podcasting 2.0 for January 21 2022, episode number 70
testing the TAM. end of the week once again, hello developers,
users, accusers. Welcome to the official board meeting of
podcasting 2.0, where we discuss everything that happened the
past week in podcasting to point out the podcast namespace and of
course, we're all the genius oozes podcast index dot social.
I'm Adam curry here in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and in
Alabama, the man who has an endpoint for everyone, my friend
on the other end, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. J.
Jones. Developers.
Hello, developers.
It is freezing ass cold in Birmingham, Alabama.
What do you have there?
20 It was 25 this morning. It's up to 28 now
Yeah, I don't think we have much better in Texas all of a sudden
that came in what do we have? Yeah, we got 27 here.
It's gonna be it's gonna be like this all week. Yeah, not normal.
You know, the part that's that really sucks is I have my whole
house generator sitting in my driveway on top of the crate,
waiting for the guys to install it. You know, I'm very concerned
about the timing of this.
That's what I thought you're gonna say is in true prep,
professionalism, gamma generators. Also w power won't
go out.
Thank you, Dave. That's what I wanted to say. Yes, obviously, I
ordered this thing three months ago, it's been a bitch. Just
getting it here.
I've got a year of freeze dried food in the garage and we won't
have a pandemic.
Now, that actually, I would read this great article, which is
called Oh, it was it categorized people like me, which I
identified with it as Doomer was it no Doom or optimists?
That is what that is exactly what you
write. It's what I thought, like, oh, yeah, this makes a lot
of sense. identify with this, I gotta send you this article.
And, and what it says is, you know, you know, Americans kind
of Americans, by definition are pretty good. preppers just
because of the pioneering nature and our history. But, you know,
the people who are prepping with ham radios in bunkers, with the
stored food, and that that's really not the type of
preparation you want to do. You know, you need to know where the
local farmers are, you know, who are your neighbors? Really? You
need to understand self defense. I mean, all of these, like,
getting a dog. I mean, these are, these are the things that
you really might need. Yeah, I
got all that covered. I mean, you get I got the Oh, you got
Texas slim. And I've been Yeah,
I got Yeah. KMC ranchers, I got everybody's all set up. The last
bit is the electricity. No, and I've been I've been looking at
you know, I believe in electricity, you know, just DC
current that you can power stuff with and you know, it's like,
but the battery technology for any type of charging scenario
that will last for more than an hour really is inherently
prohibitive, and it's just a pain in the ass. And I've been
looking at, you know, old fashioned batteries, basically a
water tower. You know, we have a little a little solar array that
shoots water up into the tower, and then you use the water
pressure as new as needed to drive a turbine that can power
your house. I've never heard of this. But I mean, you've heard
of hydropower.
Yeah, so this so you're you're pushing the the solar array
Yeah, put the makes enough juice to push the water up into the
tower? It goes
into it trickles it. Yeah, exactly trickles it up there.
And it comes back down gravity feeds turn the turbine.
So you basically have a battery. You're storing energy.
It's a mechanical battery. Yes. Exactly. Yeah,
this is the kind of stuff that I'm in this the other way is
have you ever seen those beautiful windmills? The it's
called the air aero motor. It's kind of the aluminum look that
you see on farmlands all over the country with a weather vane
yeah with the weather. So that's another way you can pump the
water up into the tower.
How much did the like what are those set you back like that?
That thing? Is that like 100 grand or is it Oh no.
What one of the one of those air motors? Yeah, yeah, this thing?
Oh, no, I priced that. And I think it's a couple grand. Let
me see if that you know, it depends on how big you want it
to be. Yeah, but they're everywhere. I'd have to look at
it. Air air motor or some crap like that has a weird here. Air
it was resolved in New Mexico that they tend they seem to be a
lot of those in New Mexico. Yeah, are driving through there
a couple years ago. There's no wind here in Alabama. That's
available. Like dependability, sir.
Oh, well, we got plenty of wind out here. Let me see order
yours. Okay, let me just take just since we're since we're
doing it, let me see if I can find a price for you. Yeah.
Yeah, complete windmill 3700
Oh, that's not bad. And then of course, only what a what a solar
array with set up.
And then you have then of course, you can go crazy with
your tower, how high you want that? Obviously,
the Alabama Power our power company has they've, they've
made sure that none of these schemes actually work because
they charge they charge you a surcharge.
Yeah, that's what California is doing now. Yeah, it used to be
you could sell your energy back to the grid. Now they're taxing
people because they have too much energy.
That's the way it is here.
What a scam they really scammed everybody on that is horrible.
Or it's the same scam as the electric cars, you know, ever
get everybody to go electric car for years and years and years.
And then, and then all of a sudden, shocker. You realize
you're not getting enough tax revenue from gasoline. So
let's tax the EVS tax levy, shocker. Hey, man, why did you
guys just print it? It seems to be so much easier. And it's
working so well. It's working. So, you know, there's two things
I want to talk about, first of all, just the realization, I had
it just the other day that when I was in the 70s, like earlier,
like 7172, I remember my parents talking about inflation. But
they didn't talk about it the way we talk about it today. So
today, we say Oh, it's 7% inflation beef is more
expensive. And you know, and the beef is doubled and gas is
expensive. And you know, it's based on the consumer price
index. But, but that's what we consider inflation is consumer
prices going up. But back in the day, this was after, you know,
of course, we were 40 years or 50 years into the Federal
Reserve Act. And, and the idea that we were off the gold
standard. And inflation literally meant that the Federal
Reserve and the Treasury would be creating about 2% More money
every year. That's what that's what it meant. And everyone
understood that. And everyone was always concerned about
inflation, not concerned about the prices rising, because that
would be the actual effect of inflating the money supply,
inflation. And somewhere along the lines, we got psi opt into
believing it's something else. And then you look at the money
supply of the US dollar 40% was created in the last 18 months.
Yeah, yeah, it's so you know, people don't I don't think a lot
of people stop to think about what inflation does. And there's
a lot of good information about this within the Austrian world
is what inflation what inflation has, is not simply rate rising
prices because of a glut of money. That's, that's just the
technical. Like, that's how it happens. That's the mechanism.
But then the effect it has is devastating on on on an economy
and on a at a personal level level. Yeah. Cuz what happens is
you it for when you have inflation that outpaces savings
in any way or wage increases wages. Yeah, it forces each
person to take more risk in order to get in order to keep
pace. Yeah, because you know, you have to save, but you can't
just simply save you have to save in ever increasingly risky
ways.
Yeah, like so you can crypto. That's where we're at now.
You got, you know, a 88 year old grandmas who are having to do or
having to watch the stock market. Yeah. And that's because
of inflation. I mean, Grandma should not have to worry about
the stock market, she should be able to just have put her money
in the bank for all these years and have something just to
retire.
Yeah, remember certificate of deposit? Yeah, those.
Those are cute. But
But that, of course, is the follow on effect from cheap
money, etc. And then you know, that cheap money pushing up
stocks, and then you what you're seeing now is you're seeing that
start to unwind, because the system is in trouble anyway. So
I just wanted to point out that it's good for everybody, I
think, to think from time to time about what inflation really
means and not just, you know, this, what it results in,
but the smartest people in the world.
And the other one was this, the news about Netflix and I think
that will affect podcasting to a significant degree. So I want to
bring a get hammered the other day their stock was down like
20% Yeah.
24 this morning. Oh my gosh. And the reason is, they poured
billions of dollars. I think it might have been 5020 or $25
billion last year into content. And they had of course they had
hits Bridger Too many hits there. As I've always said, when
you have a network, you're in a hits based business, you got to
have a lot of poop for people to kind of blow through until you
get your next hit. This is what it is. I've run networks, it's
very hard to do this in their prospectus, poop poop. Oh, yeah,
no, we have this just right there, it says one of our risk
is we will have to make some poopoo or, or buy poop.
Now, there's plenty of poop on Netflix that scrolled it. But
what did
what didn't carry over is the increase in users into this into
this first quarter from last quarter. And of course, you
know, part of this has to do with people thinking differently
about their lives in general, but you know, maybe not having
as much home time, etc. But it really freaked the market out.
And what you'll hear everyone talk about is the TAM. Ta M, and
the TAM is the total addressable market. And so, so they're
looking at the entire market for people who are interested in
streaming services, and it looks saturated. It looks like okay,
you know, and, you know, we'll see what the fallout will be
from that, because some companies will not give a shit
at all. But you know, I think Disney is also banking on it.
You know, Disney has less poop, you know, they have evergreen
poop, which the kids love, you know, everyone loves and you
know, and they do have some some massive franchises. But I think
what this will result in is far less podcast deals to try and
you know, this is the business model of networks and the hits
business, is you sign a whole bunch of shows, and then you
find the one hit and it's going to end you're going to turn it
into a TV show. I think these days may be numbered.
Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's completely rational at that
think that makes a whole lot of sense. Because that number,
that's what I've been thinking about. Everything has become
about growth. And that's, again, another effect of inflation,
everything, every industry is growth, growth, growth. And so
it like what happens when you run up against that? That wall
of market saturation, where you literally can't grow anymore?
And who knows where that is? That's a magic number that
nobody knows for every for each product. Nobody understands what
that number is going to be. I I'm sorry. No, I was just saying
what? What happens? I don't really know what happens.
Everything just seems like Netflix seems to just take a
hard U turn and go straight back down. Yeah,
because there's no growth. That's the problem. If there's
no growth, then then there's no interest in holding that stock.
And, as I've maintained before, you just look at the numbers in
my mind, it's a Ponzi scheme. You keep pouring billions of
dollars. I mean, they do $8 billion, a quarter or something,
but they spend out spend on creating poop. Yeah, and this
is, and this was, this is part of the beauty of the kind of
the, I would say, a lot of what's happening with people
signing podcasts is oh, you know, this could be one of these
could be a hit one of these could be a TV show. And there's
been many examples of that. And now that's going to decelerate,
there's no doubt about it.
Okay, so let's just, I'm gonna dig into this for one for one
minute. So what about, let's just put a reality on it, let's
just say, Spotify. They really, to me, it looks like they have
essentially, Joe Rogan is the cash cow call her daddy is? I
don't know something. And I don't know if we have numbers on
on that show or not whether it was a deal that dude, they don't
even give numbers on podcasting income. It's insignificant at
this point. I don't think Joe Rogan is a cash cow, either.
For that, see, I'm thinking about shows that are just simply
profitable.
Yeah, well, he's profitable from one from one way, specifically,
is what is it? What is the what is the acquisition cost of a
user? And so if, if the 100 million dollar number is right,
I don't know, it's never really been confirmed, it's just kind
of accepted, then that would be $10 a user, because they claim
they have 11 million people who listen to the Joe Rogan show. So
I'll throw out a million and just keep it at 10. So cost him
10 bucks to get to get 10 million users per user. And that
user theoretically pays $5 per month or more, either in in
subscription fee or in advertising revenue.
But point being that if you have if you're that top heavy, and
you have one, essentially one hit, or maybe one and a half hit
stop,
they have one I think it's just I think it's wrong. And I don't
think anything else is considered a hit. What if
I mean if Rogan, that's everybody's everybody seems to
be befuddled by the fact that even the 270 scientists, quote
unquote, that wrote a letter hasn't had an effect. Right? You
know, that's PBS economics. They can't have an effect. If they
were to do anything with Rogan. That's it. It's game over for
the podcast. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah.
Then Then it'll be it'll be it'll be it'll close down. It'll
be over right away. You're correct. And
the same thing worries me on the non hit side when it comes to
just the regular podcast advertising. Because every month
I look at that, at that chart of the biggest ad spends in all at
the topic and you do that every Monday. You do that every time
James publishes do
you put on assless chaps and beat yourself while you do? I
don't know why I said that. Dave, I'm sorry. That was
inappropriate.
I'm surprised you knew I had so yeah, let me better help. is the
number one advertiser every time and I'm like, Okay, if this is
this thing goes belly up. It's game over to me like it's just
what is better? Is that a mental health to health app app? Yeah.
Do you know Do you know how much money companies like that make?
My buddy was asked to be CEO of mindful I think mindful is
another one of these apps on
this are my Yeah
$2 billion a quarter $2 billion a quarter in revenue.
How much profit though? No, oh,
it's profitable. Oh, it's profitable. Yeah, okay, cuz
you're just it's just people people and technology and a
little bit of technology to connect them
I bet what they did was they figured out that there were so
many people coming out of college with psychology degrees
that had no prospects for a job that just funnel them all into
this app and pay him nothing and
it's worse than that. You know, this anti work thing is being
pushed everywhere it may even be them doing that who the hell
knows but this healing communities and all this kind of
stuff oh yeah there's there's a lot going on. People are
convinced they're very very troubled
Yes, hey, where are we with the with everything this week? I got
nothing on the list which means I'm pretty happy
Oh, I'm a disaster over here. I got Yeah, well
you got like real work stuff.
No, I'm I mean just on the on my prep side I've got for the first
time in six in 70 episodes I do not have my notes written out
beforehand and they're actually list like I usually list them
out on a write it out on legal pad on legal pad and it's
instead of spread out over like four different pieces of paper
and another pad but because we get I got so much to talk about.
I mean, the this week we had another ABS started another
purge of Spreaker stuff to match the anchor stuff and I don't
even think we talked about the anchor purge last week.
No we didn't and and along with that also comes the breakage of
their M for a files I think which I was reading about Marco
was
an anchor pretty happy about that. Well, this the whole I
love this though, because this this is confirmation of my
theory that Spotify wants to ditch anchor as a podcast
platform. It's it's a it seems like a money suck. It's it's
not. It is not I don't think that they even like it anymore.
I think the getting rid of RSS feeds as the default was the
first step. And each step along the way can they make one of
these moves, confirms that anchor is on Anchor is just a
dead man walking, I don't think it's a long term viable option
for them anymore. And I think they want they would they would
love to just see it disappear. They can't they really can't at
this moment. But they can make it as unattractive as possible
so that they continue to draw less and less interest in the
platform.
Was this not one day they'll kill it? Was this not there?
They're on ramp into podcasting direct into Spotify. That was
not the the concept there.
Well, the original concept Yes, yes that that was the concept.
But but but anchor came out of social audio. And that was the
previous thing was that you could like have a social network
based on audio snippets.
Oh, gosh. I mean, look,
do you remember that? Yeah. That's where and they all they
did was add RSS feeds to that guy or podcast. That's what you
have so much garbage on there like a typical on about that. A
typical unlistenable podcast that got purged two weeks ago.
Do
you have an example? Did you bring one today?
I had so many examples and I did not bring any but like one of
them was I posted some on the mastodon one of them was just
like I did 15 seconds of a guy talking about poop Wait a minute
background soundtrack.
I have to get not so you purge a poop cast? That's I don't know
Dave. I'm I'm questioning your choices here.
It was like it was like 15 seconds of a Gmail. Hey, this is
my first podcast and Yeah,
hold on. I gotta find this man. Where do you when did you post
this? I'm looking for it now.
I don't know a couple of weeks ago. Is the poop is the poop
cast. Yeah, no, it was it was fantastic. But it was it was
example after example, after example of that kind of stuff.
Some like a 12 year old girl being like we go. Oh, this is
cool. And that was it.
Hold on. Listen out what I feel. I owe you go play the trailer.
Alright. Just slap
Okay. That's it. That's the entire podcast. But that's not
the poop cast. I don't know where the poop went. There was a
bunch of poop ones. One of them had a poop emoji in the title.
Yeah, why do people do that? Oh, no, I know. I'll do a poop cat.
Actually, I know CRISPR shears, was one of the OG podcasters key
did the poop cast back in the day. This was when we were now.
So podcasting started a little bit of lore for you. And then I
want to bring our guests in who's thinking what the hell
that I join up for here.
He's like, I'm on the wrong path.
It's this thing on this was the days when we were you know, we
didn't really have studios or equipment. You know, I was
building some stuff and trying to figure it all out. But I was
doing sound sound seeing tours I called them I'd walk around with
binaural mics and you know, just different stuff a little
different from your traditional radio. I'd go flying and and
people doing different types of things. And crisper sheers did
the poop cast and and he would literally talk about his poop.
And at one point, and this is what I knew podcasting would
take off. And this was just the best medium ever. He got on the
roof of his house, made his wife put a target below on the grass.
And he was awesome. I got to find that episode. It was
legendary. There was just something about it. I mean,
think he had to be there. Yesterday typical poop stories.
But it was me.
It was dry for sticking around.
Oh, yeah. Oh, no, no, she got a medal for that. But yeah, yeah.
Everyone knew Chris. He's nuts.
I'm assuming that the pot the album art for this podcast was
the Bristol stool index. No, I forget. Nobody knows what that
is. You can Google it.
I forgot what he had his art. Anyway, where were we? Oh, about
growth. Growth. Yeah. Growth. Growth. Yeah. I was gonna say
one final thing about that. Yeah, sure. So a true just kind
of gets into growth, podcasting and inflation. If I were to
track the past 10 years of the no agenda show, which is a value
for value podcast, just like podcasting 2.0, the podcast and
the entire project. Year over year, people have given us about
between 12 and 18% more year over year. And as we're having
this conversation, I'm thinking over a 10 year span, it's not
that people appreciated us more. It's just that the dollar
devalued inflation. Yes, that is inflation. Because I'm not like
living high on the hog any higher than I was last year.
Right. So there, you know, I think there's your inflation, it
may actually be that Hi. My situation has changed some you
know, at some points throughout 10 years, Mike, my overhead is
changed. I've reduced it significantly. marrying a woman
with money helps. She also which when I say
that we're definitely you know, we, my wife married me for my
money. But they that when you look around the industry and all
the all the index funds and all the things that are like provide
a quote unquote good return, whether they're in the market or
whether they're in the equities or Whatever it is, like when all
of them return roughly the same percentage. That's not That's
not quality of product or investment. Primarily, that's
inflation.
Exactly, yeah. And what should we bring our guests in so we can
chat some more podcasting?
Yeah, let's let's turn the corner and stop trying to you
know, talk about trying to be Horowitz and
although I think our our view of the market is a lot more
entertaining, yes, because we bring in poop. It's just how
it's supposed to go. Today's guests in the boardroom are
assessed or if you will, as someone whose work I followed
before podcasting 2.0 Because I was a user of his product. And
it's dynamite and he has an incredible niche of the
industry. Very happy to have him here with us. Please welcome the
the founder developer of pod LP Thomas Barrasso.
Thank you excited to be here. And it's uh, it's pretty funny.
I can relate to the poop casts I had a connection when I was an
undergrad I actually studied Viking poop.
Viking poop. Okay. All right. This is something you can study.
This is an icon, you get credit college credit in this course.
Yeah, I'll give you the LOL my thesis version. So basically,
you know, Vikings and their their livestock settled in areas
of Greenland and Iceland. And they they pooped, of course,
just like all of us. And now those poop washed into water
systems. And you can measure them over time through
sedimentology. You can take sediment cores and lakes, and
you can measure the concentration of deagle
biomarkers and tell where people were when throughout history.
Wow. This is like counting the rings on a tree. We can we can
count the poop rings.
Exactly.
So what were people eating? Sorry, what was that? I was
gonna ask what people were eating. What were the Vikings
eating?
Oh, that that's a harder question. That's the next that's
the next grad students project.
Oh, okay. All right. Dave, you had a question? I'm sorry.
I'm just No, I'm just gonna. Just a comment and observation,
if you will. I did not. I did not come into this podcast today
expecting to hear the term FICO biomarkers. That was not on my
list of all this, I thought I would hear well, this
is the most diverse boardroom in the industry today. We don't. So
Thomas, tell us about about your app and and how it started. And
maybe just give us a little background. So everybody
understands exactly what you're doing. Because it's I think it's
one of the most important apps for podcasting future.
That that's quite the superlative. I appreciate it.
But yeah, I'm happy to give people some context. I know,
it's, as you said, it's a pretty interesting niche, at least I
think so. So yeah, at the start of the pandemic, you know, like
a lot of people, everything shut down, I didn't have a commute.
So I just had a bunch of free time. And I, one of the one of
the many items on my infinite backlog of tech ideas that I
could get around to at some point was to build a podcast app
for feature phones, because I wanted to use one for going on
camping trips. But you know, with car commutes and stuff, you
get to drive to a campsite, I didn't want to be without
something to listen to for that time. And I didn't want to deal
with the hassle of like downloading a bunch of mp3 is
and sideloading them before I go. So yeah, I ended up building
the app for myself. But then as I went through the process, I
realized the market was a lot bigger than I would have ever
imagined that at the start of pandemic there was no podcast
app available for the platform, then I'm on iOS. And then yeah,
I put it together pretty quickly. Got it out there and
then then kept iterating on it. But yeah, for people who aren't
aware, think about like your standard old Motorola Razor flip
phone, not the new one that's touchscreen and Android but like
the old school with a t nine buttons that you click around
basically they're they're those but you know these days, they're
much more capable they've got 3g 4g, they can stream audio video
that come pre installed with YouTube and Google and Facebook.
And and now you know there's penalty for listening to
podcasts.
Here's the irony Thomas. I was a feature phone user. Prior to the
pandemic I was sick and tired of being tracked I'd gotten rid of
all iPhones I never was really into Android and I got the what
is it? Which Alcatel Alcatel go flip three the Alcatel go flip
three from T Mobile. I liked it because it had a hotspot. We did
the basic things. You know texting of course is a pain in
the ass. It does have you know, predictive text was still
painful but it's okay because I was just living my life I was
doing okay. And that's when I found pod LP I'm like this is so
dynamite because I was I was trying to get my hands on the
geo phone which is the geo phone which is big in India like that.
That's even better one I was you know, just to get beyond the
form factor of the flip phone. And and so I was really enjoying
the pocket cast up. And then the irony is we decided during the
pandemic, oh, let's start podcasting. 2.0 I got so busy, I
had to text more. And then I had to get a smartphone again. It's
truly ironic.
Yeah, that definitely happen. And I can totally relate to it.
I've actually got two of those geophones, the one and the two,
including the one that looks like a Blackberry with the
keyboard. But even that I can tell you it's not. It's not the
texting machine that you janky. So So
janky is jank. So, um, so you're in the in the Chi store for chi,
iOS, I mean, how many downloads? How many people are using this
thing?
Yes. So in the last year and a half or so we're on two markets,
the Chi store globally, and the geo store in India is definitely
the largest market and we've got over 9 million installs around
the world. In 75 countries. Oh,
you're the biggest podcast app there is brother. You get? Wow,
it's a large market. You know, to put it into perspective, QoS,
I think has about 150 million monthly active users around the
world. Sure. And they only the you know, this is this is pretty
crazy. But they're only 8% of the global feature phone market
worldwide. I think people especially in Western markets
forget that that's the largest device category in the world.
So how long until we can do value for value on on one of
these phones?
I've definitely thought about you know, I keep adding some of
the podcasting 2.0 features. But until there's a Bitcoin wallet,
I don't know if I'm going to be the one that's got the time to
build it. It's web based. So there's probably some way that
you could connect it to an existing service.
Oh, man, we have we have it all set up for expertise. We can say
we have it all we have everything for you. All you need
to do is just connect.
Right Dave? Yeah, that's it. Just just as simple as that
just connect. We got it all set for you. What's your problem?
It's connect already.
Look, tell me this Thomas? Or is his chi West you're like So is
it your daily driver? I mean, you live on this phone.
I don't anymore. To be honest, I similar similar to Adam.
Basically, after launching this and having a bunch to deal with
it's pretty difficult to navigate them on a regular
basis. If you're going to be texting a lot you know, it's
fine. If you're gonna be doing calls, you're consuming audio
and stuff. But I flipped between them. I've got I don't even know
like a dozen of these powers. Now I got the new go flip for
definitely
bestest. So I'm, this is so cool. Because, you know, we had
Who do we have on? Last week, we had the RSS calm guys on. Yeah.
And they're storming the, the Latin American market. And you
know, this is everyone's dicking around here, you know, waiting
for Spotify to buy him. And meanwhile, this whole market is
opening up. It's very, it's very exciting.
So what do you think Thomas? Is India? Is that clearly the
biggest market for chi? And for me, no NGO? And that is that is
that clearly like head and shoulders above the rest?
Yeah, absolutely. India is definitely in a in a category on
its own and in large part to do and what they've done for that
industry really rapidly, you know, growing from from 2g to
4g, you know, over 100 million devices activated in like two or
three years. So it's absolutely massive. And for us an important
market, because it's one of the largest Anglophone markets,
right? Most podcasts are still available in English and English
is still a major language in India.
Yeah, that was gonna be my next question is how do you handle
your biggest market being a, you know, a particular country or
region? Do you? Do you take that into account? When you feature
podcasts within your directory? Do you say, Okay, well, you
know, here's our biggest market. So I'm going to mostly put this
type of content as sort of up front.
Yeah, so we vary the content on the app based on, you know, a
bunch of different parameters, the language, the country,
things like that. And obviously, India is one that we definitely
prioritize when we're sourcing new content. You know, it being
the largest market, but also, I think, a lot of people in
Western audience, I think maybe there's a lack of appreciation
for the diversity there, you know, with 1.3 billion people
and, you know, there's probably like a dozen different regional
languages that each have almost 100 million speakers. Yeah, it's
definitely like it's it's a very varied market, depending on
where you are in India. And our our audience is predominantly
rural and pretty diverse. So it's really interesting one to
work with.
Thomas, who's this we you talk of?
It's the I don't know, the hypothetical. We,
I mean, in a way, is it just your soil? I'm leading towards a
question. You have nine you have 9 million of anything you have a
business, technically, is are you making money in any way? Are
you? Do you have any plans? Are you just keeping this as a fun
app? I mean, how do you look at this? Where do you stand in
relation into it.
Yeah, that's a good question. So most of our revenue comes from
podcast sponsorships. So anybody who's interested in growing
their audience globally, we can promote their content, the
number one spots on our homepage, and it shows up the
first thing that users see that's something that can
generate often many 1000s of lessons in a single day. So
that's a definitely the, you know, the key prime spot for us,
we can also promote content anywhere else in the app, we can
promote it in category pages search, you know, we can promote
on other parts of the homepage. So there's there's definitely
ways to promote content and that that's really been how we've
been able to afford to grow and scale
now, is this your you have a day job? Or is this your, your full
time occupation?
Yeah, I have a day jobs. I do this basically, you know, early
in the morning, and in the evenings or weekends.
Let your true your true podcasting. 2.0. Yeah. Not
sustainable,
afraid, afraid to come into poverty? What's wrong with you?
Yes. Hey, that's cool, man. So I would definitely be interested
in in buying a position for one or two of my podcast. So send me
your rate card, I'd love to take a look at it. For sure. Yeah,
that's that's when I mean that I think that's a really under,
especially with value for value. There's so many opportunities,
app developers can be taking advantage of with content.
People like when when the when a bill and the wolf released their
their value for value album on Christmas. I mean, I just missed
the, you know, I missed the promotion from Oscar Mary, you
know, I missed the breeze hyping it, you know, and that all could
have been settled with value block splits. I mean, there's
just so much that we could do with so I love an
entrepreneurial developer who's saying, hey, you know, I can I
can make some dough this way? And, and build a business?
Maybe? Yeah,
no, I think that's a good way of putting it. And for us, I think
it's very organic, right, we get to help podcasters connect with
a new audience. And we get to help, you know, an audience of
predominantly first time internet users find, you know,
new engaging content, but they can learn from that they can be
entertained by so it's it's definitely something that's
been, you know, really, really awesome to watch as the you
know, it's been over a year.
Now. I want to ask you about your, your developer chops here,
and when what you got going on, so what I know, in iOS is mostly
html5 environment. So how do you develop an app for that? What is
your development environment look like? And know that I have
no experience other than I downloaded the simulator the
other day to try to get the pod LP up and running in a car
simulator and failed epically to do it. It was a horrible
disaster. But like, how, what is what is the language that you
that you run in? What does that look like? And and then what
tools do you use?
Yes, that's the interesting question. Because it's, it's
definitely been a challenge. I think it's easier today. But
yeah, the simulator, I wouldn't recommend if anybody's looking
to get into the that that area, I would say, just get a hardware
device, they're pretty affordable, you can get them in
the US for, I don't know, as low as like 2030 bucks for some of
the really crappy cheap ones and some of the nicer ones around
100. So yeah, I would say get a hardware device, you know, don't
waste your time in a simulator. And then, honestly, it's been a
large part of self discovery. So there's documentation, of
course, I find the documentation to be pretty incomplete as it
often is a path and actually just sort of like, you get a
device you you poke around, you learn how the API's work, you
have to do a lot of testing to see which which devices have
which API's where and when. And, yeah, yeah, so it's a lot of
self discovery. In terms of the environment, though. It's for
Penelope in particular, it's all JavaScript. It's a spelt single
page app. We built in particular and spelt because I wanted the
app to be really small, because these are pretty resource
constrained devices. So the entire app with all of its
resources, images, JavaScript styles, etc, is just under just
over 400 kilobytes. Now,
I can hear Steven be screaming at the top of his lungs. Yeah,
that the the svelte evangelists may rival only the rust
evangelists in their ability to constantly talk about svelte
that's, that's been my experience. What so what is your
so you test all on hardware? What is what's the biggest sort
of pain point or constraint that you're that you deal with is a
screen size. And the variance of all the different devices having
different screens is a storage bandwidth lack of a keyboard and
low memory like what what is your biggest obstacle that
you're kind of constantly battling?
Yeah, that's a that's a really interesting question to tackle.
I think there's definitely a lot of challenges some of the ones
that you seem apparent, like screen sizes are actually not
really all that challenging to navigate. And all the ios
devices have the exact same screen size, same screen
resolution. So they largely have the same hardware, which
definitely helped standardize things. More than more than
anything between odd castings, lack of uniformity and chi, Wess
lack of uniformity. It feels like an early days Android,
there's a lot of fragmentation. And so you end up having to
build a lot of checks in place to say like, if this is
available, do this thing. And the same goes for podcasts,
right? Like, I think I was looking at using the enclosure
Length attribute as something I could display for size of
podcast, there. Yeah. But even even sometimes it's set to zero.
I found somewhere it's set to like one or two or three, which
it looks like a real number. But that's not you can't have I
think I looked this up the mp3 header size is at least like 24
bytes or something.
Welcome to Dave's nightmare.
Yeah, I had an email from somebody the other day saying,
Hey, I've just started using API and I've noticed a bug a lot of
direct, a lot of the durations in the results are coming back
to zero. And like, well, that's because they're not in the feet.
Yep.
Yeah, that sounds about right. So between iOS and podcasting,
it's definitely been a challenge dealing with the lack of of
completeness and uniformity.
So what are you what have you implemented tag wise? Have you
done the alternate enclosures?
Yes, we have alternate enclosures. There's, I have to
go look how we got funding location person. Wow. There's
just recently I think it's, we've got transcripts. So those
actually show up both live, you can have them, or you can read
them all.
Dynamite. Well, he searched them.
You can't search them yet. Yeah. Next next iteration. Yeah,
I use that every single day. Every day. I'm like, Wow, man, I
think, you know, here's my process, like, oh, there's
something some news item. And then first of all, go to Bing
it.io, which indexes all of my show notes. I'll find Okay, I
think was this episode, then I'll go to that episode, pop
open the transcript and search, and then click listen. And then
I can find a clip. I can find almost anything. It's as a
research tool. Unbelievable.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. That I think Search Plus chapters would be super
powerful. Definitely, definitely something I've got on the
backlog. But I don't think these devices come at search by
default. So it's a pretty non standard interface to begin
with.
Right. Right.
Well, that's, that's an interesting question. And so
yeah, right. Well, so two questions on that on that topic.
One is, how do you manage this, this lack of a keyboard? Because
everybody, I'll tell you, I've known two people so far, well,
including with Adam three, I've known three people so far
personally, that have tried to go daily driver with a phone
like the Alcatel. And the thing that always makes them bail out,
is the is how difficult it is to text. And so the keyboard lack
the lack of an onscreen keyboard, or a physical keyboard
is like this deal killer for a lot of people. Do you do
anything special to try to make it easier for people to do like
autocomplete search terms or anything like that? Like, how do
you? How do you deal with that?
So we don't have autocomplete yet with search, unfortunately,
it is still pretty. It's t nine, it's still a pretty manual
process for actually typing stuff out. So I don't think
there's anything unique in that front. But I would say the rest
of the application is actually probably pretty comparable in
terms of discoverability for what you'd expect other apps,
right? Scrolling is not really that different than holding the
down key. It's really not all that, you know, it's basically
like a TV interface. If you think about TV remote, it's
basically got the D pad navigation. And that's what
these phones are, you can you can discover pretty easily, but
you go to try to, you know, search for something on Netflix,
and it's a pain, you got to go through this keyboard and you
move in left and right. It's the same interface problem. I don't
think there's anything unique that we've solved in that that
front.
Yeah. Do you have OPML import? Is somebody coming from another
app?
No, not yet. And it was mostly because it was the first and for
a long time, the only apps that we were the only other one out
there. But it's definitely something that I like, like a
lot of things. I've got a long list to get around the building.
Yeah. And one thing, one of the things on the search thing, as
far as indexing do is everything's as html5 Is
everything just local storage or index DB or something like that
on the on on the app is that what you're dealing with for
storage?
Yeah, there's a couple of different storage classes, those
are obviously available. The only caveat that I would add to
that is you have to be pretty cautious and conservative about
what you store on these phones, because they often have very
limited storage capacity, you're rarely guaranteed to have more
than a couple Meg's at most. And sometimes you don't even get
that. So you have to be, you have to have the app work,
regardless of whether you can store and then for downloads.
It's a whole different system. They have a Kiowa specific API
for creating files. And we do that to stream podcasts in
chunks and then save them locally, to, you know, an mp3
file on the device. And then you can play that back.
What is the typical bandwidth in India? From from one of these
phones? What kind of throughput are they getting?
Yeah, they're all 4g LTE. So they're pretty capable. They can
on the low end, I think they're the minimum bar that they set is
something around 10 megabits and then on the upper end, they can
they can get to three digit sometimes.
You know, India being such a huge market. There's got to be a
way that I can sell you curry calm for way too much money.
Hey, podcast, curry calm is hot. People
know, the Brit, the British would buy that before the the
I've had inquiries.
I've had inquiries. Yes, I got pretty far one one time.
But your whole world would call I know.
There's so much tied to curry calm, I would be so screwed.
Yeah. It's not a good idea. You're right.
Are you using the API at all? Thomas? The podcast index API?
Yes, well, I actually just added it like, a couple of weeks ago,
maybe over the Christmas break to the backend. It's the first
time. So it's kind of funny. When I first launched pod LP,
one of the things I was doing is basically following my
curiosity. I had no idea how podcasting works. And then I
learned about RSS, and there's like, Oh, where do you get these
feeds. And I learned about directories and indexes and
stuff. And I sort of like organically discovered over
time, but then you guys came out a few months after I launched,
and it's like, Damn, if you guys had, if the timing got
differently, I wouldn't bother building all this stuff. But in
retrospect, I'm glad I did. Because there's so many unique
capabilities that we need. But you know, I don't think podcast
index is doing and frankly, nobody is doing because we're
the only ones who have to care about that stuff.
Yeah, that that really is the best way to go is to have have
your own back end. And that way, you can sort of take the raw
data coming out of an API like packets, index, and then and
then like, filter it into what you need for your app. Yeah,
that's definitely the what do
you know the funding tag is cool that you have that in there that
just I just happen to know that Pay Pal will not accept money
from India? So we've had people tried to send us donations, not
to the show, but to no agenda from India, and always gets
rejected. Not Allowed from your country.
Oh, that's interesting. I mean, yeah, they surface basically
just as links, and there is no Pay Pal out on iOS. So I don't,
I don't know how many people, it's probably not the right
market. If you're looking for a large volume of people funding
via PayPal,
I'm not known as something I should ask more developers. What
do you do to track behavior? Do you track behavior of your
users? How they're using it? Do you extrapolate that? Do you use
that in your in your iterations?
Yeah, so we get a very basic set of analytics, in terms of
tracking behavior, you know, it's it's event space, so we can
track like, you know, how many subscriptions are coming in, how
many listens, things like that, because it's all you know, the
API that we control every time, like, we've got a standard URL
that you get for every time you want to get an enclosure URL,
and it just redirects to the enclosure URL. And so that
allows us to just count the number of listens that we get,
and track, like, you know, what podcast is being listened to?
That means that when we work with sponsors, we can tell them,
you know, if you run a campaign, how many I mean, listen, how
many downloads, how many subscribers do you get from your
campaign? What's the conversion look like? Now, but it is pretty
basic, you know, it's not like we, and it's all anonymous, so
there's no signup, there's no email, there's no phone number
that you provide. So yeah, pretty basic, anonymous
analytics.
Yeah. What I was thinking more is, you know, I think some of
these SDKs that, you know, that are out there for iOS and
Android, which I think are developed by Facebook. They put
all kinds of interesting metrics in there that you can see how
people are scrolling, what they're stopping on how fast
they're going, does that available for iOS at all?
Definitely not provided by iOS, there might be some sort of web
framework that you could use. I tend to err on the side of being
a little bit more mindful of privacy and security. So I don't
know that I would want to be that invasive. But uh, yeah, I
think it's definitely if there's something interesting that I
could glean from it and do it in a way that doesn't hurt
performance and doesn't impact privacy, then I'd consider it
interesting that doesn't exist at all. And by the way, I'm very
happy. I think that's that's the the worst part of app
development is the only way you can really understand how people
are using your app is by installing that SDK. And of
course, that reports everything to Facebook.
Yeah, the to limit tree all the telemetry telemetry. That's
the word I was looking for. Yeah. Wow, man. That's
congratulations, Thomas's that's really that's, that's quite an
accomplishment. But I just love that you saw that, that
opportunity. And and I saw it was it's a great piece of
software. I haven't used it for a bit, because I haven't used
that phone. But it's really it's a it's a great app.
Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate it. And, you know, I think it's
anything I can do to help educate folks. I think people
forget that, you know, just how, how important this market is,
right? I mean, even in the United States, there's still
millions of people using feature phones every day. And I don't
think it's going away anytime soon. Some people use it by
choice. And some people, you know, that's that's their,
that's their, their limitations are the capabilities, you know,
my grandparents had flip phones, and that they would never
graduate to a smartphone you couldn't pay them to.
Yeah, since it's such a new market, is there an opportunity
here to promote? Dave, we should probably talk to Buzzsprout and
RSS COMM And those guys about is there an opportunity to promote
podcasting 2.0 authoring features, so that, you know,
this relatively emerging new market can start out of the gate
with some modern shit. And you know, and not just kickstart
that because it seems, you know, that if creators are, are aware
of the app, and they must be, you know, if there's some
messaging, they're like, hey, you know, you can do better you
can do better than the West.
Yeah, that's a good point, something like that. I think
everybody is so locked in on, you know, on the standard
smartphone platforms that when you think when you imagine a
podcast app, you don't imagine in your head, most average,
humans are not going to imagine, at least in the US. They're not
gonna imagine something that looks like a Kiowa screen. No,
they're they're definitely not. But if you do, it sort of
changes your perspective on things sort of like being aware
of bandwidth limitations. Yeah. Makes you see a need for
something like alternate enclosure. I mean, on that sort
of vein, Thomas Woody, what is the biggest thing that you can
think of when it comes to the way feeds are constructed? Or
delivered? That that is a problem for what you're trying
to do? Like? What do you constantly run up against when
you're transmogrifying a feed a podcast into something that can
run in display efficiently on a small screen like that?
Yeah, I think it always comes down to size at the end of the
day, whether that's the size of the RSS enclosure, like you
mentioned. So having alternative enclosures is huge. You know, it
makes so much sense to have adaptable, bit rich just because
devices like this, and probably other devices worldwide, even
your smartphone on 3g doesn't really need to be streaming the
highest bitrate, it's going to cause jank and lag and
buffering, it'd be better to stream a lower bitrate and
stream it smoothly. Same with podcast images, that's an
exciting one. For me, the ability to have, you know, a
right sized thumbnail that I don't have to generate and push
myself would be really powerful. Everybody's posting 3000 by 3000
images for the latest iPhone, which is great, but that'll
crash one of these phones, you can't display that. That's 1/10
the size. So those two are powerful. And then just thinking
about and being mindful for like the length of titles. I noticed
this. Like I was listening to pod land recently. And it's
great, but some of their titles are like like in line
and scrolled off on my screen to on on pod friend I saw the same
thing
is about buffer overflow the stack
like that. Yeah. And it wraps around to the next line goes
over time lines and shit. Yeah. That's fun. Hey, we're in a
burgeoning industry here. So it's all a fresh for everybody.
Yeah,
exactly.
What is this? What is the image art size for that? You really, I
guess you scale everything down to us to a standardized size.
Yeah, I scale everything down to 128 pixels. And it was pretty
arbitrary. To be honest, these phones are 240 by 320. I just
wanted something that was large enough that I could scale it up
a little bit if I needed to in certain contexts, but most of
the time, it occupies, you know, maybe a quarter of width at
most. And so it's just something that was it was going to be
small enough, not too small. And usually with that, that size
variable. I think I average if I look at my stats, I average like
a 93% file size reduction and thumbnail images by scaling them
down that way.
Oh, well. Okay. Have you been to India?
I have not heard plans to and then the pandemic then? Yeah, of
course.
And in India, you die and they burn you outside. So don't go.
Yeah. What are you concerned at all about the long term
viability of qx iOS as a as an operating system? I mean, I know
there's some. I mean, I know it's been around a while, but
also know that, and I think this is accurate from what I remember
that Google provides, like, half their funding or more.
Yeah, I don't know if they're, I mean, I know Google's invested
in them. So I put $12
million in or something at some point, if I remember.
Yeah. I don't know what portion of their funding is attributed
to companies like that? I wouldn't. I mean, I would say
I'm not. I'm not too concerned about it. And there's a couple
of reasons. One is the telcos worldwide are moving towards 4g
as a minimum standard, going forward, this 2g, 3g network
shutdowns across the world and even here in the US. And the
other reason is, they're still half of the world's population
unconnected to any form of network device, whether that's a
phone or a computer, or like any internet capability. And so when
people think about, you know, a lot of people talk about the
future phone market as being something that's sort of
transition transitionary or temporary. It might be, but it
might not, I frankly, think we're talking about decades
before we're anywhere near, you know, having everybody on a
smartphone with electricity, and internet and all of that. So I
think there's a long way to go.
The I remember now, it was $22 million that Google invested in
KY iOS, and they did it to have, you know, the integrate Google
Search, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Assistant, Google
Assistant, on CK iOS, is quite impressive. But of course,
anyone who's using in America, a feature phone is anti Google,
probably doesn't really want that feature. But I remember the
Google Assistant being really good.
Yeah, I think, Dave, you were asking a while ago, what we're
doing about search. And that's actually one of the answers to
that on Geo, they have their own version of this. And in the US,
and around the world. They've got Google Assistant, you can
hold down the center enter button. And I think after two or
three seconds, a microphone will appear. And you can speak what
you want. So I could say like, you know, podcasting 2.0. And
then it'll put that into the input box, which is really
powerful. Like you were saying whether or not you like Google
ads. It's a really nice feature
to have. Yeah. And they make that where does that API come
from? Is that something that they coyote is baked in for on
Google's behalf? Or is that
for $20? million? For $20? million? That's what that's
right. Hello, hey, hey, Google will bake in no problem. We'll
bake it into the cookie dough, but we'll make you.
Yeah, it's just part of the standard framework. If you have
an input element, it's just there. I think you can disable
it if you want to. So you know, if you want to get rid of that
feature, and then they show a microphone icon, and that's
actually a shadow element. If you talk about how that's
implemented, like in the Shadow DOM, you can see that it's just
like another, I don't know, gear for an SVG or something that
they load over the input.
It just blows my mind that on us, you'd have a feature phone
with it has all these limited hardware. And the choice you
make for that platform, as the iOS is essentially like a
deconstructed browser instead of something like I don't know,
some sort of real time or not real time though, as some sort
of embeddable Oh, s like Q and x are in was at tins, and I forgot
what Samson's thing like there's a lot of these embeddable OH S
is and it is funny that they, that what you get with kaios is
essentially a browser. But, but if you can do it that way, it
makes so much sense. Because you just get all this sort of stuff
for free, you get a really good layout with CSS, and you get all
the standard browser, and you also get instant developer
support because any front end developer could really kind of
understand it, even if the documentation is not that great.
Like, it makes so much sense. But it's still kind of blows my
mind that you can cram a browser into such limited constrained
hardware,
you know. Yeah, the, I mean, the history it's based on Firefox.
Oh, so under the hood, it's really just running the Firefox
browser. It's like you said, it's really interesting,
especially when you look at the newer devices coming out.
They're, they're pretty smooth. Now. You know, the early devices
like that banana phone that you might have had was a little
janky. But do long
Nokia 8110 Yeah, I have five of those. I ordered them all from
China, and none of them worked on the US networks, but they
were like 30 bucks like oh, yeah, there's the Nokia and I
got the one from the UK not and even though they said oh, yes,
working America very good as perfect system. He said with a
racist accent. And it didn't of course, but man, I love that I
had the original one the matrix phone.
Oh, yeah, they're, they're collector's items at this point.
Yeah. Like, there was a man Nokia had a phone that fit in
the palm of your hand back in the day. Do you remember that
one?
It sounds like a lot of them
now, but I mean, it was it was miniature. What was the
miniature Nokia?
I don't remember that Nokia when I had an Ericsson that would fit
in the palm of your hand. Oh, so tiny. This
was even smaller. This was even this was the 3310 mini
3310. Yeah,
it fits in between your thumb and your forefinger.
Are you kidding me? Yeah. Yeah,
you could you could barely make a phone call. You could? It was
impossible to text. Yeah, it was impossible to text. The other
thing they have a mini 2021. Now what is this? This is also a
mini mini? I can't tell. No, that's that's a smartphone.
Yeah, it's just oh, it was good times, man. Good times.
Yeah, that device looks crazy. Next, I gotta get that to run CK
iOS. Right? How does that wearable?
Even work? Your album mark can be? It can be 64 by 64 pixels.
Pixel pixels. Yes. That's about right. So what's your what is
your device lineup look like? I mean, you said you had an array
of phones? What? How do you make sure that that it looks decent
across everything? If you're in do you have to? I'm assuming,
I'm assuming here says you don't use the simulator. Did you have
to unplug? replug? Build? Unplug? replug? No, you have to
go through this pop up scenario.
Yes. So I actually one of the things that I did was spend the
time to make sure that the app works. The same build works on
all environment that doesn't matter whether it's a geophone
doesn't matter if it's an iOS phone doesn't matter if it's chi
was two, five or three Oh, so it's the same build runs
everywhere. And that took a little bit of extra time to do
all of that sort of detection, environment detection at
runtime, but it definitely helps me because I don't have to then
spend all this time thinking about managing five different
builds. And then my life literally got like these things
sitting on the floor. I've got that that baby the the 8110 4g
The Matrix phone and yellow. I've gotten to geophones. I've
got two Alcatel flip phones. I've got some one from Europe.
That was I don't know how this it was like a prototype model
that was on eBay that I saw and I bought it came pre routed
which was amazing. I didn't have to do anything like came with Su
and salt. Yeah, and then I've got a couple others I got like
this blue phone. That's an absolute piece of trash. It
sells for like 30 bucks. It it sounds awful on it because it's
got I think a moto speaker on the back. And so you listen to
it and everything sounds like you're listening to tinfoil. But
yeah, using the whole array, it's pretty easy to test and
then I don't always test it on everything because the screen
size is the same for every device, every screen resolution
rather not size. So yeah, I don't really have to do too much
in terms of layout conformity, but definitely some around like
feature capability. I was testing the geophones,
performance and that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, that so what
like so if the screens are the same resolution, I guess they
just stretch them and sort of adapt them to a little bit
different format.
Yeah, every screen is 240 by 320. And then the only only
exception to that rule is the geophone. Two with the keyboard,
which is just left with 320 by 240.
Oh, sideways, okay, I guess Yep. Yeah, that's you essentially,
guys, so what you have is like a, an old school like GarageBand
pedal board with like, you know, all the all this lineup of
devices on it, like, distortion pedals plan Jurina. That's
funny.
Yeah, I definitely you're talking about the different
classes. I have a couple other Nokia phones. And I've been
thinking someday about trying to make one for one of those real
time iOS is something with like, you know, like eight megabytes
of RAM. How would you even make that work? And so that that
would be a really interesting challenge to have to, to work
through.
assembly language, all assembly language.
Sounds maintainable? Yes,
yes. So do you have like some kind of build pipeline that you
have that where you like, push out a build and it and it
adapted for each one of those different devices? You said? He
said, so that you don't have to build uniques
it's the same build everywhere. So it's the same compiled
JavaScript, whether it's running on one phone or the other. So
that's, that's pretty easy to manage. And I use roll up for
the build process, which I think is fine. I haven't invested too
much time into the different tools, but I know there's at one
point I use webpack. There's like a million out there now.
Yeah. Webpack thanks so much. Sorry, sorry, the JavaScript
guys but Webpack is a steaming pile of garbage.
This developer talk is So sexy keep going.
Sorry. As I see the floor to you. Yeah.
Well, no, I, I guess the the before we get to our break here
and thank a couple people, is there anything else that we
could do to make it more efficient for you?
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I think
you've already done a lot, like I mentioned through alternative
enclosures and images. I'll have to have to give it a little bit
more thought. But I think, like, I definitely see it going in the
right direction. There hasn't been, you know, I haven't
supported every tag yet, partly because of time. And partly
because some of the constraints on these devices like real time
streaming is definitely a whole different can of worms than, you
know, just loading like a an mp3. But yeah, I think if
anything, it's just the awareness of this will help
podcasters understand. And then at some point, I'd like to help
build tools to show people what it would look like on pot LP, or
other apps so that they can get an appreciation for the places
their podcast could be. And that'll help them think about
like, whether you're talking about names or descriptions or
images or anything like that. I know, like pod news, for
example, they were doing podcast images, and it was really cool
how they adapted the logo to go from one that includes like word
marks and a full detail to one that when it gets scaled down to
like 300 or less is just iconography.
I love that I love I love it when they take when people take
time to really care about the different sizes, and they just
run it through
like that. He's very good about it, because I think the RSS
generator creates one thumbnail, but I probably I probably
haven't really focused on as a creator of this. I haven't been
educated been schooled. Exactly on I mean, I understand the
concept. Let me just see, because we have it podcasting.
2.0 I think we had ones auto generated. What sizes and I
guess I can put more in and so is there is there standard? Here
it is I've got
what is this at some time at the genie?
Yeah, exactly. The 816 pixels. That's the width. I'm not quite
sure I understand all of this. So I bet I can add one here. So
what sizes do you need? So I can do this the right way? How do I
find out about this? So I put that in all of my. Yeah, so I
put it in all of my, my systems.
Yeah, I think podcasting the the 2.0 icon scales down pretty
well, just the way it is. But if you're, if you're a podcaster
out there, and you've got like wordmarks, or like really
detailed images, where you need to see sort of the nuance, but
just scale it down to 300 by 300. And then scale down again
to 128 by 128. And see what it looks like, if it looks good on
your computer, then great, it's probably fine. If it's like a
really, you know, high key sort of saturated icon based image,
it'll probably be fine. But if you've got like a really
detailed photograph that you're using, maybe of a person or a
place, just think about what that will look like when you
scale it down to something like 128. And if it if it doesn't
look right, then you might need to make some changes to how to
get presented.
You know, what would be great is to have like some like a, I
don't know, if you do stuff like this Thomas, but have like some
kind of blog post or something where you sort of go over a
thumbnail sketch of what the perfect set of constraints for
an RSS feed would look like to be presentable on pod LPs to 9
million. Yeah, yet image art of this album are the days this
resolution, using the end, use the images tag, you know, use
alternate enclosure with a couple of with these specific
bit rates, like something like that would be fantastic. We ever
had time because then we could, you know, push that out there
and make just raise awareness that these, this is such a big
market.
That's a great idea. Yeah, we've got a blog at blog dot Patel
p.com definitely could use more love, I don't post there very
frequently. So that's a good one to post about to show both the
imagery, like you were saying, and then sort of behind the
scenes what that would look like, you know, right now it's a
little bit tricky, because I don't I don't think I know of a
podcast host that supports images, but I don't, I also
don't see why they wouldn't moving forward because at the
very least if all you do is scale down the album art,
they're gonna save money on bandwidth in the future. Because
if you click in and all you see is the thumbnail and you don't
go to the details and load the full image. And that's, you
know, like I said 93% of bandwidth on that image they're
not loading and paying for.
And I encourage you to highlight any of the podcasts that show
all of the tags in use on the CK iOS device. Now there's this
very popular Indian podcaster His name is curry and he has a
number of podcasts and you should you should consider you
consider highlighting some of those shows to show off what
podcasting really can do.
That's the owner of curry.com. Right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I
heard that somewhere. I don't I don't recall. But
in all seriousness, you know, I'm, I'm just somebody who
probably should ask all app developers is anytime that you
can highlight any podcasting 2.0 compatible show now and maybe
say, Hey, look at the future of podcasting. And this is what you
can do now. Hey, are you a podcaster? You can do this.
Learn more here?
Yep. Yeah, that's a good point. I think I remember pinging the
your Twitter handle, I think maybe Dave, you respond to that
when I was when I was starting to build some of the support for
different tags. I was like, hey, what podcast do I use to test
this on? Like, is there one actually out there that I can
use?
I don't remember which one I gave you. Probably John. Jg
because he he's, he's more raves. He's a bigger builder at
the beginning than we were. Yeah. Yeah.
We finally got all the tags. So yeah,
no, I know, you get a heart out, Thomas. And coming up in do we
want to go ahead and thank some people. Yeah. Do
you want to hang around while we do this? Thomas, we can we can
say goodbye after that. Yeah, sounds good. Okay, this is the
most fun part of the show. It is. This is a value for value
project, the whole project is value for value. So not just the
podcast, but everything that you heard us talking about is all
supported by people who either want to support the project or
in the project. That's where most of our support comes from.
And you can do that through a number of means. You can boost
us through any modern podcast app at new podcast apps calm,
but we also fully accept Fiat fun coupon so as long as they're
good, as through our paper, which you can find a podcast
index.org on the bottom Big Red donate button. Who do we think
this week Dave?
Well, right out of the gate. Marco Arment. $500. Yeah.
Yes, every month, man, thank you so much, Marco.
Yeah. And I'm just gonna, I'm hoping I'm pretty sure he said
he was working on chapters a while back soon as soon as he
puts in the first podcasting 2.0 Tag support. It's all over. All
over. I'm going to work. I'm going to work hard on getting
him on the show. So we can we can talk about it. Oh,
that'd be cool. That would be a good get, as we say in the
business.
He does. I think he does shows every now and then. Yeah, very
often. But yeah. Thank you, Mark. I really appreciate it.
That's one of the biggest sustaining donations that we
have on a monthly basis. And Mike this is all over the map
the ad usually everything nice to separate a bit it's just a
big pile of paper right now. Michael Gagan give us $5 And and
I think yeah Michael gun he's a monthly supporter. Thank you
Michael. Charles current give us $5 That's a monthly
as these things matter a lot that's a whole server.
Yeah, it is yeah the $5 servers at five bucks pays for a one of
our ingest mesh core one of our meant core search boxes
Hey and even with Is there any inflation on that yet from
Linode?
No, no, they were they somehow managed to resist the
inflationary pressure. Oh good. It's PPP money. Chris bars Ron's
and is 2552 Nice little new. We call it numerology Palindrome,
Palindrome that's it. It says go podcasting. Indeed. Thank you,
Chris, that Timothy Hudgens. My buddy, give us $25 That's a
recurring monthly. Thank you, Tim. Might be sent in and I'm
not sure David would find. Give us $3 That he's a monthly Thank
you, David. Oh, we got a new automatic get a new monthly
subscription from and I'm thinking this is the yep, this
Dutch dollar a month but his name is vessel. Proust.
Is it vessels The first one was the last name I spell it?
Tr o s t roast? Roast? Yes. That's a tourist. Is it is that
perfect? Didn't I nail Yeah, you
Nailed it. Nailed it. You're Dutchman now.
Okay, he's from from the Netherlands. Thank
you vessel
Yeah. Let's see Oh, survive on the mastodon survived lavosh He
gave us $5 That's a monthly donation. He's that they're
still working on their podcast system there.
Now. What are they working on?
This I had a meeting with with his house and he was coming is
it.
You had a meeting and you didn't invite me? No,
no, it's just like two months. Yeah. Soon thing. I'm not I'm
not allowed to have meetings.
Meetings without me know
Let's see Keith Gibson, big supporter if for a long time
give us $50 As a $50 Thank you, Keith. Dwayne Goldy long timer
$8 $8 a month. Thank you for joining Paul Erskine. $11.14
That's another monthly Thank you.
Interesting number.
Thank you. Oh, yeah, he missed it it added up at the end of the
year you total them all up and it adds up to something.
Oh, he's got an annual donation got it. Cool. Yeah.
Oh, here we go. Benjamin Bellamy. Our buddy yes off. 50
gives $50 Oh, thanks. says thank you for your unwavering
dedication to keep podcasting open. Happy podcasting. 2.0 A
year ago podcasting Viva la boos. Yes.
And now as the French say, it is timeful loose. It must hurt a
Frenchman to do the accentuated French accent as a gag It must
hurt him it's really appreciated Benjamin Thank you.
I think he gets loads of amusement from it probably yes
yes yeah, the
French are so much smarter than we are this you just above it.
Oh yes, I make them laugh. Little American podcast people's
plebes flips the podcast plebs.
Okay, we've got a new we guess those are papers we get some
booster grams that we get Yeah, we've also got a new new jingle
Oh hello.
from Cali bear
I seem to I seem to hear him both post from last week. Love
it
nice
cows loading this up man it's like a Training
link to that is in the show notes it's the boost bait link
if you're looking for it
don't you want to do this tom? Thomas Don't you want to get on
get in on the on the boosting link and sets booster gram train
it's awesome
Thomas's like left the room
No, yeah. Like I said I it's a different world for me. I don't
I don't know how can I accept crypto payment on iOS?
We give we don't understand any of the details we just give you
a rational pressure to try to make you do thing that's just
how it works around you.
We can show you we can show you how to do that with wallets and
everything when when you're ready for Thomas.
Yeah, yeah. A breeze anonymous 6969 SAS showed show donation
from last week. Nice and the message is simply boost boosts
what we got here up drips got 10,000 SATs go podcasting.
Yeah thank you Dr. Scott man the Bruce Wayne is podcasting 2.0
He's like can I do more can I like you know change your tires
I'll do anything I want to do more for podcasting 2.0 dread
you are going above and beyond brother above and beyond. He's
the the the chapter factory una chapter good names a good name
chapter factory and even
blueberry gave us the fountain gave us a 12 by 12,121 says One
to One to One. Thank you Palindrome one boost to boost
red boost blue boost
yeah
as a lyricist we get some new names in here by the way too. We
got see through fountain you got a 3330 sets from somebody named
horn loaded
no one load has been around I think so no agenda person maybe
okay my rep was dragged was pushing boosting on no agenda
social pretty hard so I think he's he's pushing people the
Rogan appearance may start to kick in a little bit this stuff
there it comes in waves go slow
yeah dread doing doing more even more work? Go podcasting is what
Hornet is Yeah. Here we go. Mere Mortals podcast. This is from
our buddy Kyron 4321 SAS 4321 through fountain A says, Does
does this hinted at company as the ability to onboard people
worldwide. I would love to give specific instructions to
listeners and what needs to change based on location. always
hearing about cool things until the end sentence is except if
you live in X. I know this pain all too well where we're the
world's taint. Australia, the world's team I like, and I'll be
at extremely large and testerone.
Did you put that in his note? Yes, yes.
Australia is the origin testerone filled tank of the
world. Hey,
this is a tight mate. So we actually had a meeting with with
said company, and which was interesting. We we learned a lot
about their business. And where we're at right now is, indeed
they would like to do it worldwide. I don't know if they
actually have that mechanism. It seemed like they don't have it
yet. But that that is the intent. And we discussed that
specifically.
Yeah. And there seemed like part of it and they work in the other
and part of it might not.
Yeah, well, the one part that may actually work is that you
know, what they want to do is very simple. A sign up bonus,
you sign up to buy bitcoin through them, they give you $5 A
free insets right into your podcast wallet. That's the idea.
So we'll have to talk about the tank territories.
Territories
these guys seem like they want to move fast. So we're, we'll
we'll keep you posted. I'm sure hope so. But I understand that
and I know it's one of Cleveland's biggest complaints
and this rightly so. But this is a There you go this is the this
is this is a problem that Bitcoin solves everybody can use
Bitcoin all over the world right now today sending value to any
podcast or anywhere in the world. And
the problem the problem here is not the Bitcoin The problem here
is the traditional banking and finance
industry. Yes, so but you can buy bitcoin somewhere in
Australia, I presume?
Yes. hardhat give us 22 To 22 22,222 SATs road ducks oh yes
is happy content
chair Pharaoh gave us 3333 sets through fountain he says All
Aboard trains good planes bad.
Oh shoot man. Oh, you
didn't have it loaded up? No.
How do I know that? Oh, yeah, they're gonna hear me go.
Trains planes anonymous threw breeze gave us a row of ducks.
2222 And he says great new row of ducks. Boost jingle Yeah,
we'd like it a lot.
Brian of London through curio caster said he gets a 19,400 ad
sets. He says add up my boost amount for that mention. Adam,
thank you. I would honestly say that your words about pod paying
are the best thing I've ever been told about anything I've
ever built on a computer even beyond my PhD. It means a huge
amount to me.
Wow, a heartfelt note. Well, and it just so happens. I do have
diplomas that I hand out for for these occasions so that not only
was it a better feeling than your PhD, I will top it with a
very nice certificate. But it's but I meant it. Brian and I
appreciate you using the booster Graham to contribute content to
the show.
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you Brian and Alex for all yes work you're
putting into Park pod paying it's it's killer using pod ping
in any way. Thomas.
I was actually just exploring that this past week to figure
out the best way to connect it to our systems. Okay, so I
definitely plan to in the near future.
Hit me up with any thing you need. I mean, it's all very
simplistic from the consumption and so I can I can give you code
or whatever, you know, whatever you need for to make that
happen. It's very simple. John, John's wbrt gave us 49 For
90 49,490 sets. Wow fountain, he says putts ah making up for last
week. Nice John's you're you're redeemed. That's a good player
he redeemed
yes that's that's a nice dollar amount that's good Fiat fun
stuff.
Brian mozzie give us 2222 Road ducks through fountain he says
boost
I got to record you saying that sometime because that's that's
getting pretty good.
I'm working on it. Sir bargy gave us 1500 sets and he says go
podcasting. He said he gets technically it could be SEO sir
bargy again. 1500 sets go podcasting. Sir Bill 2222 Road
ducks through fountain he says couldn't stop laughing at the
duck
like it too.
Yeah, you're a psychic my friend. Signs of new growth.
Interesting. I guess that's I think that's the name of part of
a podcast. Give us a 33,333 says Holy
cow. Very nice. Thank you.
In the messages, signs of new sets sounds a new growth. I'm
pretty sure that's a podcast. Yeah, it
sounds like it sounds right. Yeah.
Okay. Our buddy cast Pelland 3300 sets through fountain and
he says, haha, boost boost chelator
is that Dutch booster later? No boost you later alligator.
Thanks for the work Sunday. I need to explain my nickname,
wink. I would love
to hear the news. Oh, boy.
I want to hear that story. Okay. Adam is less enthusiastic. Yeah.
Well, you know that the Dutch this just a little bit of
history. When Napoleon conquered the Netherlands at the time,
they made everybody register with the government with you
know, with with this new tyrannical government and the
Dutch very, very typical. They said, Oh, okay. Yeah, sure.
We'll register What's your name? My name is John's son. Okay.
Yeah. And so you have the weirdest names you know, there's
a lot of baker's What's your name? Baker? You know, cuz the
guy was a baker. What's your name? Butcher. Okay, John
Butcher. And so this to this day, there are people with the
weirdest names like you know, butts scratcher and stuff. But
it's really, because you know, of course, some of these people
got drunk like Vinay Yeah, but scratch your feet buds. Gotcha.
Yeah. What's your name? Seymour. And
advocate Ben Dover. Yeah, yeah, it'd be that became, you know,
the the record. They wrote it down, and everyone stuck with
it. So whenever there's a Dutch an explanation of a Dutch name,
I kind of hold on to my my hat. And you never know what's
coming.
It's not my grandmother. She never knew how old she was or
any of her relatives where she had to go look in the
everybody's to write it down in the Bible in the front pages of
the Bible. I don't know if there's any other country that
did this. But like, the first maybe 10 pages of all the family
Bibles in the US had a genealogy section and you would write down
your mom, your dad, your brothers, your sisters and when
they were born. I don't know why it was that way. But like that's
it had room for that. And you put in the sheet that you'd go
look it up. You know, I was like, I don't know. I don't
remember.
She lost the Bible.
Yeah, yeah. See this interested? Fountain? This is from somebody
gave us one set. Thanks.
Well it's literally a set
streamer. Okay. What app lets this happen? Fountain the
fountain stops out immediately.
Oscar shut this down. But he did have a nice note. It says thanks
for having Hasma cook on the show. Yeah, well, you're
welcome. You know, there's your
Bitcoin community your philanthropic Bitcoin community
everybody. Thanks for the SAT.
Scott gave us 10,420 sets to fountain nicaise First, thanks
to everyone. Go podcasting. 2.0 Yeah, I guess. Around 2010 i
created a Cannabis News and cannabis entrepreneur podcast
and tried starting a cannabis podcast network called cannabis
be Podcast Network pollinating minds. It might be time to
resurrect the website and gear it all around podcasting. 2.0 I
agree.
Yeah, completely ma'am. I have been a bit of a lot of people
out there would support it. Because it's very hard to do ads
and stuff. It's hard to even bank if you if you're selling
weed or promoting it or talking about it. It's very difficult.
Is Jamaica a big market for KY iOS phones there? Thomas?
Check. I think so.
Alright, they got Chinese crap in there. I think it's all they
got Huawei. Like the island? Yes. You're in Jamaica. China
took over Jamaica. i
Okay. Well, join the club. CO McCormick gave us 333 sets the
fountain he says I'm working on my shit. Okay. All right. Good
luck with that cool. See? Oh, lemon creations. Our buddy Andy
Lehmann gave us 222 sets. Through fountain he says Dave
Thanks for making hella pad. The now almost unbroken Hello Pat. I
will talk about that later. I love hearing the pew pew as
abuse as a boost comes in abuse is what I said abuse. I love
hearing the pew pew as it Boost comes in. If you have not
checked out my podcast dudes and dads podcast, go to dudes and
dads podcast.com or any new podcast app. Thank you for all
you do with podcast index. Well you're welcome Andy. I think
that's it we got a couple more. Almost almost here through it
again. Nomad Joe gave us 500 sets. He says a boosting to hear
the cowbell. cowbell cowbell.
I haven't had I haven't had a cowbell in the studio for 567
years. I don't have account. Oh man. I'm sorry. How you doing?
I got that for you. That's it. That's pretty close. And oh,
wait, somebody else came in. This looks like the same person
that gave us one set. But he gave us 2112 says this time? Oh
yes, sir. Pilgrim. I wonder if that's Harry pilgrim says. Hey,
Dave, help Adam. The correct way to pronounce this boost is a
2112. I'll give him a break on Rush since he grew up in
Holland.
Yes, a rush boost. I know. I recognize the rush boosts
Don't just stand there. Boost. Comic Strip blogger rounding it
out. Give us 10,033 says through pod friend nice. He says
greetings to Dave Jones into the end to hubby if Tina the keeper.
You're welcome to live. So you're now known as the husband
of Tina. Oh, yeah,
I know. She's taken over. She's She's now a podcast star. She's
got the bug. She's like making lists of topics and emailing
with people and making new album art. I know I've unleashed a
beast.
All the nine year olds in my West. My wife's name is Melissa
all the nine year olds in her class in her classroom. Call me
Mr. Melissa. Ooh, nice.
Melissa, Mr. Willis has a cool truck.
Greetings, Dave Jones in the hubby of Tina the keeper. You're
welcome to listen to our podcast about artificial intelligence
and titled AI cooking. Led by former BBC actor Gregory William
Forsythe foreman, from Kent in old England. Just search in any
podcast app for AI cooking to find this podcast yo,
yo, and thank you to all of our boosters and our our other
contributors, our monthly especially thank you all so much
for supporting podcasting 2.0. It's a slow grind, but the
growth is really, if you when in doubt, zoom out. It's been
spectacular what we've done so far. And from zero to a year and
a half in it had the ability to do this and have this feedback
loop. And podcasting is extremely exciting. Here's your
cue to boost. You know you want to
Thomas, you got time for one more question or you got a bell?
Yeah, I got done. I just want to ask you about live I finally got
the live tags situated is done. It's baked? I'm not touching it
anymore. I'm done. So do Do you have? Is there any way you think
you could do like a live streaming in in a KY iOS phone?
Or do you think it's just too limited?
Live streaming is definitely possible. I haven't looked into
what it what it looks like under the hood? Is it HTTP Live
Streaming? HLS? Or is it something else?
Well, it'll say the spec calls for highly, you know, it,
here's, here's the way the spec reads, it's like live item looks
just like the regular item with just a couple of added
properties. And that's a start time and end time and a status
attribute this sit on the live item element itself. And then
everything else inside of the live item. tag element, all the
children of it are the same identical stuff that you would
find in a regular podcast item tag. And so then, but the only
the wording around it is we really want you to have like all
three of these tags and enclosure as give me an
alternate enclosure, a regular enclosure with and then a
fallback Content link URL that somebody can link out if if the
app just cannot support the stream at all. So the dad and
then there's also wording in there that suggests a you know,
even though alternate enclosure can handle lots and lots of
different various codecs and transport protocols, you really
kind of want to start with supporting the basics of just an
mp3 stream and an mp4 stream if it's video to try to like
maximize compatibility across platforms. So that's that's sort
of the rundown real quick.
Yeah, I would say I can definitely take a look. I'll
poke around and find some folks that are supporting and see if I
can test it out just on one of my devices, but I don't see if
it's, if it's MPEG streaming out why it wouldn't work? It would
be so odd to have live streaming on these devices.
That would be so cool, man. Can you trigger an alert?
Oh, yeah, we can trigger a push notification. So if you have
like a subscription and the subscription had a new live item
coming up something that was like, hey, there's a you know,
something streaming right now.
Yeah, this hot new Bollywood podcaster. Hurry. Curry is live.
Yes, that's, that's how it's gonna hook into one of the ways
that pod ping is gonna come into this is that pod pod thing. The
next version of it that they're about to release is gonna have
another thing to note. Yeah, live notifications. So when a
podcast is live item, when it flips when it goes on air, so to
speak, a special pod paying will go out saying it's now
broadcasting. So that's that's the way you would get useful to
like, pass through that, that notification down to the to the
device.
That'd be perfect. Yeah, right now we batch notification just
as a cost saving measure. So they're not real time. But if
there was a way to tap into that, that would be pretty cool.
Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, I'll definitely work on the will
probably will pilot it with this, for sure. And then we
there's a couple of other feeds. And no, sir Spencer's working
on. Does there'll be plenty of to test against with within the
next short period of time, I think.
Yeah, just combine that with the real time transcript, right.
We've got the support for was it the SRT and the web VTT formats.
It's pretty cool. You could have it, like live streaming and live
captions.
That would be awesome.
How do I how do I make live captions? Where do I get that
from? I don't know.
That's where you haven't built question.
This is what I'm still on my to do list. Once again, another
board meeting where this always happens in every board on every
board I've ever been on every board meeting. There's always
one or two items that just never get addressed. And Ryan Heiss,
his transcript service. I know I'm ignoring him because I don't
understand what's going on. I need help understanding because
this, I know the guy has something I think the hits. I'm
telling you. This guy has something I can't figure it out.
So James Quinlan, talk to Ryan highs, please. Well, Chris
Curtin is good at this stuff. He's good at the transcripts.
I had so much notes as so many notes on here and we we spent
the whole time talking about solar panels and I know what
is wrong with those water batteries. I'm so I'm ashamed
now.
Alright, next week, we will we will get into oil, we'll get
deep into tech promise.
Thomas Barrasso is the developer of pod LP is storming the the
emerging markets I'm very excited for you very excited for
podcasting and, and really love that you're doing this man.
Appreciate you coming into the board today.
Thank you, I appreciate you having me and all the work that
you guys are doing. Super helpful, like I mentioned,
especially for a platform like us to be able to piggyback and
maybe get some tags that'll help us out in the future.
Thanks if you ever need anything at all, any help at all piping,
any of that jazz just just hit me up or metro fingertip. I
appreciate it. Thank
you says that to all the girls. that's it everybody. Join us
again next week for another board meeting of podcasting. 2.0
see you that.
You have been listening to podcasting 2.0 Visit podcast
index.com For more information