The older Plastisphere episodes, produced 2018 to 2024, are not available on the podcast feed anymore. To listen to the archive, find all episodes in the list on this website. Learn more about why I did this in this blog post.
For over 50 episodes, I’ve looked at the issue of plastic pollution from many different angles. I produced deep dives, interviews and shorts with many of the most important voices in the field, curated and presented guest episodes and build an archive on the issue, its history and solutions.
This month, December 2025, an unusual pattern emerged in the podcast statistics: Plays shot up by over 700%, with most of these downloads coming from just two locations: Parker and Denver, Colorado – an area with big data centers. The download pattern displays an unusual regularity in the numbers, and the only reasonable explanation I can find is that AI has started training on my podcast episodes and everything within it: Voices, stories, knowledge, research, music.
This podcast has been a passion project all along, and I am investing my free time and own funds into hand-making it. It’s made by a human being for other human beings, for you – and I do not want the research I’ve taken so much time to dig up, research and carefully compile to just be remixed and used freely by machines.
It looks like the AI drills through the RSS feed, the link that allows you to subscribe to podcasts. That’s why for now, I’m taking the older episodes I made 2018-2024 off the open feed. The 2025 episodes are still available for a bit.
Many thanks for your understanding,
Anja