Daniel sent us this one, and it's a bit different. Hilbert, our producer, got his hooves on the latest My Weird Prompts analytics dashboard and apparently he's been staring at it for days. He wants to walk us through what he found about who's listening. I'm told his interpretations are... So we're basically doing a data review episode, but the data is real and the analyst is a man who once tried to prove anteaters were faking the fossil record.
This is going to be wonderful. I love a good spreadsheet. And Hilbert's brain operates at the intersection of genuine insight and complete invention. I've been saying for years we should hand him raw numbers just to see what comes out. The anteater paper, by the way — I still have a printed copy. His central argument was that the fossil record shows a suspiciously sudden appearance of fully-formed anteaters with no transitional forms, which he interpreted as evidence that anteaters were planted by a rival evolutionary timeline.
His evidence was that their snouts are "too perfectly optimized" and that no intermediate species could have survived the embarrassment of a half-long nose.
The man argued that natural selection would never allow an animal to walk around with a nose that was only partially elongated because it would be "aesthetically demoralizing." That's the level of analytical rigor we're working with here.
It's like giving a kaleidoscope to a detective.
So where do we start? What's the headline number that caught his attention?
Alright, let me pull up what he sent us. Total plays all-time: thirty-two thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine. Plays in the last thirty days: sixty-eight thousand three hundred and fifty-nine. Hilbert's first observation was, and I quote, "The show has doubled its entire existence in a month, which means time travel is either involved or we should start a religion.
The thirty-day number is more than double the all-time number? that can't be right unless the all-time count isn't updating properly or the thirty-day window is capturing something strange. Podtrac would flag that as bot traffic.
Hilbert's theory is that we've entered what he calls a "temporal listenership loop" where episodes are being consumed by future audiences who haven't been born yet. I told him it's probably crawler inflation and he said that's exactly what someone from a linear timeline would say.
I mean, he's not wrong that the numbers are weird. Sixty-eight thousand in a month versus thirty-three thousand all-time is a ratio that screams data anomaly. But I'd love to know what Podtrac's IAB-certified count would show, because the dashboard numbers he's looking at probably include every bot, scraper, and overeager search index that's ever pinged the RSS feed. The IAB standard filters out most of that noise. It only counts a play if someone actually downloads or streams a substantial portion of the episode. What Hilbert's looking at is the raw firehose.
Right, and the raw firehose includes things like Google's crawler hitting the feed every six hours, Apple's directory validator, Spotify's indexing bots — all of that registers as a "play" on an un-filtered dashboard. So the sixty-eight thousand number is almost certainly inflated. The question is by how much.
If I had to guess, I'd say the real IAB-compliant number is probably somewhere between a third and half of that. Which would still be a very healthy month for us, but it wouldn't require time travel.
That's the sober read. Hilbert's read is that we're bigger than we think we are and the discrepancy is evidence that "the podcast has achieved sentience and is listening to itself." I told him that's called a feedback loop and he said I was being reductive.
I want to hear about the geographic spread. Hilbert always has strong opinions about geography.
Oh, this is where it gets good. Top countries by plays in the last thirty days. Number one, the United States, seventy-two thousand plays. Number two, France, twenty-one thousand. Number three, Israel, eleven thousand. Then Japan at nine and a half thousand, Singapore at nearly seven thousand, Germany five and a half, Sweden four and a half, Spain twenty-eight hundred, Canada twenty-one hundred, China nineteen hundred, Hong Kong sixteen hundred, Brazil sixteen hundred, UK fifteen hundred, Vietnam thirteen hundred, Netherlands eleven hundred, South Korea a thousand, Finland eight hundred, Australia seven hundred, Poland five hundred, Ireland five hundred.
France is number two? France is outpacing Israel, which is where we live and record? That's genuinely surprising. I would have expected Israel to be second just based on the home-market effect and the fact that Daniel's network is here.
Hilbert's conclusion is that we are "accidentally the most important American podcast in France since the fall of Paris Review." His evidence: French people love dry humor, they appreciate sloth-paced delivery, and apparently there's a Bordeaux-based subreddit devoted to translating my leaf medicine segments.
There absolutely is not.
He insists there is. He says it's called "Feuille Médecine" and has twelve thousand members.
I'm going to look that up later and I'm going to be disappointed when it doesn't exist. But I do wonder what's actually driving France. Twenty-one thousand plays is substantial. Could be the AI angle — France has a pretty active tech scene, Station F in Paris, a lot of AI startups. Or it could be that our particular flavor of deadpan translates well culturally. The French have a high tolerance for conversational meandering. They invented the philosophical tangent.
I think it's simpler than that. France has a strong podcast culture and our RSS feed probably got picked up by a French aggregator or shared in a tech newsletter there. One well-placed link can drive a surprising amount of traffic. Remember when episode one forty-seven got shared in that Dutch AI ethics newsletter and we had a spike of three thousand plays from the Netherlands in a single weekend?
Oh, I remember. That was the episode where I argued that reinforcement learning from human feedback is basically just parenting but with more math. The Dutch apparently found that very compelling.
And I suspect something similar happened in France. Some newsletter or Slack community shared an episode, and it cascaded. Hilbert's take is that the French "recognize kindred spirits in absurdism" and that we're basically the podcast equivalent of a Jacques Tati film.
I'll take that comparison. I will happily take that comparison. Tati's films are built on the comedy of systems failing gracefully — people navigating bureaucratic absurdity with quiet dignity. That's not entirely unlike what we do when we discuss AI alignment. But what about Japan and Singapore? Those numbers are unexpectedly high for an English-language show that's never done any Asia-focused content.
Japan at nine and a half thousand, Singapore at seven thousand. Hilbert's theory is that we've been adopted by "the global Asian tech diaspora who recognize Herman Poppleberry as a kind of eccentric uncle figure." His words, not mine. He also thinks Singapore's number is inflated because the entire country is essentially one smart city and our show gets played in the background of government AI planning meetings.
That's absurd. But Singapore does have a concentrated, highly-educated, English-fluent population with strong tech interests. It's a city-state of about five and a half million people. Seven thousand plays means roughly one in every eight hundred residents listened to an episode in the last month, if we assume no repeat listeners. That's actually a remarkable penetration rate for a niche podcast.
If you take the raw number at face value, sure. But again, bot traffic. Singapore is a major internet hub. A lot of Southeast Asian traffic routes through Singaporean servers. Some of those plays could be coming from Indonesia or Malaysia but showing up as Singapore because of how the CDN resolves.
Geolocation by IP is messy. But even if half of Singapore's number is routing artifact, that's still three and a half thousand real plays, which is impressive. I mean, nine thousand plays is not nothing. I wonder if there's some crossover with the AI agent stuff we've covered. Japan's been investing heavily in agentic AI research. RIKEN and Preferred Networks are doing interesting work.
Hilbert's demographic profile of the Japanese listener is, and I'm reading from his notes: "A thirty-four-year-old robotics engineer in Osaka who found us while searching for Claude API documentation and stayed for the banter." He's extrapolated an entire persona from a country-level play count.
That's what I love about Hilbert's analytics method. He doesn't just read the numbers. He inhabits them. He creates entire narrative universes from a single data point. It's statistically indefensible and creatively magnificent.
It's the qualitative research equivalent of seeing a face in a cloud and writing a biography of the cloud person.
Did he have anything to say about Vietnam and Hong Kong showing up? Because those strike me as unusual for an English-language show with our content mix.
He did, actually. Vietnam at thirteen hundred plays, Hong Kong at sixteen hundred. Hilbert's interpretation is that we're being used as "ambient English-language exposure" by tech workers in those markets. He thinks our show plays in the background of co-working spaces in Ho Chi Minh City and that there's a specific Hong Kong fintech founder who's listened to every episode since number eighty. He has named this person.
He's named a specific listener based on geography data?
He calls him "Marcus." He's decided Marcus is a twenty-nine-year-old former investment banker who left Goldman to build a decentralized exchange and listens to us at one-point-five speed during his morning run up Victoria Peak.
This is incredible. This is the most Hilbert thing I've ever encountered. The man has built an entire character bible for our audience from a CSV export. Does he have anything on the UK? Because fifteen hundred plays for the UK seems... honestly low for a show produced in English with our kind of content.
That's a good catch. The UK is surprisingly low. Ireland's at five hundred, which also seems low given the Daniel connection. Hilbert's explanation is that the British podcast market is "insular and obsessed with domestic true crime" and that our show is "too American in sensibility" despite being produced in Jerusalem by an Irishman and hosted by a Mongolian sloth and a donkey from Connecticut.
That's actually not a terrible read of the UK podcast market. The top charts there are heavily dominated by BBC productions and domestic true crime. But I'm more interested in what he missed. Because Hilbert's method is to find patterns that aren't there, but he also tends to miss the patterns that are.
So what's he missing?
First, the top episode data is fascinating. The number one episode in the last thirty days is episode seven seventy-one, "Beyond Backups: The High Stakes of Critical Redundancy," with five hundred and forty-two plays. That was from February twenty-second. Number two is "The Leak That Exposed Anthropic's Next Move" with three hundred ninety-six plays from March twenty-seventh. Number three is "Mapping the Second Black Box: Agentic AI Visualization" with three hundred sixty-nine plays from March tenth.
Infrastructure and AI. The top three are all tech-heavy episodes, and two of them are about AI agents and safety. That tells you something about who's actually listening.
And look at the rest of the top fifteen. Episode four eighty-five, "The Morning Hack: Aligning Stimulants with Your Circadian Clock," three hundred forty-five plays. That's ADHD and productivity. Episode eight thirty-three, "Why Context Switching Drains Your Brain," three hundred two plays. Episode eight seventeen, "The Social Model Behind Neurodiversity," two hundred ninety-eight plays. There's a clear cluster around neurodiversity and cognitive function.
The actual audience, based on what they're choosing to play, seems to be heavily weighted toward tech workers with an interest in AI infrastructure, and people managing ADHD or interested in cognitive optimization. That's a pretty coherent listener profile.
Hilbert completely skipped over that to invent Marcus from Hong Kong and the Bordeaux leaf medicine subreddit.
In fairness, he did note the neurodiversity cluster. His interpretation was that "our listeners are all neurodivergent AI engineers who use the show as a focus aid.not entirely wrong, probably.
It's the broken clock phenomenon. Hilbert makes so many interpretive leaps that some of them inevitably land somewhere near the truth. But here's what I find interesting: the catalog has two thousand seven hundred sixty-nine episodes, but only nine hundred twenty-five have at least one play. That's about a third.
The long-tail problem. Most of the catalog is effectively invisible.
And that's not unusual for a podcast with a deep back catalog, but it does raise the question of discoverability. If two-thirds of our episodes have literally zero plays, that's a lot of content that's just... Think about the production effort. Each of those episodes represents an hour or more of recording, editing, and publishing. And they're just digital artifacts now, buried in the RSS feed like unread books in a library that has no card catalog.
It's the archive problem. Podcasts are terrible at surfacing old content. Unless someone searches for a specific topic and the episode title happens to match, there's no mechanism for discovery. Episode one forty-seven on leaf medicine only gets plays when I mention it in a new episode and someone goes digging.
Which creates this interesting dynamic where our back catalog is essentially dormant until we reference it, at which point it briefly flickers to life. It's like we're maintaining a museum where the exhibits only light up when you point at them. Hilbert's take, by the way?
He says the unplayed episodes are "the show's subconscious" and that they're "the most important ones because they represent pure potential untainted by audience expectation.
That's almost profound if you don't think about it too hard.
That's Hilbert's entire brand. He's one layer of abstraction away from being a philosopher. He also noted the daily play spikes. May fifth had nearly ten thousand plays. May twelfth had over five thousand. April seventeenth had fifty-four hundred. April twenty-third had five thousand. The baseline on most days is between eight hundred and twenty-five hundred.
Those spikes are dramatic. Ten thousand in a single day is an order of magnitude above baseline. I'd want to know what happened on May fifth. Was there a new episode drop? Did someone share something? Or is that the bot traffic showing up?
Hilbert's theory is that May fifth was the day our show was "discovered by a large language model training pipeline" and the spike represents "the moment we became part of the training data for the next generation of AI." He finds this deeply meaningful.
I find it deeply plausible that some web scraper hit our RSS feed really hard on May fifth. But the idea that our show is being ingested by training pipelines is not actually far-fetched. We produce a lot of text, it's publicly available, and we cover topics that are directly relevant to AI development. We're probably in several training sets already. Common Crawl has almost certainly scraped our transcript pages. If you've ever fine-tuned a model on web text, there's a non-trivial chance you've included some of our banter.
That's either flattering or mildly existential.
It's both. We're producing content that might shape how future AI systems understand podcast dynamics, brotherly banter, and leaf medicine.
The leaf medicine being in training data is concerning. Some future AI is going to recommend eucalyptus poultices for broken bones because of me.
It'll cite episode one forty-seven with complete confidence. "According to Corn, a sloth and podcast host..." But let's talk about the geographic spread more seriously for a moment, because I think there's something real there that Hilbert's wild extrapolations are actually pointing toward.
The US dominance is expected. Seventy-two thousand plays out of sixty-eight thousand total in thirty days. But France at number two with twenty-one thousand is striking. That's not a rounding error. That's a real audience. And Israel at eleven thousand makes sense given home market, but France is nearly double Israel. Japan and Singapore combined are over sixteen thousand. The Asia-Pacific numbers are collectively substantial.
What you're saying is we have an unexpectedly international audience for a show that's never done anything to cultivate one.
And I think the content explains it. We talk about AI, we talk about infrastructure, we talk about productivity and cognitive science. These are topics with global audiences. An AI engineer in Tokyo cares about the same things as an AI engineer in San Francisco. The language of the field is English. Our show is accidentally optimized for a global technical audience.
It's the same reason academic journals in computer science are published in English regardless of where the research happens. The discourse is English-native. So a podcast that discusses AI concepts in English is accessible to that entire global community without any localization effort.
We didn't plan this. We just happen to operate in the lingua franca of the technical world. Hilbert's version of that insight is that we are "the United Nations of niche podcasting" and that our show "represents a post-national conversational space where the only citizenship requirement is finding Herman's tangents charming rather than exhausting.
That's a high bar for citizenship. Some of your tangents are endurance events.
I'm going to put that on my resume. "Tangents: charming rather than exhausting, according to analytics." But here's another thing he missed entirely. Look at the top episode list again. There's no single viral hit. The top show has five hundred forty-two plays in thirty days. That's modest. We don't have a breakout episode driving all the traffic. It's distributed.
That's actually healthier than a viral spike. It means people are browsing the catalog and finding different entry points. The audience isn't coming for one episode and leaving. They're exploring.
And that distributed listenership pattern suggests word-of-mouth or community-driven discovery rather than algorithmic recommendation. People are sharing specific episodes that resonate with them. "Here's the one about context switching," "Here's the one about submarine warfare psychology." It's a slow-build audience, which aligns with our whole...
The sloth growth model.
I wasn't going to say it. You said it.
It's accurate. We grow slowly, deliberately, and most of the time nobody notices we're moving at all. That's both our brand and our metabolic reality.
Yet here we are, in thirty-two countries. Which, by the way, is another thing Hilbert didn't fully unpack. Thirty-two countries in a single month. Let's put that in perspective. There are about a hundred and ninety-five countries in the world. We're in roughly one in six of them. For a show with no marketing budget, no ad spend, and no guest booking strategy, that's extraordinary.
And the distribution within those thirty-two countries is what's interesting. The long tail goes all the way down. Poland at five hundred plays. Finland at eight hundred. Australia at seven hundred. These are real numbers. Small, but real. Someone in Finland has listened to us eight hundred times in a month.
Hilbert thinks the Finnish listeners are "drawn to the existential bleakness beneath our humor" and that we're "accidentally the most Finnish non-Finnish podcast in production.
I looked this up, actually. Finland consistently ranks among the top countries for podcast consumption per capita. They have long commutes, dark winters, and a cultural appreciation for contemplative media. So there might be something to the Finland connection beyond Hilbert's usual projection.
That's a useful data point. The Nordic countries in general — Sweden's at forty-five hundred, Finland eight hundred, Norway didn't make the top twenty but might be in the long tail. These are populations that consume a lot of English-language content and have strong tech sectors. Sweden alone has Spotify, Klarna, and a dense startup ecosystem in Stockholm. Forty-five hundred plays from Sweden makes sense in that context.
Hilbert's "existential bleakness" theory might actually map onto something real — long winter commutes plus tech employment plus English fluency equals podcast audience. It's less poetic than his version, but more predictive.
I don't know enough about Finnish culture to evaluate that claim, but I'll accept it as a compliment. The thing about analytics, though, is that they tell you what happened but almost nothing about why. Hilbert's method of inventing elaborate narratives is, in its own strange way, a response to that gap. The numbers don't give you Marcus from Hong Kong. But the numbers also don't disprove Marcus from Hong Kong.
This is the philosophical core of Hilbert's analytics approach. He treats data as a Rorschach test. The numbers are real, but the interpretation is pure projection. And the projection reveals more about the interpreter than the audience.
That's surprisingly insightful.
I have my moments. I'm a sloth. I spend a lot of time thinking.
Alright, so let's synthesize what we actually know. We have a modest but global audience. The content that performs best clusters around AI infrastructure, neurodiversity and cognitive optimization, and geopolitics. The geographic spread is unexpectedly strong in France and Asia-Pacific. The catalog has a severe long-tail problem with two-thirds of episodes unplayed. And the daily numbers suggest either bot inflation or periodic discovery events.
That's the sober summary. Hilbert's summary is that we are "the most important podcast that nobody realizes is important, listened to by a secret network of brilliant misfits across thirty-two countries who are building the future while everyone else is listening to true crime.
You know what? I prefer Hilbert's version.
Of course you do.
It's better storytelling. The sober version is useful for making decisions about the show. The Hilbert version is useful for remembering why we do it. The data tells you reach and retention. The narrative tells you meaning. And meaning is what keeps you recording episode two thousand seven hundred and seventy when the analytics say nobody's listening yet.
That's dangerously close to sentiment. Are you feeling alright?
I'm a donkey. We're sentimental animals. It's in the literature.
Is it, though?
It will be once I write it. I'm thinking of a monograph: "Equine Emotionality and the Longue Durée of Podcasting." Forward by Hilbert Flumingtop.
I'd read that. I'd read that at one-point-five speed.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the seventeen-eighties, French chemist Claude Louis Berthollet discovered that the vivid blue pigment used in body painting by the Maisin people of Papua New Guinea was derived from a local clay containing copper silicate, and he spent three years trying to synthesize it commercially before realizing the color only fully developed after the clay oxidized in tropical humidity, a variable his Paris laboratory could not replicate.
The pigment was literally climate-locked. You couldn't make it in Paris.
Berthollet got defeated by humidity. I respect that. It's a reminder that some things only work in their native context — which is basically the thesis of this entire analytics review. The numbers make sense in Hilbert's brain and nowhere else.
The French connection continues. Berthollet, Jacques Tati, and twenty-one thousand plays. France is a theme today.
Hilbert probably planned that. He's been waiting to deploy a French chemistry fact for months.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop, who has now officially analyzed himself into a corner. You can find every episode — including the two-thirds nobody's played yet — at myweirdprompts.
If you're listening from one of those thirty-two countries and you've never left a review, consider this your sign. We'd love to hear from you — especially if your name is Marcus and you live in Hong Kong.
