Welcome to 2019, 2019 everybody.

Hey there, Brian here, happy new year.

I'm just sliding into your podcast feed to wish you and yours, all the best for our latest collective

trip around the sun.

But also, I want to share some important news about the podcast.

As of a week or so from today, this podcast is 10 months old.

We just passed 3 million lifetime downloads. We will do half a million downloads

this month. January, we just passed our 200th episode. I can't thank you all enough for making this podcast a daily habit and also allowing me to have absolutely the most fun I've had in years.

So here's what we've got on tap for 2019, actually for the very, very

near future. When we first conceived of this show, The idea was not to just read you the headlines because like

literally you could program up a bot to do something like that. The idea was to give you headlines along with context and

commentary. Just telling you what happened in tech today is one thing, but explaining how and why it happened is another

thing entirely and giving you a taste of how the greater tech ecosystem is

reacting to the latest news is something else again.

And over time we've sort of evolved into explaining narratives and history and all sorts of other stuff. how the pieces all fit together and I think

we've done that mostly successfully but we always knew that we could do more I I mean the long reads actually, the long

read suggestions, they weren't planned at all. They were literally just a way for

me to delve deeper into ideas that I couldn't cram into a normal show's rundown.

And so for a long time we've known that we could do even more of that if we actually spoke to people as well.

If you've been listening long enough you'll notice that we have

experimented now and again with interviews. So starting this month we are going to add bonus

episodes on the weekends. So essentially we're

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