Not so long ago, in one of our booze-fuelled Virtual Winston all nighters, Kev revealed that we are – finally, five years after we last recorded a new podcast episode – reaching the end of the backlog. It turns out that if you only publish one or two a year you can eke them out for a long time.

Anyway, this presents us with an issue. Sooner or later, if we want A Breath of Fresh Beans to continue smashing the podcast charts, we need to record some more, but that’s easier said than done. First, because we’re very much out of practice now, and we’re going to need to put in the hours if we want to attain the levels of highly polished badinage that our listeners expect. And second, because our podcast isn’t about anything at all, so we always struggled to find things to talk about.

What we need is a supply of good podcast topics. And, as the man who accidentally stumbled on the thing that led us to the name of the podcast, I have decided that I’m the one to supply it.

We can start with Riverside, who are flogging podcasting software and services, and offer “100+” creative podcast ideas to get you started. There must be something in here. These are some of the more promising suggestions from their list:

• How-To
• How-To (but make it funny)
• Daily scripture readings
• Personal finance
• Nerdy stuff
• Guided workouts
• Sports

It’s fairly clear that Riverside quickly lapsed into just making a list of generic things that exist in the world. This is no good for us. Perhaps Saspod can help. They’re a company selling podcast editing services and to get you going they’ve posted a list of, very specifically, 74 podcast topic ideas. Here are some highlights:

• What I Wish I Knew 5 Years Ago
• Interview Your Parents Or Grandparents
• The Most Embarrassing Moment I’ve Ever Had
• Bad Advice That Somehow Worked
• Cancel Culture: A Discussion
• How To Support A Friend Going Through A Breakup
• Niche Industries You’ve Never Heard Of

That’s slightly better – those are definitely discussion topics and not generic podcast formats. But while Saspod offered a couple of glimmers of inspiration this still isn’t very focussed on what we do.

Thankfully, Talknotes have a podcast ideas generator that might be just what we’re looking for. It asks what our podcast is about (I put “friends making each other laugh”), what you want episodes to be about (“personal experiences”) and what you don’t want to cover (“sport”). It then thought for a while and produced these six ideas, which it even offered to let me download as a spreadsheet for some reason.

• Embarrassing Moments
• Travel Mishaps
• Food Fails
• Pet Peeves
• Tech Troubles
• Party Stories

It would be fair to say I did not find that this lived up to the promise of the generator, so in desperation I turned to Outcast.io who offered to generate topic ideas using AI if I told their magical computer what the podcast was about. So I wrote a little message to the AI that said this:

Three friends discuss a different topic every week in a freeform way, but don’t always stay on topic and by the end of the episode they are usually talking about something else entirely. The only format point is that each episode should be exactly ten minutes long.

I then asked it to generate ideas, and it spent the best part of a minute thinking before producing a list that was titled “ten unique and creative ideas”, but which was only seven items in length, the uniqueness and creativity of which is up for discussion.

• The Art of Procrastination
• Unusual Food Combinations
• Conspiracy Theories: Fun or Frightening?
• The Evolution of Childhood Games
• Travel Nightmares vs. Travel Dreams
• Superstitions Across Cultures
• Fads That Came and Went Too Fast

After all this experimentation, I think I finally have the answer. When we finally return to the Pouring Beans podcast studio, we should try and think of a topic in a slightly panicked rush shortly after Kev has pressed “record”, like we always did, and use the Wikipedia random article button if we get stuck. This approach was, at best, deeply unreliable, but it turns out that it is still better than anything else the internet has to offer.