I did NOT see this coming - a surprising benefit of attending The Podcast Show 2026

Yes, I attended The Podcast Show. Yes I had both good and bad things to say. (One of those things is pasted below from my LinkedIn)

But through it all, there was one super surprising benefit I discovered from going to The Podcast Show 2026. I really did NOT see this coming.

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(FROM LINKEDIN)

The Podcast Show 2026 was ultimately epic. Let me go deeper, fam. Let's slide through the obvious stuff like the wonderful sense of community and camaraderie that exists among the many strangers and even those who are technically 'competitors'. This is one of my favourite things about the show. 10/10 — no notes. I'm going to say that I'm blown away by how seriously the event organisers take this show, and they only ever want to make it better each year. I also thoroughly enjoyed some of the perspectives from the stages. It wasn't a total pitchfest. And if anybody tried to schill their warez, the moderators did a fab job of keeping them back on point. (I felt for Katie Prescott from The Times who had the misfortune of moderating a panel with podcasting's perniciousness incarnate, Jeanine Wright. I mean, the tech ops had to actually resort to drowning her out with music to stop her in her delusional verbal tracks.) I won't say any more on that talk other than to acknowlege the loud and passionate criticisms from the baying audience which reassured my weeping heart. But there were a couple of negatives and it would be off-brand for me not to mention 'em. With iteration, someone, somewhere, is always going to be left slightly disappointed while others benefit. We see this in podcast production all the time – we make a tweak to improve content such as adding sound design or introducing structure, and there will always be someone who hates the new sound because it's no longer what they became comfortable with. So I accept that some of the things that I didn't enjoy as much are a subjective thing. Gone was the business stage – clearly didn't get the bums on seats last year – and so a big reason I enjoyed the event last year was disappeared. We move past that. It's one of those things. I also felt sad at how some of the people hosting talks clearly didn't know their audience. An example of this was a chat about the benefits of immersive sound design that was schilling Dolby as a tool. Now I'm not the biggest technical nerd in this space, but I'm pretty sure none of the podcast apps offer passthru of that standard, so that was a fairly pointless 25 minutes for anyone NOT considering running an audiobook on Audible. My biggest WTF moment was the one pictured. Head honcho from YouTube grabs three creatives who have seen success putting their podcasts on the platform. I'll say this, if a head of content can't project manage success in video podcasting at... well... The Guardian... then I'd have expected them to quit being in charge of content immediately, because it would suggest an incompetency problem. There we no receipts of before YouTube and after YouTube. Just a whole lot of 'trust me bro, we know what we're talking about' which too many lazy last-minute panellists tend to lean on. To be clear, this is a criticism of the individual speakers, NOT the event itself. In old money, definitely still a A+ event. Well done to all the team.

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