Casting 2.0 for January 1 2021, Episode Number 18 we're taking a
tenant.
What the hell is he talking about? Yeah. Yeah,
first Friday of 2021 I'm Adam Curry here in Austin, Texas
and the guy who's already audible the man who put the D
and the J in top 40 radio or Renaissance Man of the 21st
century. I give you Mr. Dave Jones.
We have a renter. Yeah, you said attendance we got attendance.
t and e t.
o 10. Oh
yeah. We were landlords.
Yeah, land Yeah, we're slumlords if anything, slum lords, that's
where we are. No taking attendance. If you haven't seen
the movie, we're doing some things in reverse. It's messed
with our heads. We have Denton, Dan Benjamin from fireside FM
coming up. Second half of the show. And we recorded that first
because Well, honestly, I wanted to talk with Dave first have our
regular board meeting. And, and I have no production assistance.
I have no way to like call him and dial him in and set him up
and I don't want him sitting there listening for the whole
show. That's kind of weird. It'd be weird.
It's like interviewing James Cridland and pretending it's
Christmas day when it's really not.
Like, oh,
was it just me or did Kirtland chop out all the silences on our
interview that I did on pod land?
I didn't hear it so much with you as a different with me. Now.
He may have chopped me because
I know I think he chops us both up. No, I think he did a silence
shortening it also I know we were long for what he wanted.
But yeah, but it was funny to hear the the difference in
audio. Like I'm Adam Curry. I'm Dave Jones. And he's like,
no news.
We're bluster. us Americans are whatever you want.
belligerent blusters?
Yes.
braggadocious There you go. bragging Oh,
yeah, like that. Yeah,
there you go. Where does Trump have podcasting? Orange man bad.
day the tea bag tells me right now live righteously and love
everyone. Oh, it's
a beautiful thought for the beginning of the year.
Yeah. For Brand New Year. Happy. Happy New Year.
Happy New Year to you, Dave. This is gonna be our year, man.
This is the year of freedom. Oh,
did you eat collard greens? To eat greens? No, I
didn't. It's also I'm supposed to have jello with carrots or is
that a different?
That's a different need. That's for you tell swingers
you tossed ringers
if you if you ever had cornbread and buttermilk.
Oh, my goodness. Yeah. It's been a long time.
Oh, yeah. I don't know if that's a southern thing or if that's
the very Yeah, I
think it's a thing for sure. Yeah. But yeah, it was South is
Virginia loves got all that.
That's true that we're here in Texas. I wonder if they do think
Texas is you'll fall with us during the war. So you're still
Southern.
Look how it turned out. Yeah. Well,
I'm impatient.
Understandable.
I'm just an impatient kind of guy. But I'm so excited. I was
talking with the with Tina. You know, of course, over the past
few days, we had Christmas and we had a new years. And I'm so
excited about what what is happening. And I'm kind of
really excited about what's happening in the media landscape
in general. Where every I mean, first of all, Hollywood is dead.
They they've got nothing. They can't bring anything. They can't
produce anything. They've twisted themselves in knots.
They don't know how to really produce from home. We scan
through some of the New Year's Eve celebrations. Oh my god, any
any douchebag with zoom on a podcast does better than they
were doing.
But did that too is terrible.
Here's another carcass? Let's see who do we have? Oh, yes,
Dionne Warwick who I appreciate the work I'm being mean about
it. But you know, then they can't hear her and she did. She
can't work them and nothing is miked. It's all you know laptop
microphones. It's horrible. No one
like thinking we saw like, we've scanned around too and we hit we
ended up hitting Don Lemon and some chicken this Donald
Brooke Brooke from Did you see the racist little thing in the
corner?
Oh no. What was that
this was a stage kitchen obviously. And they had a little
when I was little sugar pots of black a black round rolie polie
cook with a chef's hat and big red lips. Playing really what
this is like an Like Angie Mama.
Yes. Like, holy cow. What is that? How did that get in there?
They limit approve of that. Because I mean, like,
clearly he didn't it was kind of the thing that the member
Elizabeth Warren had something in her kitchen that people
spotted was a similar type of racist racist container,
Indian cigar statue or whatever
that was, it was one of these things where these little little
black dudes with the big red lips like holy crap,
okay, her dream catcher and this was her dream her dream catcher
your bed. But know that I think
it we,
I want to have I'm going to diverge into this is completely
off. I want to diverge for a second into one of my one of my
new year's resolutions is to is to finish up a whole stack of
books on my did. I've all got bookmarks in. And I'm so bad
that there is one book that I would recommend. It is
unequivocal it's called city of sedition. Okay. And it is a book
by New York historian. And he's written a couple books before,
but this one is fantastic. And the the the the idea of the book
is that he shows how New York was basically torn. The fabric
of New York was torn in half during the Civil War. So the
what he was saying, because there were competing interests,
you had the huge money being made from shipping and slavery,
but essentially New York was highly dependent financially on
the institution of slavery now, they all the money guys did not
want slavery to go away at all.
Well, no, it was great commodities like human
trafficking. It's great. It's it's more profitable than
drugs. Totally. And they were all dependent on King cotton. So
they they did not but then you had this other this other half
of the city. It was completely abolition abolitionist. It was
mostly religious, mostly religious. And that kind of
thing. Is the whole This is the whole back though backdrop of
the book is all about this. But the reason I bring it up is
because I was reading last night. And I think it's
important to remember in this in this new year, and all this
stuff to ask it does happen. how things were much worse in the
past than we like to pretend we Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But you so
for instance, as with elections, and all this kind of stuff, we
want to pretend as if the institution of
has always been beautiful, it's been running smoothly, no
problem. There's never been any duels people shooting each
other. There's never been any martial law called or anything
like that.
They just complete garbage that we had I was reading last night
during the election of is the one that election I can't
remember who was right before Abraham Lincoln during that
election. Yeah. You had guys. Gangs going around throwing
Molotov cocktails into the opposition's? Sure. polling
place? Oh, yeah. I mean, we're not about voter suppression.
We're a violent country. We just, you know, we don't want to
admit to it.
Yeah. And Abraham Lincoln wasn't even on the ballot in 10.
States.
I know. Isn't that great? Yeah. When you look at those three,
man, that's and that's, you know, we're not being taught the
real history. Now we have to talk about 1619. You know,
everything has its place. But yeah, there's some other things
that are important to say, anyway,
just read just reading that. And I thought, well, you know, send
to look
well, and to realize and allow me to reciprocate. If there's
any book and I read this earlier this year, if there's any book I
would recommend, for the future of freedom, I would say the
Bitcoin standard, by saifuddien. a moose is one thing that is a
must read.
Okay, and this is a technical book.
No, no, no, it explains the history of a little bit of he
actually has a follow up series, which is doing this website,
which is the history of Fiat. And he's explaining the money
system and why Bitcoin will provide freedom in so many more
ways. I mean, think about it, without getting too deep into
it. But, you know, money is printed to create war, and then
there's winners and losers. And ultimately, it's the guys who
control the money who make all the money. And, and we're all
going back to the time of New York and the Civil War. Except
guess what side we're on. We're on the human trafficking side.
Yeah, we're being trafficked as as human resources. We're even
called this such.
So that's that's an interesting angle to the war, the money
printing as as a funding source of war. That's totally 100%
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You can not fight these wars without inflationary money.
Yeah,
debt is the only end and and what do you get with debt? More
war? Yeah. It's like a never ending cycle. So I feel things
are changing dramatically I've really been following much more
of the tech than the technical aspects have been falling the
philosophical aspects of Bitcoin I feel good about it because
what we're doing is a part of an overall movement towards
independence also known as Oh, I was reading this the other day
toxic individualism that's
all that yeah
toxic individualism. This is a this is what we're a part of.
That is a fantastic term that I love that phrase and
that great I identify like oh yeah, yeah my my ruggedness my
individualism is probably looks pretty toxic to a lot of people.
It does to me, gosh, you're
you're such a horrible man.
And I love the I love that phrase. I saw the, the, my
favorite. My favorite thing coming out of the, as of last
month, though, was with with Bitcoin with Bitcoin and all
that kind of thing is the NFL guy who's now get Oh, yeah, half
his salary in Bitcoin?
Well, this is, you know, there's a trend here that I'm actually
going to mention on on no agenda. The trend is that a DOS
I'll say specifically a DOS, African Americans, the American
descendants of slavery, they they figured it out, they are
stacking SATs, they have said, okay, you know, let's, let's put
some savings away in Bitcoin. And that's really what Bitcoin
has become, is this way of, Okay, I'm going to just put a
little money away or cash app does it they you can do into the
buys or whatever, on a regular basis at all, all of these
hotep. Jesus, that, and this is great. This is a great example.
He has a service that does this exclusively. And people are
realizing that, you know what, it's like I'm saving this
Bitcoin, and it's going up. And, yeah, you can't look at it too
much on a day by day, week, by week or even month by month
basis. But overall, the trend is, is very good. And it seems
to be some kind of black hole where now you've got hedge fund
guys who are borrowing $650 million for almost 0% interest
buying Bitcoin, and making you know, 50% on it. So that, I
guess all to say that a lot of things are, I think we're going
to see an acceleration of things changing. And that also comes
with the COVID generation who are just being born now. You
know, about nine months, I guess we're we're ready to have some
COVID babies popping out. And they are not going to under
they're not going to look at an app, a Netflix or an NBC app or
a podcast app, and they're really not going to see any
difference. They're not going to feel the weight of the NBC News
Network behind the NBC app, they're going to see annoying as
they're going to see canned stuff, and they may get bored
with it. And they're probably going to want to create
themselves. And they're going to migrate towards towards the app
that they can be on.
Which is what
I think only podcast apps really if you didn't know you can
guaranteed get on a podcast app. You can't get on the NBC app.
But my point is, they're not seeing a huge mega Corporation.
The quality sucks. I mean, what I saw New Year's Eve is any
example shining example of the the technical and showbiz
prowess of the mainstream Hello. They don't know how to do people
at home we got all that figured out we have 15 years of
experience how to turn studio closets into studios.
So that brings up something that has you know add it's not a
finalized deal yet but the whole wonder Amazon thing? Sure. I
know like and this is a this is something that irritates me and
we talk about it with Dan is that you have these big I mean
wonder he is VC play. This is this that's all it was, it is a
way to get away to come in, produce a bunch of shows, sell
some rights and then get out of it with an exit strategy. And
that's essentially what is what was happened and if I may say at
least one of the venture capitalists invested in my
podcast company pod show 15 years ago, we were 10 years too
early.
They they saw what's happening and they did it with the with
wanderley they were part of it. But they we didn't have an exit
we didn't have a beautiful exit like that. But they saw what was
happening and they retimed and I'm glad for them because they
made all their investment back from us. They learned it was
good learning money.
Well they wonder you guys are a couple of x bucks. Fox
entertainment guys. In that right there's john with a jet
Jeff Glaser.
Oh yeah.
And Hernan Lopez that mean that I think they're both Xbox guys.
Now can you name one show on one
Dr. Death, that's the only one.
Well, that's more than I can then.
Interesting See that? And that's why I brought it up is because
it it's like, it sets this standard where if you're going
to be podcast if if you are going to be a successful
podcast, you know, I guess Amazon's bought it buying them
for 300 million, which I don't know how you feel. But I think
that 300 million numbers. I don't think that's what the real
terms were. I don't, I don't know, hard to believe that they
would spend 10 times earnings on that company.
Yes. I mean, I agree. To me, it's like, good. Just get them
out of the way. Clear the decks goodbye. Okay.
That's all they reported, they reported 40 million in revenue.
I mean, and they didn't never, they never said if they're
profitable or not. And I just find it hard to believe that you
would spend $300 million on a company that has 40 million in
revenue and and question mark profitability.
I don't know you and I just spent 33 million billion dollars
and sent it to Pakistan. Oh, yeah. We got
overwritten on that.
I guess. Anyway, it clears the decks for more for us in but
what it does is it removes certain things and will actually
just didn't really remove anything, I guess.
But it just bothers me because it it gives this perception that
in order to be successful in podcasting, that your production
value has to be just imminent. Oh, this
doesn't bother me at all. I spend not a second thinking
about that. Go away, go over there, do your do whatever you
need. Go make a whole bunch of shows that sound the same. I
know what people want. This is the I'm going to the AOL model.
AOL was nice neat, tidy everything in its place.
Everything worked. The we wanted the scary internet. Please give
us the scary web browser. People want the scary stuff.
The all the successful LSA all of them. We have you have a
certain crowd, that's probably the NPR type crowd that wants to
listen to that highly produced thing and they and they like it.
But then that the the overall broader, successful landscape of
podcasting is crazy stuff. Like just it's always just a note to
three people talking to each other. under the
radar. No one knows what I'm doing. No one knows no one
cares, because I don't do advertising. So they have no
idea if I'm successful. If I can pay my rent, they've No idea.
Anyway, like, I just get old school podcasting feel is still
just, that's the core to me. Well, just what I'm trying to
hang on to
Yeah, well, I'm not because I I want to break out of the mold. I
want to see a pot. I'm partial to pod friend. And why am I
partial the pod from because the interface is different, is doing
is doing different things. It's thinking more like I think it's
not giving me an inbox. You know, there's so many things
that why can't I? Why isn't there an app for sermons white,
which is different than than your traditional podcast app? I
think? Do you think the days of subscription is dead? You just
kind of go
No, no, no, no subscription, no subscriptions, not dead? But how
do you present the information? And what are you showing? I
mean, we all we're always like, so hung up on? Oh, my gosh, I
haven't, you know, searches and showing the right stuff.
Alright, well, what are you a search engine? You know, no one
is few people are giving us new experiences. We can all emulate
the apple interface. That's why I loved me I love pod friend a
pod Finder. And what was the other one? The the random cast
over? Cast coverage? Thank you. I love these things. Now they
have their own use. But also, would I want a professor to be
able to put up his, his, his What do you call them? lectures,
these lectures? Yeah. I want a kid to start a podcast today.
And it'd be up and running within an hour and see it
everywhere. wouldn't be possible to be seen on podcast apps. It's
so much more to me. So I
guess I'll say the fan podcast app UI is in general, confusing.
Now, some, some are better than others. But a fine attend. I
tend to find them all sort of cumbersome. And I think it's
just the nature of what it's trying to do. Like, take
overcast for instance, the whole idea of of creating playlists
and that kind of thing is very, that's that is tedious. If I
what I really want is just a river of podcasts. That's kinda
Well, that's just like I want a news feed.
Well, that's what pod friend has. In fact, only two weeks ago
didn't have it. And we were talking about and Martin put it
in, so you have your latest episodes. And it's your River
podcast based on your subscriptions in chronological
order.
Yeah. See that. That's all I want. I just want them all
dumped right there. Of course,
it's all you want. If people wanted an inbox for Twitter,
we'd have an inbox for Twitter. The Yeah, exactly. It's about
the timelines baby. It's all about the TL.
You're on the DL
D, I'm on the TL for the DL. Now, I congratulate today, in
the beginning of the new year caster pod for being the the
only only tool that I'm aware of that has implemented every
single namespace even before the namespace is finalized.
Which I adore.
Yes, it's it's way beyond what I've done and not even put, I've
not even put location and person into the avenue finished those
in the index yet.
Well, so you and I have been discussing this and, and this
goes back to, you know, asking Martin to do the RSS builder. I
realized my mistake is here we have who's who's running who
does cast a pod. Do we have a first name Benjamin Bellamy? Oh,
Ben Benjamin, of course. So here's Benjamin and he's just
cranking it out. I'm an independently hosted podcast. So
I'm using the freedom controller. But you suggested,
hey, you know, why don't we just, I mean, I've got to be
using all these tags I've got, yeah, look how much work came
out, or goodness came out of the chapters. Once once I started
doing chapters, we got some real heavy traffic on it. Well, we
learned that the API came a bit under stress, because of the
amount of people you know, apps loading up the JSON. Found tons
of tons. There bugs in the in the administration system, you
know, I want to do clips, I want to do things with location. I
certainly want to do stuff with people. So all of these things.
I'm ready to do it. I mean, the the no agenda, and the podcasts
and 2.0 chapter feeds are just some of the best I've ever seen.
And we've got chapter images, we got blinked. We got everything.
We have so many per episode. That's all one guide, Dred
Scott. He's doing it all for us.
Does drip have a Sphinx invitation yet?
You know, I haven't been able to create a new node.
I talked to Paul yesterday. And he he said that they've been
having some trouble with the invitation stuff. Yeah. And he
and he fixed but he fixed it. And I was able to get Spencer
in. So there may be, he said that we're working on it. So
I've got an extra invite that I can shoot to Dred Scott, because
we need to get him in the mix here. Yeah,
no, Paul was actually going to give me a whole bunch of
invites. But yeah, okay. We're all growing. So and it's also
the holidays. So we'll figure that I know, I know. They're
working on it. But you know, there's a lot of stuff they got
it was small, everyone's small here.
So are we gonna I think we talked we talked about switching
PC PCs. paquets in 2.0. showed to be on cast upon.
Yeah, so this is and since we're doing a board meeting here,
okay. So I've looked at cast the pod and and I saw the setup. I'm
like, in my eyes when all I know I can do this. But I have to be
extremely careful. Because we went through the past three
months, at least two of those, I have messed up every single RSS
feed, I have caused stress on people. I've sure we've lost
subscribers, I have skewed the stats. If anyone's looking at
overall statistics, I mean, I'm sure I've triggered at least a
million more downloads that weren't necessary, probably
more. So I need kind of a system that is ready to go that is set
up and that I can count on and that I can't screw up. So if I'm
going to install this myself, I'm a little worried about it.
Now, install it.
I mean, it can't be as bad as freedom controller. Well, I,
I didn't install freedom control either.
Well, that's true.
Yeah, once it's like, okay, now set up your dot environment. I'm
like,
Okay,
if I can't if I can do sudo apt install.
Go to the identity access management panel in AWS like,
nope, nope, not doing it. Yeah.
I got to get my PEM files. That would be really good. And then
can you import all the shit so that it outputs it so I don't
have to? I mean, I just
I don't even know. I had no idea.
Yeah, well, because I would love to use it because then I can be
a shining example. I also need to get the value block in there
because that's another thing people like I saw Brian of
London going I don't get it. How does this work and and this is
this will this will lead us to the next to another topic, but I
wanted to add that I was excited. About the IP Fs
conversation coming back. Yeah. And and specifically IP ns. And
I was thinking, is it time is that for me, it seems like Casta
pod could get nothing. Now you can configure it to anything
maybe s3 or whatever, you know, just whatever, bucket like
system, but is it time to give ipfs a shot for at least the
feed and have that, you know, in a quasi immutable place?
I'm,
while I'm thinking about this play, play I so get the tags or
whatever it
is to get our tags in maybe?
I like?
Yeah, the only thing that bothers me about IP ns is still
those long strings of company cook.
So let's just for those who don't know, we're talking about
ipfs, the interplanetary filing system, which is a peer to peer
file hosting network. And David, I've experimented with it a lot.
And it works. The IP ns is the naming system. And I'm not
familiar with that. But I, I'm presuming that you can map a
domain name to something, or you can just map an existing URL to
something.
It's like it if I understand it correctly, and the person who
will have to correct us on this is clay, Clay Ferguson. In in
the mess, Don, is it? if I understand it correctly, IP ns
IP ns just gives you a hash, but it's permanent. Oh, a lot of
garbage.
But what's what's the downside of a long hash? What's the
problem? Well, it's
just not. It's just not as it's kind of like pushing Bitcoin
lightning addresses around you. It's such a big string of
garbage. It's really hard to like, you're never sure if you
got it, right. Like you can't copy and paste it and think,
okay, you can't spot check it. Because it's just a bunch of
garbage. And so you're never real sure. It's like, Oh, did I
copy and paste? I've copied and pasted two or three of these. Is
this the right like, and then you to completely lose track of
whether or not it's I don't know, it's a little bit of a
brain freeze that they there's another thing called DNS link
MX. It's also being used in ipfs. I think that is more of a
traditional DNS, like, linkage over to IP over to ipfs. Mm hmm.
So I mean, that might be usable, but I don't know. I just saw
that like a couple days ago. But I think it's more of a link an
actual link to the DNS system. Okay. And that seems a little
weird. I can
see how that how that develops that. I mean, it just seems like
an elegant solution. But I don't know if it works well enough.
And you're you're introducing things I wasn't aware of that
makes it complicated, which is not necessarily a good thing.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's do I think we should play with it.
Because of the way we did it unfreedom controller was we just
had the ipfs daemon installed. And then the freedom controller
scripting would interact with the daemon. Like just sending it
commands and that kind of thing, which is not that much different
than a way a lot of people interact with lnd through a live
room, so it's fine, it's a fine way to do it. And if cast upon
if I understand correctly, is just, you just install it on a,
you know, on a Linux box. So you should have
just an RSS feed, good to go.
So we may be able to link these like some post linkage there
where we're, we're, we're just interacting with lnd on a cron
job. I mean, excuse me with the ipfs on a cron job or something
like that, and making those associations after the fact. I
don't know we can play with that. I'll get past the pod
install, because I do. It's so hard bouncing back and forth
between these all these different code repositories. I'm
doing the namespace. Yeah, no index, and we podcaster wallet,
a freedom control. It's like, I can't keep up in order to like,
because once we finalize a namespace thing, then I got to
put it into podcast, you know, I got to put it in the podcast
index and then also finalize it and you know, make sure that
API, namespace documentation works. And then also bacon in a
frame controller. And then, right none of time. No,
I understand. So the shoemakers, kids are barefoot Yeah,
yeah. Okay. I mean, if cast the cast upon it management's moving
so fast, it may just be better just to point and say, Okay,
well, we'll just do it that way.
Well, if, if you can install it, I'll do all the configuration, I
can figure all that out. But if you can install it, okay. And
then we'll go there, and then we'll go over it together, make
sure that I'm not going to make some catastrophic mistake, we'll
do some test output, see what comes out? Because it's, you
know, seriously the clips clip. The, it's called clips is called
sound soundbite sound bites? I mean, that's, that's the feature
clips. I can use the heck out of that. Yeah. I mean, really, this
is very exciting. And then,
yeah, you can put a button you can put a bunch of them in
perhaps. So there's no limit.
Yeah. Which brings me to the next thing. With the now we have
a number of hosting companies who are, you know, what, we have
buzzsprout. up to speed. We have a couple others. Of course,
fireside.fm has a lot of the tags implemented with the new
generation of podcast apps, who I think pretty much all are
getting there. lookups from the from the index API. Does it make
sense to just like podcast or wallet.com to allow people who,
whose hosting company hasn't provided those tags yet to at
least manage some of those in the database? Like they're
putting their lightning node in for the lightning payments? So,
so
that sounds so painful.
Yeah, I know. I know.
I mean, this is like being Feedburner. But more or less.
Okay. But But ultimately, the podcast apps, are they getting
all of that metadata from the RSS feed? Are they looking it up
in the index?
I think it's a mix of both. Like, I mean,
ultimately, you have to have the RSS infrastructure in place.
That's our fallback that could never go away.
Right. Yeah, I think like, pod station, pod friend. Uh, I can't
remember which ones. Some of them do. They just, they look
for an update, and then they'll, they'll read the feed directly.
And then other ones are, like other ones, like Sphinx, are
pulling all the metadata from us, just because this means
they're not a podcast. That's not there. They don't want to
get involved in all that. That's right.
And that's my point. Why should they? Hmm.
Yeah. I think that. I think that when you do things, when you're
doing things like reading the feed, you're using this, I love
this. Okay. So I love that how some apps are not going all in
with the index. They're using the index just for the pieces
they need. And that way, and I'm a big, I'm a big believer in
doing that. Because if I ran an app, if I ran a podcast app,
yeah, you don't want to bore
Yeah, yeah, you you want to have enough of your own
infrastructure where you can maintain some control, right.
And Ridha and not have to depend Oh, god pockets index website
went down. So now it's good.
Oh, yeah. No, we don't want that at all. No. Okay. All right.
Good point. And that
will happen, it will happen.
That just goes back to my impatience. You know, I just, I
just, I know that it's chicken in the egg, you got the content,
and the content drives the adoption. And so I can only hear
so much I can only do so much
this new year has made you is made you forward looking even
more so than normal. It's energized that aspect. I'm super
energized.
And I want to talk about the podcasting 2.0 value for value
pledge model streaming, streaming money, I just want to
give everybody an update on where we're at and what we're
thinking about. Because you and I have been doing a lot of work
behind the scenes, we didn't want to muddy too much stuff up
and we're trying to figure stuff out. But now we've had Sphinx
chat working for a couple months now.
And remember when it first launched, but it's been going
for a while.
So here's so and it works. This is what we know it works. The
system works. A lot of polishes needed, certainly on the process
of of managing you're getting you're getting everything set up
in your feed at value blocks. And of course we do have
podcaster wallet.com which allows you to to put your your
node information into the index directly which is a beautiful
It's a great hack and and Goddess goddess moving. The
issue at hand is a Sphinx is not a traditional podcast app by any
stretch of the imagination. It has a lot of stuff in there that
I think is great for the future podcast app, but it's it's
backwards. Here's a great place for your tribe. It's literally
called the tribe. You've got all your buddies, people are
listening. And while you're while you're listening To the
podcast, you're streaming sets. Fantastic. It doesn't scale as a
typical podcast app. Because in order to do what Sphinx does,
which is sending messages back and forth, and also payments
between people back and forth, you need to have what is known
as a full node that does the key sin protocol of lightning. So
there's an actual cost associated with setting up a
Sphinx node. You know, just getting an account just to be
able to play along. And I think that's a limiting factor. Right
now, for two reasons. One, Sphinx has to have the
infrastructure to spin those up quickly, which has been a bit of
a bottleneck. But also you can't be given stuff away. You know,
people have to pay for something somewhere. And since they're
going to be putting money into stream to stream money to their,
you know, to pledge money to their podcasts or listening to,
there's a lot of stuff going on. That is not sad of this very
much a bitcoiners type experience at the moment.
Yeah, I mean, I can say that wholeheartedly, but based on
trying to get Spencer set up. Yeah. Over the last cup, what
did you run into? What were the problems you ran into?
Well, he said, he said, Well, I mean, I want to go all in on
this. I believe in the future, you know, lightning.
What? apathy Piper No,
none of this a pull, I think is a crossover from no agenda is,
he's a podcast. He's do he wants to be a podcast.
Okay. Got it. Got it. Yeah. And he's got a podcast with about 50
episodes, 50 something episodes in it in, he's like, well, I
want to put it on, I want to put the podcast on state owned
things so that I can earn earn money. And then also I want to
listen there. So I can He's like, I just want to be involved
in this system. I want to be in the mix. Mm hmm. And because I
believe in it, and so he said, Well, you know, I want to, he
said, I have a BTC pay server. And can I use lightning through
it? And I was like, yeah, yeah. But it is, it really is a pain
to interact with lightning, because you mean, you start
having to mess with tons of config files and all that kind
of jazz. And so I was like, you know, really, you probably want
to go get an non dollar month lightning light node from
voltage, right. And so he did that. He got the voltage node,
didn't know, he does not know very much about lightning in
general. So I was kind of coaching along the way. And then
got him in, get him into things which, you know, had, as
mentioned, when Paul had to help me with the are we
getting to node you
can get the notes to get him into steaks. Yeah, had to get it
get them over to podcaster wallet, but that no, it was a
very, it was a very involved, it was a very involved process to
take somebody from sort of zero to 100. Like, it was very diff,
it was a challenge, right. And, and it was, it was such a
challenge that I realized, I can't even write this up in a
document. Okay.
Well,
back to the pod, the listener side. So, in order to send
streaming money, you have to have at least an outbound
sending node that you can use. The good news is that there's a
lot of different ways this can be done. And the reason why you
need that is if you This is real time, money. So when you send
it, the other end has to be online, or the payment just
fails. It just doesn't happen just goes nowhere. And it's
done. So if you're receiving SATs, you need to have a full
node. But just as a podcast app that has that built in, that can
be something as simple as like, well, the I think you found that
initially the breeze wallet, it has key send outbound. And I've
been talking to Roy over there at breeze for about a month now.
And I expect them to come out now. You know, they're also
everyone's struggling, everyone's doing what they can
but they definitely have it on their roadmap to come out with a
podcast app. Not not a wallet, but a product, a podcast app
that has a wallet in it to really deliver deliver a podcast
experience with the the streaming SATs built in. So I
don't know what issues they're going to come up against. I
haven't seen a demo. There's a back end to this that has to be
run. For every half node they spin up it has to have a router
it has to have channel so they they say that they are the
inventors of the lightning service provider and I take them
at their word for that. And let's see if they can figure
this out and get that working. While this is going on, you and
I were talking and we had a couple of different ideas and
then I actually got a note from From the the developer at
strike, jack Mahler's, who was a famous name in the Bitcoin
lightning crowd. And he has, and once I've, since we kind of got
in conversation with him, I understand what he's done. He's
built Venmo for lightning Venmo for Bitcoin. And in fact, it
even uses the same Venmo archit architecture to connect up to
your bank account. plaid and all that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. plaid
right in the middle. Which I'm not against. I don't use it, but
I'm not against it.
I do the debit card thing. Yeah.
Well, yeah, exactly. So here's, here's the idea that came out of
these conversations. And we hope to pick that up with with jack
in the next week or so. The idea we had there was to create a
value for value API, so that we could immediately enable any
podcast app who can talk to this API with the ability to do the
lightning payments. And the way that would work is strike would
function both as the podcast listeners wallet. And it could
also function as the receiving side, obviously. So if you're
listening, so my idea the way it came together, and which I think
is possible, which I think mallards gets, and I know you
get it, is you have it. So let's just take pod friend, I'm gonna
take that as an example. Because I use it. And you want to
connect the pod friend podcasting app, as it is today,
to be able to send lightning payments in real time when
you're listening. And he would literally get the stripe wallet,
scan a QR code, and you're done. And then your payments would
come the way they do it. You can go under a penny since it's
still fiat money they're dealing with but for every minute you
listen, that amount will get deducted from your account. Yes,
and it's a perfect system, it can totally work.
And that developer, in this case, Martin or
jack ma or catcher?
No. Yeah. Yeah, the add the podcast app to them? Yeah, they,
they don't have to bake in any lightning wallet functionality
at all. It's basically they're just, they're just saying, okay,
here's, they make a linkage and initial linkage between the
strike wallet and the app. And then that part is finished. And
then every time that that person listens to the podcast that that
did that every time that listener listens to a podcast,
in which they have said, I want to donate this much money a
minute that that will trigger. And there will be an API call,
he could batch them together and later and say, well, there's
there's 50 of these, you know, in the past mean an hour, or
whatever, and you just say, he bet batch them together, make
that API call every going to do it with with the strike API. And
that just getting the transfer happens at that point. So you
don't have to, there's really no lightning, knowledge to ask to
happen. And I think this is critical, because one of the
things that we had we ran into one of the things we ran into
was spent with Spencer helping him set that up was, you know,
getting the lightning nodes and up and running and all that
stuff. That's just part of the game. Yeah, the next part is you
got to make he got to have a balance. He got to make a
deposit in order to be able to open channels, yes, to do an
initial Bitcoin funding of your node, and then you and then you
have to wait for the channels to open. Right? Just because
there's open channels doesn't mean that there's an open route.
Correct? Correct. So well. But the routing is interesting. I'd
like to know what problems you ran into there. But that's, if
you're working with the vendors. I think that's quite solvable.
So already in my mind, what we have we have what we have
working 100% right now, if you can, if you have a podcast app
that can stream SATs with keys, and you can participate in the
game, the podcaster side was put that over here for a second
because you need a receiving node. Yeah. So really the in the
node business at the moment, it's a very small industry. I
mean, mind you, key sand only got put into the lightning
stack, what, six months ago?
Yes, the 20 is Yeah, was it 20 even 2019? Or was it 20?
Yeah, I think it was it might have been 2020. So we're on the,
on the knife's edge here. So things are just kind of spinning
up, but we have a use case. And node universe is well Sphinx
nodes. We've got those. I think there's an outfit called noddle
or nodal in, in Swift. And then you have strike, which will do
the keys end. At least that's I don't know if they would
currently but they can. And, to me, this kind of led to a very
logical next person to approach. And that's gray and from
voltage, because voltage lets you spin up a node as you went
through. And it's reasonably inexpensive. Although that's the
main thing I want to get to. What I've seen him do it. So he
really spins up a node on voltage, which is completely
void of any interface, anything, you have the keys you can't
have, there's no way for him to even look at anything, do
anything that would be helpful. But there's a lot of interfaces,
interfaces to different stats, programs, different wallets,
different ways to basically, at the end, communicate with lnd is
to tell to tell this one piece of software what to do. So and
we're talking with him later today, I'm just going to tell
you right now, because we'll probably hear this after we
speak to him. But this would be the same for anybody who has
this type of product. This and I don't know that maybe many more?
I don't know, I haven't run across them. My ask would be the
following. Can we implement the same process with the value for
value API, where you say, Okay, I want to pledge enable this
podcast app. And if you're new, it's out now? Do you already
have a podcast app that you'd like, you're excited about it?
You don't need to change anything. I like this part. It's
like, okay, I like I don't want to get another podcast app. I
like the one I'm using right now. There's this you know, I,
it's almost like saying, We're Spotify, we've got Joe Rogan
Come over here. Turns out, it's really hard to get people off of
their podcast that they love them. It is it is religion to
many people. So we're gonna lightning Ify your your app. And
here's how it works. You buy $10 worth of Bitcoin lightning
Bitcoin from voltage. And here's how it works. Okay, I want to do
this view, click in your existing podcast app, I want to
participate, I want to send streaming money, you click it,
that's going to talk to the the node API, the voltage API, like,
okay, new node needed. And and this is the this is really we
have to talk about is, you know, what is the base cost? What is
the absolute minimum that we can charge or that we have to charge
or that is needed to run a very small basic node that is only
going to send about 20 bucks a month in in lightning payments
to different podcasts. So, in an ideal world, it's, you're good
to go, Okay, you ready, you want to want to enable your podcast
app, okay, let's get your credit card or you know, whatever
payment method, and he put that in, and then within 45 seconds
says, Okay being and the voltage notice is set up a bit is
authenticated with your app with the app that you're using, it
has loaded you up from the get go with $10, maybe there's
packages, $5 $10 $20 2550, whatever, which you can top up
in a number of ways. But you're good to go from the minute that
happens. So the node is created with $10 worth of satoshis on it
from the get go. I like it. I think this can work. But the
question is, what is the proposition? Do we give the do
we do we build into it? Okay, you're. So now we have two
players in the on the app side, we have the podcast player that
you're using. And then we have the wish you're already using.
And they need to get a piece because that's the promise we've
made. And then you have the voltage or the node, which has
to be paid for. And I presume that this is very, very small in
cost and resources. But it either has to be paid a piece up
front, so you pay $10 and you get $9 worth of value
constrained and and the node has to take a percent. It can't be
free.
Right? Can't be free. And it also can't be so expensive that
did if it lies dormant for a while that it's just going to
become become an anchor.
Right, which so the couple things I like is you can do your
voltage node by month if you don't pay, it disappears, it's
gone. Over and out you if you want a new one, you start over
again. Part two is we could make this a beautiful experience. So
someone who you said I want you to pay money for these podcasts.
I'm asking you, here's the way you do it. They've already
decided they're going to do it. So then it's the offer, you
know, so they know that money's coming out of their pocket. And
so if the author is put 10 bucks in right now, the first month,
it's $10, you get to spend all $10. We're taking one percentage
point off of every, every payment you make. And I think
there's a lot of ways that fees can be built on the back end of
a node business. But also, I don't know if Graham or anyone
is doing Fiat conversions, to Bitcoin to lightning, there's
all kinds of fees there. There's ways to make money, but the
experience has to be, you want to do it good. It's going to
cost you money. And here you go. But everything else should be
transparent. And I think it's possible.
Yeah, that the transparency, really, the transparency is the
key. Because if you're going to everybody, everybody needs in
the chain needs to make these two needs to get peace. And if
you if your tray, as long as you're transparent about what
that piece is, I mean, that's fine. I mean, I think it's much
more transparent than it is. If you look at something like a, I
don't know, Patreon fee or some subs, or something like that,
you know, and it's just like, he says, fee. You know, it's,
here's what I'm concerned about? Well, I am concerned and not a
concern. I really like the idea of enabling existing apps. I
think I think that's a huge, a huge step forward. Just just for
the reason that it's very difficult to get people to try
something to get someone to try a new app and put money into
this new app. Because that's how they'll see it, they won't see
the lightning node. You know, they'll see a wallet indicator
in their podcast app. I see no reason for this. And you can't
there's nothing voltage is nowhere to go. So so the app
then becomes your interface to the wallet.
Well, and then there's also this aspect that wallet, lightning
wallet developers are not going to necessarily be good podcast
app developers. Because podcast app developers are focused on a
good podcasting experience. Yep. And and lightning node.
Lightning app developers are concentrating on a good
Lightning Experience. Yeah, those two things really don't
mesh very well. Yeah. And so I mean, it's really big. From a
podcasting perspective, from having a good podcasting app.
You really want the podcast app developers to be the ones
designing the app. And then the lightning stuff really shouldn't
be secondary.
I agree. And I think once and this is where I think we pay
play an important role. Because we are in the we are directing
traffic, we are a part of the system. And I think it has to
work that way with with an API. But the good news is no one
touches the money, the money goes straight from the listener
into the designated wallets of the recipients it no one has to
hold on to money or keys or anything like that. But what
excites me is now all of a sudden, if we can get our API
in. Now we can add stuff like a boost button, which is synced to
the timeline, you know, now you're giving now you're giving
our app developers all kinds of fun stuff to work with. And I
think community chapters will also come out of it. Because now
you have, you know, I can go back to, you know, six weeks
ago. And I can pull out every single connection that that the
podcast index got from the Sphinx infrastructure. I mean,
it's a beautiful database, it's there to pull, just data sitting
there, to pull out and to do timeline stuff, and all kinds of
fun things with and community chapters. I mean, there's so
many different things that I think can be solved with this.
I would love to be able to have like a community chapter system,
where when it pops up in the app, you can boost the guy that
made the chapter image or like, you go Yeah, visual chapter.
Yes, yes,
yes, yes. Yes.
I mean, it's just not just Dred Scott. But like you could you
know, if it's community chapters, if this other guy got
in the mix, and put a put a chapter marker here with some
cool art in it or something like that, yeah, in drips, God
approves it, you know, then they both get a ticket book, get a
paying on that ticket pace.
Now enter the next piece of business, which I think voltage
could also provide or another node node provider, and that's
the podcaster side because now you need some stuff on the back
end. So I'm receiving stuff. This is where I'd love for, you
know, in an accounting system, a rewards based system. You can
also you know, this is where a potential chat server would
live, it can all be on the same podcaster receiving system.
Okay, now, here's the code already exists. You know, this
is the my my raspy Blitz, which is a Raspberry Pi where I'm
running a full node here in the in the studio. I can already set
up the Sphinx chat and interact from my node to the Sphinx nodes
in the same chat environment.
Well, that brings up something that did I know that I saw the
other day in the news. I mean, there's a lot of proposed
regulations, it was in the nation using a lot of Bitcoin
regulation. Do you know anything about that? And how? Because I
know there's a there's a lot of trepidation within the Bitcoin
world about some of these new regulations. And the tracking is
supposed to be happening even where it's something like I
forget the limits, but they still are fairly aggressive. I
mean, maybe Do you know anything about that?
Well, I know a little bit about both sides and both sides is one
is, for obvious reasons. The entire financial world does not
like what's happening. Every country wants their own central
bank digital currency, it's a whole nother conversation as to
why the protectionism of the US dollar is always done with a
huge military force. So if you think that you can go against
the US dollar, go look at the Middle East, and, and tell me
what your future looks like that I think they're attacking it.
And first of all, there's no attacking it, I can, we can be
shuffling pieces of paper with the with transaction IDs, with
the sneakernet, and it would still work. So there's no way to
really stop it, what can be stopped is taxation. So the
minute you take the money out of the Bitcoin system, which is
what they will be doing, they will be, and they have been,
they'll be looking at when you acquired it, and you'll have to
have good records, luckily, that's available that's built
into the system. And, and he will have to declare capital
gains on any increase that came along the way, which is fair, or
reasonably fair within the confines of the system that we
live in. So that's one mechanism of control. And the obvious
mission is to have people all using Bitcoin internally, and
not, you know, making some money spending it in in fiat currency.
But keeping that within the within the ecosystem, and we're
not there yet, people right now they're in the stack and SATs
business, which is good, because they're saving, and they're
making money, but there's got to be a way for it to be spent. So
the cryptography is what they're trying to do by saying, You
can't have a cryptographic wallet or system on your device.
And I think that's what they're trying to do that. And, and
personally, I
think the whole conversation about we can't check on a
terrorist iPhone, we need to have the private keys. I don't
think it's about terrorism at all. I think it's it's about
money. And it's about Bitcoin and total control.
Yeah, that's, I think you're right, of course, but then I
just wanted to bring it up, because there's a fee, people
need to know when they get in to this to the Bitcoin ecosystem,
then now you do have, it's not like it's just free of any
regulation or anything like that. I mean, you when you're in
big, just cut just like when you if you make if you're making
money off advertising in your podcast, right now, you have to
pay taxes on the income. Yeah, and the same with the same with
Bitcoin, when you've got, it's still money. And it's still
you've made a gain. So you still have to, you know, there's,
there's a lot of people that there's a lot of people out
there that misunderstand that Bitcoin is, is a completely
unregulated financial instrument. And it's not. So you
just need you need to make sure that when you get in there,
like, I guess what brought me and brought it up, because you
were talking about the reporting, you know, that kind
of thing. If you're a podcaster and you're, you're making money
in Bitcoin, if your local regulations say that you're, you
know, that that's a, an equity or taxed in this way. You got to
keep up with it.
Right. Which is and and that's relatively easy. I mean, the
tools are there to track it and the actual transactions
are there forever. It's actually easier than today. This is much
easier than PayPal. I'll tell you that much. Straight up.
Yeah. So So that's, that's my mission I for myself, and of
course it whichever way and we're going to talk to Dan
Benjamin in a moment about you know, that The current state of
the industry with with statistics and, and how that's
working or not working, and he has some interesting ideas about
moving that forward. In my mind, all the things we've come up
against in the past three months can be solved by by the
lightning network, and by the really by the ledger. So if we
can make it stick, we can make it work. And we can make it easy
for the podcast app developers to bake right in, man that that
would be beautiful.
Did we ever find out whether or not you can put the timestamp
into a lightning transaction? Well, it's
timestamp by default.
But I'm talking about like, if you let's just say that a
podcast app didn't didn't have very good bandwidth at the
moment, you're listening, and they needed to batch those
transactions for later when you come back online. Can you
timestamp metadata into those transactions so that it still
tracks? Like where where it should have been looking for
stats something for stats purpose? I don't know ever got
an answer to that.
So like an offline mode, you
mean? Yeah. So like, if I'm, if I'm on a plane, and I'm
listening to a podcast, and it's caching, it's building up these,
like, 10 sets per minute on this podcast, I'm listening to them
on a land and reattached to LTE. It now sends all those things as
batch. Yeah, one trend, you know, could Is there a way to
timestamp those and with metadata in some way to say,
Okay, here's these transactions
delays are delayed send to delayed send, I think will be
possible. Something like that. Yeah. By the time we fix that 5g
will be so prevalent, you'll be fried from the radiation on the
plane anyway. You won't need to fix it. You'll be 5g everywhere.
You just funnel your stats into your health care costs for food
and your brain can
tell you I've gone pretty deep on the on the whole Bitcoin
maximalist thing, and I really see the why wouldn't you just be
a sovereign individual with a node ID? And because you know,
this splits thing that we've come up with, which is like a
royalty payment, why wouldn't it all be so direct, we don't need
I mean, you need some government, but I can pay
directly in real time for the services I want. I can be a
citizen of a of a country, just bring my Bitcoin or just, you
know, open, reopen my wallet on the other side of the world. I
mean, it really changes things quite drastically.
Yeah, I don't know if anybody's ever bought and sold, like
precious metal coins, like gold coins. Like anything. Sure. And,
you know, you, if you, if you go if you get into that world, it
really is sort of an eye opening experience, because you go, you
go into your local coin shop. And, and so let's just say, you
know, you bought the 20 Silver Eagles, and you go in there and
you say, Oh, I want to sell these 20 Silver Eagles. So I
will have, you know, offer you the offer you this much less.
Yeah, well, you're like, Okay, sure, yeah, I'll take that. And
so they, they A lot of times, the guy just reaches his pocket
and just write down off $100 bills in his hands. And you
think it's like, oh, there's no receipt. It's like, No, no, it's
just money.
Yeah, just your exchange money. It's a beautiful thing.
Yeah, it's crazy. It's years ago, I sold something. I was
like, Oh, wait, what? It was such a shocking experience that
Yeah. But that is kind of that way in the in the Bitcoin world.
It's like, Well, okay, these transactions just happen. And
they're done.
It's it doesn't doesn't there's no step three.
Yeah, exactly.
Anyway, so I'm very excited about this. I said, we're gonna
be talking to Graham from voltage later today. And, and
run this by him. But I did want to get it out there because
this, this should be an industry. And once you've got
people comfortable with the idea of flashing an app they already
use and and I just have this vision of a QR code. You know,
it's like you, you've got the app on your phone, and you go to
a website, scan the QR code, you're done. You know, unless of
course you have to, you're in startup mode and you got to put
your put your credit card in to get it up and running. But
otherwise, that should be completely transportable.
Yeah, yet this this fix app is such a new, it's almost it's
such a radical rethink of, of any thing that resembles a
podcast app, but it's so forward looking. Did it it's almost just
it's almost too much. I mean, like you get in there you're
like when you trying to get somebody into the ecosystem.
Eventually they get it like they get it on like day tours, but
it's the the paradigm is reversed. That's because they
have a different paradigm. Their paradigm is we chat. This is how
you talk to your friends. This is how this is all encompassing
all in one Super Chat. And they've added podcasting to it.
What the way it's just interface Really? What would be nice if
it's podcast app, and then oh, my goodness, look at all this
stuff. I can chat, I can add chapters, I can do all these
other things. And and then even the concept of a tribe makes
super sense. You know?
Did you see the discussions on the index the other day about or
on the social mastodon about doing that open discussion
system type deal? Because yes, that would be great. Yes, if you
have an app, like, you know, hyper catcher that's sitting,
this sitting there, allowing you to chat in those chats are
showing up in in sinks, like, right, but there'll be so
killer,
it's totally doable, as long as everybody has a node. And if you
have the node for paying, then you also have the node for doing
that kind of stuff. And the back end code is already there. It's
done. You can install it right away.
That the channels, the channels get frustrating that, you know,
because I tried to send Spence Spencer, I tried to send him
some test SATs just after we got him set up and everything. And I
could send it from one look from one node, I could stand fine.
And from another node, it just said, No, no route.
Yeah, you will, you're already three levels deeper than I want
anyone to ever go. Yeah, I mean, see that that's, and that's what
a lightning service provider like a breeze, like strike, like
a voltage. And also, like Sphinx. That's their job. They
have to make sure that your that that there's routing on the back
end, they have to I mean, any any lightning wallet you get
from an app store, they're allocating funds into a channel
for your app.
I wonder how strike one strike does it? I mean, surely
everybody that opens a strike wallet doesn't also have a note
the one to one note, customer ratio?
strike? Yeah, no, no, they're I think they're basically one big
supernode.
Yeah, yeah. So that that seems easier to manage.
Yes. But it's a central point of failure. There's a lot of
downside. You can easily be de platformed in that in that
scenario. There's a lot of things that I can see being
problem, but you know, we haven't really spoken to jack in
detail about it. So I don't know
that that's one good thing that that like sir Spencer, he was
like, I want to be in this game. I want to be I want I want to be
an ecosystem. But I want to do it the right way from the
beginning.
Right. Right. Right. Well, and we're discovering that so I
appreciate his boldness to jump in, and, and not worry about
getting scraped. And
that's what he said. He told me, he's like, I had not real good
at this kind of stuff. I'm not, I'm not.
Yeah, that's good. You're gonna
He's like, you had to hold my hand through the whole thing as
well.
So he does, so he has a node up and running right now. That's
all working.
Yes. And he's got to travel and things with his podcast in it.
And
go like, What? What podcast is it?
Oh, a bowl after bowl I think is what is called.
Okay. Oh,
God. Oh, yeah.
I'll have to look that up on the tribes. It's another one of
those things. You got to go to tribes in the web browser first.
Yeah. You know, he was having trouble joining podcasting. 2.0
tribe.
There's there's issues. I mean, there's there's also just issues
with you know, it's it's big infrastructure. waymon trot
tribes dot Sphinx chat is not Yeah, I'm not getting anything
for it was
there? It was down this morning.
Oh, okay. So they're working on it. Got it.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, yeah. Anyway, so.
So I'm just gonna be clear with you, Dave, my, and I know, you
know it, but my vision is if we can get the lightning in. So
many other things fall into place. Yeah. And it's the
future. It's where it's where it's where it's like everyone
said, Oh, that's web 3.0. Well, yeah, let's build it. Everyone's
talking. Yeah, everyone's talking.
Well, with the web, the lightning is the future and the
things that are holding, the things that make it difficult
are the same things that make anything that the beginning
difficult. It's, there's all of the all of the all beginning
technologies are like this. Yeah. And so you have to step
over the box, and you have to do all these kinds of things to get
it to work because the lightning network itself is so new. Yeah,
that you know, but it's got all the pieces so I mean, we can
marry them together. It's just, it'll be a bumpy ride for a
little while.
So So once we figured out If we can get a partner on the other
side to talk to the API, how long What do you think it'll
take to get to get the the payment, the value for value API
up and running?
I don't think that will take very long. All the pieces are
there.
Good answer, Dave Jones?
Yeah. No, and don't answer
no more questions. Period. You're hilarious. No, it's it. I
mean, famous last words. And I really don't think it would take
that long. Because once you have, we're indexing the value
block. And so for for apps that just need if we're interfacing
with lightning service providers, we would just be able
to give them that. I mean, yeah, it's just there. Yeah. And so
they and they, and we were doing all this stuff already, like
making sure that the value block is coming from an HTTPS feed,
make sure the district gets valid, all that kind of jazz. So
I think I mean, I don't see how there would be it would take
very long on our side. Yeah. All right. Famous last word.
Well, next week, we'll have an update, we'll let everybody
know, after we've spoken, and maybe someone out there has an
idea. Or maybe they're like, hey, I've got this stuff in my
head, I think I can do this. Or here's another way of looking at
offsetting the cost or here's how I can get the cost lower. I
don't know. But it has to scale. And I'd rather push people
towards a invisible full node that they don't really have to
know about. Because once they have that, then the whole world,
the whole world will open to them.
Well, that really is the beauty of things. Things to you are
your hand. Do you have a nose? Yeah, and you don't
know it? Really? That's I agree. It's beautiful.
Yeah, they really have a beautiful product. It's brain
twister on the pot for a podcaster to get into. But it is
a beautiful product. Do we want to thank some donors?
Yes. And then we got to get Dan on because it's gonna be an
eight hour episode.
We're kicking off
the new year just right, everybody. Yes, this is a value
for value, the whole everything we're talking about. And I'm
going to do a lot more work myself. And this year on
reminding people re explaining maybe refining the value for
value store a story, the value for value model the successes of
it. And this is a perfect example. We started this on our
own dime. And but you know, just putting the work into it, and
have asked anyone who likes what we're doing. derive value from
it. You might be an app developer, you might be a
hosting company might be a podcast listener, you might be a
podcast, you might be someone who just likes moving the world
forward. whatever value you get from it, turn that into a
number, go to podcast. index.org scroll down at the bottom,
there's a big red Donate button you can also donate with with
lightning, Bitcoin, lightning. It keeps everything running. It
keeps all the machines whirring. It keeps us moving forward. And
well, one day, we hope to have everybody participating in a
nice value flow. And we love to thank our contributors who gave
us their time, their talent and their treasure today.
And we got a good group. It's starting off with Victor Victor
Gonzalez Faria and know that I tried to channel my inner Alex
Trebek there. He would drop it. It's it's a rock wall.
Or like hilarya Baldwin.
What do you say how you called to come up to come?
Got from Boston, but I can't say cucumber.
Okay. Is Victor gave us $100
Wow. Thanks, Victor.
short note he just says Great job guys. Keep it up.
No, thank you. We will we will.
This is a long note from let me scan to the end and make sure
it's not supposed to be anonymous. Surely. No, it is
not. From Lauren ball. I don't know if Lauren is a boy or a
girl. We will find out. Lauren ball gave us $24.20 and it says
Happy New Year stats and sets. This donation is the first of
what will become a recurring reoccurring monthly. Adam if you
could please queue up the RTD to karma jingle which I would like
to have as a de fragmenting this I have been wanting to donate
for several months. In the fragmenting I like that. Is that
look at D douchey.
I guess yeah, it makes sense. defrag that person? Yeah, he's
different. All right, here we go.
You've got
karma.
You've been a fragment.
You've been defragmented
since I have been wanting to donate for several months and
finally freed up some extra cash to support a movement I fully
agree with.
Oh good
if there if there is an extra machine available for my monthly
donations to cover to cover and this is not bad juju in the tech
community. May I have a machine named ID? 10? t? No. No, you
can. That is not acceptable. What
is I'm not familiar with ICD 10 T. That's an ID 10 t error.
If you write it out, Id one zero T. Yes, late. It's leet. Speak
for idiot.
I got it. Yeah, that's no sysadmin
jokes. Yeah. That's like, like we used to talk to our clients.
And we talked about the locally managed network operating
protocol.
lmnop Yes, yes. Nothing.
They go Oh, yeah, yeah, it does that come with your advanced
statistics analysis package. ASAP.
Okay, tell me real quick as I interrupt this note, what was
data barn?
Oh, data barn mentioned that the other day? Yeah. I with a bunch
of guys, when we had a whole bunch of.com money. We put
together a data, a data colo facility in Amsterdam on the
Amsterdam internet exchange. This was in 2000. We had
everything the generators, the unit, the whole thing all set
up, and was very capital intensive. And for obvious
reasons, but that wasn't the problem. The problem is I had a
50% partnership. And my part we also had a helicopter,
fractional ownership company, and and the data barn. And he
not only went broke, he left the country turns out and I'd known
him for 10 years. He had a fake identity. He was wanted by the
Scotland Yard for Grand Theft Auto and trafficking MDMA. Oh,
yeah. Oh, this is really this was I had a full on like, I had
to go away for a week and just read you just collect my
thoughts, the betrayal of someone you really know. Yeah.
And this was all in Amsterdam, was I mean that that, that took
me out. I was just like, what? And yeah, we had another
business called Jambi just anarchy made by you, which was a
very early YouTube. And we had we had taken a different route.
We had clients who were paying broadcast clients. And the
minute this came out in the press, they were like, okay,
we're no longer customers. So I had to unwind everything. It was
very nasty. very nasty. Well, a lot of experience and a lot of
experience in how not to do stuff. That's
my secret identity is much better. You will never find out
about us. Don't worry about
it. Is it Anthony Quinn? No, no, no, no, no, no. Don't even
see. Well, I lost my place in in Laurens. Yeah, I didn't hear
okay. For PE BK AC. I don't know what that means. CAC. Me? I
don't know he'll have to explain that to you. As an avid listener
to podcast this show has helped me really understand that many
gears in the machine and technological challenges it
takes to make podcasting possible. sincere thank you to
all persons responsible for pushing the experience forward.
Spotify has not been on my phone for several months now because
of my poor quality of experience in too many fucking ads. Said
personally I am tired of being sold to. We experienced too many
ads in our daily lives. So I run pod so I run pod verse podcast
addict and podcast guru now. I love what these app developers
are doing to earn their podcasting 2.0 certified bad
yeah, slap it on. Wow, yours.
Shortly I plan on buying some Bitcoin to play in this new
methodology of direct support are all
beautiful.
Admittedly, I do not fully understand all of digital
currency. This show has educated me about it far more than I ever
anticipated. The long note
it's no
fun idea. Imagine a podcast that raises money for charity and
being able as a listener yes to stream money directly to the
charity listening to the podcast.
This is you know what Tina said? I want
to share it again.
Oh yeah. No, she said I want to foundation so when when when
your magic money machine as she calls it, when it when it's
running? Whatever we have coming in to our nodes like no agenda,
etc. Now you and I we get a split off of this show as well.
She wants to take a split of that and go into a wallet for
foundation. She wants to start
it seems was like, yeah, fantastic. Let's do it. I love
it. I love that idea.
Okay, so you know how you go to the grocery store sometimes and
they're like, you get to the register and they say, Oh, do
you want to pitch in and a $1 $3 $5
to support our troops? Cancer breast cancer? Yep, sure. I do
it all the time. I'm always the $5 guy. I always knew
that in Perth, you could you could say, Okay, this, this
week's episode is going to be a 10% split to this charity and
all
you need is a node. Yeah, just give me your note. Hey, charity,
what's your node ID?
Yep, should be on your website should be on your on your
business cards. In is permanent. If somebody listens to that
episode 10 years from now, it will work. Yep.
Yes. So yes, yes, Lauren. You're living the future. He's cracking
the code. Totally.
Several other ideas have come to mind about the implementation of
your current tags and stuff too. I should just join the social
already. Yes, you should. Oh fun side note just last week I was
working I was at work listening to a note into episode look down
at my phone during the cover our segment and was able to actually
see the images of art john and Adam were talking nice
nice effing rad stuff that is being developed. I'm excited
about that. Cool. I'm excited to be ahead of the curve in this
major development that is now in motion. Apologies for the
rambling long note Happy New Year to everyone peace and
prosperity Lauren, PS go podcasting.
You know, I've been using pod friend in the car. And it does
he really does a good job of displaying the show name etc.
But no album art yet. And I am so excited about the day when
I'm playing a show in the car and then the the chapter images
will change on the display. I don't know if it's possible, but
my goodness, wouldn't that be beautiful?
The whole idea that you have a web app that is interfacing to
your car stereo is just blowing my mind
and you know, I've been using graphene Oh s okay kicks ass
when it comes to whether you just regular in the browser or
if I've saved it as a as a web app. It works. You know, it pops
up on the lock screen so you can pause it you know, it's always
playing it doesn't crap out in the background. Phenomenal
difference with iOS.
So the pw a fully baked in there.
Yeah, it's great. Yeah, it really is very cool.
Get a new you have a new automatic payment profile from
Christopher reamer. We've got he's $10 a month and
subscription. Thank you Chris Radek couldn't find in a wait
here. Yeah. didn't have enough, actually. Thank you. Dave loves
listening on the in on the board meetings. You guys make me laugh
and I learned stuff. It's
great. Yay. It's success. Yeah.
What bought Now tell me what company what media company has
board meetings a that you can attend be better enjoyable.
And see that you learn things?
Where does that ever happen?
Yeah. Thank you, Chris. We have a peerage problem, by the way,
because we're out of we're out of servers.
Oh, well. Well, you know, what's next? We have to start naming
lightning nodes.
Oh, yes. You in the US service have sponsored lightning node
304.
The whole node? Well, you can actually name the node IDs. Oh,
that's me. every node can have and it it carries through the
network. So you see curry cash. That's me. And you see podcast
index.
Yeah, that's true. I
think it's m m one.com. Or whatever. Whatever that website
is. You can explore the Explore the network, find all the nodes.
If anybody has an idea for peerage that play it yeah, it
can we say this if if somebody if somebody donates, like, some
obscene level of money like $5,000 I mean, we just announced
spin up a server just to name it for
No, no, no. I'll come over there. I will cook for you and
blow you.
martinis.
That's value for you. My friend
is too much like Hollywood is way too much Hollywood,
and our next supporter day.
Here, Matt, Matthew.
Paragon Paragon. I could not find a note from Matthew but
he'd gave us $10. Thank you. Thank you, Matthew. And then we
had a blow through this one first, even though it's about a
border. This one has been Martin castle. And Martin gave us $5.
Thank you. And the last one was somebody who's anonymous, and
they cleaned out a bunch of gift cards at PayPal and so just they
gave us like the leftovers off of a few different gift cards,
which was ended up being $8.90 Hmm. And I don't know, they it
came through as Jhansi Dvorak was the name and then in the
note though, it just said this is one of four donations
totaling 890 I'm not the real Johnson
surprise Thank you.
Yeah, thank you. That was just that's a good group.
That's the whole group is beautiful group. Yeah, I'm just
I'm just I'm looking at the troll room the no agenda troll
room. And it appears that comic strip blogger is reporting to
everybody all the feed IDs of the pirated Joe Rogan feeds
which apparently there's about 11 of them
Oh, I'm trying to keep them out of the index because I don't
want that I don't hate right I wonder if any of them are in
there. There was one the other day that I pulled out
yes ram sexy dot XYZ Whoa, yeah. That that XYZ top level domains
don't even get through my piehole this like this like
persona non grata if you go to n dot XYZ I'm not dealing with you
know that I need to I need to go check those out and make sure
yeah, don't have any of those and then yeah,
WooCommerce or blogger apparently knows him. But I
don't know if he wants to divulge them so we can
he stays on forum for personal use I guess yeah, now I
can just I just don't want that I mean, come on. Like it Joseph
friends like I'm gonna look like a heel or something. Oh, look at
podcast index there. We're doing so yeah.
Don't want to be known as the as the people that help you pirate.
No, that's not. That's not that's not cool.
Not cool. And we're not the people who are enabling it is
damn a cast. And what's the other one? The Spotify guys
themselves? What's the
via anchor?
They're enabling get themselves fools. We're
fighting the good fight against pirates. And
we are doing we are.
It's the pirates fighting the pirates. Yeah. podcast.
index.org. Thank you to our supporters once again. But
really thank you to everybody. For your time, your talents and
your treasures is all the app developers. This is all the
people on podcasts index dot social people in the GitHub, any
podcast are interested. Thank you. You're all contributing
towards something and we'll get there. This is going to be our
year, I have a very good feeling about it. It really do. And it
particularly because Bitcoin is is back on everybody's radar
just because of its price point. But a great use case, man we can
take off. Yeah, we can. I mean, this is like CNBC would be
reporting on it. And if you can show the house is a simple
process with an existing app. And that's how I would position
it. It's like, Oh, your app. Oh, it's not podcasting. 2.0 Hold
on.
Yeah. Yeah,
you don't have a badge. You don't have bad scouts. And you
just scan this QR code, boom, you could get done. And then you
have all that process in there. I mean, we might as well make
subscribing to shows with QR codes. I mean, I can see a whole
future of style, I can see so much so much.
And it's all open, we'll build everything in the open. It's all
open standard saving, nothing's hidden and nothing siloed. It's
fast. Anybody can recreate it. It's just, it's it's beautiful,
beautiful system, the whole thing.
We get to our guests, anything else that we need to talk about
before we step into the step into the stats, we go from SATs
to stats,
I guess the only thing else I was thinking about is just we
had great that last week's show with James
was great. That was great. fun, wasn't it? Yeah. Like
he had, he was a little concerned that we spent time
talking about the freeze free speech stuff. He was a little
concerned that, you know, that wouldn't play well, because he's
not not an American and that kind of thing. And the speech
laws are different in different countries and stuff. But I was
like, you know, I shot him an email back I was like, This
knows. To me, that was a fantastic topic because we
don't, we don't really get to get and we spend a lot of time
talking about technology techie stuff, and we don't spend enough
time talking about the other side of our mission, which is
the free speech angle, and it is a complex topic. So I I really
enjoyed getting to talk about it. Number one, number one, just
talk about it at all, because we don't spend too much time
talking about it but then number two, enjoyed having him there to
push back from from his side of things, because you you sharpen,
you know, is it the iron sharpens iron type of thing. I
mean, you you really, it helps to have somebody push back on it
so you can refine your own thinking about stuff, and then
everybody else gets To sit back and listen and make up their own
minds, I
thought it was great. James Cridland is very important to
this overall project. Everybody plays an important role. But I
see stuff showing up like CBC, talking about the future of
podcasting were mentioned. That's because of James. People
go into James like, Hey, you know what's happening, give us a
couple quotes. And he's very kind and he, but he also gives
us what he really sees. So I
think that's really important to have some somebody. I think it's
important to have people and that's one thing I've enjoyed
about the mastodon is, you know, everybody speaks their mind.
They're not just tiptoeing around trying not to, they're
trying to walk on eggshells and not offend somebody. They speak
their mind, they tell what they really think, no matter how it
may be perceived. But then the other person says, you know,
well, I just disagree with you, that's that's Bs, or I don't
like that at all. And then it's just, everything's fine.
There's no algo to mess you up. There's no algo to throw anger
back in your face. I
know. If you don't have you don't have weeks long flame
wars. Everybody's just like, Okay, fine. We're moving on.
That's good.
One of the cool things of podcasting 2.0 is that all these
other issues that have kind of been hiding, or maybe not even
hiding, but have been unresolved and kind of stuck in the same
chicken in the egg, you know, in irons for the past 10 years? Oh,
you understand my nautical term, that's the only one I have. In
one of those discussion threads, and I really love that, you
know, we have podcasting index dot social, because, you know,
people just feel free to talk, it just seems to work has been a
discussion about stats. Now, while it doesn't. Statistics,
while that doesn't necessarily pertain to podcasting, 2.0 in
the namespace and the lightning stuff that we're looking at and
implementing, it's something that we might be able to help
solve, or at least facilitate the conversation. Dave, you've
been talking to, I think a number of people about this, and
and it gets into technical details where I understand
what's being said, but the, the nuances are too close for me to
understand necessarily without really focusing on it. And I
know you've had what we've been talking about Dan Benjamin, who
has some ideas on this, on this front, and holy moly. He's with
us here. As if I didn't know Dan Benjamin. Happy New Year to you,
guys. Thanks for having me back.
He already you already gave yourself away laughing in the
low earlier.
Yeah, no. I laid it out perfectly, though. So that was a
perfect execution on day sport. Yes. Because I said I did not. I
did not say, who gave who gave me the idea for the stats thing.
On on the on that episode. So in case it was a dismal failure, I
could just blame somebody else.
I see. I see. That's a good plan. Yeah.
But if it was a raging success, I didn't have to give credit. I
could just keep it. Yeah, I could say, Oh, I was just
kidding. It wasn't. It was me the whole time.
Dave Jones, is is Dilbert come to life, ladies.
office politics. 101, baby. That's right.
Dan has been on the show before. And he is the founder of
fireside FM fi as founder CEO. The man.
Welcome back, Dan.
Thanks for having me back. Now, this is a this is a really cool
topic. And it's something that, you know, Dave, we had talked
about a little bit. And I you had mentioned, you said how I
want to talk about it on the show, but I don't, I won't. I
won't go into too much detail about where it's from. And then
maybe we can come back and talk about us and share. Sure. But I
thought you did a pretty good job decent job of explaining it.
Thank you. Thank you very much. I did not want to, if I
butchered it. I did not want to make you look bad. So I kept it
to myself, but I think I think I mean, I think there was some
some interest in it. But there's also some misunderstanding some
sort of fundamental stuff that was misunderstood about about it
initially, like a couple, like one thing was immediately was
okay, this is tracking. And, you know, the other thing is, are
you know, like, personalized try were some somehow you could know
who it was. Right? You know, and the other one was, we were
already well, we were we've already done this before,
because you know, adding an identity adding some sort of
unique ID to every download. And, but it's sort of the
differences. A little is a little subtle, though. Can I
maybe can do a better job.
Can I can I jump in for one second as the guy who, who
doesn't understand much about this, and so maybe that will
help with the simplicity of it. Yeah. So the overall issue is
what do we know if someone When downloaded a podcast and
episode, do we know if someone listened. And I guess
preferably, and I'm thinking as an advertiser or from the
advertising side, we'd love to know if the person listened, you
know, where they listened, where they didn't listen to all these
all these different nuances, we need to know that the messaging
has been delivered. And so there's an ongoing attribution
conversation, which I think is it comes into that privacy
thing. It's like, Okay, are we are we being tracked how we're
being tracked? Who has the information? And then there's, I
think there's just seems like fundamental differences because
of the type of advertising that may be inserted, or? I don't
know, it just seems like, like, it's a huge problem that no one
really can get past because all of these are competing issues.
You're absolutely right. I mean, so everything you said is
correct. So let's take a step back. And if you look at the way
we used to count podcast downloads in the early early
days in the, you know, in in 2006 2008, you know, early
times, we just treated them almost the same way that we
treated, it's on a webpage is that Oh, there's, you know,
there's someone goes to download it, and and there's a record in
the log. And so we were actually parsing our log files, right?
Like, we were looking at the log files and counting up the number
of hits for an individual episode, for example. And, of
course, now we can look back and know that that was the wrong way
to do it. Because there's something called range requests.
And so the HTTP 1.1 spec allows for something called a range
request. And so behind the scenes, what's happening is,
let's say you've got your podcast client on your phone,
and you go to download the latest episode of this show.
When that happens, your podcast client goes to the server and
says, Hey, I want you know, I sorry, guys, I don't know what
episode you're on here. But let's say it's Episode 50. So it
was episode number 50. And the server says, oh, how do you want
it? And the podcast client, the app on your phone says, You know
what, it's 30. Meg's in size. So we better break that up into
like, five megabyte chunks, and give me six of those and send
them all to me at once. And so what is technically one download
of the episode, if you are looking at the log files,
there's going to be six, seven requests for it. One is like the
initial request, then there's a head request, then there's it
breaking it up into those different chunks, there's a bit
of back and forth. So it might actually look like 5678
downloads or requests for that file. But that's for one person,
right? So we know that that's not really seven downloads, it's
just one Well, how do we know that we have to analyze the log
in a special way. Back in the old days, I'd released an
episode of Oh, my God, we did 100,000 downloads is a brand new
show, this is amazing what really, we got 15,000 downloads
and, and maybe not even that, and that was because of this
range request problem. So as the podcasting stats, segment of the
industry kind of evolved, they realized this. So they tried to
come up with we tried to come up with ways to resolve this issue.
And one of the ways is by looking at IP addresses. And so
of course, it's a little background for people who don't
know what the heck that means. Every computer or device on the
internet, whether it's your computer in front of you on your
desk, your iPad, your phone, whatever it is, they all have an
IP address associated with them. And you go when you make a
request for something, and it logs that IP address. So when
you browse a web page, your IP address gets logged, when you
download a podcast episode, your IP address is locked somewhere.
And that seems fine. So you could say okay, well, an
individual IP address that map's to a single person. So if
there's a whole bunch of requests from this one IP
address, well, then that's one person downloading that one
episode, right? Wrong. That's not how it works either because
of something called network address translation. So every
single household, every single business company, library,
coffee shop, you name it, airport, they have one external
IP address. But within their network, they might have
hundreds or even 1000s, depending on the size of the
organization. But to the outside world, any request that comes
from that. That company, let's say let's say you work, let's
say work at a company, and you're on a floor, and there's
100 other people on that floor, and maybe that's your whole
company, 100 people. Well, every single request that goes out to
the internet is going to come from one IP address regardless
of which 100 people that are there, but those 100 people
don't just have one device each they all have a phone, maybe
two, right? They all have a computer, maybe three. So if you
have let's say you subscribed on your computer, in Apple podcasts
on your computer and on your phone, you're using, you know,
downcast. Let's say what Doesn't matter. Those are both going to
look like they're coming from the same IP address to the
outside world. But not only that, so it all the other 100
people on that floor,
understood. But here, here's the here's the crux of the issue,
which I think if we're, maybe we're just in this realm, but
really, if someone listened at all, is what you want to
understand. Yes. So downloading just is meaningless,
right? Download isn't even enough. But let me just let me
just finish with this part to just show you how complicated
this still is. Now, let's say that 20 of those people are on
the software development team, and they all listen to this
show. Now you're gonna get not 20 requests for this podcast
episode, you're gonna get 20 times however many range
requests that got, but they're all gonna look like they're from
the same IP address. So what do you do? Do you say, Oh, well,
that's one download? No, no, it's not one download, because
there were 20 different people. So it's actually 20 different
lessons. But you can't tell that. You can't tell any of
that. And that that is the crux of the problem. So the way that
they've tried to get around this is by coming up with different
methodologies to say, well, there were different user
agents, they happen within a different time period, they
should have happened within a certain time period. And all of
this other stuff that I think places like if
it's a big grep, regex string.
Yeah. And that's exactly that is exactly how we we have there are
regular expressions regex is that are out there that are
updated all the time, whenever a new user agent comes out, and
they're they're doing things with it trying to ignore certain
IP addresses.
This explains a lot of what I'm seeing Cridland and yes, Daniel
J. Lewis do okay. Now? Yes.
And so they are they are involved in this open podcast,
working groups back trying to keep up with all the new regular
expressions in different formats so that we as like fireside as a
podcast host, I use those to parse those downloads and figure
out Oh, this is the latest version of this client. And this
is the other version of this client. And they're changing all
the time anyway.
And so hold on, Dan. And so the entire industry runs on this,
this grip regex. That's what Oh, yes. But but it's still not
telling you if someone's listening, I feel so much
better. It still doesn't.
But it's worse than that, Adam, because not only don't we know,
if they're listening, we don't even really know if a download
has occurred from a real person or not, or whether it's been
scraped, or whether it's this situation where there's 20
people and it looks like one or one person in 20. So yeah, or a
bot. So the way that the way that we address that first part
of the issue and my idea for this, the IAB internet
Advertising Bureau, they came out with a spec and that that's
the thing if you hear this term called IAB compliance, or IAB
certified, if you're IAB compliant, it means that you're
following their guidelines and recommendations with your log
analytics algorithm. Do
they have a fancy badge that you get when you're certainly if
you become certified? And my understanding is that it is
something like, I'm not sure. But I've been I've heard a bird
told me that it's something like $50,000 to become certified.
Okay, so hold on. So the open statistics Working Group, like
what was the name again,
I think it's called the open podcast, working group
analytics,
analytics.
Thank you. So they're doing all the work. And I B is charging
everybody 50 grand,
they charge 50 grand to certify that the way that you are
analyzing your logs and downloads are correct.
I need to certify apps 2.0 compliant for 50,000.
I know you do.
support this board meeting I fully support
getting a journal. But so my idea was I don't want to do
because I don't have $50,000 to spend on being certified. So
fireside is compliant with IB. We follow those methodologies,
but they're flawed also because of some of the problems that
that you talked about on the last show and what we just
talked about now as far as looking at downloads and things
like that. It's not a perfect system. And so my idea, which is
what Dave talked about, a couple episodes back is if and I'm I
would like I'm working on a little website for this I
haven't named yet maybe you guys can help me name it. But I I
want someone to tell me why this won't work because I've thought
it through I've thought about it a lot. I thought about it for a
couple years. And I in anyone I've
told it to that you have yet
to tell me Oh, that won't work because but here's my idea. And
again, Adam, this does not address listens, plays. He just
addresses the download part. But here's my idea. The download
client, whether that's a podcast app, or Apple podcasts on a
computer, or whatever, you can't do this with a browser but but a
dedicated podcast client of some kind when a download going to
happen when it knows that it's supposed to download an episode.
What it will do is it will tack on to the URL of the episode, a
query string, that could be called something I probably tied
into the name. It could be good. It could be token, it could be
some, you know,
oh, let's just call the spy.
What does that stand for? OSI? No, it's not fine. Because and
I'll tell you why. That's fine. So what it does is the client,
the client, john, underscore. Nice. I'm sorry, I apologize.
So what what this what this token does is it would be a
probably like a 32. character, unique ID, it's generated, and
it's thrown away immediately. So it's used only for this one
podcast client, downloading this one episode, this one time, it
does not contain any other information. It's not reusable.
It's not stored. It's not saved. It's just generated once by the
podcast client, for this individual request of this one
mp3 file. So if they want to download the latest version of
this show, they're going this one podcast client will generate
this ID and use it just for the download of that episode, and
then throw it away. Never use it again. It's never used again. Mm
hmm. It can't be tied to an individual person it yes, you
could say, well, this token was used for this IP. But that
doesn't tell you anything, because the tokens never used
again, it's thrown out.
So it's okay. So maybe maybe this is where I messed up. So
tell me if I messed this up, then. Because what my
understanding was that you you generate the token, you attach
it to the to the URL of that one episode. But then if you as the
user download that, that episode, again, let's just say
for some crazy reason you wanted to download that same episode
four times it within a one hour period, you would get a unique
ID a different ID every time or would that one stick?
Well, you know that that's actually a really nice little
improvement to it. I think. I mean, if the client wants to
save that, and associated with that download it could I don't
see a problem with that, that would be fine. I hadn't really
thought about because
because I have it that works. That works. I implemented it
because I implemented it on our side and in the Web Player. And
it's doing it now. Like we're in the Web Player and what it
generates new and every 24 hours for that day. So like I see it.
It's very, very cool. Okay, and that. So that still fits with
your program, right?
Yeah, absolutely. That would work. But the point is, we're,
the reason that we throw it away, is because we're trying to
provide anonymity for it. But what we would never do what we
so I guess that token could be saved indefinitely by the
podcast client associated with that episode. Sure. That doesn't
hurt. The point is, it's not used for multiple episodes, it's
not used for multiple podcasts. It's only used once for that one
individual episode. So in theory, it could it could stay
for 24 hours or, or forever, but there is not going to ever be
any cross association with that ID. And that keeps it so you
wouldn't be able to say the person who downloaded this
episode is the same person who downloaded this prior episode.
We don't care about that. And we don't want to track that we want
to make it stay private. We want to keep it anonymous, because
the whole thing that people complain about, about things
like Spotify and other places are they're they're selling our
listening data. This is one of the big complaints that I've
heard about the latest Spotify is buying wondering, you said
you said something really important. They're selling your
listening data, right? That's correct. They are selling your
they have your listening data. And so you're never going to win
with downloads over listens. But I think there's something even
worse at play. And I was involved in the early early days
of internet advertising. We made all the hits mistake. So I know
I know a lot about the In fact, when statistics have always been
inherently so poor, that and this was what think new ideas
there was a company that I took public on NASDAQ. We branded it
what was what was that? That basic stats package. It was like
everyone was using it. It was kind of a desktop thing. Just
run your log through it. Can't remember it. Oh, it
patchy it did your Apache stats or whatever?
Well, it was literally a desktop app. And it was called web
stats, I think, yeah, web stats. And it was it was Windows app.
And so we'd print that out and it would have all the basic
information. And but we did two things. We branded it. We call
the ASAP, the advanced statistical analysis program.
And it was a program because you didn't just get this printout
and a dashboard. You got an analysis with a professional,
which would be made and explain, and I explained a number of
these things. But here's what I learned because I worked with
the biggest brands, the biggest advertising agencies that they
owned 18% of my company, in fact, Omni comm The dirty secret
is, nobody really wants to know the real truth. We don't really
want to know how many people are listening or watching or
reading, because that would fuck up the system. And that and
that's why you have this barrier to entry is dinner, it would be
would be too low numbers. Yeah, then First of all, the numbers
would fluctuate way too much. And I think they would be much
lower than everyone has been selling them at much lower. And
and and the same way Nielsen Nielsen, they don't also really
want anyone to know it's it's a big magic sauce, mumble and why
can No One No One Else ever really get in the game? Is
because it's a lock in. And it's a scam statistics like this,
which we know are inherently very difficult. Otherwise, here,
if you look at, okay, so we have by everyone's measure 50% of all
podcasts clients used is Apple. That's what I'm seeing. That's
just minute between 40 and 60%. Yeah, Apple has, for every
podcast, a beautiful chart of people listening on on the on
their devices, of course, and how long they listened and where
they listen, and I enjoyed looking at these charts. Now, I
don't have my full statistics. But I can see that, you know, we
do a donation segment and I can see this blip, I can see a dip.
And I can what I've always enjoyed is what it comes back
up. So people are fast forwarding, and they're not
interested in that. But they come back and it's a slope that
just goes off down to the right. And you know, less and less
people are listening. But you can extrapolate with that base,
it's much easier to say okay, well, this is 50%. So let's make
it 25% and say it's a quarter of all of this stuff. And here's
how much exposure your ad got. No one is doing that. No one is
saying, hey, look at my apple stats. Ah, because they're true.
And they're not that great. Would you consider that that's
part of the issue, and that you can only get into the exclusive
approved club if you got 50 grand? Yeah, I
mean, it might it might be and I think I think there's something
you know, I think I think it's, well, it's a really tricky
problem, because there are, you know, apple, even even if Apple
let's say apples 50% of the industry,
they are I mean, we're seeing we're seeing the numbers, that's
what everyone's reporting.
So when you look at what Apple's showing you, that's 50% of your
downloads, essentially, right that, that or it might be more.
And so that's where these download stats and the user
agents that Cridland and those guys are working on is important
because one of the things that we show you in fireside and I
imagine all the other hosts should be showing this with
stats too is you can look at an individual episode or your
podcast as a whole. And we show you like essentially a donut pie
chart showing the breakdown of all of the different clients and
who's using what and if you're on the pro plan, you can click
and it'll actually break it down into individual numbers as well
as percentages. So you can say Oh, like 35% of this episode was
downloaded by Apple podcasts and 8% was overcast and 13% was
whatever. So you can actually see that breakdown. And, and
that's useful. But then let's say 30% of your downloads on
that individual episode of whatever the podcast is. 30% was
from Apple, you can then look at your Apple analytics over on
Apple podcasts and see what that 30% did. I understand but No One
No
One sells ads on that formula you just mentioned exactly why
not? Exactly. And why not?
Because right.
I am. I've been in this scam club, my friend. I have I've
been in it. I've seen it. That's why I walked away from my own
company, podcasts of the pod show later meevo which was just
an unfortunate turn of events because I might have been able
to sell that silly network for 300 million these days. I was,
of course 10 years. 10 years early. That's too early my
middle name. But I'm not bitter about it. Because I've you know,
I made a perfectly beautiful salary for 10 years. Everything
was fine. But I had to walk away because at a certain point, the
content all of it had to be brand safe for the real
advertisers, even BMW that's who I'm talking about specifically,
Johnson Johnson, Procter and Gamble, automotive pharma, oh my
gosh pharma.
Banks, all
telecoms, these are billion dollar spenders on an annual
basis. So it had to be guaranteed brand safe. And what
you result the result is poorly produced content which has to be
done as cheaply as possible because of the fluctuating cpms
which is also based on your content and your brand safeness.
Right. And it's basically like driving a NASCAR race but all
the stickers are On the windshield, and I hated it. Like
I'd rather I'd rather not be involved in advertising it just
it's, it's not. That's advertising. So all I'm saying
is that the actual there's many ways and I think personally, if
I were to just try and solve this, I would build
a,
I would have a system that tracks the actual listening. And
I think that you could, and that would not go to a third party
necessarily, but that would be the podcaster. And it would be
verifiable the podcasters own data, okay, here's how many
listens I have. And here's where they listen, here's where, you
know, for every, every 30 seconds, I think you could do
that and get a much higher CPM. Much higher, you'd have to go
outside of this wonky system, that everyone's just kind of
waiting for some innovation.
But here's a quick here's a question, though. So when it
feels like this is probably sort of scammy on both sides of the
equation. And it's not. When you I guess when you first hear
about it, you think your your natural inclination is to think
okay, well, the podcaster, or the network or whatever, they're
the ones that want inflated stats, is probably also the
advertiser wants inflated stuff.
But the advertiser is not the customer. It's the agency, it's
the buying agency. It's the exchange, no, no, if the
advertiser B, what are we saying advertising? 50% of my money is
working. I just don't know which half? And and that's, that's the
big joke.
You're absolutely right. Yeah, it's the I mean, the sales guys
within the advertising arena, they need inflated numbers just
as much as anybody else does. And it's me, it's not, I don't
Well, I guess, but then the truth cuts like a knife, though.
So if, let's just say you have a more accurate way to do stats,
and somebody is doing it. You know, Apple's doing some version
of that right now. And then an open, more open standard could
exist that does that, well, then at least the the truth at that
point begins to get so apparent, that it may be hard to put it
back in the box, so to speak. So I guess that could be, you know,
a way that it's like, well, I see I see over here an app, if
you got Apple stats on one side, and then you've got sort of an
open standard set of stats that are supported by maybe four or
five other apps over here. And then you begin to make that now
you have a lot of numbers to work with. And you can say,
Well, now we can get some pretty good ideas that we're at these
levels. And so then, then that becomes hard to ignore. And I
don't know what ends up happening from that. I mean,
maybe everybody, maybe the money goes down initially. But then it
ultimately though, isn't that better for everybody involved,
that everything's just more accurate,
but what we need is a price discovery mechanism. And that's
what we don't have.
Yes, okay. Yeah.
Or an honest price discovery mechanism, right. There's too
many layers. There's too much technology that, you know, bid
and ask in in AD exchanges, and the ad exchanges on both sides
of the equation, which is, I mean, if that happened on Wall
Street, there would be a revolt. So
Well, here's what I was. I've been thinking about this for the
last few weeks. There was an article that was it came out
about or somebody wrote about the New York Times The Daily
Show. Hmm. And it said that that the daily generated $42 million
in revenue a year okay, $42 million from one podcast. If
supposedly the industry is up, about 800 million total. Didn't
that means you have a humongous chunk of ad spend? In the top
let's say 15 to 20 podcasts. Yeah, by the time by the time
you get below that you're getting into pennies.
Also also if I may, these buyers Now, the last time I was in the
game was a little bit ago, a hot minute, but the buyers were all
young people. I would say a lot of the buyers came in word came
in as interns worked in the agencies because I met with a
lot of them on the on the go around with with me vo and so
now they're, you know, late 20s. Just about hitting 30 and they
are in that position. Because they understand the internet.
They understand Instagram, that's that's how they came into
positions. And they have not had the traditional branding school.
Some of the real basics of advertising, and they're much
more interested in Oh, you got me some Lakers tickets? Yeah,
no, we got to buy for you to the whole system. And that's my
point that we'd have to blow up the entire system. And I'm very
willing to do it, I think it'd be very interesting if we can
connect the advertisers. And this will happen in one degree,
the other the advertisers directly to the listening
statistics. And in my mind, it should be the same as someone
doing a value for value pledge payment with with lightning.
It's like, Oh, I got this many people listening. This is how
much money is going to the podcaster? It can be that
honest. Right? It really can't. Now, what is the impact one?
This is what I think would be really, the way it would be
successful is so once we've gone from, okay, the inflated number
said I had 1000 people listening, but turns out really
it's 100. But guarantee these 100 people heard your message.
Now we want to look at an impact study and recall and all of that
stuff. That's when you that science is pretty real. Let's
understand exactly what the recall is of an ad for someone
we know actually listened. And not just a sampling of people
who might have listened.
Yeah, because if you have 1000 listeners, if you have
supposedly, if you have if you have 1000 listeners, and they in
10 of them care about anything involving your host read, or you
versus 100 listeners, and most of them care about your host
read. I mean, that's a more valuable audience at lower
levels. Mm hmm.
You would think so you would think so? Yeah.
makes sense to me.
So. So, Dan. Yeah. I'd love for you to consider that. I mean,
because I think you are onto something. And there's
definitely a way to get a much better handle on the downloads,
it doesn't solve the ultimate problem. I just see all this
excitement and energy in you and like, man, I want that in the
system. That's for the future.
And I totally agree. It's just it's the hard part. The tricky
part what what we want it let's just take a step back and say,
What do we want? We want to know, really, I although we want
it to be anonymous, we want to understand our listeners better?
I don't want to know, I'm just going to stop you. I don't
believe that. No, no, I don't believe you say we want to know
Yeah, I'm interested. I want to know, I don't know, but I'm not
Yes. But the industry doesn't want to know the industry wants
to make a lot of money based upon an approved standard that
has a nice base. Okay, now let's go up to a trillion or whatever,
we're pushing for a billion dollars. So I just have to
interject that when you say we want to know, I don't. Yeah, you
do? Sure. Cridland does? Absolutely. Right. I think you'd
love to know more exactly what your listeners are doing by
listening. That's what you really want. Correct. You want
to know what your listeners are listening to? Yes. Okay. So then
that's not downloads?
No, it is not downloads. It's it's I guess listener behavior.
I mean, look at what you get, look at what you get. When you
post a YouTube video. you post a YouTube video, you can see not
just how many people watched it. You can see how long they
watched averages, but you can see individual things if
somebody are all if they're all leaving your video at a certain
point or skipping through. So yeah, but
I'm just going to push back. That's all trickery. This is
lying with statistics. I saw how Facebook went from Oh, three
seconds. That's view pay up advertiser.
Yeah, you're right.
So So what do we do? And then you, I'm giving you the answer.
The problem is we have a podcaster. And the podcaster is
three levels removed from the advertiser, maybe more. That's
the main problem. Now is not every podcaster is equipped to,
to do the direct sales. And you know, there's certainly a place
for an intermediary, but that intermediary has to have
something real to differentiate. I think that you can go to the
advertising companies say, Oh, look, here's what we've done.
We've got the real listening numbers for real listening
numbers. This is exciting, isn't it? Yeah, that's exciting. Okay,
so here's what the real numbers are. Okay. But you think these
numbers are lower? In fact, they're even better and we're
gonna charge you more from them. And here's why. And then you
roll out your recall and all which I'm sure works, but then
you're dealing with real data. And otherwise, to me personally,
you're just fighting against something which is you have no
chance. You can't even pay the barrier to entry to join the
club. They don't want you I don't want to you know, pissing
your cornflakes but you're so smart and and I'd love to work
with you on Making a new system. Let the IAB run around with this
one, then they're the only game in town. We could be something
different.
I mean, I'm all in.
All right. Well, here's a crazy idea, though. So no in circles
that it is not. I'm not gonna say this.
This is Dave being political? No,
I'm trying.
I'm trying. Okay. Clear. Clearly, we are all on board
with, with privacy, no tracking, all these kinds of things. I
mean, these are all fundamentals. It's why we love
things like lightning, Bitcoin, all these things. But so here's,
here's the thing that probably would piss everybody off. But it
is. I mean, what about an open an open listening? tracking
standard? Yeah,
yeah, I'm all for that. But why not? I mean, there's easy,
there's easier ways to do it, I think, but
I don't really care. I don't care risk so much. If If I'm
tracked, if I'm,
if I'm going to, I have a couple of ways to support my podcast.
Okay, I sit through some ads, sometimes I think I usually fast
forward through a lot of them. I want to make donations, I want
to make pledges. As long as I know, it's happening. I get
options all the time. You know, try, you know, do you want this
app to track you to make it better? No, I say no to
everything. But I think enough people would say okay, you know,
that's, you know, we all understand.
Okay, backtrack.
Free turns out to be really expensive. That's what that's
what I think everyone is starting to realize. So you got
to do something, give something and if it was more like, Oh, I
just want to know, if you're listening, and I'm not tracking
everything else you're doing, what your what, who you're
emailing how you're holding your device. I'm not doing any of
that. Because I don't have that information. I truly only have a
listening metric from you. And if you make it, you could say if
you really don't want that, turn it off. That's fine. I'm all for
it. I'm all for an open listen standard. In fact, it's kind of
infuriating that hasn't been created before, as long as it's
open and transparent. Yeah, it's the secret shit that everyone
gets mad about.
It's that Yeah, just say I think that's right. It's this. It's
the secret stuff. It's like if you had, you know, an
anonymized?
Well, this is why I like the lightning idea that we had Dave.
Right. If you're just counting one, Satoshi, per minute that is
being sent. I mean, yeah, I'm sure you can figure out through
a number of ways who that person is everything's technically
possible. But it'll be unique from a node, which, by
definition is not, you know, not connected to somebody. So it's,
it's unique. You can have you can add your identifiers, and
whatever you need to do, as to you know, why this came in? And
the only people who have this data is the person who was
listening, or the person who was anyone basically, who was on the
payment list? Well,
yeah, I mean, ultimately, the down download, we're trying to
improve downloads, because I think let me say it this way, I
think we're trying to improve download stat accuracy, because
we're afraid of the, of what we really requires to be to be
truly accurate. We're afraid of
what will reveal
privacy, right? Yeah. privacy, tracking all these kinds of
things. But maybe, you know, maybe that that issue is just to
me, it's more overblown them than we thought it is me because
most people like I don't care if somebody knows that I get, you
know, skipped a donation segment in a podcast. I mean, like, it
just doesn't bother me that much. And even if you say, oh,
they're gonna be some podcast apps out there that say, Hell
no, there is no way on Earth. We're going to give back stats
to the host about what about what the listener behavior was.
That's most most of
them most of? Yeah,
that's fine, though. If you had, wait, Apple's already doing it,
and if they're 50% of the market, why is
everyone complaining if Apple's already doing exactly that?
Yeah. So like, if you had an open standard that did that,
then because he Okay, so here's, here's what's bothering me. The,
um, if I look through my overcast app on my phone right
now, I've got, oh my gosh, hundreds of episodes of
podcasts, that I will never listen to just sitting there.
They're just, they're gonna be sitting there. They'll never
be late. You're gonna have a new phone, and you'll never listen
to those episodes. I know.
So in doing so, because I just don't have the time. And so they
all every one of those counted as a download legitimate or not
accurate or not, it did count as a download. And so, but I never
actually listened to it. So it doesn't matter whether or not
the accurate see if the downloads worked. I mean, it's
the guy
trickery is is right in front of everyone's eyes. But no one ever
talks about it. It's the elephant in the room.
And it wasn't malicious on on my part on anyone. Yeah, it's just
set it up and thought I might like this podcast two years ago,
and I've really listened to half of one episode and it never
unsubscribed. Yeah, because I'm like, well, maybe I'll listen to
it.
By the way, as an aside, wow, so much great work could be done in
podcast apps for managing your subscriptions. So many good
things could be done with that.
So all that being said, What? Tell us more about that as well.
I
mean, sorry. No, I mean, it's, it's it's like, it's one step,
it's one step in the right direction. And what it does is
it allows people who, who we would The problem with this is,
of course, we need support and buy in from all of the major
podcast apps, and we need it from from, you know, really even
more than that. But the platforms like fireside where we
are hosting the files and gathering the statistics would
see something with this unique ID of requests that's been made
with the unique ID and we would right away be able to say, just
count those up. Now, again, this only addresses downloads doesn't
address listener behavior. But we could just say, well count up
how many of them came in and find just the uniques. That's
how many downloads you have. And those could be even segregated
as trusted downloads, because there's still going to be other
systems and clients that don't have that. Let's say Apple
doesn't implement adding the, you know, the token to their the
key to the to that for a while, well, we already know, there's a
huge chunk of downloads that come from Apple podcasts app,
those are not going to be included in your trusted
downloads, but you can go and look at their stats for them.
But what it does let us do is it does let us see that if there's
three people in on your floor on your team, and they all use
their phones to download an episode of your podcast, it's
not going to be counted as just one download, it's also not
going to be counted as 20, it's going to be counted as three
because three people had unique identifiers associated with that
download. So right away with your stack, it's perfect. You
can say boom, that's three downloads, or that's 3000 or
30,000. And at least you know, that there is a segment of your
downloads that are trusted, that are real, that are actual
people. Now what they do after they download it, we still don't
know that sucks. But at least now we have real numbers around
around those downloads. And we are not beholden to something
like the IAB been and and hosting companies like mine are
not beholden to the IAB to write them out a big check and go
through the certification process to get what are
considered to be trusted. downloads, we now know what
trusted downloads are, even if they only represent a segment of
your total downloads, we really do know. So it's something
that so here's how
easy to implement. So we implement
it. Yeah, it's dead simple to implement. Oh, I already did it.
And that apoc friend already did it. Right. Um, so the the other
the biggest pushback I saw, and I can't, the one that made that
this seemed to be the most legit is that this lowers the bar for
for download fraud. So currently, with IB, stats, they
may not be accurate. Clearly, you know, they're not but they,
in order to do fraudulent download, so to speak, you have
to go to some some bigger links, like you have to set up a cell
phone farm, or something like that. And in order to pump that
out, I'm sure there's other ways to do it, you just
auto generate a new code, a new a new unique ID every x number
of minutes. That's that's the pushback that
could you definitely could but it's not like we would be
abandoning the old techniques, either. It's not like we would
throw out all of the other things that we do, this would be
additional. So if we're looking at what you know, we have IP
addresses that are considered to be bad because they're known
farms or data centers, we still throw those out. If we see,
yeah, if we see 100,000 downloads over a 24 hour period
from one IP address. It's probably not real. So we still
use those guidelines and recommendations. We just add
this as a layer on top. It doesn't replace it necessarily.
We still have to do the diligence that we've been doing
all this time for our stats, but now we have a segment that gives
us even additional assurance that this was a real person or
this was an individual person? Well, yeah, you're you're it
could be circumvented, just like everything can be done. It
seems to me that people have no problem implementing this. We've
already had a couple implementations, we should have
you back in a bit and tell me what you see what you're seeing
on your server. And, and more importantly, is anyone
interested? Will I be it to me, it's like I likely scenarios I
would say, this is great. All right, we're going to implement
this and now you pay $75,000 to join. So I understand the
plight, I really do.
This is the hostess dilemma.
Well, it's it's a big part of it. And, you know, you're what I
heard you say is, is the important crux of the problem?
Will Apple do it? And I understand you can blend it all
and all that, but it's just more IAB crap, I really appreciate
the thinking that's gone into it. But I would, I would love to
see a write up of an an open listening statistic standard,
even if it's just what we've done now that, you know, to get
you on on the way, but for just as a podcaster, myself, I would
like to know, when people are listening or not, I'm not going
to sell ads. I don't think ever, I'll never say never, but I
don't see a need for it. But I'm very interested as a producer,
I'm interested in understanding where people are dropping off or
what's working or what's not working, and just some some
basic things. And I'd love to work on creating that. And I
think I think somewhere along the line that'll fall out of the
bottom. But we have to consider zigging to the zag, you know, is
always the same. And we spend 1015 years finally coming up
with a standard. And now we have a standard is not great, but
everyone agrees on it. And then Who's this? Who is this annoying
group of people? Shut up. We know it's not accurate. So I'm
just saying that, you know, the advertisers that we need to go
after the advertisers frustrated, advertisers are
getting hosed. They're not they know about it. They're going
back to Google and Facebook and saying, Hey, hold on a second.
What happened here and Facebook has to admit to stuff and to
getting refunds. And so they're there. They're not stupid. Is
this sophisticated people and they're going to understand what
works for them and what doesn't work for them. But we have to go
around all these organizations that are sitting there just
picking off bucks.
One thing I noticed is that in the stats, in you'll see these
were a look, I looked at Lipson stats that they published for
November. And then buzzsprout stats, yeah, they published and
the they're completely different. Like in Lipson shows
Apple podcast is 64% of the total total downloads.
buzzsprout shows 32%. I mean, that's, that's half. And then,
yeah, what's
going on? And why is that? What's the explanation?
Yes, like that. So Tom said that it buzzsprout they listen, they
they split out apple core media from Apple podcasts, they make a
difference. Okay. In C, and I don't understand it. That seems
like such an obvious thing to do. I don't understand why, why
this reluctance to do that. Do you? Do you know why that may be
done? Why would somebody be reluctant to be to split that
out?
I really don't know. I mean, it has to go back to what Adam was
saying. I think that that the more that this is a mystery, the
more of a mystery it is. And if we know that, you know, because
it's like you said, if those I remember, when we figured out
range requests back in the day, you know, you know, 10 plus
years ago, and we were looking at our downloads, and we're
like, oh, I guess they're not what we've been selling them
for. What do we do? Because like, you're you know
it,
what do you do? What do you do, right? Like, where's the money
that we are supposed to be making from this? It's not
right. And so we had to, like reboot everything. And I think
that's how would that affect this whole industry, if the
shows that are supposedly getting 10s or even hundreds of
1000s of downloads or more, all of a sudden, it's half of that.
Here's the good news. Even though Spotify has everything
the advertiser wants, they've got it all. They know who you
are. They've got your credit card, they can tie it to real
world behavior. They've got your listening behavior, they've got
everything they can insert recommend test stuff with you.
Spotify is not going to win with advertising. They Do not have
the market. So all this IAB stuff is really not even for you
damn, they just taken money from you just shut you. Seriously,
I'm saying what I feel I may be wrong, but to me it feels like,
Alright, well just take money from these guys. But really we
know who has the data. We know who the real guys are. They've
got it all. And I don't know if they're sharing it if they're
IAB certified, I have no idea. It's Spotify may be selling
outside the whole system direct to their existing advertisers.
Are they are they IAB compliant? Because you know that they're
not reporting downloads to their to their advertisers, their
buyers, their reporting profiles, and real listening
behavior, random graphics. So you guys are in a whole
different playing field with square wheels. So let's leapfrog
over that and give them an open open way. At least start with
your unique ID. But let's build for something for the future.
I'm not against advertising. It's got to be appropriate. And
it has to be fair, and advertising is inherently
dishonest. It's hard for me, it's hard for me to see how how
it will ever
really, really work. To me the quest for big for the biggest
numbers in order to attract the biggest farce. Yeah, if you're
if you're a podcast, wouldn't you rather have? I think James
mentioned this a few couple weeks ago, if you're a podcast,
wouldn't you rather have 70 advertisers for you know,
smaller amounts than three for big amounts, because at least
then you have some, you don't feel as much pressure sensor
data. That's not even what a podcaster wants a podcaster
wants to pay the podcasters rent, right? That's the bot, I
don't want to have to understand advertising. I really don't want
it in my show at all. You know, but it's I've been told I can
make money if I get numbers. And then here's all these numbers
and the advertising doesn't come and I'm left with 25 bucks at
the end of the month. I'm a little disillusioned. Where and
I've said it before you can you can make a living off of a high
quality podcast with high quality listeners with 1000
listeners. They will support you no matter what Avenue you
choose. But if you're just going for numbers, numbers, numbers,
it's it's it's not like the old world. This is not how it's
gonna work anymore. There will be no more 1015 20 million
download Joe Rogan's piece a piece in every single podcast
app, everyone's subscribed. I don't know, if they're all
listening. I certainly don't hit every single episode. Well, on
Spotify, of course, I don't download any. So it's now it's
all about how valuable is your tribe? How valuable is the
listenership that you have? And as a if I were to start a new
podcast, I'm like, Okay, I need to have some commercial things
in here. Whether it's advertorial host read or
inserted ads, I think it would be better to say, look, here's,
here's these people, they're cool with me doing some ads,
maybe we need to turn it around and audition advertisers. But
you have to show your valuable first. And the way to do that is
to show what's really true. So here's the here's these 1000
people, they listen to 75% of the entire show, right? And
here's what I know about them. Because there's only 1000. I
know, I'm real well. You know, there's a lot more you can do,
we once did a no agenda listener survey just on a Google Doc. And
people put their salaries in there, and they're what job they
have their age everything. and years and years and years ago.
And, and we learned a lot and they loved it. They loved
helping out with the whole idea. It's like, Okay, well, you know,
you're all over the map. And here's, here's the spikes that
we see. And it was their own little demographic survey. And I
know if I'd said look, we want to use some of this to, to get
some advertisers to, to pay for the for the show here, we're
going to go to we're going to approach these people. I mean,
there's a whole different way of doing it, that it's just never
been explored. And hosting companies came into it came to
life because of their lack of tools to create an RSS feed.
And, and a lack of server space and bandwidth available to the
consumer. And then to a large degree, it I think, is still
more bandwidth game than anything. And the supplement
that has kept every one a lot or a lot of companies alive, small
these smaller companies has been the advertising game. And I
understand the reluctance not to fuck with it, because that's the
lifeblood. And I think there's probably people angry just
hearing me on the show. And they I don't know what I'm talking
about, etc. But I think the elephant in the room is clear.
And I all I'm saying as I'll just repeat it last time, let's
look for a new way forward to deliver something that's honest
and let's not Be afraid of what truth comes up, because that
truth will only be more valuable. That's my that's my
vision on it. Your mileage may vary.
That the open listening stats, opening listener, but sort of an
open listening behavior standard. I mean, I think that
that, yeah, and like I said, Everybody thinks it's gonna be
okay, as prophecy is tracking. But I don't know that that's
really Yes, there are people out there that are gonna have a
problem with with they're going to have a specific problem with
that type of thing. But I feel like, you know, the the
emergence of things like ad blockers, and things like that
have less to do with tracking
and more to do with annoyance annoying noise? Yes. Yes, spot.
It's annoying. Like it makes the only reason I use an ad blocker
on on my phone is because I keep because it makes it slow. And I
can't read the page, because there's so much junk all over
it. Right? If If all that I really don't care if people
track me that much. I mean, I'm just not it doesn't bother me
that much. But so and that being said, I mean, I don't really
think anybody would care. As long as it's not, not anybody, I
don't think a lot of people would care as long as they could
opt into it. And they could be assured that it was not going to
impact the quality of their Listen,
I agree with you, Dave. And I think that this is a contract, a
social contract that has to be presented between the listener,
the creator, and all the advertising people in the
middle. Which I'm going to include the hosting companies in
there. And hey, you know, what, how about this, like the verge.
Now I have pie holes and all kinds of blockers, but you go,
you go to the verge to test. I mean, there's there's megabytes
of stuff flying back and forth, just loading one page. It's
insane what they're doing. And you're right. It's people, it's
become annoying to people. My wife said the same thing, man,
there's so many ads on everything's popping up
everywhere. And, and she, she recognizes the tracking. But
you're right. It's more the annoyance, the slow loads, all
the stuff that just popping up everywhere. It's obfuscating
stuff you can't get through it. And paywalls on websites is
another thing which just needs to be solved. But they don't
want to solve it. Because they know that it's far more
profitable to get people to subscribe with a credit card.
And their usage might even go down. Or they may not show up at
all. It'll be months before they cancel it. I mean, these it's
dishonest all of it is that if we try some honesty, which is my
motto for 2021. Try some honesty. What have you got to
lose at this point? Yeah, try some honesty. Try honesty. It
tastes great.
What do you think, Dan? What do you think would be the obstacle
to any? What do you think would be the obstacle to a proposition
for a for an open listening behavior standard?
I mean, I, I think it's, it's the inevitable future. And I
think it will take, it will take people like us working on it for
it to happen, because it's not going to come out of the IB,
it's not going to come out of Spotify. It's something that
needs to be independent. It's something that needs to be
independent, because it goes against what you guys are just
talking about. It goes against the nature of the old way of
doing ads, we really do want to know, those kinds of things and
the main obstacle. I don't know, I think there's lots of
obstacles. I think there there is a whole segment that doesn't
want this. I think there's going to need to be a lot of buy in
and support from podcasters we'll get that but the people
who make the apps, that's that's going to be tough, don't you
think?
I do. I do. But then if you look at the stats, you have apple at
the top, which they've already shown that they're willing to
do, you know, listening, listening behavior. Yeah,
standard Google podcasts that they have no trouble tracking
people's behavior.
Alright, so let me just stop you this there's a difference the
apple listener stats do not go to a hosting company, they do
not go to a third party. They do they so choose upon and go to
the podcaster. So so I think that's where your magic is, is
the podcaster has this information. It's easily
verifiable, and I have thoughts about it. And you can deliver
that maybe in aggregate or maybe you check a box and say okay,
share this with my advertising agency share this with my
hosting company, etc. Hmm.
Is it buildable? Can we build this?
Yes. We've already we've already built it.
Because that that the the download the download stats, I
think what I think what you proposed with the with the good
and neck and that kind of thing would would improve accuracy of
downloads by a huge margin. But then at the end of the day,
you're still just left with more accurate versions of something
that isn't accurate to begin with,
which makes everybody less money.
And that did that isn't necessarily insightful, either
better, it's an improvement, but it's not the fix.
So I mean, I'm totally in his like, again, you know, we just
because we are free speech, anti censorship, types of folks
doesn't mean doesn't mean that that every you know, that I'm,
you know, going to be against every idea that could possibly
be used to do anything like this. I mean, this is not an ad,
this is not a free speech censorship issue. This is just a
trying to be more accurate issue in a way that doesn't, it's not
harmful to anyone. And and I think that's explainable, I
mean, and defensible to really do and, you know, they're all
they're always going to be, let's just say, overcast, I
mean, Marco is probably never going to implement such a thing
like this. And that's completely fine. But that, you know,
what, why I agree with you, I agree with you. And I mean, I
know Marco, right. You know, I, we haven't talked in a while,
but I mean, we did a show together for a long time. And,
and, and he's, you know, he and I have talked about these kinds
of things, why wouldn't he implement this? Why do you think
I'm not disagreeing with you? I'm
agreeing, but I'm saying Why do you think he would say he never
would Why? Just based on what he said in the past that he's been
asked millions of times for, for greater access to his to the
status of his listeners, and he is never gonna do it. And, but
there again, that was just a, you know, but but maybe that's
maybe the thing is just not the right thing. If a private
company comes to you and says, Hey, we want to pay you for
stats, that feels a little gross. But then if there was an
open standard that said, Okay, here is how we're going to
deliver listener behavior stats. And here's the privacy stuff
that we have baked into it. And here's the way everybody
everybody can see it is completely transparent. In that
situation, maybe somebody maybe a person like Marco or Xavier,
podcast addict, maybe in that scenario, they would say, well,
this, if this is helpful to the podcast industry overall, which
is a thing we love. And we love podcasting, and we love
podcasters. Maybe this is something that we can support.
If it's open and not shady behind backroom deals.
I think we should leave it at that, because we're going to
start going in circles. But I think the the, the opinions are
very clear that if we can improve this for the industry in
general, absolutely. I'm not going to drive it. But I think
there's a lot that can be done. But someone has to write it up,
someone's got to write it up, someone's got to get going put
some stuff on the GitHub, I don't know exactly what it is.
Because I think that these types, this type of information
is going to fall out of podcasting in the future.
Anyway, I think I think that the date is just going to be there.
But the more I hear this, and the more I've convinced myself,
that advertising is not necessarily the way to go for
the future. I I've even I'm even less bullish on the industry in
that regard, as a whole unless everybody starts to talk openly.
And it's, it's we haven't gotten there yet. And the people
missing from the equation are the listeners and the
advertisers. They're the two people that we're all in the
middle of trying to connect. So we need to ask them,
I think more and more accurate statistics in this regard. are
they're important for maybe a weird for maybe a weird two step
reason. And that is with looking at the things that are happening
like wondery wondery being bought for 300 million megaphone
being bought for 200 something million all these humongous What
are essentially venture capital exit strategy plays within the
podcasting space. That is all driven by by phony statistics,
phony numbers. Yeah. And and that that process of VC money
coming in, pop, you know, popping a bunch of shows out and
then getting sold for hundreds of millions of exit strategy
that is detrimental to podcasting as a whole. Thank you
very
much. You're right.
I believe that
you're right, you're right. Absolutely right.
Because it changed. It changes the nature of what podcasting
is. I mean, look at Sirius XM, they announced Reno The last
couple of days that they're going to start doing a bunch of
podcasts, quote, unquote, they're not podcast, they're on
their app. That's not a podcast. And I know I keep harping on
this. And I sound like a broken record. And some people, some
people don't agree with me. But that that's just a show. Why is
it but the name podcast is being dumped is being used up to show
it
excited about a podcast, if it's called a podcast, and they that
was a podcast, I want to get like that. The other day I saw
somebody was talking about something that was it. I don't
even remember where it was. But it had some celebrity actor type
people in it. And they're like, listen to this amazing
fictionalized, you know, podcast, it's a story and the
person retweeted it and said, Yeah, they've just invented the
radio play. I mean, it's, it's, it's like everything that's been
done before you just call it a podcast now. And suddenly,
there's interest in it. And that's why that's the reason is,
yes. It's it calling it a podcast makes Sirius XM is doing
podcast. Wow, that's
amazing. We
got to, you know, we got to sign up for that thing
they've been doing right, I'm
bored. I'm sorry, I can't, I can't do this anymore. I
can't,
I am fucking anxious, I want to move forward, things are not
going fast enough for me, I will do everything we can to help you
with this, Dan. But I'm going to focus more I'd like the I would
like to have listener behavior for myself for my end, and I
want my listeners to know that I'm looking at when they listen
to me, and I don't need to know them individually. But I'd like
to know, on a trend. And I think that's valuable, it's valuable
to me, if it's valuable to me, it's going to be valuable to
somebody else. And we'll do that. But the last thing I want
and this is my cautionary warning. I don't want statistics
talk all day on podcast index dot social, because that's just
going to ruin all the momentum we have. It's it is backward
looking.
Bird fare,
and and i and i love your skills. And I love your
enthusiasm. And I want you in I want you in as much as possible.
And this goes for all the hosting companies. But I know
you're selling right now it's hard you're selling statistics
to your clients. Because they have been told this the story
that dog The more I get, right The more I can make I'm going to
be Joe Rogan. You know there's a there's a number of hosting
companies who use it who are in the advertising business, that's
all fine. But
why here I hear hostess is saying all the time that it's
just such a hard conversation to have with with their customers
where their customers get to a certain to the customer just
chomping at the bit on the stats, stats, I want to sell
ads, I need to get money.
They do. No one says I want to sell ads, they want to make
money. And this. This is my mission. This is an excellent,
excellent point. The podcast index mission is to make you
money. And you know if we can help the legacy, sure. But I
don't want to become the RSS industry chat group over this.
Do you know what I mean? I don't great. Sounds great. All right,
Dan,
what else do you have planned for? 2021 my friend.
This is it. Just this one thing? This is one I'm gonna be
focusing on 100 No. There's there's a lot of there's a lot
of stuff a lot of stuff happening. You know, but you'll
you guys, maybe you'll have me back and I can talk about of
course
we're gonna have you back. Yeah.
How many new shows how many new shows you started in? 2010?
Really?
The 60 by 60 network?
Ooh, two. Wow.
Did you did you launch the listen to Dan. Read a book while
you sleep?
recording. I'm recording the books. I'm recording the books
right now to do it because I want to have them I want to come
out of the gate really strong some I'm almost done. recording.
But that's coming this thank you for asking. Okay, yeah,
I'm looking forward to that one that's also want a podcast of
only your monster truck announcements.
Oh, you like that?
We need one for this show. We
need you won't let me do one. Did you hear it out? And I send
it to you.
Oh, did
you send it send it to him? Then it's Marvel. Oh,
I'll send it to him in a second.
Yeah, it's it?
I do. I do kind of crazy voice stuff. And I want to do it. Let
me do the intro for the show with that. Well, yeah, I'll send
it to you, Adam, if you approve of it. Give me a script. And
you're done.
Dude, we'll play anything. We have no production on this show.
I'm still using Martin's fiber Ender five render center.
Yeah, I will. I will
say I will just tell me what to say. And I'll say I'll send you
a sample
and I really appreciate you being open and and, and you
know, trying to push everything forward as well. It's it's very
much appreciated. Absolutely. I'm
thanks for having me on. And thanks for letting me be
involved. I love what you guys do here and I'm As much as
possible for me to support it, I want to do it.
Awesome.
And Benjamin fireside.fm and have a great 2021. Man we'll be
we'll be talking to you on podcast index dot social and
definitely we'll have you back on we'll get an update and who
knows what'll be going on. I feel good about this year. guys.
Thank
you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you
are my brother David. Dave, we'll see you. Friday.
Yeah, yeah, nothing, nothing. The board. Yeah. Perfect.
podcasting. 2.0 and we'll be back next week as we move
podcasting into the next phase.
been listening to podcasting 2.0 to visit podcast, Zach. org for
more information.