Passell On Podcasts; Metaverse Revisited; Cumulus Partners With YAP; "Discovering Us" Premieres September 26th

 Lauren Passell Guest-Hosts Earbuds Podcast Collective

 Tink Media Founder and Podcast The Newsletter Editor Lauren Passell guest-hosted on this week's Earbuds Podcast Collective, which curates themed podcast recommendations. Every week, a different person designs the recommendations, and this week's theme is Nigerian podcasts. Check out the episode to learn more about Nigerian podcasts. 

Lauren also spotlighted the podcast All The Wiser, which is hosted by creator Kimi Culp. All The Wiser has talked with people who have experienced life's most challenging events and come out stronger for it. The podcast's episodes unleash that existential question we all ask ourselves when hearing or reading about someone's misfortune. How would I handle that? Culp interviews Amanda Knox on the opening episode of season four. Knox spent four years in an Italian prison, wrongfully accused of murdering a fellow student.

New podcast about Second Life metaverse platform debuts

 At times, the world can get so disgusting that you want to escape to another world. A metaverse. No, that's not with just you and Mark Zuckerberg. Uggh. Remember the early-2000s metaverse platform Second Life – an online virtual world where avatars can socialize, play, work, and even have sex? 

How to Build a Metaverse is a new four-part miniseries about the gaming platform. As companies like Meta pour billions into the creation of new metaverses, producer and host Annie Minoff heads back into the original metaverse – Second Life – to explore what life in the metaverse is actually like, how the metaverse business works, and what this metaverse can reveal about the one that’s coming.

 How to Build a Metaverse, produced by Gimlet and The Wall Street Journal, launched on September 23. 

Check out the first episode available HERE. 

Cumulus Media partners with YAP Media

And so it continues. The podcast universe continues to grow more concentrated. Will podcasting one day be like the home improvement industry. Either Home Depot or Lowe's? This "partnership" is a minor one in the scheme of things within the podcast industry, but it still presages concentration of power.

Cumulus Media announced a partnership with YAP Media to monetize, market, and distribute all their existing and forthcoming podcasts. Joining the Cumulus Podcast Network is YAP Media’s flagship podcast, Young and Profiting, hosted by YAP Media founder and CEO Hala Taha. The podcast helps listeners improve their careers, think like an entrepreneur, enhance productivity, gain influence, create side hustles, and generate success. 

Additional YAP Media podcasts joining the Cumulus Podcast Network include Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan, True Underdog with Jayson Waller, A Feminine Impression with Dr. Michelle Daf, The Murdaugh Family Murders with Matt Harris and Seton Tucker, Chapter a Day Audio Bible read by Pastor John Stange, and The Greatness Machine with Darius Mirshahzadeh.

 Discovering Us podcast premieres September 26th with Ashley Judd

A new podcast from The Leakey Foundation, Discovering Us, premieres on September 26th with Golden Globe and Emmy-nominated actor Ashley Judd narrating the stories behind some of the most important human origins discoveries of the past 50 years.

This short series celebrates science with 12 exciting tales about the search for what it means to be human, from the sisterhood of bonobos to a remote cave on the island of Flores where researchers uncovered unusual fossils, to Gibraltar, where researchers think the very last surviving population of Neanderthals lived and died.

Discovering Us is an audio companion to the book Discovering Us: 50 Great Discoveries in Human Origins, written for The Leakey Foundation by Evan Hadingham, Senior.