High Notes; Vintage Podcast; Podeo; Zero Reject; Narratives Of Care; A Word With; The Life Shift Introduces Solo & Scalable
High Notes Season Four Launches
High Notes is a podcast that features conversations on the art and business of voice, hosted by voice actor and BRAVA CEO Melissa Thom. From Mongolian throat singing to vocal health, accents, gaming, and more, HIGH NOTES uncovers the craft behind the business.
Season 4 of HIGH NOTES, the podcast about the business and art of voice, launched on Thursday 8th October for seven weeks. Host Melissa Thom will speak with leading figures on both sides of the AI debate: those whose voices have been affected by AI, and those using it for good.
Experienced voice actor and communications specialist Melissa Thom founded BRAVA. Joining Melissa is a highly experienced team of actors, educators, and producers from the UK and the U.S.
What happens to the human voice as AI gets good enough to replicate it? It’s a conversation that reaches further than most people think, affecting not just performers, but anyone who’s ever recorded a voice note, sat in on a Zoom call, or had their voice used by the business they work for. If you speak for a living, work with people who do, or just want to understand what’s happening to your own voice in an AI-shaped world, this season’s for you.
Here’s an upcoming episode on Thursday 22nd October — Episode 03: UK AI Law: Unfit for Purpose? With Dr. Mathilde Pavis.
In this episode, Melissa talks to Dr Mathilde Pavis, an expert in intellectual property law, ethics, and new technologies, who helped build Equity’s AI toolkit and has worked directly with AI platforms including ElevenLabs. Melissa asks why the UK currently has no personality right for voice, how that compares to other countries, and whether the law is keeping up. The real value here is practical: exactly what to check, ask, and do to protect your own voice, as things stand today. The landscape is changing fast, so staying informed matters more than ever.
Melissa Thom, HIGH NOTES host, said: “We’re at a moment when AI can replicate, reshape, and deploy a voice in ways most of us are only beginning to understand. This season is about making sense of that change and giving everyone who uses their voice — professionally or personally — the conversation, context and tools they need to navigate what comes next.”
HIGH NOTES season 4 is available at brava.uk.com/podcast and on all major podcast platforms, from Thursday 8th October 2026. Melissa Thom produces it, and Euan McAleece engineers it at BRAVA.
Vintage Podcast
What’s This Podcast About: The Vintage Politics podcast is run and hosted by Abbie Bennington.
Who Will Enjoy This Podcast: People who are open-minded, understand public policy, respect facts and logic, and are genuinely interested in government finding solutions to chronic socioeconomic problems instead of just blaming the other side and engaging in toxic culture wars/
Creator/Host: Abbie Bennington is a former BBC News at Ten senior producer and political journalist who later retrained as a professional wine educator and writer. On her visual podcast, she brings her two career worlds together by sitting down with prominent politicians and journalists to match wines with the defining moments of their careers.
What I love about the show: I love the idea of bringing wine together with politics. It makes sense because the more I read about politics today, the more I need wine.
Recommended Episode to start listening with: Jeremy Bowen, George Osborne and Anthony Scaramucci join Vintage Politics as the podcast returns for Series Two.
Podeo.ai Launches, Turning Podcast Audio Into Full-Length Video Without Filming
Podeo.ai has launched. It takes a podcast episode's audio and returns a finished long-form video of the whole episode, with nothing filmed. It builds a 60-minute episode in about 20 minutes. Because the input is audio rather than existing footage, a show that has never been on camera can publish to YouTube using the episodes it already has.
“Podcast hosts have been told for three years that they should be on YouTube,” said Shaik Sadath Basha, Chief Engineer at Podeo.ai. “The advice was never the hard part. Finding a second edit every week was. We wanted to know whether the audio already carried enough to build the video from, and it turns out it mostly does.”
How Podeo.ai works
- Upload an audio file, or connect the show’s RSS feed and pick an episode.
- Set the show profile once: brand colors, fonts, logo, and the shape the episode should take.
- Podeo Director listens to the episode, writes the visual plan beat by beat, and fetches photographs, footage, and generated motion graphics to match it.
- The finished video opens in a timeline editor. Move or replace any clip by hand, or tell Podeo Copilot in plain English: “punchier intro, more b-roll in the middle.”
- Connect a YouTube channel and publish, with the title, description, chapters, and thumbnail already written.
Podeo.ai publishes the finished video directly to YouTube. Episodes run up to 120 minutes and export at 1080p.
Podeo.ai is available today at podeo.ai with a free trial and no card required. Paid plans start at $49 a month.
Understood.org unveils “Zero Reject,” a limited-series podcast investigating threats to special education in the United States
On June 16, 2026, the U.S. Department of Education began dismantling itself and shifting oversight of special education between the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice.
In the 2020–21 school year, 8.4 million public school students had an Individualized Education Program (IEP) or a 504 plan — 17% of all public school students.
Understood.org, a nonprofit supporting people navigating neurodivergence, announced the launch of “Zero Reject: The Uncertain Future of Special Education,” a new limited-series investigative podcast. Hosted by award-winning education journalist Anya Kamenetz, the series examines what families endure to secure a free appropriate public education (FAPE) and what’s at stake now that the Department of Education
began dismantling itself and shifting oversight of special education to other federal agencies.
“Special education is not just a family issue. It is a civil right,” said Kamenetz. “A free public education is every child’s right, and it’s our nation’s loss when any child is not enabled to achieve their goals. So many parents told me the same thing: Even when they know the law is
on their side, getting appropriate and quality education still feels like a lonely, uphill fight.”
The series’ title, Zero Reject, refers to a principle protected by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This law guarantees that no child can be denied a public education because of their disability or behavioral challenges, no matter how severe. IDEA protects students with a wide range of needs, including physical, intellectual, and developmental disabilities. That includes conditions like ADHD, dyslexia and autism.
Across six 30-minute episodes, Kamenetz combines investigative reporting with firsthand stories of parents and educators navigating the education system, plus insights from advocates and policymakers working to change it. Along the way, Zero Reject examines the civil rights history behind today’s protections, recent shifts in federal policy, and how emerging technology is shaping what comes next for special education.
“Advocating for your child’s rights has always been hard. Now, policy changes and the challenge of finding clear, reliable information make it even harder,” said Laura Key, vice president of content strategy at Understood.org. “Anya knows how to dig into complex issues
and make sense of them in a clear, approachable way — which is core to the work we do at Understood. We’re grateful to have Anya report on the obstacles people face in navigating the system, and explore opportunities to make the system work better for everyone.”
Zero Reject builds on Understood’s commitment to supporting families with neurodivergent children. This includes its new interactive “IEP Guide for Parents,” which breaks down the Individualized Education Program process, so parents can advocate for their child with confidence. Parents can subscribe to “Understood News” for ongoing updates on topics related
to neurodivergence, including special education. They can also chat with the “Understood Assistant,” an AI-powered tool built on expert-reviewed guidance.
Understood.org is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that helps people who are navigating neurodivergence find clarity and take the next step. We translate trusted knowledge about ADHD, dyslexia, and other forms of neurodivergence into clear guidance, practical tools, and community support for over 20 million people each year. Everything we do is grounded in research, informed by experts, and shaped by lived experience. For more information, to donate, or to partner, visit
u.org/media and follow us @UnderstoodOrg
Narratives Of Care
What’s This Podcast About: This 12-part narrative audio series is built from oral histories with caregivers, families, and experts in Puerto Rico. The series begins with dementia and Alzheimer’s caregiving, moves into cancer caregiving, and then widens the lens to examine some of the conditions shaping care on the island.
Through oral histories with families navigating cancer and dementia, caregivers, and people working within the systems surrounding them, the series examines the conditions that shape how care is given and received in Puerto Rico. Family networks, healthcare access, geography, infrastructure, migration, community support, and the meaning of home all shape the caregiving experience.
The series does not attempt to define caregiving in Puerto Rico or present any one story as representative of every caregiver on the island. Instead, it offers a glimpse through the experiences of the people who shared their stories.
Who Will Enjoy This Podcast:
Creator/Host: Charlotte Bayala is the creator and host who spent the past year recording and building this project, and says: “I’m really glad these stories are finally going out in the world.”
Charlotte Bayala is an award-winning podcast host, storyteller, and caregiver advocate whose work makes the lived experience of caregiving more visible. A longtime family caregiver herself, Charlotte creates work that brings personal stories into conversation with the systems, communities, and circumstances surrounding care.
She created and hosts Narratives of Care, and hosts The Cancer Caregiver Podcast and Caregiver Breathing Room.
What I love about the show: Anyone who has been, or is, a caregiver, or has a relative or friend suffering from dementia.
Recommended Episode to start listening with: Check out the first episode — Before Care Had a Name. In that episode, we meet Margarita Bermudez, who was fiercely independent. Well into her later years, she was still living alone in Puerto Rico, mowing her own lawn and deciding for herself what she could and could not do. Then little things began happening that were harder for her family to explain.
In the first episode, Margarita’s daughters, Maria and Iris, and her son-in-law Julio look back at the period before anyone would have called what they were doing caregiving. Forgetting, accusations, arguments, and increased checking in slowly began changing the family’s relationship with Margarita.
Season Two Of A World With Podcast
As world leaders prepare for COP31, activists imagine bold solutions including a world with no saviors. On Season 2 of A World With podcast, activists, artists, and community builders, including Kumi Naidoo, Tori Tsui, and Nat Kelley, share their ideas for a better world.
Following the UN Biodiversity Conference in October and with world leaders preparing for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP31) in Turkey in November, A World With returns with a simple premise: to imagine what the world we are fighting for could actually look like.
Launching Season 2 on November 2nd, the six-part series features activists, artists and community builders from South Africa, Australia, Nigeria and beyond, each describing an idea for a fairer, more joyful world. Guests include former Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo, climate activist and author Tori Tsui, and Fast and Furious star and land steward Nat Kelley.
While COP negotiations often centered on policies and targets, Episode One with Costa Rica-based environmental activist Elizabeth Couse offers a different idea for achieving climate justice. She describes a scene where a farmer who has stewarded the land for generations is treated as an expert, and an Indigenous water guardian is not a beneficiary of conservation but its author.
“I believe a world with no saviors is needed as the dominant narrative within the environmental movement is one of Western and white saviourism,” said Couse. “In many climate spaces people often don’t want to believe that Black and brown people, people in the Global South, Indigenous people or people in poverty have solutions. Marginalized people everywhere are still positioned as beneficiaries rather than the leaders of their own stories.”
In another episode, Peruvian-Australian actress and land steward Nat Kelley speaks out about the industrial honey industry. After meeting Colin, an 80-year-old beekeeper, and learning why bees matter, Kelley makes a case for a hive in every home.
“The industrial honey industry is built on extraction for our benefit, not for the health of the bees,” said Kelley. “We truck them across continents to pollinate monocultures, we breed their queens to our specifications, and we dose them with chemicals when they sicken from the very conditions we’ve created.”
The ten-minute episodes blend scripted monologues with immersive soundscapes, giving listeners a glimpse into what the world could look, sound and feel like if we dared to imagine it differently. The series is designed to be hopeful, highlighting solutions shaped by communities and ancestral knowledge around the world.
The Life Shift Podcast Introduces A Complete Production System Called Solo & Scalable For Indie Podcasters
This is a story for independent podcasters from Matt Gilhooly, creator/host of The Life Shift podcast. The Life Shift is an award-winning long-form interview podcast hosted by Matt Gilhooly that explores pivotal, life-altering moments that split a person’s life into “before” and “after”. Matt Gilhooly started the podcast as a personal healing journey after experiencing major life-shattering events in his own childhood, including the death of his mother when he was eight years old.
The overarching goal is to remind listeners that they are not alone in their struggles and that people share more common ground than what separates them.
Matt has a lot of experience as a successful independent podcaster, as he’s been doing it since early 2022. Matt just launched Solo & Scalable, the production system I built to run The Life Shift on my own. It came out of needing a way to keep up with my episodes without a team (plus a full-time job), and I’m hoping it helps other indie podcasters make the work more sustainable.
Matt says: “This is the complete production system behind The Life Shift Podcast, ready to copy into your own Notion and Claude. Every file, every prompt, and a step-by-step guide to set it up for your show.
Matt notes: “You care about this show. You’re also doing the job of an entire production team, alone. Every solo podcaster hits this wall eventually, and it says nothing about how good your show is. And the gap between what you’re putting out and what you know the show could be? That gap lives in your head rent-free.”
Matt adds: “If you’ve tried AI and the output didn’t sound like you, you were missing one piece, and it’s fixable. What’s really going on is an architecture problem. The podcasters who seem to have it together have handed the repeatable work to a system, so their time goes to the parts only they can do.”
Take a look here: soloandscalable.com
For more information on the latest news in podcasting, podcast industry trends, new podcasts, and podcasting events, subscribe to Podnews.
TrueFans.fm is a creator-first podcasting and fan engagement platform. It’s designed for both podcast creators and podcast consumers.
This week’s Forbes articles
Check out books by Frank Racioppi. Everything from novels and nonfiction to podcasting books and essays.
Comments
Post a Comment
Thank You for your input and feedback. If you requested a response, we will do so as soon as possible.