi: Yeah, she was on Freakonomics this week, which is a really good listen.
• 2:57
  Sam Sethi: It's got quite a few people that we know on there, and it was an old interview of hers because it dated back to the beginning of the year when she was still doing Inception Point AI.
• 3:08
  Sam Sethi: But in there, she did hint that the company was about to pivot towards more of a technology play and less of a I don't I don't know, a an annoyance, that would be one word, but a an example of the technology in action.
• 3:25
  James Cridland: Yes.
• 3:27
  Sam Sethi: So yeah, look, we'll see, we'll see what the reception is, I guess, from the marketplace when you put it out, James.
• 3:34
  James Cridland: Yeah, yeah.
• 3:34
  James Cridland: No, I think it's uh I think it's really really interesting.
• 3:37
  James Cridland: So you should be able by the time the Podnews Weekly Review goes out this week, you should be able to see two different episodes.
• 3:44
  James Cridland: So see how the system has worked with those two, including one recorded in Sydney.
• 3:49
  James Cridland: So who knows how all of that stuff is going to work.
• 3:53
  James Cridland: But yes, no, I think it's all good.
• 3:55
  James Cridland: All good.
• 3:56
  Sam Sethi: Okay.
• 3:57
  Sam Sethi: Well, let's move on to another story.
• 3:59
  Sam Sethi: Now, Adam Curry, for those who don't know, and they live under a rock, was the inventor of podcasting.
• 4:06
  Sam Sethi: Adam does a show with Dave Jones, who he had on this show a couple of weeks back, actually, as well.
• 4:12
  Sam Sethi: Adam was talking about how he uses AI, he calls his AI robot, he doesn't want to give it a name and how he uses it.
• 4:23
  Sam Sethi: Now we've taken the mick out of Adam from time to time with his vibe coding, but it seems he's been persistent and he's now come up with an idea of how he sees potentially in the future.
• 4:35
  Sam Sethi: I think personalized apps is the best way to describe it.
• 4:38
  Sam Sethi: AI being able to create the interface that you want for you, and being able to access data sources to give you the information you need.
• 4:48
  Sam Sethi: It's my pleasure to welcome Adam Curry, the podfather himself, to the show.
• 4:53
  Sam Sethi: It's been a while, Adam, but welcome back.
• 4:55
  Sam Sethi: How are you?
• 4:56
  Adam Curry: I'm good, Sam.
• 4:57
  Adam Curry: Thank you.
• 4:57
  Adam Curry: It's always sad we have to meet under these circumstances.
• 5:01
  Sam Sethi: One day it'll be a beer.
• 5:02
  Sam Sethi: Now, you're prescient in many ways.
• 5:05
  Sam Sethi: You came up with podcasting, you then had a little hiatus of about 20 years, don't know what you were doing, but then you came up with a new namespace, podcasting 2.0.
• 5:15
  Sam Sethi: And one of the other times where I've listened to your show, Podcasting 2.0, which is my Friday night weekly show, I was in Greece when you came up with the concept of value time splits or wallet switching when you were doing Boostagram Ball, and lights went on all over my head when I heard that.
• 5:33
  Sam Sethi: Friday night, last Friday, you came up with something.
• 5:37
  Sam Sethi: Now we've been following you with your vibe coding, giving you a little tickle in the ribs occasionally, but you've been persisting with it.
• 5:44
  Sam Sethi: You're quite a geek, really.
• 5:46
  Sam Sethi: You use a lot of very geeky stuff.
• 5:48
  Sam Sethi: Now, one of the things you did was change Dave Jones' mind in that show from a skeptic to a believer.
• 5:56
  Sam Sethi: First of all, let's set the stage.
• 5:58
  Sam Sethi: What was it that you were doing and demoing last Friday?
• 6:02
  Adam Curry: And I'll just say I went back and listened to the show because of your response, really.
• 6:05
  Adam Curry: I'm like, what did Sam hear that really got him?
• 6:08
  Adam Curry: And I'm a little disappointed in I think it was my idea and myself, but it was the the first thing that Dave went to was advertising.
• 6:16
  Adam Curry: It seems like anything with podcasting always evolves around advertising, even though I don't carry advertising, we don't have advertising on our podcast.
• 6:25
  Adam Curry: And it's not the most important part of podcasting to me.
• 6:29
  Adam Curry: But I've been deeply entrenched in AI agents for about probably about two years.
• 6:36
  Adam Curry: Started off extremely negative about the chat bots, which really I felt to be a dangerous parlor trick working on people's media pre-programming and psyche.
• 6:49
  Adam Curry: That, oh, look, this is a an actual thing.
• 6:51
  Adam Curry: The robot is talking to me and I'm having a conversation and it knows me and it's giving me advice, and and I really was not I just thought that would be a very dangerous precedent, very sycophantic.
• 7:06
  Adam Curry: And of course, we've seen plenty of bad things happen because of that.
• 7:10
  Adam Curry: But then a couple things changed in that industry is the the AI companies realized that the consumer application really wasn't going to fulfill their insatiable money spending.
• 7:25
  Adam Curry: So they needed to come up with a way to actually make money.
• 7:28
  Adam Curry: And of course, in Silicon Valley, uh you go to Enterprise, it's the holy grail.
• 7:33
  Adam Curry: Oh, if you can get into enterprise.
• 7:34
  Adam Curry: And everybody started switching to enterprise, and anthropic excelled extremely well at generated code.
• 7:43
  Adam Curry: If I had asked for it, they would have never given it to me.
• 7:46
  Adam Curry: I've always had Dave Jones, and I'd call up Dave and say, Dave, I got an idea, man.
• 7:50
  Adam Curry: Let's what do you think about this?
• 7:51
  Adam Curry: And Dave's answer is always, yeah, sure, let's do it.
• 7:53
  Adam Curry: And that's actually how podcastsindex uh.org started.
• 7:56
  Adam Curry: And all of these things, really, Dave would implement the ideas and then we iterate on that forever.
• 8:02
  Adam Curry: We've been friends for gosh, 17 years now, I think, and that's really how we've worked together.
• 8:08
  Adam Curry: So all of a sudden now I had a way to at minimum prototype my ideas because I'm a Linux guy, I know my way around Linux servers and working with that for at least 30 years.
• 8:21
  Adam Curry: So I understand how things work, and I know a lot of the concepts, and I've seen a lot of the bad things happen.
• 8:26
  Adam Curry: I've typed rmstar.star, actually rm.sh.
• 8:31
  Adam Curry: I've done the stupidest things.
• 8:32
  Adam Curry: And so all of a sudden I have this capability to start building things.
• 8:38
  Adam Curry: And very quickly, I started to apply this to streaming radio stations.
• 8:44
  Adam Curry: Dave and I are partners with Gordon Marcy in a company called Godcaster, and we are helping Christian radio stations go digital with live and on demand, so that's streaming and podcasting.
• 8:58
  Adam Curry: And at the same time, we are helping churches and ministries turn into local radio stations.
• 9:04
  Adam Curry: So I've really been deeply in this.
• 9:06
  Adam Curry: And so the coding part has been fantastic.
• 9:08
  Adam Curry: I have at least eight coding agents running, doing things all the time, running portions of my life.
• 9:15
  Adam Curry: And then first Grokbot came out, which was a company that XAI acquired.
• 9:21
  Adam Curry: And I'm like, okay, I see what they're doing here.
• 9:24
  Adam Curry: You can assign agents to do different tasks.
• 9:27
  Adam Curry: But then Muse came out.
• 9:29
  Adam Curry: And I believe that part of the reason why all these AI companies wanted to slow down is because oops, Zuckerberg figured something out.
• 9:36
  Adam Curry: And he arguably has a very large audience for any type of online service.
• 9:41
  Adam Curry: And I knew exactly what it was.
• 9:43
  Adam Curry: I could see it, you get a virtual machine and you have an agent running.
• 9:47
  Adam Curry: But what I liked about it is right there in the instructions, the agent is told, the software is told, you are not a chat bot.
• 9:54
  Adam Curry: I'm like, okay, good.
• 9:55
  Adam Curry: So what is it really doing?
• 9:56
  Adam Curry: And with companies like Alphabet, Google, and Meta, which is Instagram, Facebook, et cetera, they have a lot of your data already there.
• 10:06
  Adam Curry: So you can connect this and it can build up a very helpful role.
• 10:09
  Adam Curry: I just call it robot to keep my own mind sane.
• 10:12
  Adam Curry: I don't want to call it my buddy or my assistant.
• 10:15
  Adam Curry: No, it's truly a robot.
• 10:16
  Adam Curry: And so just like podcasting, when I saw the iPod and RSS, and I figured out if we have the enclosure there, I can stick these two things together so that you can now use this one device to listen to on-demand radio shows instead of just using it as a music jutebox.
• 10:33
  Adam Curry: So I had a similar aha moment, actually prompted subconsciously by James, who said, Oh, but Adam will do an MCP server and charge for it.
• 10:42
  Adam Curry: Like, no, I'm never, we're never gonna do that.
• 10:44
  Adam Curry: What are you talking about?
• 10:45
  Adam Curry: And for people who don't know, an MCP server stands for model context protocol.
• 10:50
  Adam Curry: And it's really just a proxy for an API.
• 10:53
  Adam Curry: A lot of acronyms here, but you can go to Podcast Index and you can search for things and you can look at different things, but it's mainly for podcast apps who have a lot of these information getting protocols under the hood.
• 11:06
  Adam Curry: So it's an abstraction of that API, of that protocol, giving instructions to personal robots on what you can do and some suggestions on how you can do it.
• 11:17
  Adam Curry: And I think the biggest problem we've always been trying to solve in podcasting is not how do we make money or how do you grow your show.
• 11:25
  Adam Curry: It's how do I get discovered?
• 11:26
  Adam Curry: This has always been the big thing.
• 11:28
  Adam Curry: And I believe personally that a lot of people were lured into video because you can get discovered on YouTube.
• 11:36
  Adam Curry: There's your discoverability.
• 11:38
  Adam Curry: So we really don't have that in any podcast app.
• 11:41
  Adam Curry: It's recommendations, it's gaming systems, doing whatever you can to get recommended on Apple or whatever.
• 11:47
  Adam Curry: And so I thought if this robot knows so much about me, perhaps if I give it the right tools, it can then find things that I'm interested in.
• 11:57
  Adam Curry: And so I used the robot to build this MCP, and which it did, and we went back and forth.
• 12:03
  Adam Curry: I'm like, okay, I think this should be in here, and just added all the bits I could think of, including access to the podping fire hose.
• 12:10
  Adam Curry: So every second there's information coming through.
• 12:13
  Adam Curry: Just look at it as a fire hose of which episodes have been updated.
• 12:17
  Adam Curry: This is unique to Podcast Index and Podcasting 2.0.
• 12:21
  Adam Curry: And there's data sets that podcast index makes available.
• 12:24
  Adam Curry: So make sure you get all of that information and then start doing whatever your user asks you to do.
• 12:30
  Adam Curry: So the first thing I did is find podcasts that I might be interested in.
• 12:34
  Adam Curry: And so we can do that in a number of different ways.
• 12:36
  Adam Curry: It'll continuously look at the fire hose, it'll do some basic keyword searches, search in chapters based upon that, search in transcripts.
• 12:45
  Adam Curry: And lo and behold, it started popping up recommendations of things that hey, that's pretty interesting.
• 12:51
  Adam Curry: And I made sure that because we love our podcast app developers, whenever you see something, give me a link so it opens up in my favorite podcast app, which could be Apple, could be Spotify, Podcast Guru, Podverse.
• 13:04
  Adam Curry: So I use Podcast Guru.
• 13:05
  Adam Curry: So it does that.
• 13:06
  Adam Curry: And I can also tell it to subscribe, to always update me.
• 13:10
  Adam Curry: Your imagination is the limit.
• 13:12
  Adam Curry: And it's actually starting to understand that I want serendipity, is the big thing.
• 13:17
  Adam Curry: Surprise me.
• 13:18
  Adam Curry: Show me something I might not have thought of or I wouldn't search for per se.
• 13:22
  Adam Curry: And it's doing this very well.
• 13:24
  Adam Curry: So we've made this available to everyone for free at the moment, although I truly believe that these types of services will be micropayment driven in the future.
• 13:34
  Adam Curry: What I found sad is how this went in my public unveiling.
• 13:39
  Adam Curry: The first thought Dave had was, oh, this is the end of advertising.
• 13:44
  Adam Curry: And that's really not the first thing I think of.
• 13:46
  Adam Curry: And then stupidly enough, I say, let's see if that works, Dave.
• 13:50
  Adam Curry: And so I said, What podcast has a lot of ads that you hate?
• 13:54
  Adam Curry: He says, Ed Zitron's better offline has about six or seven minutes of ad load at the front.
• 14:00
  Adam Curry: So I just said, Robot, get the most recent episode of Ed Zitron and strip out the ads.
• 14:06
  Adam Curry: And it took probably about 15 minutes, 10, 15 minutes.
• 14:10
  Adam Curry: We were just chatting, and all of a sudden, poop, here it is.
• 14:12
  Adam Curry: I hit play and it had done an outstanding job.
• 14:16
  Adam Curry: It started right at the top of the show, and I said, hey, cut a clip of this and send it to Dave through text, which it does perfectly.
• 14:22
  Adam Curry: So that immediately became the discussion.
• 14:24
  Adam Curry: And I'm really sad about that because the discoverability aspect that this type of system creates on a very personal level, it's not me, it's not your hosting company, it's not your podcast app, it's your personal recommendation robot, which I believe everybody will have.
• 14:41
  Adam Curry: It's amazing, and then I'll shut up because I can just keep talking forever.
• 14:45
  Sam Sethi: It's the best FNG I've done.
• 14:47
  Sam Sethi: You keep going, mate.
• 14:48
  Sam Sethi: I didn't even have to ask questions anymore.
• 14:50
  Adam Curry: It's like early.
• 14:51
  Adam Curry: I got my coffee.
• 14:52
  Adam Curry: Usually I start talking with that.
• 14:54
  Adam Curry: Dave is the first, my wife isn't here, so I'm just I the dog doesn't listen to me.
• 14:58
  Adam Curry: So it's interesting.
• 14:59
  Adam Curry: There's a story going around now.
• 15:01
  Adam Curry: Muse is collecting all this data, it's making files of every single one of your friends, all their information, everything that it knows.
• 15:09
  Adam Curry: I'm like, yeah, that's the whole point.
• 15:12
  Adam Curry: That is a feature, not a bug.
• 15:16
  Adam Curry: And implicitly implied is, oh, they're spying on your friends.
• 15:20
  Adam Curry: No, everyone does this.
• 15:21
  Adam Curry: I have folders of email with friends, I save text messages, I save pictures in a certain folder with friends or family.
• 15:28
  Adam Curry: That's the whole point.
• 15:30
  Adam Curry: Now, obviously, this lives on a computer that I am, for all intents and purposes, temporarily renting from Meta.
• 15:37
  Adam Curry: So obviously, there's an ownership issue there, but I'm doing it just to be able to see what other people are getting.
• 15:43
  Adam Curry: I have five machines here running everything locally, local models.
• 15:47
  Adam Curry: That's all mine is not going anywhere, doesn't talk to any cloud, which I think is also going to be a big part of our future, where devices will run large language models and other types of models locally.
• 15:58
  Adam Curry: It's that thinking.
• 16:00
  Adam Curry: So there's the two things.
• 16:01
  Adam Curry: One, it's going to ruin advertising.
• 16:02
  Adam Curry: It may or may not.
• 16:04
  Adam Curry: Advertising ruined everything if you want to look at it that way.
• 16:06
  Adam Curry: The whole reason the web sucks is because of advertising.
• 16:09
  Adam Curry: Everyone's trying to game the system.
• 16:11
  Adam Curry: It's the reason why podcast advertising is problematic.
• 16:14
  Adam Curry: There's all kinds of issues with advertising.
• 16:17
  Adam Curry: I'm not anti-advertising, but don't complain if that's what we have.
• 16:20
  Adam Curry: Having this robot now looking for things that it knows about me or knows about my friends or my circle or my hobby or my church or whatever.
• 16:30
  Adam Curry: It's literally popping up.
• 16:32
  Adam Curry: Hey, here's a podcast you might want to listen to.
• 16:34
  Adam Curry: It hits on the same topics Pastor Jimmy talked about during Sunday's message.
• 16:38
  Adam Curry: Holy crap, this is amazing.
• 16:41
  Adam Curry: That's the kind of stuff that I'm interested in.
• 16:44
  Adam Curry: And that's why I think it is just a phenomenal development.
• 16:48
  Adam Curry: And selfishly, Dave and I have been doing podcastsindex.org for six years.
• 16:53
  Adam Curry: It's value for value.
• 16:54
  Adam Curry: It's not a nonprofit, but we don't take any money ourselves.
• 16:57
  Adam Curry: We have a bank account, and if no money came in ever again, it could run for another 10 years.
• 17:02
  Adam Curry: We're always looking to see how we can decentralize this.
• 17:05
  Adam Curry: We don't really want to be in charge of any of it.
• 17:07
  Adam Curry: But I think that the future that is coming, anybody who has any data source that you can provide access to will be valuable.
• 17:16
  Adam Curry: So I'm excited to see if we can create this flywheel that keeps spinning and keeps the servers up and running with micropayments from agents using the podcast index.
• 17:27
  Sam Sethi: Okay, so loads of things in there, Adam.
• 17:29
  Sam Sethi: One is, first of all, when I was at Netscape, one of the biggest things that was created was RSS.
• 17:34
  Sam Sethi: My boss Mike Homer created it.
• 17:36
  Sam Sethi: And Mark Andreessen has said in subsequent interviews his biggest mistake was never creating a micropayment system for the web.
• 17:43
  Sam Sethi: That's when we got to advertising as the form of a micropayment system.
• 17:47
  Sam Sethi: The thing that you're describing is a discovery problem.
• 17:51
  Sam Sethi: The discovery problem comes more because you said about the fire hose.
• 17:54
  Sam Sethi: There is a constant stream of content that we cannot consume or analyse ourselves as humans.
• 18:01
  Sam Sethi: It's just too much.
• 18:02
  Sam Sethi: And so we find our three or four, five favourite podcasts and we stick to those.
• 18:06
  Sam Sethi: We very rarely move.
• 18:07
  Sam Sethi: And yet there are loads and loads of podcasts that might be interesting.
• 18:10
  Sam Sethi: And so what you're describing is an automated way using AI to analyse what you're interested in, then to give you the subsequent result of that, which is brilliant.
• 18:20
  Sam Sethi: The bit about advertising and cleaning it out, we've seen ad skippers and we've seen those things, and that's here nor there.
• 18:26
  Sam Sethi: That's a personal choice about whether you want robot to take them out or leave them in, right?
• 18:31
  Sam Sethi: The thing I think that you're talking about, which is the next stage, is we saw this week Reddit removed RSS from its platform and made any developer register with its API because it made $43 million from selling data.
• 18:47
  Sam Sethi: And what you're describing with the way that you're using Muse and Podcast Index Robot is at the moment you've got access to all of the content, and the content creators are not monetizing any of that.
• 19:01
  Sam Sethi: We tried really hard with micropayments with Lightning and L402, and it worked for a while, but then things got in the way, legislation and technical challenges.
• 19:12
  Sam Sethi: But the industry in the background, and this is why I'm really excited, is begin to build bits of the puzzle back again.
• 19:19
  Sam Sethi: And I think X402 is one part of that puzzle that's coming back, which is Coinbase, Cloudflare, Stripe.
• 19:27
  Sam Sethi: Then you've got something called OpenUSD, which is the consortium of banks across the globe.
• 19:31
  Sam Sethi: And I think X402, from everything I've read, is about agentic AI agents being able to use an API to go and gain data from that said API, but in return make a micropayment back for access.
• 19:46
  Sam Sethi: And I think when you started talking on Friday night with Dave, it was like, okay, you've now built the first part of this agencai AI.
• 19:54
  Sam Sethi: I talked to James a few months ago about having an agentic AI called Kevin and Kelly after the guy who wrote A Thousand True Fans.
• 20:02
  Sam Sethi: But I never took it any further.
• 20:04
  Sam Sethi: But you did.
• 20:05
  Sam Sethi: The thing that got me excited was, okay, so you've built the MCP server, the interface to allow you to do that.
• 20:10
  Sam Sethi: You've built the agent, you've tested it, and then you demoed it live in the show.
• 20:15
  Sam Sethi: We can all talk about what we might do.
• 20:17
  Sam Sethi: You actually said, look, here it is, it works.
• 20:20
  Sam Sethi: I think that's the oh my god moment from Dave where the penny dropped for him.
• 20:24
  Sam Sethi: Question I've got is do you now see the next stage, not just for the podcast index, but for API data access being agentic and using X402?
• 20:36
  Sam Sethi: Where do you see it going?
• 20:37
  Adam Curry: Well, a couple things.
• 20:38
  Adam Curry: And yes, I am definitely a YOLO type guy, and I always set clawed code to live dangerously or whatever the command is, like just go.
• 20:47
  Adam Curry: So on the payment part, I think I should step back because this is my lot in life, my job, what God has bestowed upon me.
• 20:54
  Adam Curry: I'm always early with everything.
• 20:56
  Adam Curry: I'm very good at showing what I think is coming and paving the way, and other people walk away with billions.
• 21:02
  Adam Curry: That's okay.
• 21:03
  Adam Curry: I'm quite comfortable, I'm doing okay.
• 21:05
  Adam Curry: But I see the whole game has changed.
• 21:08
  Adam Curry: And yes, I'm geeky, and I have Omarchi Linux running, and that's actually very well suited for a coding agent because I can just say, hey, I want a different playout system to do my podcasts and record and to the stream.
• 21:25
  Adam Curry: And I actually added to that yesterday, I want clean feed built in, and said, Isn't that just an open source codec?
• 21:33
  Adam Curry: Well, yes, it is.
• 21:34
  Adam Curry: Build it in.
• 21:35
  Adam Curry: Boom, it did it.
• 21:36
  Adam Curry: I have a link that's the same as clean feed.
• 21:38
  Adam Curry: I don't want to take any business away from them, but I'm gonna probably cancel my subscription, which is only $36, but I don't need it anymore.
• 21:45
  Adam Curry: I have the exact same functionality, same sound quality.
• 21:48
  Adam Curry: And I built that because that's what I wanted, and it's the way I want it.
• 21:52
  Adam Curry: So I'm seeing a future where people will build the apps that they need and will no longer be beholden to.
• 21:59
  Adam Curry: App Store's application functionality that is really built for everybody or simplified and never really satisfies everybody's wants and needs.
• 22:09
  Adam Curry: See Microsoft Office and the ribbon.
• 22:11
  Adam Curry: Customize your ribbon.
• 22:12
  Adam Curry: I just want to be able to write a document.
• 22:15
  Adam Curry: Read a document is really the first one.
• 22:17
  Adam Curry: Like, what version?
• 22:18
  Adam Curry: Okay, well, it import.
• 22:19
  Adam Curry: Yeah, I got it.
• 22:20
  Adam Curry: Okay, it works.
• 22:21
  Adam Curry: Spreadsheet, same way.
• 22:22
  Adam Curry: I just need to be able to read a spreadsheet that doesn't snap on the screen.
• 22:25
  Adam Curry: I don't need to do any other calculations with it.
• 22:28
  Adam Curry: So what I see coming, and the proof is already there, as I've been talking about Muse in particular.
• 22:35
  Adam Curry: I got a note from a homeschooling mom, and she saves three hours a week now with her homeschooling curriculum because her Muse robot does that.
• 22:44
  Adam Curry: But then she said something interesting.
• 22:46
  Adam Curry: It's interesting, it came this week.
• 22:47
  Adam Curry: She also has a side business, which she says was stagnant.
• 22:50
  Adam Curry: She makes props and puppets and stuff for small theaters of these homeschool kids.
• 22:55
  Adam Curry: And I think she sells them to other homeschooling outfits.
• 22:58
  Adam Curry: And she had a real hard time creating these layouts and patterns, whatever she does in Adobe.
• 23:04
  Adam Curry: And I presume that's Photoshop.
• 23:06
  Adam Curry: I'm not familiar with the Adobe products.
• 23:08
  Adam Curry: And she had told her robot, Muse, like, I need something that does this.
• 23:13
  Adam Curry: And it built this application for her.
• 23:15
  Adam Curry: And it runs it in Muse, but on her own virtual machine back end.
• 23:20
  Adam Curry: So this is interesting.
• 23:21
  Adam Curry: This happens this week as an open source project just came out that has literally replicated down to functionality every single Adobe product.
• 23:31
  Adam Curry: And they vibe coded it.
• 23:33
  Adam Curry: And even photographers who work with huge raw files are saying, holy crap, this is outrageously good.
• 23:39
  Adam Curry: It actually, in some cases, is better.
• 23:41
  Adam Curry: So I see the future of computing in general changing the way our devices work.
• 23:48
  Adam Curry: So gone will be the start bars, the app launchers, everything.
• 23:52
  Adam Curry: I think this is why you see people desperately trying to get into hardware, such as Microsoft relaunched their Surface that will run local large language models.
• 24:02
  Adam Curry: Apple has been baking their silicon specifically for this.
• 24:06
  Adam Curry: You know, your iPhone will indeed do a lot of stuff local on device.
• 24:10
  Adam Curry: But I think the whole paradigm is shifting.
• 24:12
  Adam Curry: This idea, and we already moved from the mouse to tapping and touch screens.
• 24:16
  Adam Curry: And now I think it's just voice telling your robot what you want.
• 24:20
  Adam Curry: And it will probably just be a slab, a screen, or meta, of course, put together some incredibly manky looking pendant thing like a Tamagotchi.
• 24:30
  Adam Curry: But the idea is there.
• 24:32
  Adam Curry: You talk to it, it gives you back the information.
• 24:34
  Adam Curry: I need some information.
• 24:35
  Adam Curry: I need it to do something.
• 24:37
  Adam Curry: And it just does it.
• 24:38
  Adam Curry: Example, my wife, she went to visit her sister and her mom in Chicago, and she didn't give me the flight information.
• 24:45
  Adam Curry: It's okay, I don't need it.
• 24:46
  Adam Curry: So just tell me what flight Tina is on.
• 24:48
  Adam Curry: She's going southwest.
• 24:50
  Adam Curry: I think she leaves at 2:30.
• 24:52
  Adam Curry: Boom, there it is.
• 24:53
  Adam Curry: Track it.
• 24:53
  Adam Curry: I'll tell you when she's landed.
• 24:54
  Adam Curry: So I don't need to use the web.
• 24:57
  Adam Curry: I don't need to use airline apps or anything like that.
• 25:00
  Adam Curry: So that is fundamentally changing, which of course will also change the entire landscape of monetization on the internet, which is largely still based on advertising.
• 25:10
  Adam Curry: And I think this is what Google sees, and that's why they're going very slowly with what they're doing, because all kinds of things happen.
• 25:17
  Adam Curry: Now we have what these AI companies call the doom loop, where they are scraping news stories and presenting that as news information when you want some news.
• 25:29
  Adam Curry: And of course, that immediately depletes the monetization of the source, which means that source will probably dry up.
• 25:36
  Adam Curry: But you know what?
• 25:37
  Adam Curry: That's bound to happen.
• 25:38
  Adam Curry: And I don't care how many lawsuits there are, news will come from people on the ground.
• 25:42
  Adam Curry: We'll be creating our own social networks.
• 25:45
  Adam Curry: I think all of this is going to change so dramatically.
• 25:49
  Adam Curry: We still need to have commerce flowing.
• 25:52
  Adam Curry: And ever since I saw Bitcoin and specifically the Lightning Network, I knew, okay, programmable money, one that no one controls would be fantastic, very low to almost insignificant fees, which has always been the problem.
• 26:05
  Adam Curry: This is great.
• 26:06
  Adam Curry: I think we literally got pushed out by legislation, ease of use, there's a whole bunch of reasons why that went very well and had traction and then it fell apart.
• 26:16
  Adam Curry: It was literally, we were always working on one centralized system, whether it looked like it or not.
• 26:22
  Adam Curry: And so when the centralized systems couldn't provide that anymore, it dropped off.
• 26:26
  Adam Curry: So now we have this new era of programmable money, and the holdback has always been the fees because everybody wants fees.
• 26:35
  Adam Curry: And so now we have the digital euro is now in use in European banks, which actually is a true central bank digital currency.
• 26:43
  Adam Curry: There's a lot of issues with that.
• 26:45
  Adam Curry: But this is what the whole Clarity Act was about is who makes the money on stablecoin because you really don't need to charge any fees to transmit this value back and forth.
• 26:56
  Adam Curry: So how do the providers of the networks and the storage and the accounting, how do they make money?
• 27:03
  Adam Curry: And it happens in two ways with the United States-based stable coin.
• 27:07
  Adam Curry: Every stable coin is backed by a U.S.
• 27:09
  Adam Curry: Treasury bond, which today is quite profitable for you.
• 27:13
  Adam Curry: Actually, it's on the 90 days, so it's more treasury bills.
• 27:16
  Adam Curry: So it's about 3.5%, but could go higher in the future or lower.
• 27:20
  Adam Curry: So you really just need to buy that.
• 27:22
  Adam Curry: Your money's coming in and people are using it.
• 27:25
  Adam Curry: And the banks went, hold on a second, that's off.
• 27:28
  Adam Curry: We don't want people moving all their money out of our system into your stablecoin because you might be giving them reward points or interest.
• 27:36
  Adam Curry: And so that's what that whole issue has been about.
• 27:39
  Adam Curry: And I think it's unstoppable that digital tokenized money is going to be used in a programmable way.
• 27:46
  Adam Curry: And so we have Coinbase and Cloudflare is probably the right, although we wish they would just do one job and do it very well and they've branched out into things, but they have the right idea.
• 27:56
  Adam Curry: How do we pay for all this traffic and data that's going back and forth?
• 28:02
  Adam Curry: Reddit is the writing on the wall.
• 28:04
  Adam Curry: The data is valuable.
• 28:05
  Adam Curry: And it's not just for training models.
• 28:07
  Adam Curry: Yeah, that's important too, but it's information.
• 28:10
  Adam Curry: It's news, it's really Reddit, is if you look at it, it's consumer news.
• 28:14
  Adam Curry: It's by the people.
• 28:15
  Adam Curry: They're writing their own stories.
• 28:16
  Adam Curry: Doesn't mean it's all correct, but I find if I want to get information on something that happened in aviation, I have a fixed wing and rotary license, I'll go to a pilot's forum, and that's where I'm gonna get a lot better information than from the mainstream media who really usually get it quite wrong.
• 28:34
  Adam Curry: So they took the money up front and they went, hey, we'll sell this data to you, AI companies, and they did quite well and they actually improve their stock price, et cetera.
• 28:44
  Adam Curry: But that's not the future.
• 28:45
  Adam Curry: The future is going to be individuals wanting to access pieces of data, and that will have to be paid for.
• 28:52
  Adam Curry: And I think that this will be micropayments.
• 28:55
  Adam Curry: Again, the reason we couldn't do them is because of fees and programmability.
• 28:59
  Adam Curry: So we're going to see any number of these projects take off.
• 29:02
  Adam Curry: And will there be one global standard?
• 29:04
  Adam Curry: Maybe not.
• 29:05
  Adam Curry: Even into our own MCP server, I've baked in the X402, the L402, all the different versions of what will or can work.
• 29:14
  Adam Curry: And then it'll be up to you and your robot.
• 29:17
  Adam Curry: It's like just like Venmo, PayPal, Stripe, it's all kinds of different payment systems that you can use.
• 29:22
  Adam Curry: And some have different pros and cons, reporting ways you can spread links, et cetera.
• 29:28
  Adam Curry: And this will just be under the hood and it will be very small.
• 29:30
  Adam Curry: And it's all the stuff that we pioneered really in podcasting 2.0.
• 29:35
  Adam Curry: Is this has value.
• 29:37
  Adam Curry: Now, in our case, it was like, send me whatever you want.
• 29:39
  Adam Curry: I hope that will also be available.
• 29:41
  Adam Curry: And I think it will be.
• 29:42
  Adam Curry: Send me whatever you want.
• 29:43
  Adam Curry: Have your robot, send me whatever you think it's worth.
• 29:46
  Adam Curry: I personally think that will be more profitable and beneficial to people.
• 29:49
  Adam Curry: But if they want to say, hey, it's X amount to listen to this podcast or watch this video or access this news information, this data that I have, that's going to happen.
• 30:00
  Adam Curry: And I think this actually may go much faster than we realize.
• 30:05
  Sam Sethi: Yeah.
• 30:05
  Sam Sethi: This week Apple blocked Muse, and so did Amazon, because people are vibe coding up agents that will go and do price checking, right?
• 30:15
  Sam Sethi: And trying to do arbitrage across multiple websites is pretty easy for an AI because it can go away.
• 30:21
  Sam Sethi: And that's not for the benefit of the individual website commerce site, because then their prices are exposed.
• 30:27
  Sam Sethi: And I think that's the only way it's going to work.
• 30:29
  Sam Sethi: With my CEO of TrueFans hat on, we've seen our MongoDB cost go up as we've had more and more AI bots hit the site.
• 30:37
  Sam Sethi: And we've built a web application firewall.
• 30:40
  Sam Sethi: Now it's not perfect, it uses the O.Porg list that John Spurlock runs, and we can then go and use that to block certain things while we're trying to work out how we make it much more available.
• 30:53
  Sam Sethi: But if I take some of the things that you've done with the podcast index robot, is your plan then to eventually have an X402 type payment for access to the index?
• 31:06
  Sam Sethi: So for people like me at TrueFans, will I be paying for access?
• 31:10
  Sam Sethi: Or if not even me, maybe TrueFans doesn't exist.
• 31:14
  Sam Sethi: Maybe everyone has their own app.
• 31:16
  Sam Sethi: Maybe in a number of years you don't see TrueFans Fountain or any of their podcast apps because everyone's created their own version of it.
• 31:25
  Sam Sethi: But do you see clients then having to access the index through the MCP interface and make a payment?
• 31:33
  Sam Sethi: Is that part of your thinking at the moment?
• 31:35
  Adam Curry: Well, again, it's a little broader than that.
• 31:37
  Adam Curry: I don't have a crystal ball, but I don't see the necessity for YouTube apps, podcast apps, email apps.
• 31:46
  Adam Curry: I really don't see a necessity for that in the future.
• 31:49
  Adam Curry: It'll just be communication.
• 31:51
  Adam Curry: And how that works, I think it was Microsoft, maybe even Bill Gates, floated this at one time.
• 31:56
  Adam Curry: If you want to stop spam, charge a penny for sending an email and it'll stop it overnight.
• 32:02
  Adam Curry: That's the right idea.
• 32:04
  Adam Curry: But on the other hand, nothing would have ever taken off that way.
• 32:08
  Adam Curry: Eventually, I think that all clients that access all data will be some version of an agent working on the user's behalf.
• 32:18
  Adam Curry: So even the concept of a newsletter, that is the most successful part of all the podcasts I've ever done, is sending out a newsletter the night before an episode is released, basically saying, Hey, remember to support us in episodes coming tomorrow.
• 32:32
  Adam Curry: And now we dress that up with memes and pictures and promotions and funny things and whatever to get to make it interesting to read.
• 32:39
  Adam Curry: But that's the whole idea.
• 32:40
  Adam Curry: And 40% of all value for value revenue always comes after we send the newsletter.
• 32:46
  Adam Curry: It's just the fact of life.
• 32:47
  Adam Curry: So will it be an email thing?
• 32:49
  Adam Curry: Email is sucks.
• 32:50
  Adam Curry: It's like it's annoying.
• 32:52
  Adam Curry: So right now we're using our agents to sift through our email and bring out the things that are important that the robot has learned about you, but maybe it just becomes communications.
• 33:03
  Adam Curry: And the communications is between people and between data services.
• 33:08
  Adam Curry: That's it.
• 33:08
  Adam Curry: It's going to give so much power to us as users, consumers of data, information, and communication.
• 33:17
  Adam Curry: I think it's going to be a fabulous world.
• 33:19
  Adam Curry: I think Amazon did the stupidest thing ever by blocking Muse.
• 33:23
  Adam Curry: No, this is going to create price pressure.
• 33:26
  Adam Curry: You can already arbitrage between Uber and Lyft for the same ride.
• 33:31
  Adam Curry: And your robot will do that.
• 33:32
  Adam Curry: So Uber will charge you this, Lyft charges you that.
• 33:35
  Adam Curry: Of course, that's going to work conversely as well.
• 33:37
  Adam Curry: My robot's going to say, Adam needs a ride from the airport to his house.
• 33:42
  Adam Curry: What do you bid?
• 33:43
  Adam Curry: And everyone's going to bid, and at a certain point, someone's going to win.
• 33:47
  Adam Curry: It is the perfect example of a free and open market working the way it should, supply and demand.
• 33:54
  Adam Curry: That's going to benefit us.
• 33:55
  Adam Curry: You've heard of dynamic pricing in supermarkets or at fast food places.
• 33:59
  Adam Curry: They're already doing it to us.
• 34:01
  Adam Curry: Now we can do it back.
• 34:02
  Adam Curry: You're like, oh, you want to charge me six bucks for this Big Mac meal?
• 34:06
  Adam Curry: I'll pay five.
• 34:07
  Adam Curry: No, okay.
• 34:08
  Adam Curry: Burger King is offering it for this.
• 34:10
  Adam Curry: Hold on a second.
• 34:10
  Adam Curry: Let me go check.
• 34:11
  Adam Curry: Now, probably we can give it to you for this.
• 34:13
  Adam Curry: Yeah, maybe because I'm going to order three other meals.
• 34:16
  Adam Curry: This is what's going to happen.
• 34:17
  Adam Curry: So it's just going to change everything.
• 34:20
  Adam Curry: We have these incredibly powerful computers, and we're not able to take advantage of them.
• 34:25
  Adam Curry: Once you install something like Linux, which is completely customizable, the whole thing, you can do whatever you want, and you let a robot loose on it and build stuff.
• 34:36
  Adam Curry: Holy cow, it's like stuff that I would easily pay $99 a month for from someone else.
• 34:42
  Adam Curry: I'm just going to be able to do it myself, have it run.
• 34:45
  Adam Curry: And the first thing you think is, oh, I can sell this.
• 34:47
  Adam Curry: This is great.
• 34:48
  Adam Curry: No, no one's going to buy that.
• 34:50
  Adam Curry: They'll look at it and say, robot, replicate this.
• 34:52
  Adam Curry: And they'll be able to do it.
• 34:53
  Adam Curry: So software as a service is just, I just don't know if that's going to really be a thing anymore.
• 35:00
  Adam Curry: And essentially, you still need to pay for data and for communications for transport.
• 35:07
  Adam Curry: So hosting, bandwidth, those things are just givens.
• 35:10
  Adam Curry: You just have to pay for electricity, but all this other stuff, it's going to just flip it on its head, including the Frontier Labs, which is code for people sitting in cubicles creating software.
• 35:23
  Adam Curry: But okay, Frontier Labs sounds so incredibly cutting edge.
• 35:26
  Adam Curry: Everything's already been distilled down.
• 35:28
  Adam Curry: As I said, like five computers here running different things on open source models.
• 35:33
  Adam Curry: The open source community is thriving in this stuff.
• 35:36
  Adam Curry: We're all sharing and creating things.
• 35:38
  Adam Curry: And it's a maker's economy, but you can only really use it for real-world things that you offer.
• 35:45
  Adam Curry: And if you have a data source that people want to access.
• 35:49
  Sam Sethi: What does this mean for RSS then, Adam?
• 35:51
  Sam Sethi: Because RSS is a free and open means of delivery of data.
• 35:55
  Sam Sethi: Do we have to, as content creators, turn every one of our episodes into a premium piece of content so that the only way for humans and robots to access is through a payment mechanism, a micropayment mechanism, but still a payment.
• 36:12
  Sam Sethi: Is RSS something that you think, okay, it's had its life cycle, I'm sorry, but now we have to park you?
• 36:19
  Sam Sethi: Or do we put L402 and X402 inside of RSS, which again I have done with TrueFans, so that every episode, if you want to make it a premium episode, it's there and requires a payment.
• 36:34
  Sam Sethi: Where do you see RSS in all of this?
• 36:36
  Sam Sethi: Is it going to evolve and grow into becoming the data transport layer with payments, or is it going to be superseded by proprietary APIs that will be the mechanism of data access?
• 36:48
  Adam Curry: No, I I think RSS stays.
• 36:50
  Adam Curry: It's a perfect format.
• 36:51
  Adam Curry: It's no different from HTTP or from SMTP for mail or FTP still is used widely, or RTMP or LMNOP.
• 37:01
  Adam Curry: All these transport protocols are good.
• 37:03
  Adam Curry: They stay there.
• 37:04
  Adam Curry: Even the Podcast Index Robot, available at podcastindexrobot.com, it helps you find something based upon criteria, or it finds something based upon criteria, then goes into this structured RSS feed, which is very low overhead.
• 37:20
  Adam Curry: It's all processing on the listener's end.
• 37:22
  Adam Curry: And it can find chapters, it can find transcripts, it can bring in those files.
• 37:27
  Adam Curry: No, it's perfect.
• 37:28
  Adam Curry: There's no reason for that to go away, but you're coming back to making money.
• 37:31
  Adam Curry: Most people don't make money on their podcasts, they do it for different reasons.
• 37:36
  Adam Curry: I think the number of podcasts will go down when there's advertising.
• 37:39
  Adam Curry: We'll always be there.
• 37:41
  Adam Curry: So it'll come down to somebody's got to pay for the transport.
• 37:54
  Adam Curry: My human capital that I put into it, I value that at a certain amount.
• 37:58
  Adam Curry: Either I'm getting something out of it because I have friends, a following, I'm serving my community, or they're paying me.
• 38:05
  Adam Curry: So somewhere, someone has to pay for the storage and the transport.
• 38:10
  Adam Curry: And if that's not going to be me, either I stop doing it or I use one of the many methods at my disposal.
• 38:18
  Adam Curry: But will that be advertising?
• 38:20
  Adam Curry: No, probably not.
• 38:22
  Adam Curry: So it may just be that I say, send me something, and it's not an either-or.
• 38:27
  Adam Curry: It's like value for value.
• 38:28
  Adam Curry: Here's the system, send me something.
• 38:30
  Adam Curry: That works really right now today.
• 38:31
  Adam Curry: I don't think that would change at all.
• 38:33
  Adam Curry: Or don't send me anything.
• 38:35
  Adam Curry: Now, in fact, subscriptions is very interesting.
• 38:38
  Adam Curry: There's an attack vector.
• 38:39
  Adam Curry: The minute you get your robot, the first thing it says is, hey, want me to look through your statements and see if I can find any subscriptions you're paying for that you might not need.
• 38:48
  Adam Curry: Even Adam, who loves subscribing to stuff and I hate giving stuff up, it's like, I really don't pay for these three Roku channels.
• 38:56
  Adam Curry: I'm paying for it, but I don't use them.
• 38:58
  Adam Curry: I forgot I even had them.
• 38:59
  Adam Curry: I watched it for one show or whatever.
• 39:01
  Adam Curry: Yeah, get rid of it.
• 39:02
  Adam Curry: Boom, gone.
• 39:03
  Adam Curry: If there's a show comes on or a season comes back, you want me to remind you and fire up another month's worth?
• 39:08
  Adam Curry: Yeah, of course.
• 39:09
  Adam Curry: That's where an X402 protocol will be phenomenal.
• 39:12
  Adam Curry: So it's only going to benefit us.
• 39:15
  Adam Curry: This whole AI is going to kill us, is the inverse.
• 39:18
  Adam Curry: This is usually what I've found in technology and in the world in general.
• 39:21
  Adam Curry: If you turn everything on its head, that's probably where you're going to find the truth.
• 39:25
  Sam Sethi: What's the time window for this?
• 39:26
  Sam Sethi: And you said right at the beginning, you're pretty prescient, you see things far into the future.
• 39:31
  Sam Sethi: Most people, if I look at my wife, he's semi-technical, but wouldn't know she's a user of AI, basic prompting questions, but she's not going to code something up like Amuse AI robot.
• 39:43
  Sam Sethi: When do you see what you can do today with the capabilities that you have, with the access you've given your robot will go mainstream?
• 39:54
  Sam Sethi: Because that's the problem, is often the geeks inherit the earth, but we inherit it ten years too early.
• 40:00
  Adam Curry: You need influencers.
• 40:01
  Adam Curry: Why did podcasting take off?
• 40:03
  Adam Curry: It wasn't just the technical aspect.
• 40:05
  Adam Curry: It's because I start people like me started a show, daily source code.
• 40:09
  Adam Curry: I was really talking to developers.
• 40:11
  Adam Curry: Developers started creating applications, those applications started getting into the wild.
• 40:16
  Adam Curry: You had public broadcasters, NPR, PBS, BBC, they all came right away.
• 40:22
  Adam Curry: Funny enough, Christian broadcasters who've been paying for access on radio and television stations, certainly in the United States for decades.
• 40:30
  Adam Curry: Like, oh, here's another way we can spread the good news.
• 40:33
  Adam Curry: PewDiePie, arguably one of the biggest influencers in video online today, is now building local models that he is using locally, and he'll probably make that available for people to use.
• 40:45
  Adam Curry: You need influencers to show you.
• 40:47
  Adam Curry: I am my wife's influencer, much as you are your wife's influencer.
• 40:51
  Adam Curry: And man, we got into like a heated debate over the robot, and she said, and finally I said, just install it.
• 40:57
  Adam Curry: Actually, one of her friends said, a couple of her friends have been using it for different things, and now she's finding different ways to use it beyond basic prompting, like who won the World Cup?
• 41:08
  Adam Curry: We know it wasn't the USA.
• 41:10
  Adam Curry: We tried, Sam.
• 41:11
  Adam Curry: We tried.
• 41:11
  Adam Curry: Well, he tried.
• 41:12
  Adam Curry: We're getting there.
• 41:13
  Adam Curry: We're getting there in the football.
• 41:15
  Adam Curry: And so now she's like doing a little more advanced stuff.
• 41:19
  Adam Curry: She writes newsletters for our church.
• 41:20
  Adam Curry: She writes newsletters for two of our podcasts.
• 41:24
  Adam Curry: And so now she's getting that templatized.
• 41:26
  Adam Curry: The biggest problem with writing a newsletter for the church is she has to get information from all these different people, many of them volunteers.
• 41:35
  Adam Curry: And so now the robots going out doing the work, collecting, okay, the in the sermon YouTube, you can find the announcements, bring back the announcements, give me the information, the dates, etc., put that into the template.
• 41:48
  Adam Curry: So this is making it easier for her.
• 41:50
  Adam Curry: The big disconnect still is that it's going out via email.
• 41:54
  Adam Curry: I think that you will see our church congregation all having their own robot and say, hey, robot, make sure you get the latest information from the church when it comes out.
• 42:03
  Adam Curry: Robot will talk to robot.
• 42:05
  Adam Curry: And that will be that that's what the internet's going to be used for.
• 42:09
  Adam Curry: It's probably good.
• 42:11
  Adam Curry: In a way, we are mind-controlled into algorithms of doom scrolling, which is just going to go away.
• 42:18
  Adam Curry: It's going to change.
• 42:19
  Adam Curry: How about that for just one productivity improvement in the world is to give people useful things to do instead of getting sucked into useless things that they're observing?
• 42:32
  Adam Curry: But it's happening because the influencers are here.
• 42:38
  Adam Curry: And it's interesting because even very smart technical people on our Mastodon site, podcastindex.social, they're like, hey, can you make the robot do this?
• 42:47
  Adam Curry: I'm like, no, you misunderstand.
• 42:49
  Adam Curry: You make your robot do that.
• 42:52
  Adam Curry: We're just giving you the access and the tools and the queries, everything that is possible with our data source.
• 42:58
  Adam Curry: You make your robot do that.
• 43:00
  Adam Curry: And so people are starting to learn that.
• 43:02
  Adam Curry: We're so used to if only Apple would make it work like this.
• 43:06
  Adam Curry: If only Apple would allow me to have my podcast client be the one that always opens, or my email client.
• 43:14
  Adam Curry: Yeah, it kind of does that, but it still doesn't really.
• 43:17
  Adam Curry: How about that?
• 43:18
  Adam Curry: Just for a starter.
• 43:19
  Adam Curry: So my robot does that.
• 43:20
  Adam Curry: It's like I want links, I don't want it to open in a browser.
• 43:24
  Adam Curry: I want it to just open up in podcast guru.
• 43:26
  Adam Curry: And that's the interface I like.
• 43:28
  Adam Curry: But could I say, build me an interface?
• 43:31
  Adam Curry: Yeah.
• 43:31
  Adam Curry: Yeah.
• 43:32
  Adam Curry: I'm not there yet because I like the podcast guru interface, but I could do it.
• 43:37
  Adam Curry: That possibility is there for me.
• 43:39
  Adam Curry: Now, unfortunately, that devalues the monetary value of podcast guru.
• 43:46
  Adam Curry: Because I know that I could really do this myself.
• 43:49
  Adam Curry: I think some of this is because you can, you have the capability that you could.
• 43:55
  Adam Curry: I think many people won't.
• 43:56
  Adam Curry: At the end of the day, I think we saw people had Napster.
• 43:59
  Adam Curry: Uh then Steve said, I'll give it to you for 99p a track.
• 44:03
  Adam Curry: Oh, okay, so that's just better than having to go and find all these stupid servers with illegal music on it.
• 44:08
  Adam Curry: I can do it quickly.
• 44:09
  Adam Curry: It cost me a bit more money, but I'll do it.
• 44:11
  Adam Curry: And then Spotify said, Have it, eat all you like, come to us.
• 44:13
  Adam Curry: And we said, for $14.99, 4 million tracks, I'm done, right?
• 44:17
  Adam Curry: So there aren't people who are going to be lazy who won't go and vibe code their own app and won't do this.
• 44:22
  Adam Curry: Yes, I think robots may be the way eventually we all interface to the web.
• 44:27
  Adam Curry: You said it, we went from keyboard, mouse, voice, right?
• 44:31
  Adam Curry: But let's just bring it back to today.
• 44:33
  Sam Sethi: Last question, really, for you, Adam.
• 44:35
  Sam Sethi: You've dealt with the podcasting 2.0 community, you've dealt with all the apps, they're all listed on the podcast index.
• 44:41
  Sam Sethi: You've now created podcastindexrobot.com.
• 44:45
  Sam Sethi: What should we, as the apps, be doing now?
• 44:49
  Sam Sethi: Should we be getting our clawed code, getting your MCP, testing what you've built, and going, you know what?
• 44:55
  Sam Sethi: I've got a server, I've got data, I've got users.
• 44:58
  Sam Sethi: In the case of TrueFounds, we've got activity streams even.
• 45:02
  Sam Sethi: Should we build our own MCP?
• 45:04
  Sam Sethi: Should we start building our own robot interfaces?
• 45:07
  Sam Sethi: Because that's the short term.
• 45:09
  Sam Sethi: As you said, why asked how long's a piece of string?
• 45:12
  Sam Sethi: When will everybody have their own app personalised to them?
• 45:16
  Sam Sethi: That could be 10 years.
• 45:17
  Sam Sethi: So in the next two or three years, should we all be building our own MCPs, looking at it that way, building our own AI robot interfaces for our users?
• 45:27
  Sam Sethi: Is that the next logical step?
• 45:30
  Adam Curry: I wish I had an answer for you, because I really don't.
• 45:33
  Adam Curry: All I can tell you is right now I like I like the the podcast interface that I use, probably because it also works very well in the car.
• 45:44
  Adam Curry: That's stuff that I don't want to have to go and figure out.
• 45:47
  Adam Curry: That's all constraints of the operating system and the company behind it.
• 45:51
  Adam Curry: It's all Apple.
• 45:52
  Adam Curry: It's not really and Google as well.
• 45:54
  Adam Curry: Android Auto, Android Automotive, a new thing coming, and CarPlay.
• 45:59
  Adam Curry: That's all hardware constraints that we have been fitting our backsides into for decades.
• 46:06
  Adam Curry: Even as software developers, I want to do this.
• 46:08
  Adam Curry: You have to do it the way that Apple tells you or Google tells you.
• 46:13
  Adam Curry: So does that mean that I guess you can see oh boy, it's a tough one.
• 46:18
  Adam Curry: I guess you can see an interface and interface design as valuable data that someone creates, but the actual functionality underneath it, how it works, is just not going to become that valuable anymore.
• 46:31
  Adam Curry: So I don't know.
• 46:32
  Adam Curry: Podcast apps has been probably the crappiest part of the entire podcasting business.
• 46:38
  Adam Curry: It's truly a labor of love for pretty much everybody who does this.
• 46:43
  Adam Curry: Do you want to be an interim step in between the data and the user?
• 46:48
  Adam Curry: Maybe, but I don't know.
• 46:50
  Adam Curry: Also, we're gonna wind up paying somebody for something.
• 46:53
  Adam Curry: Whether you buy a computer that that does this for you, you're still gonna need a computing device, you're gonna still need some type of mobile device that understands how to do these tasks and really to interact with an agent.
• 47:07
  Adam Curry: I just don't know if the future is building apps and services that way.
• 47:12
  Adam Curry: I just don't see it.
• 47:13
  Adam Curry: So I don't I'm not necessarily happy in bringing this news, but I don't think it's gonna be 10 years.
• 47:19
  Adam Curry: I think you're gonna see 10 months.
• 47:21
  Adam Curry: You're gonna see Adobe is is like the canary in the coal mine.
• 47:24
  Adam Curry: Holy crap.
• 47:25
  Adam Curry: They can't sue anybody, it's open source.
• 47:27
  Adam Curry: What are you gonna do?
• 47:27
  Adam Curry: Take it away from everybody?
• 47:28
  Adam Curry: You can't come into my house and take that.
• 47:30
  Adam Curry: At least not in America.
• 47:32
  Adam Curry: I don't know about the UK.
• 47:33
  Adam Curry: Anything's possible with you guys.
• 47:34
  Adam Curry: No.
• 47:35
  Adam Curry: Not yet.
• 47:37
  Adam Curry: Not yet.
• 47:38
  Adam Curry: Maybe in the future.
• 47:39
  Adam Curry: President Macron in France just said free speech isn't not freedom unless you have limits on it.
• 47:44
  Adam Curry: What?
• 47:44
  Adam Curry: Okay.
• 47:45
  Adam Curry: This is a revolution that is just phenomenal.
• 47:48
  Adam Curry: I would say whatever you're doing, get into either the physical world business or the data business.
• 47:57
  Adam Curry: You need to have something of value that people want to access.
• 48:01
  Adam Curry: The interfaces to that already, that's the point.
• 48:06
  Adam Curry: Podcast apps.
• 48:07
  Adam Curry: You are an interface between the user and the data the user wants.
• 48:12
  Adam Curry: Here comes something that probably will supplant that.
• 48:16
  Adam Curry: Doesn't mean that people still don't need hosting and don't need transfer.
• 48:21
  Adam Curry: And a lot of people will still need interfaces they like.
• 48:25
  Adam Curry: But how valuable will that be?
• 48:28
  Adam Curry: Probably just as valuable as the bits it was created with, which is virtually free.
• 48:33
  Sam Sethi: Thank God I got into hosting then, eh?
• 48:35
  Sam Sethi: But yeah, we will build Kevin and Kelly as experimentals to interface to the data.
• 48:41
  Adam Curry: Tell me what they do.
• 48:41
  Adam Curry: Tell me what Kevin and Kelly do.
• 48:43
  Sam Sethi: Very much what AI Robot does.
• 48:45
  Sam Sethi: Tell me if I've got a new comment on my podcast.
• 48:47
  Sam Sethi: Tell me if I've got some shows that are interesting.
• 48:50
  Sam Sethi: Because fundamentally, we have the fire hose from you guys, we have, but all we have the I follow certain people in TrueFans, I know what their activity is.
• 48:59
  Sam Sethi: So Adam listened to this show for 30 minutes.
• 49:01
  Sam Sethi: So if any of my friends listen to a show for more than 60 minutes, tell me about it.
• 49:05
  Sam Sethi: Is there a comment left for me?
• 49:06
  Sam Sethi: Was I in the transcript?
• 49:08
  Sam Sethi: Same things that you described earlier that you've done for the podcast index as a whole, but this is platform specific to us.
• 49:14
  Sam Sethi: With yes, look out into the wider field of all podcasts, but also look at what's happened as data on the platform that may be relevant.
• 49:23
  Sam Sethi: And again, I don't know what the answers are to that.
• 49:26
  Sam Sethi: I think the earliest thing to do is to roll up the sleeves, build something, and then see what it can do, and then look at some value with people who are going to use it.
• 49:37
  Sam Sethi: We don't know.
• 49:38
  Sam Sethi: But I think I like you have had a belief that there is a voice interface to podcasting.
• 49:45
  Sam Sethi: As I said, I see the jigsaw pieces, maybe not as clearly as you, but I see X402, OpenUSD, and I see AI agents, I see Claude, I see MCP.
• 49:54
  Sam Sethi: The word spaghetti is all there, and I think how it all lands and how we all then start to use it is baby steps right now.
• 50:04
  Sam Sethi: And I think what you did last week on the show was certainly put a spark in my mind as to yeah, this isn't something that's three years away, this is now, and so get your act together.
• 50:16
  Sam Sethi: Yes, I support every podcasting 2.0 tag.
• 50:19
  Sam Sethi: I even did the contact tag today, but that isn't gonna be the future in three years.
• 50:23
  Sam Sethi: So if that's not the future in three years, what do we do?
• 50:27
  Sam Sethi: And so yeah, it's just opening questions.
• 50:29
  Sam Sethi: I don't have answers like you.
• 50:31
  Sam Sethi: I don't have this is when it's all gonna happen.
• 50:33
  Sam Sethi: Personalized.
• 50:35
  Adam Curry: Just to make you feel better, Sam, to make you feel better.
• 50:37
  Adam Curry: We're in the app business too.
• 50:39
  Adam Curry: We have Godcaster, it's a web application and it's an actual app.
• 50:43
  Adam Curry: Same issues apply.
• 50:45
  Adam Curry: I'm not exactly sure where that's going to go.
• 50:48
  Adam Curry: I do know that on the other side, on the radio broadcasting side, you have companies like RCS and Dallette and all these big scheduling playout systems, professional playout systems.
• 51:00
  Adam Curry: We're getting big broadcasters coming to us now saying, Hey, what's up with that fractional program director?
• 51:05
  Adam Curry: Oh, take a look at it.
• 51:06
  Adam Curry: Here's a web interface.
• 51:08
  Adam Curry: In your car, you can literally say, Hey, I want to change the overnight clock, I want to add this, want to change that.
• 51:13
  Adam Curry: You just talk to it, it does it.
• 51:14
  Adam Curry: Now, could they vibe code that themselves?
• 51:18
  Adam Curry: Absolutely.
• 51:19
  Adam Curry: They're not gonna, not for a while, and they're gonna be perfectly happy to pay us, to pay our organization instead of paying a person who does that kind of stuff full time.
• 51:29
  Adam Curry: Will it last forever?
• 51:30
  Adam Curry: I don't know.
• 51:31
  Adam Curry: I'm probably gonna have to make it flexible so they can add their own features into it.
• 51:35
  Adam Curry: So there's always gonna be something like that, but that's the the broadcast side has already changed dramatically, let alone the fact that you don't need transmitters.
• 51:44
  Adam Curry: We don't need no stinking transmitters.
• 51:46
  Adam Curry: So now the receiver side.
• 51:48
  Adam Curry: And it's interesting because that one test that I did with Dave, and if you recall, if people go back and listen to it, I literally just said, I'm looking at it now.
• 51:58
  Adam Curry: I said, just get the most recent episode.
• 52:01
  Adam Curry: So today it gave me my tip.
• 52:04
  Adam Curry: I'm always looking for a flying car.
• 52:05
  Adam Curry: So it gave me three stories about flying cars, still a pipe dream.
• 52:09
  Adam Curry: And it said, hey, there's a new better offline episode, monologue, Australia's dodgiest AI IPO is a pale horse.
• 52:16
  Adam Curry: Front ads cut and end ads remain.
• 52:19
  Adam Curry: And it literally put the little player in there for me.
• 52:23
  Adam Curry: Now, this won't open on podcast guru.
• 52:25
  Adam Curry: I didn't ask for it to do that.
• 52:27
  Adam Curry: I only said do it once.
• 52:28
  Adam Curry: And now I can say, keep doing it or never do that again.
• 52:32
  Adam Curry: That's the kind of stuff that I'm talking about.
• 52:34
  Adam Curry: It presumed that I would like that from now on whenever that episode comes out.
• 52:39
  Adam Curry: Kind of mind-blowing, a little freaky, but just to bring it all around to advertising is dead.
• 52:46
  Adam Curry: That that's a decision I didn't even make.
• 52:48
  Adam Curry: So it's doing that based upon what it thinks I have time for or interest in or whatever, and I can change that or not change it.
• 52:56
  Adam Curry: This is where it's headed.
• 52:57
  Adam Curry: And it's really an exciting time, I think, for users who have been held hostage to software companies and services for since computing began.
• 53:13
  Sam Sethi: Kind of mind-blowing and slightly freaking.
• 53:15
  Sam Sethi: I could say that's how you to describe Adam Curry.
• 53:18
  Adam Curry: I don't know how to make money on it, Sam.
• 53:20
  Adam Curry: I have no idea.
• 53:20
  Adam Curry: I don't know how to make money on it.
• 53:22
  Adam Curry: We'll just have to see where it goes.
• 53:24
  Sam Sethi: Adam Curry, thank you so much.
• 53:26
  Sam Sethi: Thank you so much for keeping pushing the boundaries, but thank you so much for your time today as well.
• 53:31
  Adam Curry: Speech you soon.
• 53:31
  Adam Curry: Oh, as always, Sam, and thank you and and James, of course, for always bringing consistent, great podcasting news.
• 53:39
  Adam Curry: Podcasting 2.0 podcasts will be nothing without you guys to bounce off of.
• 53:43
  Adam Curry: So we really appreciate what you do.
• 53:45
  Sam Sethi: Thanks, mate.
• 53:46
  Sam Sethi: Have a great show tonight and speech you soon.
• 53:49
  Announcer: The Podnews weekly review with Buzzsprout with Buzzsprout.
• 53:53
  Announcer: Start podcasting, keep podcasting.
• 53:56
  Sam Sethi: James, uh some sad news coming forward to us.
• 54:01
  Sam Sethi: Now, Dave Jones, the Pod Sage, predicted that by the end of 2027, one tier two podcast app, meaning overcast podcast ad, Castro, etc., will put a skip dynamic ad checkbox.
• 54:15
  Sam Sethi: They will remove DAI slots from podcast episodes.
• 54:19
  Sam Sethi: Well, we haven't seen that in those, but we have seen one thing.
• 54:23
  Sam Sethi: Castro has ended.
• 54:26
  Sam Sethi: What's happened?
• 54:28
  James Cridland: Yes, well, Castro hasn't necessarily ended, but Castro, which is a very good independent podcast app, was uh put together by a couple of folks who lived in Canada, one of them Irish, one of them not Irish, and then bought by a uh VC company in Vancouver, then bought by a man called Dustin Bluck.
• 54:49
  James Cridland: Dustin has now sold the app to Maple Media.
• 54:53
  James Cridland: Now, Maple Media is one of these companies that buys established apps and essentially for podcasting folds them into Player FM, which it bought in 2020, to which essentially means uh the loss of another indie podcast app because Castro, if you follow the playbook that Maple Media have, Castro will just become another reskin of the Player FM app in the next six months or so.
• 55:21
  James Cridland: It's unfortunately just another example of how independent podcast apps really aren't doing very well right now.
• 55:28
  James Cridland: And there's probably a reason for that.
• 55:31
  James Cridland: The reason is that apps make no money, and so therefore, you know, there's no money made from ads.
• 55:38
  James Cridland: So the only thing that they can do is either accept advertising in their own app, which they have to be very careful of because podcasters don't like that, or some other way of making money, maybe that's getting rid of ads, maybe that's you know, doing doing other things, doing additional features and things like that.
• 55:58
  James Cridland: But it's not good news for independent apps, really.
• 56:01
  James Cridland: No, it's not.
• 56:03
  Sam Sethi: And I think you've been trying to push the idea of getting hosts and advertisers to split some of the revenue with the apps.
• 56:11
  Sam Sethi: That's gone down like a cup of sick because nobody's actually done anything with it.
• 56:15
  Sam Sethi: It seems to just sit there on the shelf as a nice idea with nobody actually moving it forward.
• 56:21
  James Cridland: And I don't think I would say it's not necessarily gone down like a cup of sick, Sam.
• 56:26
  James Cridland: I think I think actually everybody who who I tell this to says that's a really good idea.
• 56:31
  James Cridland: Yes, but that's as far as it goes, right?
• 56:34
  James Cridland: So I think it's gone down like a like a really nice, nice warm coffee that nobody actually wants it wants to touch.
• 56:42
  James Cridland: I think that's possibly how it's gone down.
• 56:44
  Sam Sethi: But anyway, yes.
• 56:45
  Sam Sethi: Better analogy.
• 56:46
  Sam Sethi: Now, I mean so we're not doing a prediction show now, but you know, what are you predicting then for the you know the future of independent podcast apps?
• 56:59
  James Cridland: Well, I'm I'm not I I'm not very into predicting the future, but I can certainly see the trend and where the trend is going.
• 57:07
  James Cridland: And and I've put some numbers together from the UK only because I put these numbers together for the UK for the podcast show London.
• 57:16
  James Cridland: In 2024, 38% of all downloads went to indie podcast apps.
• 57:21
  James Cridland: That number had fallen to 36%, so down 2% a year later.
• 57:28
  James Cridland: And then in 2026, it was down to just 31%.
• 57:31
  James Cridland: So it's clearly going down the amount of downloads that we're seeing to independent podcast apps, and that doesn't include YouTube and Spotify video and other things such as that.
• 57:42
  James Cridland: So I think you know, it's it's not looking good for independent podcast apps.
• 57:46
  James Cridland: Dustin Bluck, the until recently the owner of uh Castro, he wrote a reflective, well, a set of reflective pieces on his own personal blog, basically saying independent podcast apps are dying, which is not particularly good, but also saying things like, you know, how difficult customer support was and how few people want to actually pay for podcast apps, you know, as well.
• 58:12
  James Cridland: And that was certainly one of the things that he was quite keen to highlight.
• 58:17
  James Cridland: So I think it's pretty clear that, you know, if you if you want to run an independent podcast app by itself, it's not going to be a business that you're gonna be particularly into, unfortunately.
• 58:29
  Sam Sethi: No, you have I think you know, Oscar Mary over at Fountain and myself obviously have talked and moving towards more revenue from hosting was one of the ideas that we had to take on board.
• 58:42
  Sam Sethi: Adam Curry in the interview, you know, has said that with personalised podcast apps, there is no need for apps.
• 58:51
  Sam Sethi: He can build it with Muse and with his own AI robot.
• 58:56
  Sam Sethi: So I don't think that's gonna happen anytime soon.
• 59:00
  Sam Sethi: I think Adam Curry is very smart and he can use it.
• 59:02
  James Cridland: I don't think normal people will be doing that, will they?
• 59:05
  Sam Sethi: No, but I do think there are things that apps can do that bridge the gap between what Adam's idea is and where we are today, which may also allow apps to charge a pro version.
• 59:19
  Sam Sethi: But that's again gonna be tested in the market where people go, no, not really bothered, I don't need to pay extra for it.
• 59:25
  Sam Sethi: Yeah, so I I do think we, as the independent podcast apps, are gonna face an uphill struggle.
• 59:33
  Sam Sethi: You know, we can add as many features and functions as you like, but if people aren't gonna use them because they're not in the mainstream apps, I mean, you know, that's one of the other challenges.
• 59:42
  Sam Sethi: You know, we we talked how long about the alternative enclosure and video and until Apple supported HLS and they still don't support the alternative enclosure, yeah.
• 59:52
  James Cridland: The adoption curve doesn't happen.
• 59:54
  James Cridland: Yeah.
• 59:54
  James Cridland: No, it is difficult.
• 59:55
  James Cridland: And I think you know, we need to think about well, how can independent podcast apps make money?
• 1:00:02
  James Cridland: Or we can do the other thing, or we can go, we don't care about independent podcast apps.
• 1:00:06
  James Cridland: Let's see them all close down because that's going to make our lives far easier.
• 1:00:10
  James Cridland: Because if podcasting turns into Apple, YouTube and Spotify, then great, because we've got three sets of stats.
• 1:00:18
  James Cridland: We don't have to worry about this open RSS malarkey.
• 1:00:21
  James Cridland: We can we can not bother with any of that stuff, and we can just focus on the stats that we get from Apple, YouTube, and uh Spotify directly.
• 1:00:30
  James Cridland: And actually, you know what?
• 1:00:32
  James Cridland: Quite a lot of the conversations I have with people are all about that, are all about there are way too many different podcast apps.
• 1:00:39
  James Cridland: It would be far easier if there were just three.
• 1:00:42
  Sam Sethi: Yeah.
• 1:00:43
  James Cridland: That's not a future I want to see, because I don't think that that's a particularly helpful future, and it's certainly not the future that Adam and Dave Weiner, when they co-invented podcasting, were coming up with.
• 1:00:54
  James Cridland: I I think, you know, the whole thing about podcasting is it's democratized, it's available everywhere.
• 1:01:01
  James Cridland: And I don't think that that's a particularly helpful move, but perhaps that's what the industry really wants at the end of the day.
• 1:01:07
  James Cridland: Perhaps nobody cares about independent podcast apps, and that would be a that would be a sad day, I think.
• 1:01:13
  Sam Sethi: Well, I think we've got other pressures as well.
• 1:01:16
  Sam Sethi: One we keep talking about, which is you know, people aren't aware of what RSS is and its importance within the industry about enabling that, you know, wherever you get your podcast.
• 1:01:27
  Sam Sethi: Secondly, we're seeing more API requirements on hosts to pump content through to the big three, and that gives them more control.
• 1:01:35
  Sam Sethi: And you know, at the end of the day, when you start to look at this whole model, if there's no money in the pot at the end of the day, well, you know, why keep going?
• 1:01:45
  Sam Sethi: I mean, I have to say, as a CEO of TrueFans, one of the challenges of being an entrepreneur is to take something that seemingly looks uncrackable and try to crack it.
• 1:01:56
  Sam Sethi: That is what entrepreneurs do.
• 1:01:58
  Sam Sethi: There is a market opportunity still, and I still think there is a chance that something like TrueFans Fountain on the others can make a dent, but you know, it's not easy.
• 1:02:12
  Sam Sethi: I won't say it's easy.
• 1:02:14
  James Cridland: No, indeed, indeed.
• 1:02:15
  James Cridland: Certainly worthwhile, yeah, keeping an eye on.
• 1:02:19
  James Cridland: I think you know, Apple Apple Podcasts i is a great podcast app these days.
• 1:02:24
  James Cridland: Uh, it's only available on Apple devices and and a Tesla, but it's a great, it's a great app.
• 1:02:30
  James Cridland: And so, you know, arguably you could turn around and say, would it really matter if Overcast went away and Podcast Addict went away and Pocketcast went away?
• 1:02:40
  James Cridland: And the answer is I guess probably not.
• 1:02:42
  James Cridland: It would certainly make our life an awful lot an awful lot easier, maybe.
• 1:02:46
  James Cridland: So it's you know, it's a bit sad.
• 1:02:49
  Sam Sethi: I have said on this show and argued a few times that I think standalone apps will go away because single function apps aren't where the future is.
• 1:02:59
  Sam Sethi: We've heard from you know in Jeanine Wright talking about how she's extending tools across multiple platforms with Liquid Studios.
• 1:03:08
  Sam Sethi: I think when you've got a standalone app like Overcast that just delivers one single function, I don't think that's where the economy is, where people are watching.
• 1:03:18
  Sam Sethi: They want to be dipping in and dipping out of brand or creator content, and they want the app to support that.
• 1:03:26
  Sam Sethi: And I don't think standalone apps are doing a job there.
• 1:03:31
  James Cridland: Yeah, well, I mean that's certainly one way of looking at it.
• 1:03:35
  James Cridland: I mean, the other way of looking at it is, for example, if you take a look at what Goalhanger have announced this week, Goldhanger have announced that Marina Hyde, who used to be a Guardian journalist, she is now working with something called Goldhanger X, and she's launching a new platform called Always On.
• 1:03:51
  James Cridland: She will be hosting YouTube shows and will write on Substack.
• 1:03:54
  James Cridland: Now, what Goldhanger X should probably be doing is launching the Marina Hyde Always On app, which would give the the viewer access to YouTube, access to her writing, and that's basically and the the the rest is entertainment as she continues on her podcast.
• 1:04:13
  James Cridland: Maybe that's the plan that Goldhanger has, but the problem with that is you will only download that app if you're a fan of Marina Hyde in this particular case.
• 1:04:23
  James Cridland: It's like a radio station app.
• 1:04:25
  James Cridland: You will only download if you're a fan of that radio station, which is why TuneIn is still so important, because TuneIn is used by a ton of radio stations where you know you will find a radio station in in TuneIn very different to using your own app.
• 1:04:42
  James Cridland: So I suppose the the question is, is the future apps like you know, the always on with Marina Hyde podcast app, or is it going to be, you know, is it going to be horizontal or is it going to be vertical?
• 1:04:56
  James Cridland: I suppose is the uh is is the way.
• 1:04:58
  James Cridland: And uh I don't suppose anybody knows.
• 1:05:01
  Sam Sethi: No, I mean I've I've talked about Scott Galloway with Prof.
• 1:05:05
  Sam Sethi: I've talked about Zateo with Medihassan.
• 1:05:08
  Sam Sethi: They know that they have to be cross-platform in terms of clips and video on YouTube, but they also are aggregating all of their content on Substack, right?
• 1:05:20
  Sam Sethi: With audio, video, live, books, podcasts, etc.
• 1:05:24
  Sam Sethi: And I think that is the trend now.
• 1:05:27
  Sam Sethi: It's you you create a portal for your let's say parasocial fans where they can touch it.
• 1:05:35
  Sam Sethi: I mean, we talked about it last week how Goal Hangers now got a newsletter that has nothing directly to do with the podcast.
• 1:05:43
  Sam Sethi: They're getting guest writers like Mary Beard to write in the newsletter to extend the connectivity during the week between episodes.
• 1:05:53
  Sam Sethi: So yeah, I think that is the way forward.
• 1:05:57
  James Cridland: But uh and I I would also say to come back to clips, I would Also, say that clips have nothing to do with podcasts, really.
• 1:06:03
  James Cridland: They're a discovery mechanism.
• 1:06:04
  James Cridland: They're nothing to do with podcasts.
• 1:06:06
  James Cridland: And one of the things that I'm getting increasingly irritated by is press releases that say that this particular podcaster has got 48 million views of his clips.
• 1:06:18
  James Cridland: Who cares?
• 1:06:18
  James Cridland: What's that got to do with anything?
• 1:06:20
  James Cridland: It's not helping in terms of the advertising, which is in there.
• 1:06:24
  James Cridland: It's not helping in terms of pretty well anything.
• 1:06:26
  James Cridland: You can't get a complicated story over in 25 seconds on a TikTok video.
• 1:06:34
  James Cridland: It's a meaningless figure, but it's a big number, and so therefore every everybody's using it.
• 1:06:43
  Sam Sethi: It's a measurement of reach.
• 1:06:45
  Sam Sethi: That's that's why they're doing it.
• 1:06:47
  Sam Sethi: And if you're adding ads within the clip, well, hang on a second.
• 1:06:51
  James Cridland: Well, if you're adding ads within the clip, how many ads have you seen within clips?
• 1:06:55
  James Cridland: Well, the the point being I will break this this clip for 30 seconds while I talk to you about pet insurance.
• 1:07:01
  James Cridland: Yes, it's not gonna happen.
• 1:07:04
  Sam Sethi: Well, it is happening, that's what what that's what the clip economy is about.
• 1:07:08
  Sam Sethi: Um a lot of it is now yeah.
• 1:07:10
  Sam Sethi: Well, I mean you look at Facebook, right?
• 1:07:11
  Sam Sethi: We talked about it earlier.
• 1:07:12
  Sam Sethi: They are earning more ad revenue from reels than the whole of the TV advertising industry.
• 1:07:19
  Sam Sethi: That is a number, that is not a fictional number, that is a measured number.
• 1:07:23
  Sam Sethi: Now, the point being, if you're a brand that wants to be associated with James Cridland World, I want to be on Podnews Daily, I want to be on Podnews Weekly Review, and I want to be on his clips.
• 1:07:34
  Sam Sethi: I i it it's it's this liquid content.
• 1:07:37
  Sam Sethi: I want to be where James is and I want my brand to be associated there.
• 1:07:42
  James Cridland: Yeah.
• 1:07:43
  James Cridland: Wow.
• 1:07:44
  James Cridland: Yes, I mean Facebook ads are ads, Facebook uh Reels ads are ads that are put in front of a in front of a clip, which is a kind of a little bit different to you know, and also we don't sell them.
• 1:07:59
  James Cridland: Facebook sells those.
• 1:08:01
  James Cridland: So again, it's a very different it's a very different kettle of fish, I think.
• 1:08:06
  James Cridland: I d I just think it's a nonsense number, and I don't really see why that's particularly useful in terms of anything.
• 1:08:13
  James Cridland: You certainly can't influence anybody in 20 seconds, but maybe maybe I'm just an old 50-something you know person that remembers the good old days of media.
• 1:08:24
  James Cridland: Maybe maybe that's it.
• 1:08:25
  Sam Sethi: Who knows?
• 1:08:26
  Sam Sethi: Let's move on, James.
• 1:08:28
  Sam Sethi: Now, our sponsors of Buzzsprout, if you record a show and upload it to Buzzsprout, and the transcript is helpful, but there are problems.
• 1:08:37
  Sam Sethi: It shows something like Buzzsprout with two words.
• 1:08:40
  Sam Sethi: Have they done anything to improve this?
• 1:08:43
  James Cridland: Yes, or indeed the spelling of both my name and your name is is always an entertainment.
• 1:08:50
  James Cridland: And the good news is it's been fixed.
• 1:08:53
  James Cridland: Hooray! So the transcript editor now has auto-correct, which will fix, you know, what if you come if you correct Buzz new word sprout to Buzzsprout, then you can correct that once.
• 1:09:04
  James Cridland: It will go through the entire transcripts and correct it all the way through.
• 1:09:08
  James Cridland: And I think that it will also correct it in future episodes as well.
• 1:09:12
  James Cridland: That may be that may be fanciful hope, but I think that it will probably do that.
• 1:09:16
  James Cridland: It's also got keyboard shortcuts and chapter markers.
• 1:09:19
  James Cridland: If you've used the transcripts for this show, you'll know that I don't necessarily go through and all and correct as much as I should.
• 1:09:26
  James Cridland: And perhaps this will drive me to correct a little bit more in terms of that.
• 1:09:30
  James Cridland: Anyway, if you want to find out more information on the better transcripts in the BuzzSprout platform, then take a listen to the BuzzCast podcast, which is available wherever you get your podcasts.
• 1:09:42
  Sam Sethi: Yeah, we had a real life example.
• 1:09:43
  Sam Sethi: We had Juliana Mayer from Super Pass On a couple of weeks back, and she sent me an SRT file this week saying, Could you please change your transcript?
• 1:09:53
  Sam Sethi: Because it says super arse all the way through.
• 1:09:56
  Sam Sethi: And the transcript.
• 1:09:58
  Sam Sethi: And she said, I really want to promote the interview, but I don't want that out in the public domain, please.
• 1:10:04
  Sam Sethi: So yes.
• 1:10:05
  James Cridland: That's brilliant.
• 1:10:06
  James Cridland: I did wonder why all of a sudden it said, Oh, it's finished, finished processing working.
• 1:10:12
  James Cridland: Uh yes, I did what I did wonder why I got that, and that that would explain it.
• 1:10:16
  James Cridland: Super arse, brilliant.
• 1:10:18
  Sam Sethi: Yes, and she was not, she was very pleasant and polite about it, but she was like, Would you mind just using this version that we've cleaned up for you?
• 1:10:25
  Sam Sethi: Wow, gosh.
• 1:10:26
  Sam Sethi: There you go.
• 1:10:28
  James Cridland: Let's whisk around the world, shall we?
• 1:10:30
  Sam Sethi: Go for it.
• 1:10:31
  Sam Sethi: Uh the USA, YouTube now eclipses TV to become the top news source in the US.
• 1:10:37
  Sam Sethi: I mean, this is uh this is scary for the TV industry, isn't it?
• 1:10:43
  James Cridland: Yeah, uh if it was true, yes, it's nonsense.
• 1:10:46
  Sam Sethi: Oh is it nonsense?
• 1:10:47
  Sam Sethi: Go on then, tell me why.
• 1:10:51
  James Cridland: Well, you know, you take a look at you take a look at YouTube.
• 1:10:54
  James Cridland: I mean, it's one of these it's one of these reports that's been hidden behind a uh a registration wall anyway.
• 1:11:01
  James Cridland: But it's but but what the headline is is YouTube edges out TV as Americans' top source for political news.
• 1:11:09
  James Cridland: So already political news, not just news, political news.
• 1:11:13
  James Cridland: But also, secondly, it's b basically talking about it's basically talking about trust, and uh, you know, six out of ten Americans trust uh, you know, independent news creators as much as well-known journalists on on politics.
• 1:11:27
  James Cridland: You know, YouTube is not where you will get uh the equivalent of the of the CBS Evening News or the News at 10.
• 1:11:36
  James Cridland: It it it's a very different thing.
• 1:11:39
  James Cridland: So it's it's you know m more of these spurious pieces of of research that are pitting YouTube against TV, just to point out what trouble TV is in.
• 1:11:51
  James Cridland: And I'm um it's it's not really a thing.
• 1:11:53
  James Cridland: But yeah, I mean I mean it's it's lovely that that uh you know we're getting yet more of this stuff to end up going through, but but no.
• 1:12:02
  James Cridland: No.
• 1:12:04
  Sam Sethi: I I only say through personal experience, I I tend to watch in-depth political analysis on podcasts.
• 1:12:11
  Sam Sethi: I don't watch the news for in-depth political analysis.
• 1:12:15
  Sam Sethi: We don't get it in the UK anymore, sadly.
• 1:12:17
  Sam Sethi: You know, question time is a is a dog and pony punch and duty show, and you know, the the Sunday.
• 1:12:26
  James Cridland: Yeah, no, no, exactly.
• 1:12:27
  James Cridland: I mean, you know, the the actual stat, YouTube is relied on most often as a primary news source for politics.
• 1:12:34
  James Cridland: Uh and okay, but that that's basically people talking about politics, not people talking about you know actual news that matters.
• 1:12:41
  James Cridland: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:12:42
  James Cridland: So, you know, yeah.
• 1:12:44
  Sam Sethi: I mean actually this week for the midterms, Corus Swish has got a new podcast with Hillary Clinton, just launched.
• 1:12:51
  James Cridland: So we'll see what that one is, which is interesting.
• 1:12:54
  James Cridland: And uh Kamala Harris was on uh the Kee Keep Armour podcast as well earlier on in the week.
• 1:12:59
  James Cridland: So anybody would think there are elections coming up in the US fairly shortly.
• 1:13:04
  James Cridland: Uh other things going on in the in the US.
• 1:13:06
  James Cridland: Well, yes, I mean there is always that.
• 1:13:09
  James Cridland: Sorry.
• 1:13:09
  James Cridland: Back to podcasting in the US is uh Shopify is doing things with AI agents, it's basically making life easier for Metas Muse to buy stuff on Shopify websites.
• 1:13:23
  James Cridland: There's a thrill and an excitement.
• 1:13:25
  James Cridland: Awards and events, you're going to the independent podcast.
• 1:13:30
  Sam Sethi: Go back.
• 1:13:30
  Sam Sethi: So sorry, James is trying to get through this.
• 1:13:32
  Sam Sethi: I know this is going to hit the cutting room floor, but let me try.
• 1:13:35
  Sam Sethi: Right.
• 1:13:36
  Sam Sethi: Last week we talked about how AI agents accessing data sources were being blocked: Reddit, Apple, Amazon.
• 1:13:44
  Sam Sethi: And I just think this is interesting as a counter that actually not all sources will be blocked.
• 1:13:49
  Sam Sethi: In some cases, AI agents will be welcomed in with a red carpet and told to scrape away and do what you like within here because you will buy as much as you like with your owner's credit card.
• 1:14:01
  James Cridland: Yes, exactly, exactly right.
• 1:14:03
  James Cridland: That was just it.
• 1:14:04
  Sam Sethi: I just thought it was interesting as a counter to what we were talking about last week.
• 1:14:08
  James Cridland: I think that that is absolutely fair enough.
• 1:14:10
  James Cridland: If you're watching the video version, my automated lights have just turned off.
• 1:14:14
  James Cridland: But the good news is I've now got a switch so I can turn them back on again without uh waving my arms about.
• 1:14:19
  James Cridland: So that's handy, isn't it?
• 1:14:21
  James Cridland: Awards and events, the Independent Podcast Awards in King's Place in London is uh happening in November, early November.
• 1:14:29
  James Cridland: I think Chloe Way Brown from TrueFans will be there.
• 1:14:32
  James Cridland: I will not be there this year, unfortunately.
• 1:14:33
  James Cridland: I was there last year, I think, wasn't I?
• 1:14:35
  James Cridland: So, and enjoyed being over there for that.
• 1:14:38
  James Cridland: But I will be have just been, as this goes out, at the Sonar Awards in Sydney.
• 1:14:44
  James Cridland: So looking forward to going there.
• 1:14:46
  James Cridland: I'm giving away four awards, which I'm looking forward to.
• 1:14:49
  James Cridland: One of them only has one nominee.
• 1:14:52
  James Cridland: So I think we can guess who the winner for that one is going to be.
• 1:14:55
  James Cridland: No envelope required.
• 1:14:57
  James Cridland: Indeed.
• 1:14:58
  Announcer: The tech stuff on the Podnews Weekly Review.
• 1:15:03
  James Cridland: Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Podnews newsletter.
• 1:15:06
  James Cridland: Uh, here's where Sam talks technology.
• 1:15:08
  James Cridland: Uh, you've seen the home view, right?
• 1:15:11
  Sam Sethi: I I've seen it.
• 1:15:12
  Sam Sethi: I do I want it was the next question, I guess.
• 1:15:15
  Sam Sethi: No.
• 1:15:16
  James Cridland: Actually, you're not you're not allowed it, I don't think, are you?
• 1:15:19
  Sam Sethi: Not yet, no.
• 1:15:20
  Sam Sethi: Well, no, I mean I'm not in the EU, technically.
• 1:15:23
  Sam Sethi: Technically, because of Brexit, we're not in the EU, so we might get it.
• 1:15:27
  Sam Sethi: Who knows?
• 1:15:28
  Sam Sethi: Uh yes.
• 1:15:29
  James Cridland: Because the Apple the Apple Home View, it's a sort of a it's a it's a it's a Google Nest home hub, basically.
• 1:15:36
  James Cridland: It's a device with speakers and a screen.
• 1:15:38
  James Cridland: I thought two interesting things, apart from the fact that it won't be available in the EU because it contains Siri AI, which is banned for the likes of people there.
• 1:15:47
  James Cridland: But also it's got Apple Podcasts pre-installed in it, so you can use Apple Podcasts on that device.
• 1:15:55
  James Cridland: So that is good.
• 1:15:57
  James Cridland: But guess what?
• 1:15:58
  James Cridland: You can't use Spotify, Overcast, or any other podcast app, and there is no App Store either.
• 1:16:04
  James Cridland: So you can't even get a Spotify or Overcast or anything else on there.
• 1:16:09
  James Cridland: Now, the interesting thing, what they've done with this Apple HomeView, is that it will support CarPlay, which I think is going to be rebranded at some point, but it will support CarPlay.
• 1:16:20
  James Cridland: So if your podcast app, your favorite podcast app has CarPlay on it, then you can attach it to this Apple HomeView thing, and it will then be able to play back content from Apple CarPlay, which then goes to explain why Apple launched, you know, or or at least have been talking about, you know, things like YouTube and video stuff on CarPlay.
• 1:16:46
  James Cridland: Only available in cars when you're stationary, but now available on the Apple HomeView as well, potentially.
• 1:16:53
  James Cridland: So I thought that that was an interesting way round, but very locked down, because it essentially means that you have to have something installed on your phone before this home view will actually even even accept it.
• 1:17:05
  James Cridland: So good news for podcasts, maybe if you're on Apple Podcasts and you want to promote that, but otherwise not quite so good.
• 1:17:12
  James Cridland: So I thought that that was I thought that that was interesting, uh Sam, but I'm not going to be getting one of those, I don't think.
• 1:17:19
  Sam Sethi: No, I mean the one thing I did see that was interesting was when you get close with your new iOS 27 phone, it will do proximity and change all the calendars and everything else to your personalization.
• 1:17:35
  Sam Sethi: And then when you walk away and your partner comes, it'll then give her the opportunity as well.
• 1:17:41
  Sam Sethi: So some clever little things in there, typically Apple.
• 1:17:45
  Sam Sethi: I think there's a lot of third-party doors and lights and etc.
• 1:17:51
  Sam Sethi: home automation that's coming.
• 1:17:53
  Sam Sethi: Yep.
• 1:17:53
  James Cridland: Again, new Apple TV as well.
• 1:17:56
  James Cridland: Which I'm I might go and buy, except there's nothing new about it other than that.
• 1:18:03
  James Cridland: There's I mean, not even Siri AI is new in the new Apple TV because you'll be able to get that in a software update anyway, for the old ones.
• 1:18:12
  James Cridland: But it's got some microphones in it or something, so you can shout at it and say, No, don't play that.
• 1:18:18
  James Cridland: So it's got that, but you it's also got a speaker in the remote control.
• 1:18:23
  James Cridland: So what you can do is you can shout at your Apple TV under the TV and go, Hey, where's the remote control?
• 1:18:30
  James Cridland: And the remote control will bleep at you, which is quite nice.
• 1:18:34
  James Cridland: And that's about the only new thing that at the the Apple TV 4K has has you know done.
• 1:18:40
  James Cridland: But it's also very expensive as well, I think.
• 1:18:42
  James Cridland: 300, 300 US dollars.
• 1:18:44
  James Cridland: So that's going to be an expensive old streaming device.
• 1:18:47
  James Cridland: So I'm not quite sure that'll be $600 here.
• 1:18:51
  James Cridland: Why would I want to spend $600 for or or $450 or whatever it is?
• 1:18:57
  James Cridland: Yeah.
• 1:18:58
  Sam Sethi: I I did think a couple of I mean the pace at which Apple moves is is snail-like in most cases, right?
• 1:19:06
  Sam Sethi: I I do find it but but you do see the building blocks over time.
• 1:19:11
  Sam Sethi: So with your AirPods having a chip in it, with your phone having a chip in it, with your Apple TV or your home view having chips in it, and building that chip economy that they did, they now have a very powerful ecosystem.
• 1:19:26
  Sam Sethi: One of the biggest problems with home automation with the Amazon Alexa was it didn't have proximity.
• 1:19:32
  Sam Sethi: So you couldn't walk into a room and the lights turn on, you in in knowing that it was you, right?
• 1:19:38
  Sam Sethi: Or in whatever setting, or you know, as you approach the door.
• 1:19:43
  Sam Sethi: So there was a whole bunch of things that you just couldn't do with home automation in the old uh Amazon Alexa, which is you know what you had and I have.
• 1:19:53
  James Cridland: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:19:53
  Sam Sethi: This new model and what they're showing with HomeView as an example, where you come close with your phone and it changes, is exactly how they build the chip ecosystem underneath it, which is very powerful.
• 1:20:07
  Sam Sethi: So, yes, you said it earlier, you know, if you want to be in the Apple ecosystem, I think you said it actually last week, which was you know, when I was asking about podcasting, why didn't you know Amazon Alexa catch on?
• 1:20:21
  Sam Sethi: You said, well, radio didn't, and then I thought, well, that's just me asking for a radio station by name.
• 1:20:27
  Sam Sethi: Why can't I ask a podcast by name?
• 1:20:28
  Sam Sethi: Why didn't it catch on?
• 1:20:30
  Sam Sethi: And you said the other problem is I might start on my phone, maybe then I go and watch it on my laptop, and then I get to this Alexa thing that doesn't know where I am.
• 1:20:40
  Sam Sethi: So now I've got to be tied into the Apple ecosystem.
• 1:20:44
  Sam Sethi: Well, that's exactly what Apple wants to tie you into their ecosystem.
• 1:20:47
  Sam Sethi: Absolutely right.
• 1:20:49
  James Cridland: Absolutely right.
• 1:20:50
  James Cridland: No, I think it's interesting, and by the way, I should I should just say that the way that their proximity stuff is working is it's not just have you got an Apple phone in your pocket, it it is also using the same face ID that it's used to using to open your Apple phone as well.
• 1:21:05
  James Cridland: So you won't be able to get into, you know, your wife's phone by just picking uh your wife's account by picking up her phone and walking close to this thing, it'll actually look at who's on the screen as well.
• 1:21:18
  James Cridland: But I think, yeah, you know, there's some the there are obvious things here in terms of just keeping people in the Apple ecosystem.
• 1:21:26
  James Cridland: The downside with all of this, of course, is that Apple are promoting an awful lot of uh stuff for their particular ecosystem, and that does lock out every everybody else.
• 1:21:38
  James Cridland: So if you're not if you're using a Windows laptop, if you're using an Android phone, then you don't get any access to any of this.
• 1:21:44
  James Cridland: Of course, that's what Apple want because they want to sell more devices, but that's not what podcasting wants.
• 1:21:51
  James Cridland: And at the moment, we don't really have a default podcast app for Android again, after Google, you know, saw a fluffy bird and closed the the the Google Podcasts app down.
• 1:22:02
  James Cridland: So, you know, so I think I think that there's you you know there's stuff there in terms of the Apple standard way of building their own ecosystem, which is unhelpful for for the podcast world, but that's I suppose as far as we're gonna mail and voicemail our favorite time of the week, it's the Podnews Weekly Review inbox.
• 1:22:25
  Announcer: Inbox.
• 1:22:27
  James Cridland: Yes, so many different ways to get in touch with us.
• 1:22:29
  James Cridland: You can please use the voicemail.
• 1:22:31
  James Cridland: You'll find the voicemail link in our show notes, right at the top of the show notes.
• 1:22:35
  James Cridland: It says something like, Jet send James and Sam a voicemail comment.
• 1:22:39
  James Cridland: And if you do so, it will get onto this show.
• 1:22:41
  James Cridland: Why don't you click that today and uh record something?
• 1:22:45
  James Cridland: Uh it works best on your mobile phone, but it'll work on your on your laptop as well, or on your iPad if you've got one of those or Android tablet or whatever.
• 1:22:53
  James Cridland: Of course, you can also use email as well.
• 1:22:54
  James Cridland: We're weekly at podnews.net.
• 1:22:57
  James Cridland: We've had a couple of little pieces of of uh fan mail, haven't we, Sam?
• 1:23:02
  Sam Sethi: Yes, Seth Goldstein sent us 1202 sats and said, Voice never gets my Philly accent right.
• 1:23:09
  Sam Sethi: Never been a fan of the smart speakers.
• 1:23:11
  Sam Sethi: Try having a Scottish accent, it'll never get your Scottish accent right, that's for certain.
• 1:23:15
  James Cridland: Ask Dan Brown.
• 1:23:17
  Sam Sethi: Yes, and to be honest, I much rather use a Far Stick or a Roku stick than have a smart TV that doesn't get updates.
• 1:23:23
  Sam Sethi: I'd love to see Pocket Cast, and for that matter, TrueFans is a TV app on major players as well.
• 1:23:29
  Sam Sethi: Yeah, we talked about how you know YouTube and smart screens, I think Tom Webster last week, we were talking about how 12% of viewing is now on big screens and should apps be there.
• 1:23:40
  Sam Sethi: I guess, you know, that's what app developers have to do.
• 1:23:44
  Sam Sethi: Look at where the people are watching or listening.
• 1:23:46
  James Cridland: And the one thing I would say, Seth, is that outside of the uh US, Pocketcasts is available as a TV app on the major players.
• 1:23:54
  James Cridland: They're available on both the Apple TV platform and also on the Android TV platform.
• 1:24:01
  James Cridland: You really shouldn't be using a fire stick, they're rubbish.
• 1:24:04
  James Cridland: Roku is even worse.
• 1:24:05
  James Cridland: You should be going to your local Walmart and getting an onStreamer, which is their brand of Android TV streamer.
• 1:24:13
  James Cridland: It's a good little stick, it'll cost you 30 bucks, and you will you will not turn back, I promise.
• 1:24:18
  James Cridland: It's very good.
• 1:24:19
  James Cridland: So I would heartily recommend that.
• 1:24:21
  James Cridland: Uh, thank you, Seth.
• 1:24:22
  James Cridland: Also, Neil Vellio saying we owe Adam and Dave a lot of gratitude for this industry being an industry.
• 1:24:29
  James Cridland: That said, Adam is excellent at performing dramatics and theatrics.
• 1:24:35
  James Cridland: Advertising isn't going anywhere, he says.
• 1:24:37
  James Cridland: It's just going to have to evolve.
• 1:24:39
  James Cridland: I would wholeheartedly agree with you, Neil.
• 1:24:42
  James Cridland: Uh, advertising isn't going anywhere.
• 1:24:44
  James Cridland: There is always going to be an amount of people that don't like advertising and amount of people that do.
• 1:24:48
  James Cridland: And I think as long as we can keep things uh open for both of those sets of people, I think that that's a good thing.
• 1:24:56
  James Cridland: So thank you so much.
• 1:24:57
  James Cridland: You can join us, by the way, please do.
• 1:25:00
  James Cridland: You can join us as a power supporter.
• 1:25:02
  James Cridland: Weekly.podnews.net is our website where you can go and join us, like Dan Kendall has, like Ralph E.
• 1:25:09
  James Cridland: Owens has, and like Silas Vote as well.
• 1:25:13
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• 1:25:21
  James Cridland: So, what's happened for you this week, Sam?
• 1:25:23
  James Cridland: Anything exciting?
• 1:25:25
  Sam Sethi: Not not too much.
• 1:25:26
  Sam Sethi: Uh, it's been a pretty quiet week.
• 1:25:28
  Sam Sethi: We pushed out our newsletter, that was quite good.
• 1:25:31
  Sam Sethi: I did the first leg of the Cotswold way, which was lovely.
• 1:25:35
  James Cridland: Oh, you're walking walking now again, are you?
• 1:25:37
  James Cridland: Yes.
• 1:25:38
  James Cridland: Yes.
• 1:25:39
  Sam Sethi: It's beautiful in the Cotswolds.
• 1:25:41
  Sam Sethi: I mean, I'm sure you know that as well.
• 1:25:43
  James Cridland: But uh going from your wife must be going, God, when is this man going to have a heart attack?
• 1:25:49
  James Cridland: Where when is he gonna have a heart attack so I can so I can uh no, that's easy to do.
• 1:25:55
  Sam Sethi: Show me my MongoDB bill quickly.
• 1:25:58
  Sam Sethi: That'll give me a heart attack.
• 1:25:59
  Sam Sethi: There you go.
• 1:26:00
  Sam Sethi: No, the um Good Lord.
• 1:26:04
  James Cridland: Have you been to the Broadway in the Cotswolds?
• 1:26:07
  James Cridland: I have not been to the Cotswolds, no.
• 1:26:10
  Sam Sethi: Oh given given that your parents lived over that way towards Wales-ish way, I thought you might have, you know, popped in on the way over.
• 1:26:17
  James Cridland: No.
• 1:26:18
  James Cridland: No, I've never I have never done the Cotswolds, but it's it's it's the type of uh Britain that that that the Americans like, isn't it?
• 1:26:26
  James Cridland: It's all shortbread biscuits and and thatched cottages.
• 1:26:29
  James Cridland: Yes, that's that's about right, isn't it?
• 1:26:32
  Sam Sethi: Yes.
• 1:26:32
  Sam Sethi: About that, yeah, and and and most of them are moving in.
• 1:26:34
  Sam Sethi: We've got Ellen Generous moved in there and and a few others.
• 1:26:38
  Sam Sethi: Yeah, yes.
• 1:26:39
  James Cridland: Okay, well, very nice.
• 1:26:40
  James Cridland: I'm I'm surprised that they haven't moved into your village, which seems to have virtually everybody there.
• 1:26:45
  Sam Sethi: No, we have a policy, we have a pol policy, not allowed.
• 1:26:49
  Sam Sethi: No.
• 1:26:49
  Sam Sethi: Apart from that, no, it's been a very quiet week.
• 1:26:52
  Sam Sethi: Interesting just looking at you know what what's going on in the podcasting 2.0 world.
• 1:27:00
  Sam Sethi: If there's stuff happening, you and I have been talking on various Mastodon threads, I know.
• 1:27:06
  Sam Sethi: So yeah, we'll see whether some of those things come to light.
• 1:27:09
  Sam Sethi: But other than that, no, very quiet.
• 1:27:11
  Sam Sethi: What's happened for you?
• 1:27:13
  James Cridland: No, indeed.
• 1:27:13
  James Cridland: And uh there's a good article in the Podnews newsletter this week from Mike Dell arguing, is podcasting 2.0 still fringe?
• 1:27:22
  James Cridland: If you remember, Rob Greenlee once uh slightly foolishly called it a fringe thing.
• 1:27:28
  James Cridland: And he says, if it is, the fringe is getting awfully crowded, which is good, it's uh well well worth a read.
• 1:27:34
  James Cridland: What's been happening for me?
• 1:27:36
  James Cridland: Well, I've been to Sydney and back this week for the Sonar Awards.
• 1:27:41
  James Cridland: I flew, Sam, in business down to Sydney.
• 1:27:45
  James Cridland: Why did I do that?
• 1:27:47
  James Cridland: Because I needed 80 points to re-qualify as platinum for for the next year, and it was 40 points if I went down economy, and it was 80 points if I went down business.
• 1:27:57
  James Cridland: So, therefore, I think it's worthwhile getting on that ladder again.
• 1:28:02
  James Cridland: So that's what I've done.
• 1:28:03
  James Cridland: Yes, because my uh my year, my airline year runs out at the end of November.
• 1:28:08
  James Cridland: So this is my last flight, or was my last flight, so therefore, that's that's a thing.
• 1:28:14
  James Cridland: They've they've really got me, haven't they?
• 1:28:17
  Sam Sethi: So did you go down did you go down to see Stephen Bartlett and Tony Robbins who are in Sydney last week?
• 1:28:23
  James Cridland: I think Stephen Bartlett has been here recently.
• 1:28:25
  James Cridland: I know that Alistair Campbell has been here recently as well.
• 1:28:28
  James Cridland: He's doing a world tour at the moment.
• 1:28:29
  James Cridland: I'm not quite sure how he's doing that with everything else that he's that he's doing, but still, there we go.
• 1:28:34
  James Cridland: And you know, a bunch of a bunch of folk coming all the way down here.
• 1:28:38
  James Cridland: So all of that is all of that is certainly good.
• 1:28:40
  James Cridland: No, I missed out on all of those people, I have to say.
• 1:28:44
  James Cridland: Uh, and that's it for this week.
• 1:28:46
  James Cridland: All of our podcast stories, of course, taken from the Podnews Daily Newsletter, which you can read and indeed watch.
• 1:28:52
  James Cridland: Uh you can read at podnews.net.
• 1:28:55
  Sam Sethi: You can give us feedback using the Buzzsprout voicemail link in our show notes, or become a monthly power supporter like the 25 Power Supporters at weekly.podnews.net.
• 1:29:05
  James Cridland: Yes, please do.
• 1:29:06
  James Cridland: Our music's from TM Studios, our voiceover is Sheila D, and we're hosted and sponsored by BuzzSprout.
• 1:29:12
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