podcasting 2.0 for December 12 2020, this is episode number
15. And Hey baby, we're with the band
all around. But it is
a Friday time once again for a meeting of the Board for
podcasting 2.0 podcast index.org. And now, ladies and
gentlemen, the man who put the auto in autocomplete the
developer Dynamo, Mr. Dave Jones.
Was the band, the band.
The band, we were the band. Were the band. Yeah, this is
something. First of all, how you doing? Man?
I'm sad. You're sad, is extremely depressed. What's
wrong? And nobody appears to like us anymore. We had two
donations this week.
Oh, honeymoon is over.
No. Yeah, yeah, it's Yeah, it's the cold hard. Facing the cold
hard reality now of the dark winter. Yes, it's dark winter.
Yeah, it's dark winter. Well,
then let me say right off the bat, if this is a value for
value projects, podcast, index.org and the accompanying
podcast. And if you want to support it, if you get any value
out of what you're seeing, maybe you're an app developer, maybe
you're just a podcast listener, maybe just listen to this
podcast. Who knows? Maybe you just like free speech. And that
kind of stuff and fighting against canceled culture. Put
that into a number put in just keep it in your head, go to
podcast index.org and hit the big red Donate button and send
us some value. We'd really appreciate that. We did get a
nice sponsored value returned from RSS calm.
Yeah, totally. And I've put that into the donation since he was
already so sure.
That's one of the two. Yeah, let's
not talk about that right now. You gotta save it.
Okay, that's not
one of the two. That's the nest number three, like two and a
half. Yeah.
That was in pod news. And I and I do want to say now you're sad.
I'm a little bit Earth.
Oh, yeah. Because
I know. James Cridland pod news. dotnet. He has a podcast, which
is that called the pod news podcast. Is
that what that is? But there's that and then he's got a new one
called pod land.
I don't know which one I was listening to maybe was pod land.
And all of a sudden, he's like stealing our material he's doing
he's doing hot namespace talk. Excuse me. Yes, that's not okay.
It's like horning in on our business. Dave?
Yeah. No, we get there's only one podcast that gets to talk
about namespaces for an hour seriously.
I mean, we are the porn hub of namespace.
And it's so appropriate.
Appropriate. I know I saw a Ryan Gentry from lightning labs he
was he posted in one I think Tales from the Crypt tribe on
swings chat, says Does anyone know anyone over to Pornhub
asking for a friend
is like okay, they need a Visa MasterCard. For exactly the
processing. Let's get in there. My immediate reaction was well
get ready for Bitcoin. 100,000. Yeah, is it's going up baby.
And Tina right away. She's like, oh, Bitcoin. There's your
answer. That's what you got to do.
That was funny. Yeah. That was funny. Yeah. deeper on on social
media.
She knows man. She knows
that. If she does. She needs to send them an invoice. That's
good. material. Reminder, insulting.
She should send us a Yeah, when she can send us a lightning
invoice. We'll pay it. Yeah. When she can. She has a wallet.
So does she Yeah. Oh, yes. I want a wallet. Okay. You go. And
what she needs is a podcast that wallet. That's what she needs.
And that's true. I want to ask everyone who's listening to this
in a in a lightning enabled app to crank up the value sliders,
please peg that to the right. thing. Go to whatever whatever
your value settings should be. And I was thinking now that we
have Dred Scott, doing community chapters for the show, which is
dynamite. I don't know if you've seen it.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was awesome. I saw it. The one I saw earlier,
the chapters were rolling through. And it was like, just
links to pay like iframes with pages and it could scroll. It
was awesome. It was that love that article? substack. karate.
Oh, yeah. Last week it was in there. You could just read the
article right in the app. Yeah, cool is that pause the podcast,
read the article and then unpause it. Of course, that
article was like 500 miles
an article. Yeah. And if you're wondering how you can witness
all this beauty, go to new pod stamps.com that's where, where
you can find all the apps and services hosting companies that
are podcasting 2.0 compliant, and certified as an idea.
I just had an idea. Okay? If that happens, you're sitting
there listening to a podcast and the chapter comes through, and
has something you can read or something like that. We get a,
you get to have some way to have like a lightning payment into
things. So you can see you could like, help the person, this
stuff you're linking to.
So okay, two things. And this, and we'll just get this out of
that we have guests hanging, so I don't want to take too long.
But I had dinner with Paul from Sphinx chat. He was in Austin,
the other day. And so first off, yes. What I'd like to do with
the show right now, since Dred Scott is doing our chapters, I'm
going to get him a node. And we should cut him in on the value
block for what 5%?
Oh, yeah, sure. Should
we do that's great. Yeah. So we can also show how this actually
works and, and have him enjoy some of that. I mean, that's the
whole point is, you know, we are eating our own dog food here.
And coming back to what you just said, We're with the band was
something that Paul identified at our dinner, he said, what's
happening with the community chapters that people can add to
it, but also in Sphinx chat with the boosts and with the chat
itself. That's all additional content that is added by the
listeners, I like to call them producers. And it makes you feel
like you're with the band. And so Dred Scott is truly with the
band right now. And the Lee with the the amount of creativity he
can put in with still very rudimentary tools is quite
astounding. And what he's what I see him do on no agenda, where
he's doing the same also gonna put him in the value block for
that show, is he'll get images, appropriate images from no
agenda, art generator, and put those in topics that we're
talking about stuff because most of those images come up from a
topic that just not picked up the album art. So now he's
putting that in. So now that that now also brings in the
other artists, I mean, it's, you know, who you're with the band,
and they get to be a part of the podcast, it's really mind
blowing. And I want to have that for clips. You know, there's,
there's just so much stuff that we could add to it. And it's
gonna be pretty app specific the way it is. Now, unless or until,
you know, every child born is provided a lightning node ID at
birth, which is really what I think should happen. I'm
going Somali, I'm
going to lobby for this. Yes. A shot of every child needs a
lightning
node ID Yeah. And you just barcode it on your forehead?
Well, that's fine. As long as it's not on the forehead or on
your right hand. And it's not the mark of the beast. It's a
good thing.
Yeah, everybody gets a lightning node. And here's the number
we're gonna tattoo. I don't, there's nothing wrong with this.
So and this is maybe something we'll talk with our guests
about. It kind of flows into what is the end? God, I can't
believe I'm using the term the deep data file, which is up for
discussion now. Which you're not liking it. Oh, you're not out of
file. Well, hit me, brother.
I don't know what rule I got what rule it is. It's the rules.
First, we
need to go back to the rule book. Yeah.
Yeah, you know, and I get it. I totally understand that. The
name doesn't match up with necessarily all the things it
does. The problem, though, is that it really doesn't matter
what you call it. That that is in that is one of the rules for
standard makers. It totally doesn't matter what
right. All right, the then I'm misunderstanding the issue. I
thought it wasn't just about, here's what I here's what I feel
is happening. And I could be wrong. And it's not an
accusatory statement. I feel there's a push to have an
external data file that will contain all kinds of extra
goodies. And one day, I'm gonna wake up and it's gonna be JSON.
That's,
that's what it already is. Jason, you're living your
dreams. Okay.
I knew it was a backdoor to JSON somehow.
I say yeah, no, it's Jason. Is it JSON all the way down, but I
do
see the value in having the ability now. And it all depends
on what's easier. Is it easier to have podcast apps, no one to
refresh the feed and get new information, or is it easier to
have a couple of files in there that are static that the apple
just reread every single time it fires up for an episode? That
seems to be the the main crux of the issue.
Yeah, I mean, the chapters file is already basically that it's
it's it is the quote unquote deep data file. And I'm never in
a. That's, that's what it is. And so that's what like Daniel
is saying is that he thinks that the the name chapters does not
properly reflect what, oh,
I don't care about file. I don't care about the name
that doesn't. That's, that's where I'm at to it. And he, he,
he likened it to with choosing the name podcast for the podcast
namespace. I think that is that is different. That is that is
something that's sort of external as far as the way it
works in the world. And you mean, it's a name that people
need to understand,
right? They even is, but this came out of a confusion saying
that clips is identical information to chapters, or did
I misunderstand?
Well, it does sound I think you think sound bites? Yes. Yeah. it
so well. My my thing is that when I say it, totally doesn't
matter what you what you name it, I don't mean that it doesn't
matter what the Nate what you call it, ever. Like, in all
circumstances, what I mean, what I mean, in in, I'm probably not
making this clear either, is that it doesn't matter what you
call it, when you get down into the technical weeds? Mm hmm. So
like, we use things called me, think of a TCP IP is a
meaningless term. It's an acronym for something and most
people don't ever, most people don't need to know, it doesn't
matter what it even stands for. It just does a thing. And we
know what it does. The name chapters, it doesn't matter.
Because the only people referencing the chat the name
chapters who even need to know what it means, or the people
that are doing the protocol implementation. And so for those
people, they just know that a chapters file has all these
other things in it. And, and so it's just fine. I mean, you
could call it, you know, you could call it block.
Okay. All right. Let me let me play this back to you. So the
chapters file, could be could be both chapters file and sound
bytes file or just the sound bytes file, it doesn't matter
what it's called, that day, that type of data will be in that
file.
What it's more, it's less about the soundbite and more about
other types of data like location, don't you know, that's
in I don't even I didn't even want to bring that up. Because
location tag is, is not I got I got all hot and bothered listen
to Cridland about it. So I might as well bring it up. Yeah, no,
it's the location tag is fine. It stands alone, it's gonna be
it we get, we get that it will get over the hump. But there is
also an idea of putting a location location points inside
the chapters file. So if somebody was doing a podcast of
like a walking tour, you can put little pocket. So at that point,
it's like, well, it's not chapters anymore. It's something
else. But you know, my, my counter example was bookmarks
and a PDF, bookmarks and a PDF. Yes, they function as bookmarks,
but they also have other things. And I'm like, you can put a full
JavaScript code in. Right, which, which I have, yeah, yeah.
And it resizes the page, when you click on it changes font
does all this crazy crap. So and we still call them bookmarks.
You don't know. I'm just saying that. At a technical level, you
don't have to change the name of a thing just because it doesn't
necessarily match the functionality of the thing. As
long as the name sort of encompasses the idea. There the
the goal, you know, that's fine. I just don't I just not I just
don't think it's that big of a deal. Yeah, okay.
Well, I was confused because I didn't realize was just about
that. What it's called I thought it was much deeper. So I'm
sorry, even brought it up. I'm sorry, I ruined your day.
Piss.
Okay.
Before we get past them I know, you know, before we Anyway, it
was great planning and talking to Paul. An update on that
front. You know, the breeze work continues. I've no idea when the
when their drop date is for, for a wallet with, whether it's
wallet with podcast capabilities or a standalone app. I'm not
quite sure but they are developing and they have code on
GitHub. Did you see that code?
Do you look at it at all?
I did I linked over to and look at the wall had met totally had
no idea what else
could you figure it out?
I could.
I could lie to you and tell you I was all over it. This looks
really
look real structured to me.
Yeah, I think it looks fine. Yeah, let's just look beautiful.
And then we also talked about about nodes and stuff like that,
and I've been talking to graham@voltage.io because We
witnessed kind of an overload of our nodes with the with the
amount of transactions and he confirmed it. I think, you know,
podcast index.org has the most transactions of anyone right now
on the lightning network, which is quite bizarre. And something
happened because he automatically upgrades to more
CPU and we're actually going to get a dedicated set up from him.
And so channel started to close and then we were missing keys
and payments. And
now I can't work
no and, and even closed our channel to Spinks chat. I'm
like, What am I gonna do? And even though it's discouraged in
the lightening documentation, which I didn't realize until I
was told later, that
there's light, there's lightning document documentation.
Yes. Well, yes. And there's apparently there's there's a
thing that says it's really quite not done to request
inbound liquidity on Twitter, which I do it. And of course, he
got like 15 or $20,000 worth of inbound liquidity from some
great partners and peers routing. So
you're a rule breaker, man,
I
What can I say? All right, our guest today,
we're invited. Daniel J. Daniel J. Lewis. Olivia. Don't hate me.
You are the worst. No one hates anybody. But we're honest. You
know that. We got no time for politics. We really don't. We
got no money for politics. How about that? I got no money for
politics. Sorry, interrupted. Go ahead. Well know you invited our
guests. So why don't you give them an intro?
Oh, john, and Justin from transistor. Welcome to the show.
Oh, damn. Great intro.
JOHN, john and Justin.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay. That
guy. Justin Jackson transistor, Fei.
Yeah. Dave. I signed up for this gig. Because those intros man I
would, I would sign up to hear those all day long.
doing a podcast with Adam. It's just like, you just turn on the
fire hose. This is great. But the
auto and auto complete. I mean, that is? Well,
I mean, this is a new feature Dave's been working on he isn't
done yet. He got an autocomplete endpoint, don't you?
This should be a safe it. There's gonna be a chapter
whenever. Whenever Dred Scott puts the chapters together? Yes.
Episode is just one of them's gonna be called Davis sad. face.
Yeah. And the other one's gonna be called Is it done yet? Every
week, there's gonna be one called Is it done yet? No, it is
not done yet. Okay, it isn't. It's not done. I got a curve.
I got some curveballs. See, this is this is what I know that Dave
is, like, he's a little bored is when all of a sudden they're
like this new feature is like, I'm doing this now. Like, holy
crap.
Am I right?
That's what that's that. Justin. And john, are you Dr. Y'all both
developers.
Now. Now in our partnership, john is the developer. So this
is making me look real bad, because now he's going to expect
a similar Adam Curry treatment. Every time he releases something
new.
Just talk like you're no you're talking about?
Exactly. That's
what I do. That's what we that's what we do every week.
All right. So john, come on in here. You're the you're the
developer of the two with the with the deep breath with the
deep voice.
Yep, that's me, Kofi.
That's what I was gonna say when Adam asked if that was true, if
I was bored as well. Yeah, john. I mean, of course, that's what
happens. You do stuff and you get you start working on
infrastructure stuff, and it gets boring. And then you just
have to like, shake it up and do so I can
I can relate. I have. I've been I've had multiple projects going
on once and then I just switch between them until I can finish
one. Yeah, it's like Justin, Justin knows. Yeah.
So Justin, to the frustration of everybody else.
Yeah. So Justin and john, together founded transistors hit
transistor or
transistor, FM. Some people don't like putting their domain
extension in there. But for me, that's like free marketing. It's
transistor.fm is the site. But it's, it's legally just
transistor.
Yeah, I like this name. Because for me, it triggers all kinds of
radio, visions of a transistor radio that may not have even
been the intent behind the name. But give us a bit of the
backstory because it's a relatively young hosting
company, I think a couple years, right.
That's right. Yeah. JOHN, do you want to do you want to give the
guy and try to give a short history? Let's see. So it we'd
launched officially in August of 2018.
I think that right? Yeah. August 2, yeah.
Okay, so August 2018. But the actual code it started in the
end of 2017, I was working for Cards Against Humanity, and they
were doing a big holiday event. And one of those was a podcast
they were releasing. And I was a developer there. And it
previously worked on a podcasting platform. kind of
thinking about doing another one building my own, again, by
myself. And so with that, I had the opportunity to sort of build
something simple just for that one podcast, which then
eventually spun out into transistor. So they were nice
enough to let me work on side projects, which they kind of let
everyone do. And then I had known Justin for years back for
meeting him at Expo Expo down in, in Portland, OR over in
Portland, whichever direction you want to go. And we've been
talking about doing something together for a long time, I sort
of wanted to do transistor on my own, based on just previous
experience with some with a co founder. But, but the more I
thought about it, I was like, I don't really I don't have any
idea how to market this thing. Right. So it's just me a
developer, I would basically do nothing to market it. And
Justin, I kind of wanted to do something starting in 2018. So
we decided to partner up and made it legal. And kind of been
going from there. We went full time last summer. I believe,
yeah. Almost a year, exactly. To a year after we launched
officially. So August 2019. And bootstrap the whole thing.
That's a pretty generous retelling, actually, because
when john told me he was working on this, I begged him. I'm john.
I said, john, you gotta let me You gotta let me partner up with
you on this. We got to do this together.
Yeah, I didn't want to mention the desperation, but
perfectly played perfectly.
Now what now? Why? So john, you're a developer. So you'd
like to what you were doing you developed it? Was there a Did
you see that there was a an opportunity in the market? Or
was the market so small? Because you know, there's a number of
players out there. Yeah. And Justin, why were you begging
man? What the hell were you thinking? Taking a vow of
poverty getting into podcasting?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I thought there was still an opportunity. I
know, there were there were even two, three years ago, a number
of posts. There's obviously more now, but I thought there was a
huge potential in podcasting. I just had fun working on it.
Previously, in my in a previous iteration for a different
service. Guys, I just I really, I liked the podcasting landscape
I liked kind of who was involved in it. I like the open nature of
it. It just seemed like they were pieces of like the original
internet frontier still in podcasting. And, yeah, it was a
tough business, a fun, fun project to work on. All the
customers are great, great to work with. People seem really
excited about podcasting. And yeah, I just, you know, had some
previous knowledge of it and wanted to just build something
up from scratch again, and no, one of those developer pitches
you got to scratch
and just, you were big, you were begging to get in what did you
see?
Yeah, well, see, I started podcast in 2012. And I've always
been in software. So on the product management side, and I
used to have folks come to me all the time, you know, between
2012 2013 2014 developer saying, Oh, you know, I got a great idea
for podcasters. And I always said, don't build that, because
the podcast market back then, was mostly di wires and
hobbyists and, you know, people that wanted to do things
themselves, they didn't like paying for things. And that this
swit the the trend that I saw developing that got me more
excited, is you still had this indie podcast scene. But
increasingly, those folks were okay with paying for posting and
analytics and other things. But then you also had just way more
mindshare. So when I was in the coffee shop, people weren't just
talking about what apps they were installing on their phone
or what they were watching on Netflix. They started you know,
saying hey, I'm listening to this new podcast, and it like
when I heard it the first couple times in a coffee shop. It made
me stop in my tracks like what nor normals are talking about
podcasts. Like they figured out how to you know, find a podcast
app and subscribe subscribe to an RSS feed like what is going
on and so and, and all of these kind of big cultural touchstones
like cereal and you know, and then everything that happened
after cereal that you New York Times publishing a podcasting op
ed every single week, it just felt like there's this
burgeoning wave. And now and then companies starting to
invest in it right yet. branded podcasts and, and even companies
that I knew that like Basecamp, which is a relatively small, you
know, software company, they hire two full time people and
built a studio to have a little podcast, you know, set up,
right? That's, that's at least $200,000 a year prop maybe even
more, like, wow, if they're willing to spend that much on,
you know, hiring some podcasters, then spending, you
know, $99 a month on podcast hosting might not be a stretch
for them.
So do you. What is your your target client base? I mean, it
seems like you're, you're offering everything we take care
of it, make sure that your podcast is published on all the
platforms and you got your status, that's still a big a big
draw for customers that the big one yeah,
to be unlike at first we thought our audience was going to be
businesses. But it turns out that there's like the big draw
is people searching? How do I start a podcast, or best podcast
hosting? And
I see right here how to start a podcast right on your menu use
you slide little Seo? w.
Yeah,
that's all Justin.
But, you know, there's there is a lot of people who want that
kind of help. And so they're looking for a simple tool that
people don't think about, like most podcasters are not thinking
about RSS, they're not thinking, all they're thinking about is
how do I get my audio out into the world? And whatever is the
the easiest, or the most friendly, or the most efficient
way to do that is what, that's what they want. We have folks
switching from Ankur, which is a free product that switched to us
just to get customer support.
Yeah, it's a big one. I've heard a lot about this. And people
really like the customer service.
Yeah, yeah. And so I think we do have a lot of businesses that
sign up. And that's a great, you know, that's, it's great to have
those folks. But I think what john and I really dig is the
Indies, people just in their basement, buy a microphone, and
have something to say and want to get it I like growing up, I
always wanted to start my own talk radio, you know, radio
station. And I actually knew a guy that bought a radio station.
He was a friend of my dad's and I, you know, I went up to him
when I was a kid and said, How do I do that? Like, how do I own
my own station? And he was like, well, it's millions of dollars.
Justin. Are you are you can go like serve coffee for years and
years and maybe get on the microphone. And the idea that
now with, you know, a $99 USB microphone, and then you know, a
service like transistor, you can have your own talk radio
station. That's an attractive idea to a lot of people.
Yes, the and the non live nature of it, I think makes it
attainable for a lot of people, they just say, Well, if I mess
up, I just go back and clean it up later. And I don't have to
have you know, I don't have to have the terror of having live
radio and that kind of thing that will make you shut down
makes it a little bit more accessible for the average human
to think that they can, you know, pull that off and not be
embarrassed about what the final product looks like. Yeah, yeah.
I think it's cool that he did talking about it, podcasting,
feeling like sort of early internet days. I totally agree
with that. Because Yeah, it's there's this I remember back,
oh, gosh, this is probably been 20 years ago now and are close
to it. And I was heavy writing a lot of assembly language at the
time. And we're in one of the one of the things were
you in prison? What the hell were you thinking?
It's even worse. It was on Windows. On Windows. Yeah, using
the masm 32 packages. But they one of the things that was so
interesting to me about that whole thing, I think probably a
lot of, you know, sysadmin developer type people think this
way is that you could understand what you were doing like you
could one of the first things I wrote was a podcast downloader
and this podcasting was very, extremely new at the time. And
it was parsing the RSS feed and all that jazz. And you had to
actually make the HTTP one, you know, one dot one call it in,
you know, your your hand coding the protocol
doing this in assembly language.
Yeah, and it's in languages, right? Yeah. And it's still got
the code out of post. It is kind of crazy, but you're doing
you're making all the code He calls and stuff. And it felt fun
to actually be able to like, understand the protocols as
they're being used. You know, in now, today, your most
development is so many layers removed from the actual, you
know, wire wire level protocols and the actual, you know, low
underlying technology that it feels, you're just like, Oh, I
need to do this, I'll just go get a library and plug it in,
and I'll just pay no, that's fine. But then you never, you
don't have that sort of thrill of being able to kind of get in
and really dig down deep and understand something to do it on
a protocol level. But you still have kind of had that in
podcasting. It's fine. You get to parse the RSS, you get to do
all these interesting coding challenges. It's, it does feel
like old internet.
Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of interesting things you can do
around a very simple protocol. Which RSS, which I really hope
will stick around. I mean, this has its limitations, obviously.
And
you know, what I heard a lot of a lot of over the past few days,
people emailing, even saying, Can I do video with this?
Because YouTube is like, gonna, I'm gonna take my channel down
and like, yes, yes. All this stuff works. It's there.
Yeah, that's going to be an interesting journey. And I've
resisted doing video, but even a platform comparison between
YouTube and podcasting. And RSS is, it's kind of having its
moment right now. Because we've seen what the, the, you know,
the owned platform looks like YouTube came in, they bought out
a lot of indie video people at the beginning, they captured all
that market, and now they own it. And, you know, for a while
creators, were happy to publish on there, and have YouTube, pay
them add, you know, add, share, or whatever. But once somebody
owns the means of distribution. So now that means of production
have been that's been democratized, everybody now has
the ability to turn on a microphone, or a camera, and
create their own stuff. But now what's being locked down is
distribution. And, again, you know, especially during the
pandemic, some creators saw their YouTube ad share, get cut,
and you know, all sudden the algorithm is no longer showing
their stuff. And in podcasting, with, with Spotify, we now have
the same kind of risk is there's this big platform that wants to
be the YouTube of audio. And I do think there's, this is kind
of a pivotal moment in podcasting, our podcast creators
going to go the same ways. You check YouTubers and be owned by
the platform? Or are they going to keep their independence and
figure out other ways of, you know, making the money work?
Well, that that is partially up to you partially up to the app
developers and partially up to us for and I'll take some of
that responsibility to get the word out there that there's an
entire universe, we are making a difference. There's been, we're
seeing the uptake, in not only just apps, they're integrating
who see the see the value in it, we'll see exactly how I think
the experience is what it comes down to. And that's why you've
always seen people have their favorite podcast app, because it
has that one little feature they love. And sure a lot of people
like I just whatever Apple has is fine. But once they
introduced to that one extra feature they like it could be
simple as a share. And features is where we're gonna win
initially. And money is where we're definitely going to move
ahead. Which brings me to podcasting. 2.02 point out where
you guys are, I think, as integrated and compliant as
possible at this point, am I correct? in assuming Yeah,
because you guys as transcript transcripts, of course, the
logtag funding chapters soundbite
and we don't have we don't have all that stuff. You don't have
all of that. We only have two of them
locked in funding, whereas
we're as compliant as we can be. Technologically because we
don't. Right now have support for chapters. Shame on you.
That that was Adam's way of public shaming.
Actually, I was looking at new podcast apps calm and it says
that you have all those features. So I guess I was
wrong. Yes.
That's the way to light a fire under arrest, I guess.
Well, it's on the side. So you better have you better had a
good luck.
Good luck, by the way. I don't know which site that is. Yeah.
So we Yeah, we do support locking and, and funding. And we
do integrate with the podcast index API directly so people can
just submit with one click.
Very nice. And yet, what is your roadmap look like? Do you think
you'll be supporting chapters And transcripts?
Yeah, I think so I mean, transcripts. Yeah, we have to
build a new way for people to upload those people often ask
for auto transcription, which I don't. I mean, we'll have to tie
into a different third party service for that, if we do
that think otter.ai may have the may have an API that you can
access for that. Okay.
Yeah, it's it's one of those things where we kind of want to
do it right, instead of do it fast.
So what can we do to help?
I mean, you, you guys got to keep blazing trail. That's the
whole point, just because just because we're a few miles behind
you, that doesn't mean you shouldn't keep blazing the
trail,
I guess maybe I mean it differently. So I realize with
my developer hat on, which is a very nice paper, I realize what,
you know, when when chapters comes out, and, you know, it's
like, oh, and here it is, and you just put this JSON to this
file over here. I realized that, oh, wait a minute. That means
you guys got to figure out a way internally to have yet another
file. That is that is hosted and loaded and linked and cetera.
And I know that takes, you know, that takes some thought and some
time to integrate that to have it worked the right way. So yes.
So when moving forward, as we come up with stuff. Do you have
preferences from your end of the ecosystem? Like, well, gee, if
we could put it all in the RSS, that would be better, because x,
y, and z? Or we'd rather have all this stuff external? I mean,
that's the kind of stuff I'm looking for. How can we blaze
the trail and not leave just ashes for you to just sweep?
I mean, I would personally prefer it not to be the rssb
just because those things get huge. I mean, if you stuffed the
entire transcript into an RSS feed, yeah, I would use that I'm
with you. Yeah.
Yeah, that's what all the hosts are said. Yeah. Adding
on adding on external things like that to external URLs, I
think is probably the way to go.
Yes, this this was said by and I was reading this and something
that pod news headset had had in their newsletter. And then think
Tom Ross, who posted this is a quote from Dave's Rob. So Rob, I
know he knows his name, charitable and he said closed
versus open as Spotify expands their suite of exclusive
content. And others, like Amazon and Apple enter the fray will
begin to see more competition between closed platforms and the
open RSS based ecosystem. I believe that open open ecosystem
can continue to thrive. Competition is healthy after
all, but the open ecosystem will need to continue to innovate as
an industry to serve listeners, creators and advertisers well,
and I think that like, I think that's right, because my
response to that was, I mean, if you have, if you have a podcast
that has all, like, if you just go ahead and think extrapolate
out to the end of phase two, and let's just say that we are of
the namespace, and let's just say that we have location in
there, we have person in there, we have named seasons in there.
And we also have social media links in there. If you
extrapolate out to the end of phase two, and you have
potentially 10, new tags that give you all this extra stuff. I
mean, like that blows away any closed platform, Spotify doesn't
have all that stuff. Apple podcast, doesn't have all that
stuff, just Stitcher. None of them have that on their closed
platforms, that that open, that paves the way for the open
ecosystem, to not just compete, but to actually just bypass. I
mean, like, go miles ahead of any closed system that I know
of.
Mm hmm. And on that note, I think where we can actually help
you is we were front lines, we've got customers coming to us
every day that want to accomplish things. And, you
know, like, named seasons is one of them. It's like, Why can I
only choose a number? Oh, yeah,
this is a big one for us, too. And for NPR? Yeah, we're doing
this I
I'm listening to unfinished right now. And it's unfinished,
but it's that they're short Creek season. But I just search
for that in a in an app. It's like, which one is this is
they're stuffing it into the episode title. It's just, it's
not great. And so I think when, when folks on the ground level,
like us, are interacting with customers and real podcasters
and they're saying, they're just trying to figure out how to get
things done. How come I can't name a season? Well, that's not
possible right now. And to have folks like you that are opening
up that possibility, you know, that's a, that's a could be a
big deal for us. It allows us to build features that people want.
Now how when so when you have customers saying well, I want to
be able to name it X, Y or Z and then we have the and that'll be
in phase two. We have the seasons tag, a season tag, but
that will be likely require one of, you know, five or six
different apps that are truly compliant with it. And I don't
know. And Dave chime in if this will break. If this will break
ordinate does not show up at all, unlike the apple podcast
app, you know, so how do you can you sell that to your clients by
saying, well, it's new, and here's the apps that do it. But
it's not it's not the Apple App.
Yeah. I mean, there's, there's no, there's already this mess in
in podcasting. So we're always having to explain, you know,
why, what, why can't I add a private podcasting is huge for
us. How come? I can't add it to Spotify? Well, that's
not the opposite of the opposite. Yeah.
It's a tricky, tricky thing, too, when you're building out an
interface for someone to even manage their podcast with us,
right? So you if we support named seasons, but Apple doesn't
support that, you did then have to have like a different input
for specially for Apple season numbers. And then you have
another iPad, or a named one. And I'm working
on that, by the way. That's one of the I'm, I'm hopefully I'm
presenting the namespace to the Apple podcast team in January.
Cool. So we'll see. Cool, man,
how can we help with that? Yeah. Show show show up with the mob.
Well show more podcasts that have this in their feed. I mean,
that's, that's really that's really the way it's, it's a
chicken in the egg. You know, it's, it's, and so yeah. And my
next question to you guys, would be a little bit further down the
road. Are you open to integrating with other parties
to who do like lightning nodes specific stuff so that you can
offer that to your customers? But it would be a third party
that's doing that? Or is that something you want to do
yourself? Are you interested at all when it comes to the real
time? Again, totally
honest with you? I don't know what you're talking about. Maybe
Hey, man, I looked at your Wikipedia What the hell's wrong
with you?
Just say yes. Just say yes, john.
I'm sorry. Okay.
We didn't I didn't even know there was a lightning
documentation until until 15 minutes? Certainly. Yes.
Yes, well, you guys need to see this because we have, there's a
tag that an experimental tag that will be in phase two,
what's called the value block. And in that block our payment
digital payment addresses for Bitcoin but on the lightning
network, which is kind of an off chain, and you can stream it in
real time. So at this moment, while people are listening to
the show people who are on the Sphinx app, which is the only
one that supports everything right now, they're sending 100
satoshis or less, perhaps, per minute to Dave and I, because
we're the host of the show, we produce it. But also, Spinks
takes 1% and 1% is going to the, to the podcast index, and that's
infinitely dividable. So you can say I want 5% of this episode to
go towards the guy who's doing chapters for us. And so it's
kind of a royalty system. It's a real time payment system. And
it's all built on the pledge model, which is similar to
donations except you don't have to pay upfront you pay as you
go, you really you play, and then you pay. So it's it works,
whether you have money in your wallet or not. So that's that
we're really driving that so that we can get some some real
revenue flowing amongst podcast, app developers, but also much
more reason for hosting companies to be involved.
Because, you know, now when you have streaming, streaming money,
you know, there's all kinds of services that can be exchanged
for that.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, with stuff like that, that really does have
to come from customers, customers have to be saying,
Hey, we want this this thing. And that. So I think, I think
we, I mean, we, if it's if it's relatively easy to implement,
maybe we didn't. Anyway,
I will say that I mean, I think the the funding, funding
donating whatever you want to call it, pledging money to
podcasters themselves, I think that's to make this whole open
ecosystem work. That's gonna be that's huge.
We're gonna have that we're gonna have to, because the
eventually some of these other pay routes will just get, it'll
be too easy to cut it off, you know, right.
Hey, I just sent you some clips. Adam. Yeah, I got him here.
Okay, and the see the, the thing that gets me about that, is that
the, the straight now everything is there's a push for streaming
ads. Yeah. And they they're streaming ad insertion or
dynamic ad insertion. Mm hmm. And I'm just
such as it not work. Not working for you today. Is it not so? So
the way I understand it, the way I understand it, and maybe john
and Justin can do a better job is he got the streaming ad
insertion, which is within Spotify universe only. And that
is, so you can't Fast Forward has a whole bunch of hope. It's
their bait, you're not downloading a file and listening
to it on the fly, you're being streamed bits that they
predetermine, and the dynamic ad insertion is where they inserted
on the way out when you download it, or as you're listening to it
downloading streaming to an app outside of any closed ecosystem,
I think that's what it is the difference? Yeah.
Any of those? Are y'all doing any of the dynamic ads?
We had, we had mapped out what we call dynamic content. We'd
map this out early on maybe a year and a half ago. And we
ultimately shelved it partly because we're a two person team.
And we have to weigh anything we build, like, is this complexity
worth it? Because we want the app to stay relatively simple.
And we still want to have a relatively good life. We don't
want to be maintaining a bunch of complexity.
Yes, streaming ads, and dynamic dynamic ads and dynamic, dynamic
content. It's such, it just opens up such a can of worms,
for support. I mean, it would, it would have been a large
amount of work to get that to work. You know, we
interviewed Dan Benjamin from Firestarter a few weeks ago. And
he he said that the funny thing is that his the customers that
he has that are the ones clamoring for dynamic ad
insertion are all the ones that are probably going to make very
little or no money from of
course,
what we've we've seen this very thing we've had people say, Hey,
we're leaving, because you don't have dynamic ad insertion. And
many times they come back 345 months later, because it even
look at anchors ad network, there's very few people making
any money on on that network. And it's just ads, there's a ton
of podcasters who want to run ads, and there's not that much
supply. So and and there's, there's more big shows than
ever. So I don't think ads for the indie creator is the answer.
That's really interesting. Because Spotify has the inverse.
They have jacked up all their advertisers. And they can't they
don't they can't convert enough people to listen. So that's why
they had to buy megaphone. Yeah, they had to get it they need to
be selling their ads in dynamic ad insertion because they can't
fill the orders.
Because there's a volume like they need more. Yeah, they
can't.
Well, just because you have 300 million people who use your app
to listen to music doesn't mean that bringing in Joe Rogan
converts everybody to podcasts, all of a sudden, they got they
got a little trajectory there. And yes, and I'm not so sure
it's the same customer.
I honestly don't understand why. Like, if you look at SoundCloud,
SoundCloud has been doing dynamic ad insertion forever,
for both music and podcasts. They're losing tons of money
every year. like
losing stuff. That's that's the that's the business model.
Look at quarterly reports for any of these companies that have
advertising. They're all down right now. So it's not making
the big megacorps any money. It's not really making that many
podcasters any money. I'm not saying I think ad should be
completely done away with but I think host read ads are are
better than dynamically inserted ads. And there's other ways for
podcasters to make money. They aren't dynamically inserted ads.
Yeah. So Dave, you had some example of some shitty ads is
that what we're gonna do here? Because I like it.
Oh, yeah. So the the play play clip one now this is not this is
not podcast is not for Spotify or anything like that. This is
from YouTube. But it is this video went around yesterday. And
somebody might texted it to me and I was watching it. And it's
uh, you know, you had these critical moments in the video
where this guy's given testimony in Congress. Right? He's he's
about to say something. Bam, ad, like halfway through a word.
Play clip, one about hearing I hope your testimony would be as
impactful today. Cory. Senator, thank you and thank you for
pulling this here.
US Attorney john Durham has filed the first criminal charges
investigation and
yeah, it's interesting because I think that that video was
actually taken off of Facebook. Facebook, was a Senate hearing
was the immediate was like, hey, screw this, we'll just put that
you'll go away and we'll make some money. Beautiful.
The best one, the best. One is clip three that played out on
August 27.
I want to be clear. I am not here as a politician or to
dramatists or sensationalizing what I'm recommending. I'm going
to be very clear and very simple. All I ask Hey,
Have you ever seen those shots?
That's fantastic. So the
podcasters, who are clients who are clamoring for dynamic ad
insertion?
Do you want your show to sound like that? a horrible experience
for your customer reminds me so much of early cable when I was
at MTV in the mid to late 80s. And, you know, Manhattan, it'd
be channel, I don't know, 23 or something, maybe a little
higher. But, but, you know, at the time, it's like, people were
laughing at cables. Like, that's not real television, no one's
gonna advertise on cable. And it really was seen as just second
rate dumb. And you'd get these local ads that would be program,
which is at the time was, you know, a guy in a room with
pneumatic videotapes. And you know, shoving them in and
hitting the machines and switching. So you'd always see
like, half of a local car dealership, and they'll be boom
and go to a jewelry commercial, boom, go back to something else,
there's a mess. And it still it still has those problems.
It doesn't seem terribly intelligent. I mean, it seems
like there should be insertion points for some of those
commercials. It's weird that they automatically choose a
point and throw it in, in the middle of someone's speech and
not too much tactical side of it messes up chapters in chapter
timing, and oh,
yeah, that's the thing. This is this is the sliding II, the
slippery slope is first you start with manually choosing
your insertion points. And then you're like, wow, the machines
can just do this for us. Let's just let the machines choose the
insertion points. And then, you know, now you just have machines
programming everything for you. And yeah, it's not very, it's
not good radio,
in the last three in the last three months, like if this same
thing happens to to to the podcast platforms, like Spotify.
And those guys, if the same thing happens there. That
happened on YouTube in the last three months, YouTube has become
almost unwatchable.
Oh, yeah, it's three ads at the beginning. It's, it's, it's
unstoppable.
It's all over. And it was quick to me, like it went from being
sort of tolerable to it was almost like
overnight. Yeah. You see, YouTube has the, I've looked at
all of this, Dave. YouTube has the opposite. They have. I mean,
they have so much advertising, they have the inventory, but
they just double down. They were doing political ads on
children's shows. Which is, which is which is basically
ripping the advertiser off, because it's not the target
market. This
Yeah, I mean, I see my daughter, my 10 year old, she'll watch.
Like, those YouTubers that play video games, she'll watch like
a, it's totally some kids video game. And she's sitting there
watching it. And it's obvious that the target demographic for
this thing is like a 12 year old. And they're in they'll
throw up a, like some kind of pharmaceutical ad. And what a
waste of money. The bottom
line is that if you don't control the distribution, you
can't really control the advertising and take it from me,
I, I started one of the first podcast networks I saw that was
not possible to do, unless you're going to just create
junk. There's a whole lot of a whole lot of problems that comes
along with it. And and we're trying to keep this open in
this, that's the whole point is to have it open and just not
really appropriate for the typical programmatic ads that
they're trying to shoehorn it into.
Yeah, I think the for the podcasters, especially folks
just starting out. I mean, again, we see a lot of patterns
with people signing up, Hey, why are you signing up? And you
know, some people just want to try out a show and whatever, but
a lot of people are trying to start a business, they're trying
to earn some money. And, and, you know, like, right, in the
United States, I think, in 2020, there was three times more
businesses started because of the pandemic, like people are
hungry, kind of metaphorically. And, sure, sure. And, and so
the, and I think, I mean, we can be cynical about that and say,
Wow, they're just never going to make the money. Why even try, I
think the attraction to dynamic ad insertion, and anchor, and,
you know, these things that offer the the opportunity for
money, like the idea of although there could be some money is, is
pretty powerful. And what we what folks need to see is that
there are other ways of earning revenue. And, I mean, you guys
are talking about lightning again, which I have, I don't
really understand but like john and i have a very simple kind of
monthly supporter program for our podcast. And it was
basically a show about us building a software business.
It's, it's, it's,
is that the SAS podcast?
Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's kind of like branded content and people
were Excited to support us? monthly? Exactly. Oh, yeah. Oh,
yeah, no, this is and there was moments where the monthly
support was making more than the software. So
so so I'll give you I'll give you my pitch. When when it comes
to podcast listening. So with the no agenda show, we've
converted between three and 4% of the entire audience to donate
money. Hmm. IAB numbers, 100 million Americans listen to a
podcast regularly average one hour per day, I think we can
convert 1% of that 100 million to give money to a podcast. In
fact, a large percentage of that 1% probably already does it
through PayPal, Patreon. Other ways.
Mm hmm.
If you value and this is where the pitch gets fun, if you value
that hour at $1, and everyone's using an app that will send in
increments $1 an hour to the podcast or listening to that's a
million dollars a day now that is flowing through podcasting.
Yeah, I mean, that's a great dream. And that's
just the bare minimum.
The problem with your pitch, though, is that you're gonna
have to get those 100 million people on some sort of app and
understanding No, no, only one machine, only 1 million, I
don't need 100 million, I need 1 million.
That's true. I mean, well, I guess it all depends on how, how
it funnels down. If you've got, if you've got a if you're saying
that one in 10 people are willing to donate, are you
saying one in 10 are willing to donate but are also like going
to have some sort of blockchain?
just it just a different app, just a different app? And you
can put money into the app? It's it's not. It's not anything
funky? It's just an app? Yeah, it's nothing. It's not.
It doesn't, it doesn't necessarily, it could just be
pre loading it in some way. Some sort of tokens.
You can load it with money out, you can load it with your credit
card. It's literally that simple. Yeah, I
think that that that's probably more palatable. Because the way
people pay for pay for Patreon right now, is I think they go
well, you know, I could probably spend about 40 $45 a month on
this. And then they kind of divvy it up. They're like, Okay,
guys, personally,
this is exactly the same in reverse, where and I believe
there will be apps that you buy with $25 already on it. Oh,
yeah. And then anything, you listen to the payments
automatic, and you can value you so like, Oh, I want this to be
like $2 a minute. Yeah, it was 150 cents a minute, you can set
that individually, all you have to do is, is either purchase a
pre loaded app, which you can then top up or get the app and
then either buy with a credit card or if you have Bitcoin, you
can put it in?
Yeah, you know, the interesting thing is, in consumer
psychology, is it feels like consumers need some sort of
brand space or some sort of mental space in their head in
order to justify the the payment. So as an example, like
before, if I came to you guys and said, Hey, I'm thinking
about building a, you know, consumer product, and I want you
to pay me $100 before I build it, and I'm going to go to a
bunch of people do this, folks would be like, now like that.
That doesn't, that doesn't excite me. But as soon as you
have Kickstarter as a thing, it becomes a space in your head of
like, Oh, well, this is a thing. Like, people do this. And so
then it's like all support a Kickstarter, that becomes
normalized. Or Patreon, I want you to donate to me monthly. How
many people in early blogs and podcasts tried that and it
didn't work? And then all of a sudden, you have this Patreon
kind of space, and habit, or whatever it is. And people are
like, Oh, yeah, I'll do that.
Okay, so I'll address that. One, the donation model has been
working for a long time, or what we call the value for value
model. With just PayPal, people are lazy. So Patreon took away a
lot of the issues for people who are lazy and don't want to do
administration, which is really software as a service is very,
very good idea. Please understand that Patreon has
canceled lots of people. So you know, Patreon is not the end all
be all because they literally have canceled people from their
accounts. The beauty of podcasting is that it is its own
marketing machine. So once there's an app that can scale,
so Spinks app does not scale for the purpose of podcasting the
way I'm thinking of it. Yeah. When I say on no agenda, if I
say hey, check this out. I can guarantee you I'll have 10,000
people using the app tomorrow and then It'll end they'll
figure out how to put money in it. And then when that happens,
they'll they will communicate with the other podcasters they
listen to, and say, Hey, you know, you can make money out,
you can get money while I'm listening to your podcast, why
don't you put this value block into your feed or go to
transistor? And they have it all set for you? Yeah, that's,
that's how the rollout will work.
Yeah, and is, it just seems I agree that that could that could
possibly work. The, the thing I'm just noticing is that
there's this weird thing with consumer behavior of, like, it's
just weird to me that at scale, like Patreon, kind of built
monthly donations at scale, they gave it a name and a space. And
it happened before. But once there was a name, and there's
alternatives to Patreon, right? There's member fall, there's all
sorts of other things. But people have their little
Patreon, like wallet, you know, it's like, this is my little,
this is a little stash for Patreon. And they've created
space in their life for that thing. And that's kind of my
dream for whatever unit like that the donation namespace that
you're talking about. If there was a maybe it's called, or it's
called, it's called the podcast, wallet, podcast. Well, maybe
that's it. As long as it's not, as in some sort of mimetic way.
Listeners adopt at scale this idea of, Oh, yeah, like normal
people, like me have a podcast wallet that I put money in every
month, and support the shows I love. Like that's a normal
thing. Everybody's doing it. And that's the that seems to always
be the the tricky part is how do you get this to scale? And part
of it might be everyone broadcasting about it. Although,
you know, sometimes that doesn't work. I don't know what all the
pieces are. It's there's a bunch of things that have to come
together for it to work. So we have a test environment with
just, I think, maybe five podcasts
as nine nine.
Yeah. And how many people? Do you think that are? 50? Yeah. So
what are we sent through in one month? $1,000 worth of value was
running through these shows? Yeah. Yeah. And that's just
that's just the test group. I mean, it it's, this is this is
in the station getting ready to go. I mean, once once we have a
an app that that is outbound on the sending part was just a
technicality. Mm hmm. I think it's going to go pretty quick.
It's not something that is it's not something that's easy. For
me, as far as you know, like, there's been a lot of plumbing
that's gone into, but then I think I see what you're saying.
Justin, I think you're, you're saying that there's a it's more
like a there's a space for not really a brand, but like a
concept. Word whether
Patreon is a concept, that's totally a concept that they
become the Xerox of donation, I
completely agree. Yeah, it's mostly mostly a cultural issue.
Sure. How do you how do you get exactly how do you get the
culture to okay with
the culture to me is cashapp. This is this is your your next
if not your current podcast? listener?
Venmo cash app.
Yeah, yeah. Venmo cash, the cash app does does Bitcoin, you can
send Bitcoin, you can load up your podcast wallet with cash
app. Even better if cash app had a button that said, Here's your
podcast. No. Yeah, they could do that tomorrow.
Yeah. How many of yours? How many of yours customers do you
think are trying to hurt our podcasting? Just because they,
right, just just just for fun, and versus how many or do you
think are like trying to make money?
Oh, man. I mean, I think I don't think any, any of the indie
shows would turn down somebody supporting their show, like I
but actively seeking it. I mean, qualitatively, maybe 25 30%.
That makes me happy. That makes me happy to hear because I'm
like, you want podcast. We all want podcasting to be an
ecosystem. That's monetizable. And people can make money from
it. But then, but what one of the things that makes it
beautiful is that there's also this very large percent of
people who podcast just for just because they enjoy it, and it's
fun, and they really don't ever care about making money. Yeah,
yeah, I agree. And it's one of the reasons like we we have a
pot, this, you pay a subscription, but you can start
multiple shows on a subscription.
Oh, that's nice.
And so the whole idea was once I started podcasting, I was like,
Whoa, I want to I want to sunset this show and start something
else I want to, I want to create a five episode series, and then
to have to go in and pay every time I wanted to flex my
creativity was like, I'm just not, you know. So I, yeah,
there's a lot of people that just do it for fun. And I mean,
those are our favorite customers, the people that you
know, are are just like the people that are actually less
fun are the people that are really trying to optimize? Yes,
like, john, john sometimes gets, you know, folks that are like,
How come? How come? My download stats on transistor are two off
what I'm seeing in apple? Yeah, podcast.
listener from Denmark, but they're not showing up? I don't
know how to track that one down. Exactly. But
yeah, there's a whole episode of buzz buzz cast recently when
those guys were talking about some stats that all sudden
showed up from like, some obscure town in Washington. Oh,
yeah.
What was the reason behind that was some policy server so
he was like a something or, or maybe some sort of like God, IP
address to like geolocation errors or something like that.
But it's like, people get so worked up about oh, my God, I
had 100 listeners,
my favorite story, when this is in 1994, or five, somewhere
around there, and I built my company was building Planet
reebok.com for Reebok. And back then, you know, stats are you
would now have stats, we'll do some kind of grep the log for
you. And somehow that God, I'm not kidding. Somehow that,
excuse me, that got communicated through an account, person to
the client. And the client was like, holy crap, crap, we got
like 5 million people looking at us this past month, of course,
these were hits. These were server entries. You know, like
every image on the page, everything was a was a log
entry. And then you got stuck. It's like, holy crap, how do we
tell this person was probably a fraction of that. And we're
like, fuck it, let them think whatever they did.
That was the golden age of the web. I hit count.
All you needed, you just needed a counter.
We miss you. It is frustrating.
On the one hand, like I get it, I mean, it's, you know, they're,
they're small time podcasters. They just want they want an
audience. And they want to know what
everybody wants the feedback. And this is, this is why I'm
pushing so hard. Here, where podcasts and gets his ass
kicked, is in the real time comments that people I mean, do
on YouTube, when so the one is streaming live. And even if you
go back, you see the chat scroll by you know, of what, what past.
But really just the comments itself is is a huge feature of
what YouTube offers. And you know, this idea of super, super
chats, you know, where I throw you five bucks, or 10 bucks, all
of that. And all of that can be done with the technology that
we're looking at and implementing. And that's where
it has to come from, because and I think that that is just the
idea that you have almost like the hearts being thrown at you
in a in a periscope, or Instagram Live. That's the kind
of stuff that is that audiences thrive on. That's how they can
participate, be a part of it. And
all the big podcasts have chat rooms. Sure. I mean, sure does.
Take me know, once you get to a certain size, you know, they'll
want chat rooms because everybody in this world
would love to have every single podcast app that I used to just
log into our IRC chat room, boom, just sit on the app and
and troll along while you're listening with other people. And
you know, even better if it's synchronized, but I see that
experience we've we've been experiencing it for a couple
months now with the Sphinx chat. It's fun.
Yeah,
it really is.
Think the difference though between podcasting and obviously
YouTube is you don't your eyeballs are not a thing all the
time right like my phones in my pocket and I'm walking around
Yeah, but it's it I mean even audio people will do this on
YouTube just an audio show just crazy. How how deeply ingrained
that is. Here's a question though. are you guys looking at
some different types of compression etc. If for people
who want to do video podcast because obviously the problem
with video podcasts is file size, transfer costs, etc.
Yeah. Have
you been looking at that?
We haven't yet gonna take this. Yeah,
yeah, we haven't yet. I mean, there's, yeah, there's a number
of ways to do it. But
I mean, right now is the time and people are looking for an
alternative.
Yeah, yeah. The end of the day. The uproar of them removing all
the Joe Rogan videos off YouTube has been huge, especially
in comments.
Yeah, yeah. And even you think about going back to something,
you're saying, Adam, if I could tap my air pods, when somebody
says something that I like, and it and it rings the metaphorical
Bell, and gives them a little donation or a little feedback or
something, that would that would be an incredible audio
experience. And audio first, right? I'm walking around air
pods are on. And there's a way to, of course, right, Apple
would have to agree to this. But there's a way of me interacting
with, hey, let me ring the bell right now. And give them some
feedback. Like I like that joke, or that was a good point for
Yeah,
we haven't spent a lot of money. Yeah, we have this actually,
it's integrated already is called a boost. So you can boost
in this amount of satoshis. Which by itself is, is part of
the game is you know, come up with a cool number, like I'll
boost 404 Dave, I think is doing 133 or something like that. And
then as a podcaster we go back, you can, you know, see all the
boosts on the timeline, you can scroll through it and see where
people were, as you would say, we're ringing the bell.
Yeah, I love that idea.
Maybe listening and all of a sudden, you'll have like this
string of that come through, and you're like, Oh, I don't know
what just happened. But something exact somebody said
something. cool idea. I
mean, I I'll have to look in and kind of read up on what you guys
have been doing. There's a lot of seems like there's a lot of
pieces that need to get, we
got to get you in the test group. So you can gather
as long as long as whatever ends up being as easy to use for
customers and casters and platforms at least.
That's your job. We got all the complicated.
I have fun, john.
really put that somewhere on our shoulders.
What What do you think y'all will? What is the next part of
the namespace that y'all think you will work on?
I mean, I think having a spot for people to upload transcripts
is that's that's a natural one. People have wanted that for a
while. So yeah, I think transcripts is and I don't think
it's that hard. Even if we just started with like, you can
upload an SRT file or something like that. Yeah,
you know, let him get away with saying what's hard and what's
not. Right?
How hard can it be?
Yeah, you just copy and paste of like texts? Yeah, probably
transcripts. I mean, chapters are a little we don't support
those directly. I mean, those are tough, because it does tie
into the actual mp3, the chapters themselves the chapter
tags.
Now, not in this not we are we have different chapters now.
Okay, yeah, it's a JSON file. It's an external JSON file, and
you just you just put an captors element in there, and then a URL
to the JSON file, and you're done.
And here's what's cool about it. If you think of something that
your customers might like, because this is part of this
podcast in 2.0, where you're part of the band, or you're in
the band, so I have community chapters. So this, this JSON
file with the chapters is external, it's it's referenced
in the RSS feed, and hyper capture, which is an iOS app
giveaway, a simple way for anybody to just tap it and say,
Oh, hold on a second. I want to place a chapter here. And then
there's a back end as a podcaster, I can approve those
links, I can add a picture to it. Now there's a few other
things you can do, which will start expanding. So now now
people can start submitting very much like a, you know, like a
timeline on SoundCloud, you can submit either a comment or
chapter marker or a URL link. And, and in my case, I just use
the API. There's an API endpoint for each episode. And I just use
that whenever whenever a 2.0 app comes along, and it finds the
chapters it just puts them right in right away ended updates on
the fly.
Yeah, yeah, that is that is cool. I think chapters is a is a
cool. I'm also really excited about Sam bytes. Yeah, from from
kind
of the same thing as we figured out.
Yeah, sound bites is an interesting one. Because in the
discovery, like if podcasts have a discovery problem, or
whatever, the problem is that you get to Apple podcasts. And
then there's 200 episodes that are all two hours long. It's
like, Well, how do I get a quick sense of what this what this
episode was about? Or what this man is about?
You want caste coverage? Have you tried that app yet? No.
caste coverage is the craziest fucking app in the world. It
gives you you fired up and it just grabs a random podcast
dumps you in a place in the file randomly. So you can listen to
Do it and then you don't like it hit the next one. It's perfect
for finding shit.
Yes, the scan is the Scan button on the FM radio. Yeah, and
it should have it should be using sound bites now it's just
taking something at random. But think about how cool it will be
with sound bites for discoverability
pod verse two, you know, podcast is all about sound bites they
pod is a pod first
pod verse.fm. Yep,
yeah. And then you basically just as community sound bites,
and people are doing it, and it publishes it back out into
chapters into chapters format.
Yeah, we'll have to look into the chapter stuff. I mean, it's
I think it again, it has to be sort of seamless for the
customer. And I don't know if necessary know if we'd want
people editing tables of chapter data. If they can, if we can
pull the chapters right out of the mp3 if they already had it.
That's obviously better.
Oh, that's a cool idea.
Yeah, that's what this was some vendors, some holsters or do any
pull it in, and then you just scan the frame headers, and
yeah, Addy three stuff out and build the JSON out of it.
Mm hmm. That would be that's what,
that's why we did the Jason. That's why we did the JSON is
because mp3 embedded chapters are just, they've never taken
off. Right. And it's, it's too, I'm not gonna say it's
difficult, but most people's, like, most people are uploading
their mp3 to the host. And they're not gonna sit there and
go through there and use an editing tool to do that sort of
thing. They're gonna upload it to the host. And then once you
have that point, you really don't want to do a bunch of re
encoding and that sort of thing to me. But see,
y'all just I just want to say you technical boys, don't miss
the point here of the community aspect. So when you're baking it
into your file, you know, that's one way only, and people only
get to see that as bookmarks or whatever you want to call them.
When you get the audience out there who can say, Oh, shit,
this is a great joke, I want to mark this here, or I want to put
a funny picture here, I want to link to something. Now Now
you're cooking with gas, because that's what people want. They
want to participate.
Cat chapters go both ways. It's not just like one direction.
No, because you can have as long as you can, you have an
interface for other people to edit the JSON, which I see which
still has a back end for approval. So you know, people
aren't putting porn in there, although very appropriate in
this show, then I can approve, you approve it. And it's all
rudimentary. And it's basically just a list of start types, you
know, start time URL, image URL. That's it. So yeah, and it's
just, uh, you know, just, each time you add a chapter, it's
just a row is added to the interface. So it's, and then it
spits out the the JSON on the other end. But that's what makes
it cool is that anyone can edit it. And I want this to be cross
app. If it could be two, I want someone on one app to be able to
do something on a chapter and then someone else can add their
own. And before you know it, you got comments, you know, this
this could move quite quickly this way.
Yeah, or even the thing I thought about if we realized
that people the reason people supported us monthly for our
show, because we had all these tiers and staff and you know,
benefits. What they wanted was the shout out at the end of the
show. Exactly. And we have this big long list of people yeah,
and they want the shout out that's what they want. And so
now imagine if you know if you you get the shout out but then
you could you're one of the supporters you can take a
picture of yourself and send it back and now you appear in the
in the chapter artwork right? It's like what like that. That's
good. Dave Jim cat.
There you go. Speaking of which, Dave let's thank our three
people. Oh, yeah. Because we're I value if you don't mind for a
second here, john and Justin, we are done. I
we do that transition perfectly. Yes, we do.
Our value for whatever you whatever value you get out of
this project as we are pushing podcasting forward. We're in it
to make it work for everybody. And the only way to keep the
machines humming is through the charity of Dave and myself. a
cast of 1000s and your actual financial donations we look at
the three T's time talent and treasure. What do we think today
Dave?
Well, the The first one is not an actual donation. It's more of
a it is a donation but it's not just a money donation. It's
thinking Ben and Alberto at RSS calm because they sponsored on
our behalf for pod news to brand their tech section of the
newsletter with podcasts index
that was really nice. And it was it was it that's a nice little
blurb we got Oh, yeah, yeah, it's a piece of placement. Yeah,
really appreciated that. That's that's that's incredibly
valuable, that brings people over. Really appreciate that,
guys.
I've talked a bit A few times over the last couple of months,
and he's just just a top notch guy. Great. Very cool. Yeah. And
he and he really wanted to do that for us. So that's, I don't
know how to value that. But I'm sure it's not cheap. And we
really appreciate that guys. The we have a automatic payment a
new subscription. Ah, very nice. Joseph maraca $5 a month and I
could not find a note from Joseph, Bill.
Thank you, Joseph. It's appreciated.
That's Yeah,
it's value. That's all we care about.
And we also got a one time donation of $7. From Earl
Hamilton. Again, no note. So that took a really long time.
Well, we
have we appreciate any support we get. And obviously we thank
all the developers and people who are on podcast, index,
social, who are hanging out, adding their two cents thinking
about stuff, writing stuff, helping with the namespace with
specs, sometimes just making us all laugh, it's, it's a lot of
fun. And it really throws back to what we were talking about,
you know, the, the early days of podcasting, a lot of that spirit
is, is alive and well rejuvenated. It's really nice to
see how everyone is coming together and making this work.
And it's its independence. But I think, at 40 or 50% of the
market outside of apple and Spotify. We're doing pretty darn
good. And you can support us again, your time, your talent,
your treasure, go to podcast index. org, at the bottom is a
big red Donate button. Or if you have Spinks app where you got
some lightning payments, there's a QR code, you can support us
there. And thanks again. It's really appreciated.
And john and Justin both personally promised to me that
they would donate $1,000 each. So that's in there. I guess
that's right. Did I get those numbers? Right? Yeah.
That's how we that's how we fund distortion.
I like it. This is the new model.
I will say I will add a route the community aspect of this.
I'm in a in a Slack channel for the open pockets analytics
group. And there is a channel in there for indie podcast and host
companies. And like everyone is really friendly and open to
talking about stuff and sharing ideas. So like, cool. It's
really, it's really cool to see that I know everyone is a little
bit worried about Spotify and all these other making, oh,
we're here, we're here to fight that man. That's what we're
doing here.
We're, everyone's everyone's on board, I think everyone is.
So all we need is better features, you know that
eventually they're going to redo their app, and it will be much
better. But think about I personally don't know if
they're, you know, their purchases they've made if
they're going to be on the same development trade. And they put
all their resources into streaming ad insertion and
tracking, getting all that stuff done. But you know, as we know,
there's these little things like, you know, the 1.2 1.5
times speed, being able to share something, be able to, to clip
something, there's all these little features that they're
going to have to catch up on. We have, I think 18 months
headstart, and if we really push, they'll never they'll
never really get off the ground.
What's the What's your feeling about Apple in all this case?
Because they've been kind of the benevolent. I don't know what
they've kind of they hold a lot of the balance of power right
now.
Oh, crap.
You don't think so? No, No,
they don't. They're they're in irons right now, to use the
nautical term. So they are of course contemplating doing a
podcasting plus a podcast plus, which will be, you know, talent
and news, etc, which is a burgeoning business for Apple. I
don't think it's, I mean, they have to do it, I think, I don't
think they're particularly great at it. They curate very kind of
middle of the road very safe, at not really what people are
looking for anymore. They want to be able to explore the unsafe
stuff. On the other hand, they're totally stagnant with
with podcasting, and I've been kicking them, I'm saying, look,
I you know, whatever you do, you I would suggest adopting to the
new features that are coming out. If you want to really play
both sides of the fence against Spotify, you're already under
50% market share according to the numbers, whatever it means.
So, yeah, go ahead and compete if you really think that, you
know, the offering you can put together is going to be worth
some type of subscription Where again, you know, we're going
exactly the opposite. And eventually, all these streaming
channels on television or your Roku and all these apps, that
someone is gonna have to come up with the universal way to do
that, because you can't have a $300 bill and only listen to a
couple of shows, or watch a couple of TV shows on every
different app. It's just it's, it's very arrogant. We have five
Joe Rogan's outside of these places. Hmm. And their audiences
are so powerful, that when Michelle Obama's podcast
couldn't get the audience that they had sold to the
advertisers, all of a sudden, it was no longer just an exclusive
to Spotify. It's on every podcast app everywhere, because
they can't get the audience who has the audience? We have the
audience.
I see what you're saying. Yeah. But in terms of like actual
listening apps, Apple is still outside of Spotify. Apple still
has most of that, that that market share, and I'm guessing a
lot of people are still like when they discover podcasts for
the first time. They're not downloading overcast, their most
normal, quote unquote, are, you know that they use the apple
podcast app, I'm guessing
well, that the apple podcast app stats, first percentage of
downloads has been dwindling. It's been steadily going down.
And I think if you go back, if you go back 10 years ago, you
would have never convinced anybody that Internet Explorer
was not going to be the dominant browser. And that and that your
grandmother would go out and download a copy of Chrome onto
her computer, you would say, well, just the thing that it
comes with, is the thing that everybody's going to use. But
the the power of word of mouth, it got to the point where people
were saying it became known amongst everybody, that Internet
Explorer sucks, you need a better browser, go download
Chrome. And it just became this thing that everybody knows. And
I think that's happening in podcasting. The Apple podcast
app is bad. It's just that people are saying these, like,
I'm using overcast most of the time, unless I'm listening to
Sphinx. If so when I whenever somebody asked me, What should I
listen to, I'll just tell them go get overcast, I think that
read that replicates out, and I think it's having an overall
aggregate effect.
And, and also don't get stuck in in the kind of what I call the
the holsters dilemma with and that's what's been going on for
a decade, as well as Apple going to support it. So now we have 15
apps that support these new features. When I when I say to
someone, hey, and I, we have a pretty big audience, I say, you
know, go get hyper capture, his servers get overloaded, because
people are getting hyper capture, and why are they
getting it because it has features they like they can do
something with it. If I if I say check out this episode, I almost
now instinctively send them to a pod friendly, because it's a Web
Player, it comes up fast, it works fast, that has all the
features in there, and people are often blown away. It's like
not really, it's not it's a big step for someone to switch apps,
because someone who's really, really dedicated to it. And
you'll see a lot of people, you know, pie pocket casts, you
know, very dedicated podcast attic extremely dedicated. So
instead of getting people to switch their apps, the ones they
like, now we have features that these app developers can upgrade
to an apple, if they don't, you know, what is NPR gonna do? They
want seasons, the way your customers want seasons,
eventually, there's going to be enough apps to support seasons,
that NPR will say, hey, if you want to find our seasons, use,
you know, pod verse.fm they will, they will do that. Now,
I've been around long enough to see it happen. So just like Dave
is saying, this idea that it's all over now is the browser Wars
was totally driven by features. Totally, it was all about the
features. And it still is and developers Thank you, Michael,
Microsoft is now trying to capture some of that back and
and you know, I think they've gone totally overboard where now
the browser just runs and sucks out your life in data full time
but without even open. But yeah, it's it's it's going to come
down to features and people have been wanting these because every
other platform has this is your own platform you can interact.
And so podcasting needs to get it and let's, you know, let's
see if Spotify does anything like that? I don't think so.
It's not their purview right
now. Yeah, I mean, I my my preference would be for Apple to
Apple to adopt this stuff. Because it would be nice if, you
know, outside of Spotify has already said you know, their
their path. is clear. But all these other players that support
RSS feeds my preference would be like, yeah, let's, let's use the
podcast index stuff. When we first started, I was like,
what's going on with RSS? Like, what's, where's the RSS working
group and all that? And that's, uh, you know, I don't know, do
you guys ever talk to those? Is that even a thing anymore? I
was a founding member of the RSS board. It's a piece of crap.
It's like, it's like nothing's like people running around
talking stuff for 10 years doing nothing.
Yeah. So So this seems to be the best approach is to say, let's,
let's enhance RSS to renew open protocol. I'm totally on board
with that. I mean, my, my dream would be for Apple to adopt it.
And then, yeah, we don't have because you're right. All the
only innovation we've had, in the last 510 years. It's been
when Apple
announces new, you know, new tags. And so here's, here's,
this is the problem. And this is why part of why we started the
index. podcast, app developers have never been in the deal
flow, there's been no money for them. So what's the incentive to
create a great app? And and Beside that, in order to create
a great app, you need endpoints, you need an API that is
expandable, you need someone on the other end of the API to
create the features that you need. So we provided that, and
now we have apps that never existed before. So the longer
Apple waits, the more market share we're going to take from
them. Yeah,
yeah, that's the way I see it. And maybe that's the hedge to is
to is if they want eight, to maintain some space in
podcasting, they, and they are competing against Spotify. And
maybe that's the hedge, as you say, like, Listen, like
podcasting is moving on. And we need people are demanding these
features. Just adopt them. And then you've got, you've got a
big advantage over your competition.
Yes, exactly. Right. Because you think my, my dream of how this
plays out is that Apple currently has the iTunes
namespace of which is mostly a standard, and they but the
iTunes brand isn't even a thing anymore, that iTunes doesn't
really even
nowadays, remember, name doesn't mean anything.
Just refer to it as iTunes.
I don't know what you're talking about. The, the iTunes namespace
refers to a product that doesn't exist. But so so really what you
could do, and this is my dreaming here, really, what what
Apple could do is they could look at the podcast namespace,
and they can just merge the podcast namespace in with
iTunes, and just and just call it podcast. Branding isn't
giving them anything anymore. So this could be an industry wide
change.
Great idea. That'd be fantastic to just merge it in Nice.
Yeah, there would be no breakage, I think I think would
just roll.
It's gonna take a lot of pressure. I mean, I think as a
group, you know, between smaller hosts like us, and people like
you guys, like it's gonna take a group effort to really think
pressure, pressure Apple, maybe there's some campaign we can do
all at the same time to just bombard them with. everyone's
asking for this stuff.
Well, that's that's actually not necessary, because they're quite
aware of what we're doing today are, they're very aware I'm
presenting the namespace to them in January. Yeah, give them
shit. Yeah.
That's I don't, it may not take as much pressure as we think. I
don't think so either. I mean, I think I'm gonna lay my case out
before them. It's like, the timing is interesting. Why, why?
Why even? Why even compete with Spotify? That's fine. If you
want to do that, you know, it would be is Apple plus Apple TV
plus really competing with other things? Is it really?
You said, I mean, Adam, you said, you know, a couple months
ago that you think that Joe Rogan will be coming back, you
know, outside of the ecosystem as well that they'll have to
open that thing back up?
Yeah, I think so. I think they're gonna have a real
problem getting the numbers that they that they wanted to get.
Absolutely, based on what I've seen, are already the audience
his audience reaction, that that's a very likely scenario. I
mean, and if that happens, that tells me everything I need to
know about people's about the successful about whether it's
going to be successful, to capture exclusive content, and
that your business model,
then that and that's the mistake that they're making some mistake
that Apple's making is the ID n and Spotify is the idea that the
success lies with the podcaster With the audience and the
audience is all over the place. And by the way, they, Spotify
may come for the podcast apps next, they may start buying
people.
Hmm,
I don't put that beyond them at all. So make sure you got all
your damn features integrated before you become a millionaire,
your damn developers,
does transistor have a app do have an actual app? There's no,
we don't.
Yeah, just testing, we really want things to be as simple.
That's the beautiful part about an open system is that you can
provide one part of the value chain and then let other folks
do what they're good at total, is so as a two person company,
we can you know, have a good business and have a good life
and serve our customers and go home and eat dinner with the fam
you know. And so I, our preference is that to encourage
the overall ecosystem have, you know, we have an API, we, we
want other folks to build stuff on top of what we've got or
build stuff on top of just pot, you know, podcasting in general,
by the way, cannot cannot view source your API documentation
and just steal all of your styles and all that stuff can
make because our API documentation looks like
garbage.
You should also use
tailwind, tailwind. CSS is what we've been using for all of our
stuff.
Okay, cool. So yeah, cuz I was looking at your API about a week
ago, and I was like, Man, it's documentation is so pretty, are
just like a dump.
All right. Now,
now we're down into nerd stuff. Looks. Pretty baby.
I mean, you know, Pornhub got defunded, so I gotta do
something.
Justin, and john transistor.fm. Really appreciate the work you
guys are doing in the podcasting. I'm gonna say it in
the podcasting space. It's super important. We support everybody
who is who is out there making it happen, who is independent.
And I really appreciate you guys taking the time to share your
thoughts with us today.
Yeah, this is fun. Yeah.
Thanks for having us. Yeah, we really, really appreciate what
you guys are doing to push things forward.
Well, I want to say thanks to because you're one of the I
mean, you're very early to integrate with the artists
submission to the index, I think. I think y'all implemented
that maybe like two or three weeks after we launched pod cast
index. So I mean, it's right,
right in the UI, people can click a button right when after
they submit to Apple, they click a button and automatically
submit it to the index. Pretty cool.
Yeah, we really appreciate y'all jumping on board. That was
great.
And we and we'll, we'll get you into one of these tests with
some of the the pledge model apps I think you'll enjoy seeing
it absolutely. will show you the future. The future is testing
2.0 Ladies and gentlemen, Dave, anything else I can do for you?
What do you need? Oh,
the day job has been hectic this week. And yeah, any any coffee
in a good book.
All right, everybody. We are building the future of
podcasting, podcasting. 2.0 Dave, we'll do another board
meeting next next Friday, my friend.
I see you bro.
All right, everybody. Make sure you support us if you feel like
your time Townsend treasure podcast index.org podcast.
We'll see you next week. Bye. Bye, everybody.
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