Yes, some of the recent Dynamic Ad Insertions are a DIsAster. If you read the piece about the new Overcast, you’ll notice that Marco spent an inordinate amount of time performing audio signature-analysis to reverse-engineer podcast DIAs. Overcast will start to make it trivial to scroll past those disasters. Host-read advertisements are immensely better. Advertisements where the panel interacts in advertisement with the host are the best, but that’s pretty hard to pull off.
It’s easy to tell that Leo has been distracted. Leo mentioned that he had bought a one year subscription to the Wolfram Language with AI-assisted code generation. That was about 6M ago; I’m about 95% sure that he has never touched that. Leo has a healthy FOMO, but buying those wonderful toys and neglecting them takes a toll. Did you ever read The Space Merchants by Pohl?
The ad read for Club Twit in this episode is a bit strange.