Hot Pod

Spotify’s stock is currently up about 7 percent following the announcement that the company is laying off 17 percent of its staff. If CEO Daniel Ek is trying to appease investors with a new focus on efficiency, it is working. More than 1,500 of Spotify’s employees will be notified by tomorrow afternoon that they are out of a job.

Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast studio was once an industry darling, but has been gutted by three rounds of layoffs in the past year. Mia Lobel, former head of content at Pushkin, published a Substack post today that details the business decisions that pushed producers to make more shows than they could sustain and chase growth at all costs.

The first of three new Doctor Who episodes is about to premiere at 6:30PM GMT (1:30PM ET, and if you’re not in the UK or Ireland, you’ll find the new episodes on Disney Plus now). And after fans watch “The Star Beast,” for the first time, there will be an official post-show podcast (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts) to extend the experience.

The only odd thing about this is that Doctor Who didn’t have one before, and if you’re still wondering why every new show has a podcast, Hot Pod has tried to answer that very question.

After three rounds of layoffs this year, Pushkin staffers have unionized with Writers Guild of America East. The union has received voluntary recognition from Pushkin management, which recently went through a restructure as the studio behind Revisionist History has fallen on hard times.

It’s been six months since James Corden left The Late Late Show, and now he is joining SiriusXM to host weekly celebrity chat show This Life of Mine with James Corden. Like Trevor Noah and Conan O’Brien before him, Corden is the latest comedian to abandon the late-night grind for what is surely a lucrative, lower-lift podcast deal. The show will be exclusive to SiriusXM subscribers in car and on the app.

The tech giant will premiere original podcast “The Pirate of Prague” on November 13. While the show itself is hardly groundbreaking (another scammer pod!), the fact that Apple is doing an original at all signals a shift in its approach. Apple has produced about a dozen such shows as it has lost earshare to Spotify and YouTube.

The boys are back in town, baby. Musk appeared on a special episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the first two hours of which are available on X (usually, the interview would be exclusive to Spotify, aside from clips). It’s mostly just bros being bros, but if you thought we were going to get out of this unscathed, Musk does throw in a little Soros conspiracy theorizing.

In a call with investors Tuesday morning, Spotify CFO Paul Vogel said that the company’s podcasting business is on track to (finally) become profitable. This follows a year of deep cuts to the podcasting arm, including the dissolution of Gimlet.

It’s been almost a year since Elon Musk took over Twitter and, well, a lot of things have happened since then. Now, after previously diving into the backstories of dating apps, Meta, and Tesla, the Vox Media podcast Land of the Giants launches a new season about Twitter, its richest user, and “why Twitter’s cultural and political influence far exceeds its size,” hosted by Peter Kafka.

New episodes will arrive weekly starting on October 25th, and you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or other podcast apps.