Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Mines by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
I'm Alistair Bunch and this is a special episode.
Yes, it is episode number 500.
So to mark the occasion, we are going to deviate from our usual style of weird and wonderful stories.
Instead, I am going to talk to you about this milestone, what it means for me, for the business and where we go from here.
Oh, and stick around as I have a special time-sensitive announcement that I think will be of interest.
Okay, then, let's get right into it, shall we?
If you look through lists of things that you should and shouldn't do after having a baby, especially your first child, most of it probably won't surprise you.
You'd probably find recommendations about spending some quality time with your partner before the baby comes, whether that's going out for coffee or dinner or just having a calm walk in a park together.
Maybe someone would advise you to get some of those blackout blinds so that your baby can sleep more easily during the day.
Someone else might suggest not organising anything for the first few weeks, as you'll be tired, you never know what might happen, you know, it's best just to play things by ear.
One recommendation some people might give you is to not start anything new, as you will already have enough changes going on in your life.
And especially not starting something that requires peace and quiet and no background noise.
Most people probably have the good sense to realise this, but five years ago I didn't.
Just a few weeks before my first sun was born, I wrote and recorded the first episode of this podcast, English Learning for Curious Mines.
Fast forward to today, almost five years later, and this is episode number 500.
As we are now halfway to a thousand, I wanted to mark this milestone by sharing a little bit about the behind the scenes of the podcast, about our listeners and how the sausage is made.
But the first thing I want to say is thank you.
Whether you've been listening since episode one, the very first episode, or whether you've only just started listening, you are amazing.
And if you've listened to every single episode, all 500, and especially if you are not my parents, thank you very much.
You've spent more than 150 hours listening to me, blabbering on.
I hope you've enjoyed it, and that you will continue to enjoy it, as we get to episode one thousand and beyond.
Now, thank yous out of the way.
Let me start by telling you a bit about how the sausage gets made, how we go from a kernel of an idea through to the finished product.
Well, we have quite an extensive research process.
For a while, I used to work with a small team of researchers, but in fact, I now do almost all of this myself.
It normally involves reading books, academic papers, documentaries, articles online, and a fair bit of Wikipedia.
There is then the writing of the script, the reviewing, the redrafting, reviewing again, and hopefully that's it.
It is a lot of fun to do, but it's tough, because the more I learn about any kind of topic, the harder it is to condense it into a 20 minute episode.
There are always, and I mean always, large bits of really interesting information that I need to cut out in order to make sure it doesn't get too long.
This leads to tons of emails from people saying, you should have mentioned exo-while, but hey, the objective with every episode is to tell the most interesting and relevant bits of the story, and if people feel inspired to go and research it themselves, then that's great.
They will no doubt find other interesting elements that didn't make it into the final script.
A few people have asked me how much I use tools like chatGPT in the research and writing process, and the answer is that I don't really use it at all during the writing process, because I find the output to sound quite unlike my style, but it is pretty useful when it comes to reviewing and suggesting areas for improvement.
Then, when the script is ready, there's the recording of the episode.
On one level, this is the easy bit, because it involves reading out a pre-written script, but it might surprise you that even after 500 episodes, I still make loads of mistakes and often have to re-record large parts of it.
Then, there's the audio editing, cleaning the sound, removing any background noise, and fixing any errors or retakes.
At the beginning, I did all of this by myself.
I think I did the first 100 episodes or so, but my wonderful editor, Ezekiel, has been doing this ever since.
So if you think that the audio sounds good, which I certainly do, well, it is he that you need to thank.
When that's all done, I go through the finished audio.
I select all of the more advanced words and expressions that will be defined in our study packs.
There are normally around 100 of these more advanced words, which we create custom definitions for.
After that, the transcript is passed over to our in-house teacher, Foccion, who meticulously prepares each of the study packs.
Creates custom definitions for each word or expression, makes the quizzes, and turns them into top quality learning materials.
And then there's the finding the right image, writing descriptions, publishing it on our website, creating a version for YouTube, and all of that sort of stuff.
Each episode is around 20 minutes long, but behind the scenes, all in all, it takes something like 20 or 30 hours to go from an idea for an episode through to the final, published audio version, complete with all the learning materials.
Sometimes it is quicker, if it's a subject I know a lot about already.
Sometimes it's a lot longer, if it requires a much more extensive research process, like the Bumper one we just did on Haiti, for example.
Now, what else can I tell you about behind the scenes?
Well, you listen to this show, but how about I tell you about where some of your other fellow curious minds come from?
Podcasts are funny, because you put one out into the world, and if you don't have a large budget to promote it, like I didn't, you just sort of hope that people will find it, recommend it to their friends, and continue listening to it.
And this has happened beyond my wildest dreams and expectations.
We have listeners from all over the world, and by the time you listen to this, the show will probably have been downloaded more than 8 million times.
It sounds, like a lot, maybe it is a lot, but it still seems small when you think about how many people around the world are learning English, either officially or unofficially.
We definitely have a lot more room to grow, and perhaps when we get to episode number 1000, that number will be 80 million, who knows.
In terms of where most of your other fellow listeners are, it really is split all over the world.
Europe is responsible for around 45% of our listeners.
In other 33% are in Asia, there are around 10% in both North and South America, 3% in Africa, and around 1.5% in Australia.
Breaking it down even further, for reasons I've never been completely sure of, Spain has always been the most popular country for this podcast, making up around 14% of all listeners.
It's followed by Germany, Turkey, Brazil, Iran and Italy, which all account for between 4% and 5% of listeners.
Now as you may know, this little business started with this podcast, but we've since expanded to do quite a lot of other stuff.
We made a business English course, we've done a live academy, our new story-based courses have been particularly popular, and we also have our membership, which gives people access to stuff like interactive transcripts, instant translations, study packs and even live challenges, like the one that's going on as I'm making this episode on the theme of rolled
down. There is a lot going on, but the core and the heart of the business where everything emanates from is this podcast, English learning for curious minds.
Fortunately, the podcast is made possible by thousands of paying members from over 100 countries now, which is a wonderful thing.
It means we don't have to rely on adding annoying adverts for Coca-Cola or dishwasher tablets or Hyundai cars.
And the few times that we have accepted sponsors, these have been for products that I truly believe align with our mission of helping people like you improve their English.
Without the thousands of members who support our work, this podcast wouldn't be possible.
So if you are a member, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
As you may know, if you've been following this podcast journey from the start, we've been making two episodes a week of English learning for curious minds, a bonus one on a Tuesday that you need to be a member to listen to, and one on a Friday that's made available for free to listen on all podcast apps and now also on YouTube.
This has been the case almost from the start, so a total of 500 episodes.
But going forward, we're going to make a change to our production schedule.
Instead of releasing two new episodes a week, the member only bonus one on Tuesday and the free one on a Friday, we're going to release one a week.
This will of course continue to get all episodes, but if you're listening on the free feed, and this is the free one, you'll get new episodes once every two weeks instead of once every week.
The old episodes are going nowhere, you can still continue to catch up on those if you haven't listened to them already, but from now on we'll publish a new one on the free feed every two weeks instead of every week.
Now, why are we doing this?
You might be wondering.
Well there are two main reasons that come from different directions.
Firstly, thousands of English learners have joined as members and started to learn with our resources.
It's been just fantastic to see, but there is a recurring theme.
We now make so much, and we have so many episodes for people to choose from, that many people don't know where to start.
I get questions all the time from new members asking about how to choose episodes, how to use our study packs and vocabulary lists, essentially how to use everything we provide to learn most efficiently.
And I get it. There are now 500 episodes.
That's more than 150 hours worth of listening.
And study packs containing something like 20,000 unique words and phrases, pieces of advance vocabulary, thousands of comprehension questions and so on.
It is a huge amount to process, and I've heard from lots of people that they feel like they can never catch up.
We make new episodes faster than they can listen to them.
For a new member, it would take almost a week of listening non-stop, 24 hours a day, to catch up on everything we've made.
And that's before you take into account the two new episodes every week.
It would be an insane amount of listening to do.
And I'm not surprised it can be confusing and overwhelming.
And there is another reason that comes from a different direction.
To put it bluntly, keeping up with making two episodes per week, in addition to everything else we are doing, is really hard work for our small team.
And gives us almost no time to develop the new learning focused content that people want and need.
Ultimately, what you want to do is to improve your English.
And it's my job, my duty even, to our members, to make sure that my team and I are helping you do that as effectively as possible.
So making slightly fewer episodes will give us a bit more breathing room, and mean that we can continue to make the membership better and better, which is exciting for me, and hopefully exciting for you.
By the way, there will still be weeks where we'll make two new episodes a week, when we are making mini-series for example.
And we'll aim to continue to make one three part mini-series every month.
There is of course a way to continue getting a new episode every week, sometimes more, and that's where our membership comes in.
This is Avley and Ardo English, we'll continue to receive all of the bonus episodes, as well as all of the learning materials that help you boost your comprehension, your vocabulary, and help you become a smarter and more confident speaker of English.
If you haven't checked this out already, it includes interactive transcripts, study packs with custom definitions of literally tens of thousands of words, and access to our community.
And as a special offer to celebrate this 500 episode milestone, we are running an offer on our membership.
You can get an annual pro membership for only 99 euros a year, which gives you access to everything we offer, the downloadable PDF study packs, the interactive transcripts, the subtitles, the vocabulary lists, absolutely everything.
And of course, this also includes the 250 plus bonus episodes and all future bonus episodes.
This offer is going to run until midnight on August 31st, and we'll mean that you can get this deal for life.
In other words, if you join before then, the price will never increase.
It'll be 99 euros a year for as long as you decide to remain a member.
There's a special link to do this in the show notes for this episode, or you'll just need to choose the pro annual option and add the code 500500.
Now I understand that if you've been listening loyally for five years and patiently looking forward to every new episode, this news might be disappointing.
We are making slightly fewer episodes.
There's no getting around that.
But I hope that this explains the rationale behind why we are making this decision.
Our mission of building the most interesting place to improve your English hasn't changed.
And my hope is that this next stage will allow us to make this podcast better and better and help you improve your English in a more interesting way.
Thank you for being part of this journey, and I really hope you'll stick around for the next stage.
Okay, then that is it for this unusual episode.
A celebration of a milestone that's just a number but an important one nevertheless.
As always, I'd love to hear from you.
How long have you been listening to this show?
Do you remember what the first episode you listened to was?
What can we do to make it better for you?
For the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.ly and on oenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
And as a final reminder, there is that special offer on pro membership.
You can check out the link in the show notes or just head to our website and use the code 500500 on the pro annual option to get it for 99 euros per year.
You've been listening to English learning for curious minds by Leonardo English.
I'm Alistair Bodge, you stay safe and I'll catch you in the next episode.
