The episode I'm releasing is 1h40m long, which sounds like it couldn't possibly fit in 1.44MB, but there's an obscure but free codec mostly used by digital HAM radio enthusiasts called Codec2 [1] which can encode human voice in as low as 700bit/s (315KB/hr). At that quality setting it sounds like complete garbage, although still barely intelligible, and there are no readily available media players for it (there's not even an established file format) so I'm having to include complicated ffmpeg instructions in a README to get people to play it, but I think it all adds to the charm.
Funnily enough after searching for days for how to fit the original episode in a floppy (tried low-bitrate MP3, Opus and AAC, all of which fail at the task), and after discovering Codec2 almost by chance, I only then came across an article titled "Codec2: a whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk" [2] which I probably would've found if I had started by searching "podcast in a floppy".
1: https://github.com/drowe67/codec2
2: https://auphonic.com/blog/2018/06/01/codec2-podcast-on-flopp...