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Thank you.
I'm your host, John Chidjie, and today I'm joined by David Jones.
How are you doing, Dave?
Good.
Thank you.
Appreciate you having me on the show.
No, thanks for coming on.
I have started learning about Podcasting 2.0
and about September last year.
And then I learned who you were
and I've listened to every episode of Podcasting 2.0.
Some of them multiple times
'cause there's a lot of information in them
and I had to go back over and re-listen.
- I'm sorry you had to do that.
(laughs)
- Come on now.
But yeah, so I really appreciate you coming on the show
to talk about this 'cause there's two aspects.
I guess it's podcast lightning, kind of,
I want to talk about both of them,
but to start out, I think podcasting 2.0,
I guess I'm just curious in your words,
how would you describe what podcasting 2.0 is?
Then we get stuck into the details.
- You know, there's a lot going on in this whole thing.
It's really sort of a,
I feel like sometimes there's so many GitHub repos
and social net, you know, Mastodon and doing podcasts
and all this, it's just, sometimes I get,
I feel like there's like this Lovecraftian,
you know, Hydra, Cthulhu thing that's just sucking me,
you know, like pulling me apart in every direction.
But, so it's kind of hard to boil down into one thing,
but I'd say there's the podcast index,
which we started as a service, as an API
for small podcast apps to be able to hook in,
to be able to launch a podcast app
without having to have the heavy lift
and the expense of having a full backend.
And then there's the podcast namespace.
And so it's sort of the,
the podcast namespace is more what you think of
as with Podcasting 2.0,
But then you also have the podcast lightning aspect of it.
So it's really sort of a marriage
of all three of those things.
So like what we think of Podcasting 2.0
is really trying to break the stagnation,
this kind of held back podcasting
for really about a decade now.
It sounds weird to say that,
it sounds strange to say that podcasting's been held back
'cause it's seen such explosive growth.
But it's seen growth on a, just a listener count
and podcast creator level, but the technology behind it
is really just been kind of really stagnant.
And so we thought, number one, our sort of goal
with the index was to have a place that would protect
people from being, or not protect, but help people
that were afraid of being deplatformed,
And then also to have a sort of launchpad
to get some of these bigger ideas kicked off,
like direct payments through the Bitcoin Lightning Network,
the podcast namespace to do things like add new tags
to RSS feeds, and just sort of like have a launchpad there
where we could do bigger things and create bigger ideas
in the podcast technical space.
And the biggest thing of that is we wanted it
not to be siloed.
And so, what had been happening for a long time
is people had been having some good ideas,
that plenty of good ideas existed.
I mean, that was never a problem.
It's just that everybody felt like they had to go
ask Apple's permission.
Or Spotify's permission, or it's like, okay,
we can't do it unless we get Spotify, Apple,
and Google on board.
And we just didn't buy into that.
And so we were already trying to create sort of this other decentralized platform.
And so we said, well, why don't we try it?
And it turns out lots of people have great ideas.
And if you just do it, the hosting companies jumped on board quick.
And they were like, yeah, this is great.
We want to see this tech advance, too.
So anyway, when I think of podcasting, two people know,
I just think of this idea of taking the tech part of podcasting
and bringing it along further to where,
so that it can catch up with some of what these,
the other areas of podcasting have some of that growth.
- Yeah, okay.
So look, that's the whole problem with describing
what Podcasting 2.0 is,
and I think you pretty well conveyed that,
is that it's actually quite a few different little things
that sort of collectively create
what has become referred to now as Podcasting 2.0.
and having watched, sorry, watched, listened and read
and been part of just on the periphery from my perspective.
So, I mean, I've incorporated some of the tags,
for example, into the Engineering Network site
and all of its feeds and playing around with lightning,
which we'll get to, but, you know, the first part of it,
so I sort of thought about all the different activities
that Podcasting 2.0 is trying to achieve
and trying to address the gaps and different aspects.
And I sort of broken down into roughly four,
This is just my classification just for my own brain
'cause I just like classifying things, I guess.
But search being the first one.
- You did more homework than I did.
- I did, I put a couple of articles up on my blog about it.
So I'm kind of, yeah, I did think this through.
I sort of thought, well, okay,
so search is obviously the first big one.
And the interesting thing is if I look back
and think about how like podcast search sort of came about
is that it's just been, going back in time,
when Adam handed over the Adam Curry,
handed over the actual original list to Apple
as the custodians, essentially.
A lot of people just defaulted to Apple.
And I think that that was fine for a while,
but they didn't really do much with it.
At least that's the perception.
Like they've added a few little bits and pieces,
but what's happened is other corporate interests
have come in and they've just sucked
all of Apple's index out and then added their own stuff.
Some of it behind their own paywalls, even.
like Spotify, for example, iHeartRadio is another example, I believe. There's a few
different ones. Search then becomes-
Amazon.
Yes, another good one. Yes, Amazon, exactly. There's no real definitive search. There's
no, I guess to an extent, it's like a Google search. I hate saying Google because I don't
know how much Google senses whatever it senses, but never mind that. The point is that there's
no one who is not a hosting platform in a sense other than Apple, because I'm thinking
about this, there's probably maybe there are a couple, but it's like, there's no one all-encompassing
search that can cover everything anymore. And that's a problem because you don't have
that independence. And so I see that that search piece was an essential piece that needed
to be added at some point by somebody. And that's one of the big things that, and just
in the most recent episode of Forecasting Tip when I read previously until this point,
the API key was the only way to get access to do, I believe it was submissions and queries.
That's right.
But that's going to be changing shortly, is that right?
I hope so.
I'm trying to figure out the logistics of that right now.
Currently if you want to play around with the index, you can go to api.podcastindex.org.
You can get API keys.
That's the way this thing has been done since the beginning.
What I would like to do is open that up to where it's more like Apple's Lookup API because
I think that's the other thing that made Apple sort of de facto is that they had an open API
That didn't require you know a big
Much of anything to get into anybody can query it
And so I would like to to have that on there and that's all that's on my roadmap
And I'm hope I hope to have it done soon because I think it's kind of important now
Whether it's just a flat-out open API with absolutely no authentication whatsoever
or if it's just a simple token header, I'm not sure yet.
But the way that it works right now is a little bit of a,
it requires a little bit of heavy lifting
on calculating the header side.
It's not just a simple thing,
it's an Amazon AWS style authentication scheme.
So, but I'm hoping to have that be more open.
Number one, because I just think it's important by itself.
But number two, I think that it would help us
with caching and a lot of that stuff
to not have to have those extra per request
unique headers in there every time.
And so I'm hoping that that will come soon.
I just had to figure out ways to,
since we're behind Cloudflare,
the biggest stopper to that is I have to make sure
that I can do it in a way where things like crawlers that go crazy and bots that start
hitting you, just hitting you relentlessly, I don't want that to just become a big major
problem. So I need ways to key on the source IP address to be able to block that kind of
stuff. So right now I can tell if an API, if somebody's API request is going crazy,
if a certain app is going nuts and I can say, okay,
well, we need to rate limit based on this API key.
But once it falls back to the IP address,
then we just got to make sure that all that stuff
sorted out 'cause I don't want to put us at a big risk
for getting hammered on that kind of thing.
But I think it'll work out.
We just have, I just got to do the,
finish doing the logistics.
Right now, what's been holding me back
from some of that stuff is that we just released
the closed phase two of the podcast namespace.
And so that's really just sucking up a lot of my time
this week.
So hopefully within the next couple of months,
I think I'll probably be able to figure that out
and know what we're gonna do.
- Okay.
- Yeah.
- Cool.
So obviously that'll move forward.
At the moment, if you wanna search the podcast index,
you can just run a query on the website without an API key.
- No, you can.
Yeah, you can.
And you know, that's the whole thing.
It's kind of, you know, we act like we're trying
to hide everything behind an API key
so we can have some control over it.
But I mean, somebody could easily just scrape the site.
So it's not, you know, it's not that hidden.
- Yeah, no, that's okay.
All right, so look, search is really important
and I'm glad that that's moving forward.
And it's, I think, how many have you got in there
at the moment in terms of active shows?
There's a lot of them, isn't there now?
- Yeah, it's about one, it's a little less than 1.4.
And this is sort of a constant 1.4 million.
So it's a little bit of a constant debate
as to what constitutes, you know, okay,
if you start looking at other directories,
so there's a few around here, Spotify.
Well, Spotify is a good example.
They just came out and said that they had
2.2 million podcasts listed.
Out of those 2.2 million, I can promise you
more than half of those are dead shows.
There's just, there are people that, you know,
they did a show, they did two or three episodes,
and just, you know, for the heck of it,
and then they quit.
Or, those types of things.
And there's also, like, or you can take the Google approach,
they got like two and a half million shows
in their directory.
And they sort of take the approach,
from my understanding, what I've heard,
is they just pretty much suck up any RSS feed
that has an enclosure tag in it.
And that just shows up.
So, I'm not too concerned about having like the most
as far as count goes.
I'm really just, all I care about at this point
is that if somebody searches for something,
that they find it.
And on that side of things, we're doing pretty good.
And your compatriot there in Australia,
James Cridland, has helped a lot on that.
He feeds our index a lot of shows that we may miss search hits on and that kind of thing.
So we got a lot of people that are feeding into us.
Daniel J. Lewis, he's given us access to his API so we can pull stuff out of that.
Another guy, Christopher Isene, who's really active on the podcast index.socialmastodon.
he compiles, he's constantly crawling for feeds and he sends stuff to us. We had, we
had quite a few people send us country specific OPML lists of feeds that are, one was from
Kazakhstan, another guy sent us a bunch of stuff from France, a guy sent us a big list
from Poland. So we just got people feeding stuff to us all the time and I'm pretty happy
with where we are, but I mean, I want more, but I'm not going to go out there and just
to get a number, I'm not going to pollute the index with hundreds of thousands of just
kind of junk feeds.
Yeah, for sure.
And I think the debate you said before, it is quite an interesting debate about what
constitutes a podcast worth counting, because if a podcast was created 10 years ago, they
haven't had a new episode in nine years, then that's not an active show.
And then of course that opens the discussion and the debate of, well, when does a show
become inactive?
Because I suppose in television, for example, like they'll approve a season and they'll
make a season of like 10 episodes of some show.
And there'll be a six month period where people might say, well, is it over?
Are they going to make another season?
Has it been approved?
I mean, we don't know.
And then they could do a whole Netflix thing and they're saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's
on.
And then cut the funding and say, yeah, no, it was like a really good show.
they cancelled it and you're like, "Oh, damn it."
So, you don't even know.
And it could be like that for multiple years.
So, is the show dead or stagnant?
And I guess the problem is that the terminology that people use is incorrect.
So, it's like you've got active in terms of, you know, active in terms of it's intending
to make more episodes.
So, there are more episodes are planned.
And then you've got shows that are like on hiatus potentially, like it's there are non-planned,
but it's not over over.
But even getting agreement on that
is kind of a bit difficult.
- There's another aspect to it as well.
Like if you have a podcast,
excuse me, another aspect to how to maintain the index.
So one thing we do is we run a job,
a background job that's constantly sort of cleaning up.
But a lot of times you'll see episodes, old episodes,
like especially a daily show,
there may only be 200 episodes in the feed,
but we have 500 episodes in the index listed.
And so there's that, you get that also sometimes too,
it's like, why is there a bunch of old shows in here?
And we sort of have this lazy background process
that cleans up stuff.
But we're not rushing to, 'cause it's sort of,
I like it, I mean it's kind of archival
to have old episodes of stuff.
I mean I don't wanna necessarily be
the archive.org of podcasts,
but I'm not also gonna rush to remove them either.
So there's that debate too,
is like how aggressive do you get with your cleanup?
And so, 'cause you take two sides of that.
You have the one side that says,
well if it's not in the feed,
it shouldn't be public.
And then the other side as well, I mean,
it was public at one point and so,
and I don't know which one of those is right.
This is just sort of the constant back and forth
that you go with with these kinds of things.
- Okay, so I think search is definitely
the one to lead off with,
but I wanna sort of start tackling the next category.
So I sort of thought about, well, what about the namespace
and how does the namespace actually break down
in terms of what's the intent of the tags?
'Cause there's quite a bunch of different tags in the XML
in the podcast namespace.
And what I try to do is I try to look at the phase one
and phase two tags and maybe sprinkling
of the future phase three and such,
and try and classify what problem
they're trying to solve broadly.
And I sort of thought of it in terms of like discoverability,
interactivity and monetization.
And I'm not gonna capture probably every single flag
in one of those three buckets, but I just, for my brain,
I just like to think about it that way.
It's like, what are the problems
we're really trying to solve here. And the problem, first of all, of discoverability.
So just about that straight away and discoverability, I've seen that as being something
that Apple started to go down that road.
Like you would be like they would pick certain shows and you could like put in like they'd
ask for a mugshot and, you know, they would say, well, this person is on these podcasts and
have their own like people page and everything.
But it was like an invite only thing.
Yeah. Yeah. And I'm like, well, that's really not useful, is it?
I mean, it's like, well, that's not even a half of a solution.
That's like a 100th of a solution.
- Yeah, well, Adam, you know, Adam submitted his photo,
I don't know, months and months ago,
and it still doesn't show up on there.
And who knows what, you know,
I think Credlin said you have to like, you know,
know somebody who knows somebody
and then participate in a seance
and all this kind of stuff to, you know,
actually get yourself in there.
- Yeah, so it's basically Apple anoints you and says,
you are worthy to have your mugshot in here
and be grouped this special search way.
I'm like, yeah, so that is not helping very many people at all.
And so one of the simplest ones for me is simply, I mean, I've had
on the Internet Web Web, Internet Web website, I've had this baked in from 2015
is I had like people, individual people again, flagged against episodes
in the the front matter.
It's all done in Markdown.
And I use GoHugo as my static site generator.
And so I already had all the information there.
So adding the podcast person tag and so on was extremely easy to add to the RSS feed.
Have you added it already?
Oh yeah, I added it months ago.
Oh great, great.
Yeah, so it's like right now you can go to the internet website and you've been able
to do that for the last five or six years is you could actually search and say, "Well,
what episodes has Marco Armit been on or Merlin Mann been on?"
And it would give you a list of all the episodes and it would take you straight to it.
But now that can be sucked in by a search platform and people can say, "Right, well,
right, well where's Merlin been? And it's like, oh, hey, he was an episode of
Pragmatic and it's like, oh, okay, cool. Yeah, turning that stuff
into structured data is going to be so good. You know, because you could
always do it. We have a search now. We have a person search as an
endpoint in the API and you can, and we have, it's basically a humongous stop list
of words and we pulled out almost everything in at least the
English language and left everything that wasn't a known English word and then we put
all that in there and then we pulled out common words that conflict with names like Mark or
I can't think of another but like the name Mark or something like that that may be a
crossover.
So we pulled all that stuff out and the person search in that regard works fine but it just
you know you're missing tons of stuff.
And so if you can take,
instead of having to do that sort of trickery,
if you can instead just have purely structured XML data
that specifies a person,
I mean, that solves the whole problem.
That's what we, like discoverability in that regard,
and it's what XML's for.
That's what it's good at.
That's the whole point of it.
And so having that markup language
and not using it for these things is criminal.
- Yeah, exactly.
'Cause I mean, I was just thinking about it.
How is it that, how is it, was it previously
where you would be able to search
and specifically search for podcasts
that John Siracusa was on?
And the way you would do it is you would hope
that they were mentioned in the show notes
and that that was linked and indexed as part of the feed.
That was pretty much the only way.
Or you could go to their website or blog if they had one.
Many people don't.
They'll guest on a podcast
and it's like, they don't have their own blog.
So how else are you gonna find out about it?
So that's a big piece of the discoverability component
because people listen to people generally speaking.
So it's like, they'll follow like fans of this show
might listen to my other podcasts,
like fans of podcasting 2.0 might start following
when your guest appearances.
So it's like that ability to discover
and search that way is huge.
And it's such a simple thing.
And it's like Apple sort of started that
and did a 100th of a job or something like that.
and it was just not.
So that's one of the things I think is fantastic.
It's such a simple thing.
And I say a simple thing,
'cause I realized that was actually quite hotly debated.
- Yeah, yeah.
There's two tags that were the most difficult so far
in the last, oh gosh, five months,
and person and location.
And we spent, oh, we spent so much time on those two tags.
And every time you thought you had it right,
somebody would come in and just blow it up,
and it's like, oh no, we had to start over again.
But actually, and I'm glad those things happen
because I think the final, sort of the quote unquote
final product that we have,
I think it ended up being really good.
The way I look at these things with the tags is,
we heard early on from hosting companies
like Buzzsprout, Fireside, those guys,
we heard early on that if you make the tags,
if you make those things bloated,
If you start putting 25 tags per item,
per episode into a feed, it's just a no-go.
Because if you have a company that has
85,000 active podcast feeds, that's real bandwidth.
You add a couple of K to each one of those feeds,
that adds up.
And so you're costing them money.
So if you do those, if you create these things,
They have to be a lien and they have to be very specific
and targeted, they have to have a use case.
You don't just start throwing a bunch of stuff into a fee.
And that's one thing, we looked at prior art
all along the way and we try to find
as much stuff as we can.
And so for instance, there was one with the chapters tag,
there was one chapter specification that put chapters
in the XML from Podlove.
and that had been around for a long time,
but it just wasn't gonna work
because if a show had 30 chapters in it,
and some do, if a show had that many chapters,
you may bloat that feed up humongous,
and it's just not workable.
So that's why we said, okay, what can we do?
So we switched to a JSON format for the chapters,
and then you can just have one link, it's simple,
so, and it doesn't bloat the feed.
So it's just things like that all along the way that we've had to, it's been nice to have
all these voices.
You've got app developers in the game that are making their desires known from a consumption
and UI perspective.
And then you've got the hosters that are in there saying, "Oh, well, don't forget about
this.
I mean, you've got to think about how difficult this is going to be to write the UI for something
like the location tag.
going to be a pretty heavy lift for them on the UI side.
And they got to make it easy for their users
because a lot of their users are not technical.
And so then you have other directories and also listeners.
So having all those voices sort of in there together
has been really nice.
And honestly, some of the best ideas
that have come up for the namespace
have come from people who are not developers.
They're just podcast listeners that jumped in there and said,
"Hey, I wish that I could do so and so."
It's like, "Oh, that's brilliant.
"Yes, of course, why not?"
- Oh, for sure.
- 'Cause as developers and IT people,
I'm a sysadmin by trade,
and as technical IT developer-oriented people,
we forget so quickly about how hard this stuff can be
for non-technical users.
And that's, and in the podcasting world,
That's a death blow because most of the podcasts out there
are not done by tech people.
It used to be, but it's not anymore.
It's a different ballgame now.
- That's very true.
And I've seen a lot of that collaboration going on
on the Mastodon.
I follow, well, yourself, Adam,
from a bunch of the other people on there.
And hence I get generally copied in on the main feed
of on my timeline of a lot of those conversations.
I sort of dig into those as they come up.
It's very interesting.
And the one on the location tag was interesting
as well, because I see that under discoverability as well.
Because if I'm looking for podcasts,
and just to be clear, I think early on,
when I first heard location,
I was confused as to the intent.
And I think that I was confused
because it was still being debated,
not because it was confusing.
And that was, is the location the location
of where the podcast is recorded?
If it's an individual, that's possible.
But if it's more than one person
and they're not in the same room
and they're in different places around the world,
is that the location of where they're sitting?
And I was like, well, no,
that's not really what we're getting at.
want the location of something specific that the episode is focused on. So for me, my causality
was a perfect fit because I did an episode recently about smallpox and the last case
of smallpox in the United Kingdom. I was in Birmingham. So absolutely, location tag makes
perfect sense for a show like Causality. And so I added it to Causality.
So are you going to go back and add the tag to all your previous shows?
- Yes, I've already done that, yes.
So the entire feed of causality has now got,
every episode has the correct location.
And finding the correct location of Piper Alpha
was a challenge, just saying.
But yeah, in the ocean.
- So what do you do?
Okay, so let me ask you this.
What do you do for like the challenger?
Did you put that at Cape Canaveral?
- Yes, I did.
- Okay, all right, cool.
- That's exactly what I did.
And I said, technically, you're right.
I mean, it would have, I mean,
what was its exact GPS coordinates
when everything went wrong.
And Columbia is a similar problem,
but no, I had to make some decisions.
I've picked the launch site, but yeah.
Space is how it happens.
- Yeah, I think that was a critical moment in that tag
is when we were like, okay, wait,
we've been overlooking this one critical piece
of information the entire time.
Is, wait, is it where the podcast is
or is it what the podcast is about?
'Cause that makes a huge difference
and we haven't even talked about that yet.
- Yeah, so. - I think it's great.
- Yeah, so I mean, I'm assuming that at some point
we will incorporate more detail on individuals.
So if a podcaster, like under the people tag,
a person tag, sorry,
they can also have a location associated with them
if they choose to.
But that's separate from the location tag.
'Cause if I'm searching and I wanna look for podcasts
about Cape Canaveral, then, you know,
those two episodes of "Causality" would show up in the feed.
And that's another way for another way to improve discoverability.
So I think that's fantastic.
Yeah. And I'm hoping, I'm hoping that extra services pop up around this.
So one of the, one of the ideas that, um,
Adam always brings to the table, and this was true for,
and this comes from their, their experience doing the no agenda show is that the,
you know, they,
they just allow anybody to do whatever they want with their stuff.
And they always have. And so they, you know,
I've always got their listeners are free to just pop up,
you know, some merchandise store that puts their logo
and their name and all stuff all over it.
And they're like, "Oh, whatever," you know?
And so that's sort of the mindset that we brought to this
was anybody that wants to hook in
and do anything they want, it's fine.
I mean, that's, you know,
we just are donation-based purely.
And so we try to encourage people
to just do all kinds of crazy stuff.
And so one of the things I'm hoping will come out of the people and the location tags, the
location tags specifically, is I really hope that somebody just creates a location search
service using all this stuff and where you can just look at podcastgeography.com or something
like that.
You just go in there and plug in, like you said, Cape Canaveral, and then you just get
all the stuff about Cape Canaveral or Birmingham civil rights and you get all
the stuff all the critical podcasts that happened around Birmingham and Alabama
so that's that's one thing I hope happens and I'm sure it will it's just
gonna you know take a little bit of time but if you give if you give that if you
just create it and then just sort of give it away to to the to the tech guys
they'll run with it and just do all kinds of cool stuff. Absolutely so yeah
And I also looked briefly into how I could then, I suppose,
inversely incorporate what I just incorporated
into the website, 'cause I thought,
well, I could actually read those GPS coordinates
and put that up on an open street map
and embed that in the website.
So that as you flip through the feed on the website,
it would give you a nice picture
as to where that was on the world map.
And I put that into the future enhancement bucket
and we'll deal with that later.
But yes.
- You build your site with Hugo though, right?
Yes, I do. Yes. Okay, so that shouldn't be too troublesome. No, I know. I bet that would be cool.
I don't know much about Hugo, but I've got a buddy who's real into it. He's just like, he loves it.
Yeah, it's got a lot going for it and I've been using it now for probably about three and a half years.
And it's been transformative. It really did fix so many problems. I used to use something called Statomic.
I don't know if you've come across Statomic before. I don't think I've heard of that.
Nah, it was a bit of a niche product and I'd written it for version 1 and then version 2 broke a lot of things
and then version 3 broke everything else. So I'm like, okay, I'm done.
So it's like Swift.
It's exactly like Swift, yes.
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the engineered network. Okay. So, right.
So the other one just on quickly on discoverability I wanted to touch on is
soundbite. And it's, it's one of the things,
it's one of the things that really annoyed me about the way that the whole Apple
trailer thing works. So you can flag an episode in your feed as the trailer,
and different platforms will see that as a trailer, like Apple will,
but other platforms won't necessarily. And you like,
in some of those platforms that are shot like a normal episode,
which can be really annoying.
So I sort of looked at soundbite and I'm like,
oh, you're gonna need flag one per feed, right?
So soundbite on the other hand--
- For soundbite?
- Not for soundbite, no, no, no, for the trailer.
- Oh, for the Apple tag.
- Yeah, for the Apple tag, yeah, yeah.
Whereas what I love about the soundbite
is that I can have multiple soundbites if I want to
on a per episode basis if I want to,
which is the ultimate in flexibility.
So if someone wants to come and listen to an episode
and some of the episodes of "Causality"
are an hour and 10 minutes long.
So how do you know you wanna listen to that episode
about the 737 Max, well, you know,
I can now highlight multiple sections in there
that people can have a pre-listen to,
10, 15 second snippets, multiple thereof,
and they can make a decision if they wanna dive into that
and listen to the whole thing.
So, you know, I think that that is also a big win
for discoverability.
- Yeah, no, I think so too.
That was a tag that Buzzsprout had been kicking around
in the back of their mind for a while.
And they brought two things to the table pretty quick.
They brought transcripts and Soundbite.
And that's two things that they had.
They already had transcript in production,
but the only podcast app out there
that would handle it was Podcast Addict.
And so they just sort of had like a one-to-one thing
going on with Podcast Addict.
And so then they were like,
"Hey, let's just stick this in the namespace."
And so we re-engineered it and stuck it in there.
And then pretty quickly after that, they were like,
"Hey, we also have this idea of Soundbites,
and we kind of already know what we want.
And so let's, you know, let's,
they put that as a tag proposal
and we adopted it pretty quick.
'Cause it's so simple.
And you know, you can,
actually another service came out just today,
some, Andy Lehman on the,
on the Mastodon server,
he just released his podcast soundbites.com.
It's still very early,
but he's making a soundbite search service.
and so there's stuff popping up around soundbites already,
but they brought that to the table,
and I thought the soundbite idea is so neat
because you don't have to have a separate audio file,
you don't have to address a whole episode.
You can just say, here's a soundbite,
and it's just a reference to the enclosure,
and it starts at this timestamp,
and it lasts for this duration.
It's it, it's just so simple.
- No, I think it's brilliantly simple,
And it all helps for discoverability,
which has been one of the biggest problems with podcasts.
And it's like the podcast stagnation problem
that you mentioned at the very beginning
that podcasting took when I was trying to overcome,
a lot of my issues with it are related to discoverability.
Because if you've got an existing audience
and you bring an existing audience,
so let's say you're a movie star
or you're a radio personality or something like that,
and you start a podcast,
obviously you're bringing an audience with you.
And then if you're only featured,
if Apple anoints you to be featured,
then how do people find you if you're not one of those people?
Because those people are coming into the space
and essentially drowning out everybody else.
And it's like, well, some of that is deserved,
some of it isn't, perhaps, but irrespective,
that's just the way it seems to work.
And it didn't seem to be a way around it.
So if you can improve the discoverability
of people that don't have those sorts of audiences,
then hopefully the better stuff will float to the top.
And that's the hope anyway.
- I think our idea around that,
and this is why we created the podcast Index API.
I think our, we've never really articulated it,
but I think that our idea was that
discoverability follows apps.
So you can go back to what happened with RSS readers.
And as soon as Google Reader came into the space,
it just, all progress stopped.
Everything was just frozen in time, basically,
when it came to podcast readers from then on.
And so you used to have this huge wealth
of podcast reading apps, you know, Net Newswire,
and all these different podcasts,
excuse me, news feed reading apps,
Google Reader comes in and it just,
all the innovation stops.
And it lasted for a long time.
Well then when they shut Google Reader down,
all of a sudden you see this explosion of apps,
you know, Feedbin, Feedly, you know, Net Newswire's back.
You know, all these apps now, you know,
you've got two dozen feed reader apps.
And so we were thinking, you know,
When it comes to podcast apps, it's sort of the same deal.
It's you got the Apple Podcast app,
you've got, which is sort of the app default,
tyranny of the default thing.
You've got Spotify, which bought their way into the game.
And then you've got Overcast, Podcast Addict.
That's most of the market right there.
And the difference in market share
between number two and number three is humongous.
And so we thought, well, you know,
if we can allow more apps to come on the scene,
that's going to bring with it new options
for discoverability because you're inevitably
gonna get apps that focus on one thing or another
or are good at one thing or another.
And so maybe by broadening the app ecosystem,
you can help the discoverability problem too.
Because like you said, when you just have,
when everybody's relying on getting up
to the front page of Apple, of Apple Podcasts,
it's just not gonna do it.
I mean, there's just not enough room.
There's too much inventory and not enough space, you know?
And so we thought, well, if we can get more apps going
by lowering that barrier of entry
with having to run 25 servers on your backend,
then maybe the discoverability problem will begin to solve itself as well.
And then you throw the namespace on there and that gets even better because now you
have, you know, now you have things popping up that aren't even podcast apps.
Like, like the podcast soundbites thing we were talking about a while ago.
I mean, like that's those things, that's not a podcast app, but
it's helping you find podcasts.
Yeah.
So yeah, I think, I think they go hand in hand and I'm really, I'm
really happy about the sense of innovation that has come back because I
think that a lot of this stuff... here's a good example. I mean Blueberry, Todd
over at Blueberry, Todd and Mike, they have been wanting transcripts, some sort of
transcript tag for seven or eight years. And just there it just nobody could
degree on it. Now it's there. I think just that one thing to help innovation, to sort
of help bootstrap that sense and that feeling of innovation, that is going to pay all kinds
of dividends down the road with discoverability and just people's ability to see what podcasting
is capable of on the tech side.
Absolutely. You've mentioned a few times now the transcript thing. When originally
the tag came out for transcripts in namespace, I sort of like shook my head and I'm like,
but I thought transcripts were a solved problem.
And my problem was that I didn't realize that no one had actually agreed on it until I dug
into it.
And then I'm like, oh wow, it's 2020 and they still haven't agreed.
It's low hanging fruit.
It was.
How was this difficult?
So it's like, you know, that was a, like you say, low hanging fruit, easy win.
However you want to, whatever you want to say, however you want to put it.
But that's great too, because I went through and did a whole bunch of transcribing, just
using drag and dictate years ago of my back catalog of most of Pragmatic.
And I think I did a few of Causality, but I just had them linked on the website, but
they were never embedded in the feed.
So another one on my to-do list is to introduce that properly through using the namespace
in the feed and link to those files and do them as SRT files and have them time-linked,
stamped and such, but on the to-do list.
- Yeah, it's a really cool experience to see that
on a podcast app and just see it looks,
man, it's like closed captions on Netflix or something.
It's so cool.
- Yeah, it makes it look really, really professional,
even though it's not that technically complicated
to actually do it, but when you see it all come together
in the final app, it does look very professional.
So that's for sure.
- Yeah, it does.
And not to mention the accessibility stuff
that goes along with that.
I mean, there's a big component to that too.
for people who are just hard of hearing and have challenges in that way.
Oh, for sure. So that one requires a little bit more effort on the podcaster, but it's
good to know that that's there now. So it is on my to-do list. And I think that's another
one that's great for discoverability. So I think that's most of the ones in discoverability
that I wanted to just touch on. There are probably other couple of ones, but I really
want to move on to interactivity because I struggled with the idea of the category of
of interactivity because originally when you and Adam
were talking about, you know, the chapters,
Adam kept calling them community chapters.
And I never really connected for about,
I don't know, three or four episodes
as to what he actually meant.
Because to me, chapters have been around,
embedded in the MP3 file for a very long time
in the ID3 spec, and that's nothing new.
Even storing the chapters independently in,
what I did on my site previously back in 2015 is I trialed a thing where I had it in the
YAML.
So my YAML front matter would have all of the timestamps for different chapter settings
and artwork and so on.
And I only had it embedded in the website.
There was no way to put it in the RSS feed at that point, of course.
So I'd kind of indirectly done similar to what he was suggesting, but in the end, it
wasn't community editable.
And that was the point.
And it took me a little while to get my head around the fact is that what Adam was pushing
for was something that a community could then provide input into.
So the listeners of the show could contribute and say, well, I think this would be perfect
chapter art at this timestamp when you're talking about blah, blah, blah.
And that community interactivity was actually the point of putting it in that file as best
I can tell is driving that interactivity with the audience.
And I believe that you now have someone who actually does this regularly, a fan of the
shows doing this for, I'm not sure if it was No Agenda or Podcasting 2.0 or both, I'm not
sure.
Both, both.
Yeah.
So that's something that's just completely new.
No one's ever done that before as far as I'm aware.
Yeah, I'm not aware of it either.
And so, yeah, just to catch everybody up to speed, what you're talking about, John, is
It's just the ability to put all of the chapters, not in the MP3 file itself or the AAC file
or whatever it is, but take the chapters and stick them in our specification, which is
a JSON spec that's tied to the namespace.
You just put all those chapters into a JSON file that's stored alongside your MP3.
And then the way that we're doing it through one of our developers who's active on podcastindex.social,
David Norman, he runs HyperCatcher.
It's a podcast app for iOS, but he's got a companion tool called HyperCatcher Studio.
And so he baked in the ability to edit the JSON chapter format.
And so you basically create the JSON chapter file for your episode and then link it, link
that file URL in the chapters tag for that episode in your feed.
So then anybody else who's got the HyperCatcher app can listen to the show and as they're
listening they can tag chapters and they can drop in chapter art and they can drop in a
URL or name, you know, and a chapter name and all this kind of stuff.
So as, as they're doing that, they're building the JSON chapters for you.
And so what we see is like, we'll release a show, Adam will go ahead and just create
the dummy chapter file for that episode of podcasting 2.0.
He'll create, he'll create this, the, the JSON file and stick it up there.
And then, uh, at first, when it first comes out, you may see two or three
chapters that he put in there by default, but then you know as it goes
through the week you just start see all these more you know all these other
chapters come up and it's it's mostly headed up by one guy, Dreb Scott, who's
active in the Mastodon, but he he's doing our chapters and he's doing a lot of the
No Agenda chapters, but then so he's sort of like the moderator and so he'll
approve you know chapters and he puts stuff in himself but then other people
will submit and he'll say, "Yeah, this is fine to go in."
And it's just, you see this crazy building of the chapters
that happens over the course of a couple of days
as people listen.
And he's so good at it, he's so committed to it
that we put him as a split in our lightning value tag.
So he's now getting paid to do that for us.
And if he gets tired of it and bails out, that's fine,
but we, you know, it's all community driven.
And as far as I know, that's never happened before.
And I think it can probably,
we can take that and probably put it,
we take that idea and probably put it
into some other stuff too, down the line,
you know, that will be coming up with
some of the other tags that we're talking about
with like, so like social, or not social,
but like discussion tags and that kind of thing.
I think that that model works really well
Cause it keeps the feed really lean and small.
Uh, but then you can have this whole rich interactive file that goes along with it.
And it doesn't mess up the feed at all.
Like it doesn't conflict with anything that's already in your podcast.
But if a podcast app knows how to read that format, it's like, boom,
you get all this cool stuff.
I mean, it's pretty neat because you can be sitting there listening to an episode
and, uh, not, you're not just seeing show art.
sometimes it'll pop up with a screen, like an iframe.
You can just scroll through a website.
'Cause if Adam is talking about some article he read,
well, you just see the article there.
It's almost like turning your podcast
into a PowerPoint presentation or something.
That sounds horrible.
No, that sounds horrible, nobody wants that.
But it's actually cooler than that.
- An actually good PowerPoint presentation.
And they do exist, it's just they're rare.
But yeah, you're right.
It's transformative in my opinion,
in terms of that interactive element.
And it offloads some of the additional work
and a lot of the podcasters face
and provides another opportunity for audience interaction
and for listener interaction.
And those are all really good things
because listeners that are big fans of shows
want to contribute something.
And one of the things that you guys talk about
is the whole value for value kind of model
and time, talent and treasure.
And it's like, that's someone's time
helping with the chapters,
but that's time that you and Adam don't have to spend.
So as a podcast creator,
if you're focusing on creating content,
do you really wanna spend time
breaking it up into 20 chapters
and finding appropriate show art and so on and so forth?
Most podcasters couldn't be bothered
and won't do it because it's just extra time and effort.
Yeah, for the longest time I didn't do it
and I still don't always do it for Pragmatic.
I definitely do it for every episode of Causality though.
But I never used to do that.
And it's just an extra burden that I've sort of taken on.
And I've gone back and forth over
whether I would do interactive community chapters or not
on something like Causality.
And I think I'm a little bit too much of a,
I'm talking about too much OCD.
- Perfectionist.
- Yeah, perfectionist.
I don't think I could hand that over.
I'd be like, "No, it's my chapter."
But-
- See, that's the thing,
but you've converted me to Causality now.
I'm totally on board.
I'm hooked 100% on that show.
Like, I mean, I have not really stopped listening to it
for a while.
And so, like for a show like Causality,
I would totally be willing to sit down and do chapters
and do all those kinds of things.
And say, like, and I'm not really that guy.
You know, I'm not really the guy who gets all sold out
as part of an audience.
But if you can, if you find your audience
that loves your show or your product,
they are willing to give you their time.
Not just their money, that's the thing is,
I think people are, and rightly so,
people get really focused on things like Patreon
and that kind of thing,
'cause they really want their show to make money.
But the other aspect of that really is a time part,
because if you think about,
and just take a show like, I don't know,
Accidental Attack.
Accidental Attack is a show that may take three,
maybe two and a half, three hours. When you finish with that show, the thought of having to go back
and edit it and do the chapters and do a transcript and do all this kind of stuff.
I mean, you've got six, seven hours in each episode and that's a lot. If you could offload
that, you know, like Adam does with No Agenda, I mean, if you offload that with to your audience,
even if it's just a tiny fraction of your audience that's willing to get in there and do
some of that work for you. Man, that is a huge time saver. That's a life changer really.
Exactly. And it's funny, I sort of think back to one of the comments you made earlier about
who's actually podcasting these days. And it used to just be a bunch of geeks because
we knew how to do all of these things. But mind you, we didn't know very much about how
to make very good audio. I think that's fair to say across the board. And that's why a
lot of the early podcasters sounded terrible and that's okay. But, you know, so we learned
that skill, but now of course, with the tools maturing and things getting a lower barrier
for entry, people are now able, like normal regular people who are not geeks, are tech
savvy enough to do this, but they may not be tech savvy enough to sort out all the chapters,
but now if they can outsource that essentially to the fan base, then suddenly that's one
less thing for them to do, and it improves the value of what they're creating.
And so everyone benefits and I like that.
That's really good.
- Yeah, I think this next generation of podcast apps,
Sphinx is one example that sort of marries
all these ideas together.
Hypercatcher will be another example.
Like we really have not seen anything like this before.
It's kind of crazy if you,
and I may talk about Sphinx and that kind of thing before,
but like just stepping back for a second
and looking at Hypercatcher,
that app has this idea that you're editing chapters
in the app that you're listening to the podcast in.
That is something that's new.
- Yeah, that's out there.
- Yeah, I mean, how often, I mean, that's just weird.
From if you think about all what we have gotten used to,
which is this sort of inbox style of podcast app,
you know, it's okay, here's your episodes,
you're gonna listen, and you're done.
if you bring in this element of interactivity to it, where you're actually literally modifying
the show or participating in the chat or something like that right there in the app, it's kind
of a, it's kind of a, you know, mind blower.
Oh, for sure.
And so, I mean, the interactivity component, um, I was thinking about, well, what else
could we do?
Because, um, I've been making podcasts now for about eight years and, you know, I think
about like from different kinds of course but for different periods of time and I think
about like different shows have different requirements and one of the ones that is popular
are things like Q&A you know like ask me anything kind of things and then there's proposals
for you know future topics for example like it'd be great if you guys could talk about
blah blah blah and they just and it seems like the most popular place to throw that
sort of thing as like a hashtag on Twitter or something. I mean, there's many other ways
of doing it, of course, but I mean, that's the one that I've seen used quite regularly.
And I mean, there's no reason why we couldn't like extend, for example, to having like a
tag for like proposed topics or Q&A or something like that, using exactly the same methodology
as the community chapters at some point in the future. I know it's not currently a tag,
but I'm also, I guess I'm just pimping my idea because I put that one on there.
- It could be, but throw it on there, man.
I mean, you're on GitHub, put it up there.
- Yeah, it's on there.
But anyway, so, but look, I really wanna move forward
to the last topic, monetization,
because it's not straightforward
and it's gonna take a little bit of time.
So, which is of course part of a problem,
but it's also cool.
So, you know, gotta talk about it.
So there are a couple other little tags in there,
things like the locked tag,
which I think is good to prevent people
from just stealing your feed, which is good.
It doesn't really form any of those other classifications,
but it kind of like felt like the minimum barrier of entry.
It's like, sorry, the price of entry,
really it should have been from day one.
- Yeah.
- So I'm glad that's in there.
- That was a tag that was all about shaming
a couple of companies that were bad about doing that.
And it's all about just giving the ammo
to make those people feel bad about what they're doing.
- Yeah, yeah, I understand.
But I think that that sort of thing,
It's like, it's a solved problem with like domain transfer,
I think more or less.
And yet here we are with podcasts
and it was something that had never happened.
And at first I thought, well, why do we need it?
And then I read up about it.
I'm like, oh my God, how come we haven't had this yet?
So, so yeah.
- Yeah.
- Like a lot of these tags, in fact.
- Yeah, it really is like that a lot.
It's funny when somebody comes up with something,
you're like, yeah, yeah, maybe.
And then they're like, and then they just subtly tweak it.
And they're like, well, what about this?
and you're like, yes, that way, that makes so much sense.
Why didn't I see that before?
It's a, people have great ideas, man.
I mean, like that's really,
if there's any thing that has contributed
to the podcast namespace success, which,
and we're, I think current stats are we about 10,
a little over 10% of all podcasts now
have the podcast namespace in it.
- That's awesome.
- And that does not include Lipson.
those stats do not include Libsyn, which now puts the tag header,
they put the declaration, the namespace declaration in,
but they have not implemented the tags yet. So that'll be another, you know,
75,000 feeds or so. So we're making a lot of progress.
Technically, I suppose you could go into the, um,
to the custom tags and then add them and it'll, the feed it validate in Libsyn.
But most normal people aren't going to do that.
They're going to wait for it to be available on the front end.
That's the interesting thing about the Libsyn deal is that,
It's actually pretty neat because they are going to now be the only host where you can
use the value tag because you could drop it in their custom.
And so that's actually kind of an odd little quirk to this that makes it very interesting.
If you're a Libsyn feed customer, you can go in there and put the value tag even though
they don't, even though the other hosting companies that have done a lot more with the
actual tags themselves, you couldn't do that over there. So it's kind of a weird mix, you
know?
Oh yeah, for sure. And since you mentioned it, I think it's about time we talked about
the value tag. And the funny thing about the value tag is I think that's not technically
in phase one or phase two, because we're breaking down the tags into different phases to try
and make them bite-sized chunks to deliver a bunch at a time. And I think it's still,
it's not technically in phase one or phase two, is it? As a tag?
- It's in limbo. - It's in limbo.
- It has no effect. And I don't know when it's going to be actually officially adopted
because it's complicated. - It is.
- And I keep thinking we can't really, I think it's going to take a while because it seems
straightforward and it works perfectly right now, but I'm waiting for somebody to come in and I know
this is going to happen. Waiting for somebody to come in and say, "Okay, what about this use case?"
And I'm going to be like, "You know, the way it's structured now is not going to work. We're going
to have to tweak this." And I don't want that to happen after it's already delivered. And so I keep
giving it some time. And I also know that it's not a rush type deal because the hosting companies
are completely not prepared for that. Their customers are not asking for it. That is,
even if we finalized it today, it would be a long time before any of them saw any reason
to actually put it in there. So I think it's going to be a while. It's going to be in limbo
for the foreseeable future.
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this nut somehow and I'm thinking how do we start and I'm thinking we have to
start with Bitcoin because I okay so I give us a rundown of exactly how
Bitcoin works, Josh.
Oh, yeah.
How long have we got?
Oh my God.
Okay, so I just want to start by saying up front that everything I have learned about
Bitcoin and Lightning, I only started caring about this after September last year when
I started listening to Podcasting 2.0.
So prior to that, I was aware.
You're welcome.
Yeah, thank you.
It's now my brain has melted, so yes, thank you for that too.
Yes. So turns out that this whole Bitcoin thing has been going on for quite a while.
And I was tangentially aware of it.
You know, it's like I'm aware that there are places in the world that I've never been to either.
So I was aware of Bitcoin and it was over there and it was happy.
But learning all the ins and outs of it and then understanding what the problems were.
I'm going to have a stab at this and just tell me how well I did, because I think you've been
Bitcoining longer than me.
So basically, Bitcoin is based on the concept of a blockchain,
and a blockchain can be used for anything you like.
But the data for this is particularly about a currency that's called Bitcoin.
And the idea is that you will have a Bitcoin miner
which will do a bunch of calculations for transactions.
And those transactions and that Bitcoin miner will go and crunch away.
And they each compete
through a series of distributed nodes,
and they distribute the result of the distributed nodes
until a winner is agreed upon.
and that winner then becomes the head of the blockchain and then the next set of transactions get essentially queued up and then they start crunching away at that.
And essentially as a reward for being the winning block you will be awarded a certain amount of Bitcoin.
And the amount of Bitcoin is being reduced gradually over time as a reward because the,
suppose the amount of money in the system, well Bitcoin in the system is increasing as the blockchain grows.
The only other thing I would suggest is that there's more than one kind of cryptocurrency.
And this is the problem a lot of people have with the terminology.
I certainly, I had the same problem.
Is that there's more than one blockchain and each of the blockchains can represent a different kind of cryptocurrency.
So, Bitcoin is not actually the name of every single cryptocurrency out there.
Because there's lots of them.
There's like Litecoin and Dogecoin or something.
I don't know.
It's a whole bunch of different crazy people.
- There's a lot of them.
- There are.
- Hive, there's a lot of them.
- Yes, and it's like, okay, so,
but Bitcoin is the oldest and most popular
as to my understanding,
and Lightning relates to Bitcoin specifically
as a method of, okay, we'll get to that in a minute.
So first things first, how did I go?
Is that roughly right?
- I'm not gonna correct anything you said
because I think that is absolutely fine.
- Yeah, I mean, there's a,
the really big thing that makes Bitcoin what it is
is the proof of work and the miners.
And you know, the miners pull transactions
out of the mempool and compete with each other
to be the first one to solve a hash.
And the first one that solves that hash gets the reward,
which is the coinbase of the new block.
And so they get new coins.
But even after all the coins are mined,
which there'll only ever be 21 million of those.
Even after all the coins are mined,
the miners still are incentivized to do their job
based on fees, they get transaction fees.
And so if you wanna send Bitcoin from,
if I wanna send you half a Bitcoin,
I'm gonna have to pay a fee to get that done.
So that fee goes to the miner.
So anyway, I'm not gonna correct anything you said,
I think it's perfectly fine,
but the lightning is where it gets interesting.
Yeah, so what I tried to do was give the high level version of it and that is a gross simplification of certain aspects of it, but that's the gist of it.
So what I learned very quickly with Bitcoin and the reason that everyone's so excited about Lightning is that the law of supply and demand over the mempool and getting transactions
mind and such and so on and so forth,
that can actually get expensive.
And it's not just that,
it's also how many of them transactions
you can theoretically process in any given moment in time,
like time period, minute, hour, whatever,
transactions per, I forget the time base they're used, but--
- 10 minutes. - Per 10 minutes.
Okay, so it's like, that's a problem with Bitcoin
because of the way that that works.
And so one of the proposals was,
I think it's a second level protocol,
I forget the name that they use.
- Layer, yeah, like a layer two.
- Yeah, so it's a layer two protocol.
And the idea is that we will build a series of nodes
and those nodes will talk to each other
and open up transactions channels to each other.
And each of those channels will have a certain amount
of funds available on each end,
liquidity on each end, inbound and outbound liquidity.
If you, in theory, then connect enough
of those nodes together,
you can transact completely independent
off of the main blockchain.
And the only time you interact with a blockchain
is when you open or close a channel.
And apart from that,
all the nodes and the routing of funds through those nodes
is all set on a very, very inexpensive amount of money
that's set by whoever is using that node
as a lightning node to forward on transactions.
So does that pretty much cover it or no?
- Yeah, so the difference between the Bitcoin,
I think you did, I think that was perfectly fine.
The difference between the Bitcoin on-chain transactions,
or excuse me, the Bitcoin on-chain operation and Lightning,
the main things to know are that Lightning operates
on more of a BGP-style routing,
traditional network hops, like that sort of thing,
versus Bitcoin, which is really
a peer-to-peer gossip-based protocol.
And so, from a networking standpoint,
if you forget the crypto part of it,
from a networking standpoint,
it's automatically gonna be faster.
It's gonna be more efficient,
because it has the power of traditional packet-based
concept networking in it.
But then you have, like you said, the idea of channels.
So you conduct, say I have a Lightning node,
you have a Lightning node,
and we want to be able to exchange funds with each other.
We open a channel between each other,
and so we do one on-chain transaction to open that channel.
And let's just say it's 100,000 Satoshis,
and a Satoshi is a 100 millionth of a Bitcoin.
So let's say I open a 100,000 Satoshi channel to you.
We open that channel together.
What that is doing is essentially creating
a multi-signature address that we share.
we both have private keys for. And so then we can exchange funds on private
ledgers off quote-unquote off-chain is the terminology and then once that
channel closes we settle up that those ledgers and that's put back on-chain.
And so you have you can just do super fast payments for very very low fees
sometimes no fees if you have a private channel between two parties.
And so you can, it opens up, Bitcoin is never going, itself, on-chain is never
going to be able to scale to something that can handle Visa and MasterCard
level transaction volume. You just can't do it because you're only talking about
a transaction, excuse me, a new block every 10 minutes roughly. And so I don't
know somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 transactions approximately per block.
That's just not much. And so you had there in order for this thing to scale
there had to be a layer two on top of it that allowed for a higher volume lower
fee type scenario and that's what Lightning is and it solves it really
does solve that problem. And now the you know at the beginning Lightning was this
same type of concept as sort of on-chain payments. It was, "Okay, I'm going to... I
want to get paid. I'm going to send you an invoice, and then you're going to pay
the invoice." And so that idea was more this sort of like a traditional
transaction from two-party perspective. And what changed the game for Adam,
and he's the first one, he called me. We had already had the idea for the podcast index
before we ever even thought about the lightning stuff. But if you know Adam's track record,
you know that when he calls you and says, "Hey, I've got this idea and I think it's gonna be,
it could be pretty big." You better kind of stop what you're doing and listen.
It doesn't mean it's gonna work, but you better listen to it because it might. So he said,
And we were already talking about the API and the index and everything.
And he said, "You know, I just read about KeySend.
And KeySend is the part of Lightning that is a, it's like an open invoice.
You can just, if you, if I know your Lightning Node ID, I can just send you money.
I don't have to ask your permission.
You just get it.
And as long as you're, as long as your Lightning Node accepts KeySend payments
and my lightning node can handle key send payments,
I can just send you money all day long.
And so that was really the thing he said,
why, you know, everybody is struggling
to figure out Patreon and how to get paid
and all this kind of stuff.
And they're really at the mercy of their advertisers.
That's a huge deal for some,
you know, like politically based podcasts.
They're always at risk of somebody
that doesn't like them coming after their advertiser.
So he's like, in order for,
to sort of get rid of all of that,
why don't we try to come up with something
where we can layer lightning on top of podcast apps?
And so that's the ultimate value for value model.
So, you know, as I'm listening,
I'm sending you little small amounts of Bitcoin,
you know, once a minute or once every 10 minutes
or some time interval.
and there's no sort of, there's no parties in between.
It's just a direct transaction between me and you.
And I thought, God, that's brilliant.
Yes, absolutely.
- It's mind bendingly, it's simple
and it's an amazing idea.
And it took me a little while to get my head around it.
It's like, it literally is pay per listen,
but as you listen.
And so you get rewarded, you know, as a content creator.
And I do hate that term, but still as a content creator,
if you have someone who has a high listen through rate
as a listener, they listen all the way through to 97%
of the episode, the last, you know, 3% is, you know,
just you rambling on saying,
hey, please write us an iTunes
or whatever the heck you say at the end of it.
- Yeah. - You know.
- Hey guys. - Yeah, hey guys.
Yeah, just, anyway, but please don't worry
about the whole ratings thing.
That's been debunked, but nevermind.
It's fine. But yeah, but the idea is that you will get rewarded for that 97%
duration of the person listening directly through through
Key Send. And if your episode is really,
really boring and horrible, and I don't know, you offend everybody five minutes in,
well, you're only going to get stats for the first five minutes.
And then after that, you're not going to get anything.
And it's like, that's the ultimate in the ultimate granularity
of listener engagement.
It's like, I'm paying you for the value I'm getting out of it.
Five minutes in, it's no more value.
So that's it.
And it's like, it's, that's beautiful.
Right.
So I sort of thought about, well, okay, how do I sort of get involved with this?
And I of course then took the next step of saying, well, practically speaking, what
have I got lying around?
Well, I didn't have any Raspberry Pis and I had to look at my Synology and I'm like,
Hey, this thing can run Docker containers.
Um, so let's just spin up some Docker containers and see how we go.
So I tried to do this and I'm speaking in past tense,
so that's probably the giveaway as to how it went.
I'm going to assume this failed.
You assume correctly.
OK.
I just want to quickly lay out the reasons why it failed
and why I didn't realize why it would fail.
In short, the problem, as I perceive it, with Bitcoin initially,
is that you need to have fast read/write access
to your storage medium for reading and writing the blocks.
It's not heavily computationally intensive,
downloading the blocks and validating them.
Obviously it plays a part,
but the CPU in the Synology,
whilst a lot of people would scoff at it
'cause it's a Celeron,
it's quite capable of doing that.
But the problem is that most Synology drive,
NASs that people have got or QNAPs or what have you,
are all gonna be spinning rust.
They're not gonna be solid state drives.
And one thing I missed early on
is that the recommendation for the Raspberry Blitz and the different boxes out there that
you can get for as a Bitcoin node and a Lightning node is that they're all using solid-state
drives.
So had I dug through and read all that detail, I wouldn't have even tried that.
So then I tried different things like, oh, I could attach an external solid-state drive
to my Synology and I could point the Docker at the USB share drive, which did work actually,
And I was able to download the blockchain, set up a lightning node, open a couple of
channels.
But then the vagaries of Docker on the Synology came back to bite me because whilst I could
open outbound channels, they would never actually finish because the Docker network on a Synology
essentially is its own private network with its own NAT layer.
So because of that address translation layer, between that and my router network, it was
essentially double NATed.
And that was a problem because the transactions are saying,
"Well, hang on a minute, I don't know you are who you say you are
because I'm going through two layers of NATing."
And there were a bunch of things you can do in the Synology
to actually change that setting,
but it would change it for all of the Docker containers.
And that would then mess up some of the other stuff
that I already had working just fine.
- Yeah, and so now you're getting into the realm of,
"I can get this working, but it's going to be so fragile
that I don't know if I want to keep it working.
This is too much of an investment.
- Yeah, and that's exactly the point I reached.
I'm like, right, that's it, I'm done.
So I sunk some money into it.
It's sitting on a hard drive and it's gone nowhere.
And I finally decided, you know what?
I'm just going to do what most people
that want to own their own node are doing from day one.
And that is you just buy a Raspberry Pi
and chuck it on that and use a Raspberry Blitz.
And that seems to be, I think that's what Adam has.
I'm not sure if that's what you've got or something similar.
I'm using Voltage.
I did this, I got a similar,
I went down a similar route as you.
I just didn't do it on a Synology.
I went with just a VM, I spun a VM up in Linode
and installed BTC pay on it, which is a big conglom,
that's a bunch of modules put together.
So I put BTC pay on it.
And I also found myself fighting Docker for,
you know, a week trying to get this thing to work.
And it was like, no, I'm done.
I just was like, I just deleted it like yesterday.
So this thing had been around
and I'd been fighting it forever.
And I was like, nah, screw it.
So I just went with a voltage node and it's like,
you know, I think it's like 10 bucks a month or something.
And it's, you know, one of the,
I will end up probably doing a Raspi Blitz at some point.
But I was like, no, I just, I need to,
I need to just have something working.
And so that's what I'm doing. I'm on voltage.
Yeah. So, I mean, that was the thing I thought about originally.
And so I got in on Sphinx before Sphinx kind of,
how should I say maxed out? They had some capacity limitations.
We broke it. Just be honest. We broke it.
Yeah. You guys broke it. That's what happens when you, you know, I don't know.
But yes.
We broke, we almost broke lightning.
I don't know how true that is, but it may be truer than I like to admit.
But because I mean, I think Ryan Gentry over at Lightning Labs,
if I remember it correctly, I think he told Adam at one point we were like half
of the total Lightning payment volume on the network was for podcasts.
>> Wow. That's amazing.
Because that's only ever been since September at the earliest.
So --
>> Well, you know, Lightning is so young, too.
I mean, it's really only been around for a couple years.
And KeySend specifically has only been around for, gosh, maybe like 18 months,
less than that, something.
And so it's not that we're doing a lot of monetary volume.
This is we're doing a lot of transaction volume.
Yeah, for sure.
So I guess the thing is, I'm thinking about this from the perspective of this is
forward looking. This is forward thinking.
This is not, I mean, to say that this is something that every podcaster should be
considering is probably not the right advice.
I would be saying that it is,
it's something to be keeping a close eye on.
And as it becomes easier, like voltage, for example.
So just for the listeners sake,
you can actually go to voltage
and spin up your own node right now.
And you can get a node ID
and you can start incorporating that into your feed.
But if you wanna fully own it and not pay monthly fees
for, you know, for their,
obviously they're charging for the pleasure
of hosting your node for you.
And they deal with a bunch of the liquidity and everything,
as far as I'm aware?
- No, not really.
It's purely, I mean, you got to manage that thing.
And that's one of the things that's kind of,
we're trying to figure that out.
This is sort of a two headed monster.
So you have the pod, you got the podcaster side,
and then you've got the podcast listener side.
And the podcast listener side,
what we're working on right now is something with
an API called LNPay.
And on that side, the channels and all that kind of stuff are managed pretty well.
On voltage, it really is like spinning up a raspberry pie in your house.
I mean, like, okay, you've got a node now and good luck.
You know, that's really not going to help you at all.
So you have to figure out, okay, you got to know I got to put Bitcoin on it
enough to open a channel.
I got to open my channels.
I got to do all that.
You know, you got, there's, there's some knowledge that has to happen there.
That was, that was kind of the beauty of Sphinx.
was things you could spin up a node and it was pre-funded and you sort of had everything ready to go
until you know, they hit a lot of scaling issues. And so that they're trying to, they're getting
solved actually right now. But that I think really in order on the podcaster side,
you're, there's going to be, there's going to be a lot of Bitcoin enthusiast podcasters that are
they're gonna know what to do.
Or people like you,
that are willing to jump in there
and learn enough to get started.
But then for your average,
non-technically inclined podcaster,
it's just too much of a hurdle.
And so there's gonna have to be this second level service
where it's not just that they're gonna get a node,
you're gonna get a node and it's already got
everything set up with the channels you need.
And so we've been working sort of behind the scenes
with multiple people trying, multiple groups trying
to figure out how to get that started.
Graham over at Voltage, we've been talking to him
and say, okay, is there a way we can give a podcaster
a node, but then have it pre-funded
and already have some channels open and that kind of thing.
So it's a lot to figure out.
There's a lot of moving parts on the podcaster side.
- Yeah, and I think that it's,
so listening to how this has been evolving.
So I get in early on Sphinx, so I have a Sphinx node
and Causality is currently the only show
that I have on there with the Sphinx tribe, as you know.
And it's been relatively straightforward
once that was running,
but I know that they've had onboarding problems since then,
but I know they're working on it and that's fine.
But you can, of course, if you get something like a Raspi Blitz,
then you can actually just enable the Sphinx chat capability on that
and then do exactly the same thing, but on your own node.
- Does it have the Sphinx relay on it already? - Yeah.
I had a look at the GitHub website and it says you can actually enable that functionality.
- So this is just what it says on the repo. - Oh, that's cool.
I haven't actually tried it myself.
And funnily enough, I actually ordered it already.
So I ordered it like two days ago.
So I'm waiting to see if it shows up today or tomorrow.
It'd be hilarious if it actually showed up
during us talking about it, but I don't think it's gonna.
- Yeah, that'd be cool.
- That would be cool, but I don't think it's gonna.
- Then you can plug it in and tell me for sure
if it's got Sphinx Relay on it.
- Well, I'll let you know one way or the other,
but apparently it does.
And one of the attractions of doing it that way
is that you can add whatever software you want to it.
So you could actually add additional modules.
And so I suppose what I learned is,
like you mentioned BTC Pay, that's one of them.
So there's the Lightning Labs, LND, Lightning implementation.
There's also another one called C Lightning.
And these are all different ones that are out there.
And what I didn't know early on is that a lot
of the different interfaces don't work on all of them.
So it's like, so it's not like Thunder Hub only works
on LND, it doesn't work on C Lightning.
And so I learned the hard way that when I'm trying
to pull, peel, like piece together all these different
Docker containers, some work nice together and some don't.
and it just all got so very, very difficult.
So if I was ever giving anyone an advice
that they wanted to dive in and have a crack at this,
step one, don't try and reuse unless you genuinely have
like a decent Raspberry Pi 3 or 4
lying around with a solid state drive.
Apart from that, either you get a node
that essentially has a monthly charge
or you just get a Raspberry Pi and do it that way.
Trying to repurpose like a NAS
is probably not the smartest thing to do.
And I needed something that was on all the time, right?
So using my laptop's not gonna help
'cause I can't leave it on all the time
'cause it goes off, I take it to work
and the random outsets, it's not practical.
And then that way you own it.
But then the other thing I love about Lightning
is the whole liquidity thing.
And it took me a while to get my head around it
because it's kind of like,
to me, this is what banking is sort of like
fundamentally about.
It's like, I'm gonna open up a channel,
we're going to have an agreement about how much money is in that and we can each draw
on that. And whenever we dissolve that channel, then there's going to be payment fees and
we settle up and that sort of thing. And I'm just like, I thought to myself, this is the
side of banking that I've never known about, but it makes perfect sense. It's just accounting,
I guess, but it's yeah, that layer of complexity. And it's something that I remember listening
to a recent episode of, of with you and Adam talking about and Adam's like, no, we're already
three or four levels down further than he ever wants anyone to go or have to go.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, which I understand.
But at the same time, I'm thinking to myself, well, if you do have enough
podcasters that are able to set up and own and run their own nodes
and that's as straightforward as possible, or there's a clear pathway, you know,
like buy this, install that and you're good to go and put this in your feed
and you're good to go or and so on, then they will
they will suggest to their listeners, hey, you know what?
rather than Patreon, we have this other thing that's like, um,
potentially better than Patreon as a method of support. And,
and this is kind of,
if we can get to that stage where you have enough listeners that are willing to
support that way,
and you have enough podcasters that are enabled to accept that support in that
way, then suddenly you,
cause the way I'm looking at this is that this is,
it's like lower transaction fees on the lightning side. Yes.
Going on and off off chain is always going to cost you some money.
So you'll lose something there.
But then Patreon, for example, they take fees.
So this is just the equivalent of doing business that way.
But in theory, in aggregate, the fee should be less in the end if you need to go to and
from fiat currency, for example.
And ultimately, you can't be de-platformed insofar as I know that sounds terrible.
I know that's like that's the it's not the buzzword, but it's just what people are saying.
It's like, oh, you're going to get de-platformed and this is cancel culture and blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, I don't think about it quite so decisively.
I think of it more as there are a million and one ways where things can go wrong with like a company like Patreon.
Some people use Memberful.
Memberful was bought by Patreon, if I remember correctly.
So it's like Memberful and Patreon, the same sort of thing.
And I'm pretty sure it's VC backed or if it wasn't, it was for a period of time.
So it's like, well, what happens if that business, you know, falls apart?
You know, it happens, you know, and all their servers go down for an extended
period, or there's a, there's, like I said, there's a thousand things that could
happen. And it's like, well, what's, what's the next option?
So if you've got this big support of fan base of people that love your work, and
that's the only way that you can, that they can show their appreciation.
What's the answer?
And so I'm looking at lightning as like, well, lightning is actually the answer.
It's like that is the distributed support pathway for people that don't want to edit chapters.
They're happy to let someone else do it, but can't contribute in any other way.
But they want to contribute something.
And it's like, well, I think that's fantastic.
You sound like a Bitcoin maximalist, John.
I don't.
You're in the deep end, man.
You've jumped all the way.
I know.
I've got to...
It really is.
No, but it really is a head.
It's a head spin.
It is.
Like, because, you know, Adam, he kids around and he says,
in the future, everybody will be given
a lightning node ID at birth.
And it's like, but there's some interesting,
you know, it's like, there's some interesting aspect
of that, because you think about,
you gave the banking example.
I mean, if you're running your own lightning node,
you are essentially your own bank.
- Yeah, sure.
I mean, from the standpoint of that currency,
you are now managing,
if you imagine that the other currencies go away
and that Lightning is the currency,
let's just say 20 years from now,
Lightning is the way that we transact.
I mean, you really can,
it doesn't take much to get you into the mindset of,
yes, you actually are your own bank.
It's a little bit of a mind bender.
But the other thing on the de-platforming and that kind of stuff,
we just have, humans are good at pattern recognition.
We're just like, we're amazing pattern recognition machines.
But we're really terrible at trend recognition.
We don't, we find it really hard to accurately
look back at history and tell and say, okay, this was the trend. And what I mean by that is we
forget. We forget a lot of things. And, you know, when it comes to, you know, politics,
if you go back 25 years ago, it was sort of the right censoring the left. And now people say it's
the left censoring the right. And things keep flip-flopping back and forth. And what it really,
And it doesn't matter which side it is.
All that you need to know is that that historically has always been the case.
There's always been attempts to silence people.
And I don't think we want, we don't want political, none of us collectively want political and
sociological based podcasts to go away.
You know, we don't want them to be afraid that they're going to say something wrong
and go away.
And so there's all these ideas about, you know, who is going to be sort of in power
and trying to silence the other people.
And none of that matters.
All that really matters is that you have an option to, if you feel that your message is
important, that you have a way to get paid for it or supported by your listeners in a
a direct way without having to worry about whether you're going to offend an advertiser
or something like that.
And that really is kind of sad if you think about the podcasting, the trajectory that
it has taken where it's all just advertising dominated now.
When people think of how they're going to fund their podcast, they just can't even think
of any other way.
It's just, I have to read ads.
It's like the only option.
But this, obviously there are Patreons and stuff like that, but this is a way that you
sort of directly connect you to your audience.
And there's no memberships.
There's nothing like that.
It's a pure honor system where you say, "If I make great content, all I ask is that you
pay me something to listen to it."
And you can tell if you're making bad content because nobody will pay you.
And that's to me on the political side, I think it's a self-solving problem too.
Like if you have these, you know, some wackos that are saying a bunch of crazy stuff on
a podcast, if you, there may be some advertisers out there that are making money selling seeds
or gold or something like that, that are willing to support that podcast. But if that podcast
has to survive purely on the donations of people, of listeners, there are not enough
listeners out there that agree with that, to support that person. So I think, like even
on the political side, it's a self-solving issue. If you take all the middlemen out and
just say, "Okay, you have to make your living spouting whatever this is that
you're saying." I think they would all fail just because most
people are smarter than that. But yeah, anyway, I think it really
changes the whole dynamic of how you relate to your listener as a
podcaster. Because you can tell, like, you know, on our show we read donations
every week. And it's like sometimes we get a week where it's like, "Oh, we got $20 this week."
Last week's show must have been terrible. We need to change this. And it's like that with this. I
mean, there's like this direct feedback mechanism where you can see Satoshi's coming in and your
balance is going up and you can tell, "Oh my gosh, people are listening to the show. They're doing it
right now, you know, I can tell.
I don't know if you've seen that on the Sphinx side
or if you see that part of it.
- I do, it doesn't, I have to have the Sphinx app open
and when people are listening and I do see that.
I don't think that it's as big as something like No Agenda.
So I don't see a steady flow,
but I definitely do see a jump every now and then,
which is lovely to see.
And 'cause I know that people are getting value out of it.
And what I--
- When you get your RaspiBlitz set up
and if you get the Zap wallet attached to it,
It's so cool because you just flip it open and you can see, boom, boom, boom.
You can see all these transactions coming in. It's really neat.
Cool. Yeah. Well, I'll hopefully I'll set that up and I'll let you know how that goes.
I yeah, because I what I like about like your what you just talked about was that is the problem of the middleman and the middle person, I should say.
But the fact is that these people, companies, advertisers, in some cases, are patrons.
example, it's like, if you want to deal with us, this is what you need to do. If you don't,
you know, meet these requirements, then there will be consequences. And it's like, well,
you know, like, and that's the sponsor problem is that, I mean, I work very closely with the
sponsors that I've had in the past and present, and I try to, you know, genuinely present good
value for them. But the reality is, I've never had a point where they've, I've felt like I have to
censor myself based on that. But the thought occurs to me is that that is inevitable. If
I continue funding through that pathway, then ultimately that decision will come. It's inevitable.
I think about cable companies as well. That's another example. If you want these TV shows,
you have to deal with this cable company because they've got the deal with the studio and the
studio will only get this show on this cable company. So you've got to deal with the cable
company where you just can't watch the show. And streaming services like Netflix to some
extent have sort of solved that to a point, but they haven't solved it because I can't
subscribe to a show. So it's sort of like, well, instead of dealing with a cable company,
now I'm sort of dealing with Netflix. And it's like, well, has that actually changed
anything? I mean, ideally it would be, here's a production company. You want to watch this
show, then we will, as I watch your show, I will fund these guys. Cause I love that
show. There is no Netflix. There is no middleman in there. And essentially it's like, the funny
thing is what we're trying to create here is, is a sort of like an environment where
not only can this lead the way with the funding models for podcasting, it could potentially
grow beyond that. And, and, and that's when your brain really starts to melt. So yeah,
I see massive potential, but the barriers,
the technical barriers at the moment,
and that minimum barrier of entry,
we got to keep chipping away at that.
And I see progress happening.
And I mean, like I said, I'm diving in,
so I'm probably crazy, but oh well.
- Yeah, well, that's the thing is you have to be,
and we've tried to be honest,
especially like on our show each week.
I mean, we don't know how this stuff is gonna play out.
And it's totally building the plane in flight,
is what it's doing.
And from week to week, things break
and we come up with new ideas and all this kind of stuff.
You know, the target is still within
some reasonable amount of time
to have some mass of podcasters
earning money with streaming lightning payments.
And if that takes a year, and at the end of a year,
if we had 150 podcasters that were gaining
some non-meaningless amount of money from this,
I would say that that is a win.
That is not a failure at all.
Because that means that you've established a baseline
for how this thing is gonna work, and you've proven it.
even proven that it's sustainable.
And that's really what you have to have.
The Podcasting 2.0 experiment with the namespace
and the index and all this kind of stuff,
really, if you boil it all down to it,
it's just really one big, long proof of concept
to see at some point in time, did all this stuff work?
And on the lightning side of that,
if within a reasonable amount of time,
if we can say that, okay, yeah, it's not big,
but it is working, like, that's huge.
I'd consider that a win all day long.
And so I think, you know, I think it's just gonna take,
there's, like all these things,
it's gonna take a little bit of sort of critical mass
because there's, I'm trying to figure out
how to say this, how to put this into words.
With any project, it sort of gets to a point
where it grows bigger than itself.
And I'm waiting for that to happen
with the lightning thing.
And we had a Zoom with a bunch of the app developers
on the Mastodon this past, was it yesterday?
Yeah, it was yesterday.
Man, the weeks are just flying by.
But it was yesterday and we were just giving them
an overview of the LNPay API and here's how to get started
and from our current understanding.
And a few of the things came up, like,
okay, what about funding to the wallet?
How are we going to do the time sync?
Is it sending a payment once a minute
as somebody is listening?
That sounds like too much.
We have to queue all that.
I mean, what if they go offline?
There's all these questions that we have to answer.
But it was no, what was encouraging,
it was not just us asking those questions anymore.
The developers themselves were in there
asking those questions and coming up with solutions.
And at some point, it wasn't even me leading the thing anymore.
It was just everybody saying, "Okay, here's how we should do this,
and here's what I'm doing," and blah, blah, blah.
And I think there just needs to be, at some point, there will be this critical
mass where the Bitcoin people and the podcast app people and all these groups
kind of come together and begin to do this stuff outside of just the podcast
index or me or Adam or that kind of thing.
That's when it gets to me.
That's when it gets really exciting is when that thing begins to that
product, when a project starts to sort of take off, take, get its own feet
under it and run off in a direction.
And I see it's trying to do that right now, but it's just not quite there yet
because of those like technical hurdles that you mentioned about having to
understand liquidity and all this kind of jazz, if we can like cut one of those
things out. I think that's all that's needed. Like I saw today that Visa is going to start,
they've partnered with some company to start doing Bitcoin transactions. That's huge. I
mean, this is the first time that a major credit card processor has even acknowledged
Bitcoin exists. And then you now you've got Square that's in their cash, with
their cash app that allows Bitcoin, you got PayPal that allows Bitcoin
transactions. If just one of those companies supports Lightning,
problem solved. Immediately problem solved. You've got Strike, which I use. I
don't know if it's available worldwide. No, it's not. It's not? Okay.
Strike is what I use and it's essentially Venmo for Lightning.
And so if you have any one of these major companies that already have a large user base
to adopt Lightning, done.
To me, it's just that immediately makes this whole thing immediately doable.
And that's what I'm waiting for.
Yeah. And I think that, you know, of course we can't tell the future.
I don't know how far down the road that is, but I think that it's,
it's one of those things with momentum. We, we, we add, uh, we had a few more people,
you know, a few more people get behind it, that momentum builds,
a few more people build, uh,
grow on top of that and then the momentum builds some more. And, um, yeah,
it is interesting to see where it takes off and, um, I feel, and I'm,
I'm really badly mixing metaphors there, but nevermind. Um, so, but,
- Well, I've got an article that I've been,
haven't even talked about on our show yet.
I mean, it's, I forgot where this came from.
This may be a Cridlin article.
He says, yeah, 38% of people believe
there are too many ads in podcasts.
And let's see, here's a super listener study.
Yeah, 56% of heavy podcast listeners
think the number of ads in podcasts is increasing,
and 38% believe there are already too many.
I mean, we're at the ad saturation point.
- Yeah, we are.
- Yeah, and you can't just keep cramming ads in there.
You've seen what it's done to YouTube.
I mean, it's killing YouTube.
And if podcasts try to make up,
if podcasting as an industry tries to grow itself
beyond this magical one billion dollar barrier
by stuffing more ads into podcasts, it's gonna kill it.
there's gotta be an alternative.
- Yeah, exactly. - There just has to be.
- And one of the other things that we haven't spoken about,
I don't think, is that I've been focused on
like Lightning for the podcaster
and Lightning for the podcast listener,
but what I don't think we really touched on
is you can actually split in your RSS feed
and you can say, well, I'm gonna give a certain percentage
of the proceeds on Lightning to, you know,
the like a hosting company or an app developer,
like the app developer could also have a split
so that the app developer will get a fraction
of whatever's going through their app, for example,
as a way of them monetizing,
which then drives that economy.
Because at the moment, that's not the way,
if I'm writing a podcast app,
it's gotta be sold by like Overcast, for example,
you download Overcast for free,
but you can have an in-app purchase that is a subscription
for 12 months to give you extra features
and so on and so forth.
the number of people that take that up is not enormous.
And so like Marco, for example,
is relying on that as his income,
but what if all of those, not even all of them,
I mean, just even a fraction of them,
you know, like a 10th of the shows
that are played on Overcast,
he was then given a fraction
of whatever those lightning transactions were
for podcasts listened to on that.
You wouldn't need to have a subscription model
potentially at some point.
I mean, I don't know where that at some point is, but yeah, it's like, but that, that, we
don't need it.
No, no, no one knows it not yet.
But if we, if we start building in that direction, then that answer will, will float to the top.
It has to.
And I think that just creating those opportunities for that value to be distributed more fairly.
And another thing, what, why does Apple get 30% of it?
Anyway.
But you know what I mean?
You know, the 1% thing is what we've, I don't know if this, this is a new market and nobody
knows what, you know, markets have to discover their own prices.
So who knows what this will end up being.
But our sort of thing from the beginning has been, it makes sense that if you got, that
if each person, each group in the chain, if each component in the chain of podcasting,
that's down the line.
So that's 1%, if each one of those gets 1%, so 1% for the podcast app, 1% for the
for the hosting company.
If the podcast app is using us, 1% would go to the podcast index.
If it's using some other service like Listen Notes as an API, that's one of our,
another one here in the US, Listen Notes API, they could get 1% if the app's using that.
Basically, if anybody that's in the chain from distribution down to the podcast listener,
if everybody along that line gets 1% and then whatever is left over, let's just say 97,
96%, whatever it is left over goes to the podcaster, then you have an economy there
where the podcaster can make plenty of money with very reasonable fees and everybody else
down the line can also make money. And so like you said, you've got the podcast app guys.
What I've been saying is that it's criminal that podcasters can make a decent living,
but podcast apps have to sell their stuff for 99 cents on an app store.
It's just really, it's almost offensive because you can't even listen to a podcast without a
a podcast app. It's like the most critical part in the whole chain. And everybody loves
their podcast apps. Good ones are hard to find. And so the app developers need to be
rewarded for that. So the way we've set the value block up is in your RSS feed, you can
specify all the different ways that you, all the different people you want to get paid.
And so if you look at the podcasting 2.0 for example,
our split is set at, I think it's like 40 something percent
for Adam, it goes to Adam's node,
like 40 something percent goes to my node,
and then there's a percentage to the index,
and then there's a percentage to Dreb Scott,
who does our chapters.
And so every time somebody listens to our show,
once a minute, I get 40 something percent,
Adam gets 40 something percent,
and then Dreb Scott gets 5% I think.
And so, you can do that as many,
split, you can split that as many ways as you want to.
And the cool thing about it,
is that it does not, you know, this is so open-ended,
to where if you had a,
let's just say you have an executive producer,
you could, that executive producer could fund your show
and then you can put the split for that producer
into your show, into your value block.
And every time somebody listens,
let's just say if they pre-funded,
if they gave you capital to get your show up and running,
they get paid back slowly over time.
And so you can have all these cool ways
where you can split up the payments.
And even 10 years from now, if somebody goes back in your back catalog and listens to an
old episode of yours, 10 years from now, you're still getting paid for it.
It's like you don't have to worry about, "Oh, I need to go back and change my ads and change
my dynamic ad inserts to make sure it's relevant now and it's not some old ad read that this
company doesn't exist anymore."
like this perpetual payment activity that you can always get. It's really cool. And
the other idea is, like you said, it goes beyond even podcasting. Imagine if listening
to music was this way or Substack. What if you had a Substack type service that was this
way every time you read an article? It's like, boom, it fires off a couple of payments to
the writer and the researcher or whoever.
And so, yeah, it's really, I mean, I believe in the idea 100%.
The only way that it will fail is if it's just technically too early.
And I say fail in quotes, like, Adam's got this, you know, he's got this tendency to
see technology that's still 10 years in the future.
And so we're hoping that this is not a 10 year in the future type deal.
I hope it can happen faster than that.
But I think really, it makes lots of sense.
And the only thing that'll stop it is just
whether or not the tech is up, is it can keep,
you know, is there or not.
And that's still really the biggest hurdle
we're trying to overcome right now.
- All right.
Well, I think we might leave it there.
So if you wanna talk more about this,
you can reach me on the Fediverse
at chigi@engineered.space,
on Twitter @johnchigi,
on Word or the network at engineered_net. I'd personally like to thank Premium Jane for
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A big thank you to all of our patrons, a special thank you to our silver producers, Mitch Bilger,
John Whitlow, Kevin Koch, Oliver Steele, Lesley, Law Chan, Hafthor and Shane O'Neill, and
and an extra special thank you to our Gold Producer known only as R. Patron rewards include
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with your help. So if you'd like to contribute something, anything at all, there's lots of
great rewards and beyond that, it's all really, really appreciated. If you'd like to get in
touch with Dave, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you, mate?
I'd say email's fine, it's dave@podcastindex.org,
but really, if somebody wants to talk about anything,
it's probably the mastodon, it's podcastindex.social.
That's where everybody hangs out
and lots of great people there
throwing ideas around all the time.
So that's probably the quickest way
to get in touch with me.
- Awesome, fantastic.
So once again, special thank you to all of our patrons
and a big thank you to everyone for listening.
And as always, thank you, Dave, for coming on the show.
Really appreciate your time.
- Yeah, that was a great time.
I hope we can do it again and we have you on our show.
- Ah, well, yeah, I'm up for it, someday.
- Yeah.
- Let me get my lightning out working first.
- Yeah, yeah, do that and we'll have you on there
to talk about all the pain that it was involved.
- I'll step you through my pain, yes.
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