Discussed Podfans, Value 4 Value, Podcasting 2.0, Podcast Standards Group at podstandards.org

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Technology, you make it sound so special. Well, welcome back to The New Media Show for another week of, uh, just Rob. Todd's on a special assignment. No, he's actually at an AI conference, and so he's kind of out of the pocket until next week, but he'll be back next week. But it's always exciting to do this show and actually host it myself and bring on terrific guests on board with us as well. So I want to, you know, do an introduction. Sam Sethi is is joined us. He's a co-host of Pod News Daily or Weekly, and of which I was a co-host on with James Cridland just a week ago or so. So we're kind of trading places to some degree and doing each other's shows, which is terrific. But yeah, Sam's here. It's great to have you on the show, Sam.

Cheers, Rob. Yeah, lovely to be here. I don't know if I can step into those big shoes of Todd, but we'll try.

I think you'll do it. Do a fantastic job of it. Um, but really, I think the big thing that I wanted to kind of COVID on the show this week— and I— this topic came up as a contrast to the conversation that I had with, uh, Lisa Laporte, um, who, um, was on the show talking about, you know, the monetization strategies that the TWiT network has. And, and this conversation popped up on Twitter about, uh, how Twit is not necessarily embracing. And we didn't talk about the value-for-value model that is growing in its momentum out there. And I think really kind of genuine interest in the podcasting space about maybe some new ways of monetizing podcasting content. And I know that you're working on a project called PodFans, and I did set up an account at PodFans and, uh, have access to it as well. I know it's in an alpha phase right now and you're still testing, but, uh, but I wanted to have you on to talk about it a little bit and to also talk about the model of value for value. And I know it's a big pet project for Mr. Adam Curry and Dave Jones and, and a variety of folks that cover and, well, and follow this podcast. So, so I know Todd is all in on it. There's Satoshis flying around as it relates to this show, and it has a reputation for being really supportive of the Podcasting 2.0 project. So anyway, why don't you kind of just start off and just tell us a little bit about the concept behind PodFans and what you're trying to create there and how that kind of is a terrific example, I think, of what this value-for-value model could potentially, as it gets more adoption across the podcasting industry, bring value.

Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, Lisa was a great guest. I really enjoyed the interview you did with her or co-host you did with her. You know, she really laid out why or how TWIT works. I found that really interesting. I fundamentally disagreed and I reached out to Lisa as well. So we should talk about what I think Leo and Lisa could do. And in fact, I have a long email going out to them, uh, in the process now, uh, with some screenshots. So, um, but let's step back. Podfans started about a year ago. The idea was looking at Apple and Spotify with their subscription-based models, or, um, you know, uh, how could we adopt something different as Podfans? That was the first thing. I could not just repeat what Spotify and Apple did and just have a subscription-based model. And then thankfully, a couple of years prior to that, Dave and Adam, Adam Curry, the inventor of the Podfather himself, you know, had come up with this idea of using value for value or no agenda, which was great. So the idea is that the creator, the podcaster sets a value and the user or listener or fan agrees with that value or disagrees with that value and changes that value. That's what value for value is. And we have that in the real world. You know, we can barter the price of any good we want. So a shop selling that top you're wearing, Rob, might have a price on it and I could take it off the hanger, go up to the counter, offer a different price. And often in the sale there is a different price and we can barter that price. So that's where we started. Now I just want to take a quick step back. You and I, are of a similar age. We, you, you were in Microsoft. I was in Microsoft. I moved to Netscape. And one of the big things that Netscape failed to do, and Microsoft in many ways, and the industry eventually, was create a micropayment system. And in the absence of a micropayment system, what did we do? We created user sentiment analysis, which hearts, likes, thumbs up, claps in Medium, which guess what? Doesn't pay the bills and you can't take it to the bank. So advertising became the monetization mechanism for content creators. Fast forward to today and we now have Bitcoin, which is a, a, a currency, as you'd know, Rob. Um, and a micropayment of that currency is called a Satoshi or a sat, and it's 100 millionth of a Bitcoin. And what does that mean? It means that it's a peer-to-peer system. That means I can give you sats directly from my wallet to your wallet without going through a bank or a third party or a payment gateway. So there's no intrinsic block that can be put on it. So Podfans has adopted that value-for-value model and that micropayment system. Now we've done that so that we believe that people should be able to pay for any digital content, podcasting being what we start with, but it could be music, video, audiobooks, on a per-minute basis. So that's what's different about what we're doing. We're building a platform to allow podcast creators to set a value for their content and for listeners to listen to that content and only pay for what they consume, as opposed to pay upfront on a subscription model. So best, best example is, you know, it's not the Chinese eat-all-you-want buffet model, which is what Spotify and Apple offer. But this is a gourmet menu where you pick the best stuff that you only want to eat and you only pay for what you choose to eat as opposed to paying for the whole shop and eating what you can. So that's where PodFans starts anyway.

Yeah, I think it's terrific. And, and I, I don't know if, if you want to screen share your experience, uh, or, you know, what PodFans looks like. I mean, I could do it on my end, but it just depends if if you have access to some stuff to show us, you can certainly do that in the share area.

Let me just go to the front page and then come back and share. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

Right. Share screen. And I then pick that platform there. There we go. So, um, PodBands is in its alpha, very early days, um, but you know, we, we're getting there. We, we currently support all 25 tags from the podcast namespace, and I'll explain what that means. Let me just sign in very quickly. Um, when you sign in, uh, so at the moment we are limiting access to the system, and the reason is that, as I said, we're in this early alpha and There are bugs, unfortunately. That's what happens when you build software. So instead of having lots of people jump on board and scream and shout at me, you know, I bring people on board who I think can give us good feedback. So it's Netflix-y in its first iteration. So this is the homepage. You see shows that I'm currently a fan of, and that's the shows that I subscribe to. You'll see stuff that's recently been updated through a mechanism called PodPing, which is like a real-time update. Shows that we've recently added, new and featured, homegrown hits. And you'll see this flag, which is basically you can determine what country you're in and then see the top 10 podcasts from that country. Um, live shows, which is one of what we're doing now. Um, and again, society and culture, comedy. So we choose all the top 5 Apple categories, but you can customize this to be whatever you want it to be. In your settings. If you go into See All, you get a search engine. And of course, what we've done is we've supported all the extended tags. So person, location, what we're using here is category for comedy. We have country. So let me turn this off and let me put in the word James, for example. Now if I put in James, you'll see in the title it has the word James, which is what you would expect from a search engine. But if I put on person tag, we now find podcasts that don't have James in the title. And the reason is when I click through, you'll find that James is the host. And this is the podcast that James and I do weekly. Now we pull through the RSS as you would expect, and those podcasts that support some of the enhanced namespace tags, we then expose some of those features. So for example, here we have the funding tag., and that would link out to whatever page was in the funding tag. Um, we also support metadata around each podcast. So every podcast has this. So we, we look at the date it was created, how many seasons, subscribers, and other metadata. Uh, we can see the last 10 episodes, um, when they were published, um, how long they were. Um, and again, what day they are often published, which is a Friday in our case. Um, but the key thing I want to show you is how do you set value? So we talked about micropayments, Satoshis, and here's, uh, the value. We as Podfans have set a default value for every podcast to be 100 sats. Now that's $0.001, right? Um, and what we then do is we take the time of the show times the number of sats to give you what the actual value of the total show would be. Now, not everybody listens to the start and finish of a podcast, so you don't always pay that full amount. You might do. I'm going to hit play. And when I hit, it's going to mute. It's Friday, the 21st of July, 2023. So that's now playing in the background. And after the first 30 seconds, what we will do is take 100 sats from your wallet. Now, when you onboard, we will ask you to do a number of things such as give us your name, give us your email, um, set your country, and we will set you up with a wallet. Now again, what we're trying to do is give you 10,000 sats into your wallet by the time you've completed all the tasks that we ask you to do. So you've got money in your wallet and you have it before you even have to get out a credit card or anything else. And the idea is to make that onboarding experience as seamless as we can. Now, I know we're going to talk about it in a minute about your experience, because again, it's still a bit too complex, but let's have a look. We've got to 53 minutes, 53 seconds. So let me pause that there. The, the original value was $7,500. If I refresh that page now, you'll see.

So is that on a per episode basis or can you pay like a regular payment for access to every episode?

Is that, you can do both.

And I'll show you both, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

This is on an episode basis. So it's now 7,400. We've taken that first 100 sats. As I said, I can go to another episode and I can say, I only want to pay 10 sats per minute. And that will go down. Um, if I played that once, let me find one I haven't played. I played quite a few, as you can see on this one. Let me go to a show that I haven't played. Uh, no, I seem to play it a lot. So let me go to another page. I'll eventually get to one. Okay.

This one here, podcast consumer.

Yeah. So this one here is 10 sats per minute, but I can set the value to zero if I want even. And therefore I can set it to zero and pay nothing. And I could play that and I would pay nothing to consume that content. So again, it is on a per episode basis. Let me refresh the page and go back to that podcast we were looking at just a minute ago.

Yeah. It's not a required payment. It's an optional payment type of situation. That's the concept of the value for value, right? Is that you're, you're receiving value and you're willing to share some value back. That's. That's my understanding of it, right?

Exactly. And that's what it should be. Equally, we have little chapter markers here, but I can just jump to any point in the show and I'm not paying for this bit of the show that I haven't listened to. I'm only paying for what I play. So that's what we do. Now, let me go into the profile quickly. Let me go here. And in my profile, I now have a number of tabs. The current tab is what I'm currently listening to. So this is the show we were just playing. These are some of the other shows I've been listening to. So I get a lovely view. And then of course, uh, where it says new or resume, it's a difference between updated shows that I'm a fan of or shows I've currently listened to. But the view here, which is called the list view, gives you a much better perspective on it. So we just paid 100 sats, the value remains 7,400, and it was 7,000— sorry, it was 7,500, it's now 7,400. And you can see all the way through here how much I paid. So these new shows I've paid nothing for yet, but shows that I want to resume, so I chose not to pay for anything there. Um, so again, this show I paid 200 sats. So you can see I get some really interesting stats as a user as to what I've consumed, how much I've paid, what I've listened to. Now, the difference between being a fan and not a fan, becoming a fan, is simply you get push notifications and updates when the next show drops. Um, you can mark a show complete or finished, or if you actually finish the whole 100% of a show, and it then gets dropped into what we call the history tab. There you go. You see, Rob, last week's show.

Yeah.

Um, uh, In here, I have a view of all the shows that I've listened to in the past. I can view that by month, and I can also view that by the shows that I'm a fan of or not. But again, in the list view, which is most interesting, I now get a very detailed view of when the show was published, when I finished it, how much time I listened to it, the percentage I completed. So James's Daily Show is very small, of course. And how much I actually paid. And Bumper, which is this brilliant agency, um, uh, Dan Meissner and Jonas Wust, um, are trying to get the industry to move across to this metric, which is downloads aren't a very good metric because anyone auto downloads, well, does that mean they've even listened to the show, uh, let alone consumed any percentage of the show?

Right. You don't know.

Right. Exactly. And it's a really bad metric. Whereas time I listened, percent I completed, and the value I paid is a really great metric. And what we do for creators for each show is then roll that up from each user into a dashboard. So they then get a view of how many people listened to my show, what was the average consumption, who paid what. Again, just some more metrics. Last couple of things. Um, One of the things we've done is built a complete, um, activity stream within the system. So what that means is I can then give it a second to load. What it allows you to do is see everything you've done individually. So I just played that show, I just paid this show just a minute ago, and I paid 100 sats. I shared something earlier, I activated my Twitter account, I followed these people. So again, in the system, we have what we call 30 verbs, and I can look at all these verbs and see what activity I did. I also follow a lot of people, and we have a social model within Podfans, so I can follow friends, I can follow people who I want to. In that social model, what it allows me to do is see which people I wanna follow. So I've got Kyren from The Mere Mortals, Matt Bigelow, Lots of other people I can go and have a look at. And so I can see, oh, look, Kyren was the first to play this podcast today. And so he earned. So the, the model we have is not only do you pay Podfans for playing podcasts, but we as Podfans will pay you for certain activities. So if you're the first to play a show, we will pay you. If you are, um, the first to boost or whatever you want to do. So again, Matt was listening to that show. I've never heard it. He paid 101 sats. I'm gonna go and have a look at it. So I can open that. Oops, there you go, that's Twitter. Um, I can open that and I can see, oh, he was listening to Adam's show, No Agenda, uh, and he paid to listen to that show. So again, you get this real, uh, with the activity stream, not only do you get a view of what you've done, but you also get a view of the people you follow. And again, that helps with discovery. Last two things. So, Rob, sorry.

Yeah, I was just going to ask kind of a deeper question on this too. I mean, we're exchanging Satoshis through your platform and just more broadly with the value-for-value model. But it's, it's actually a little more complicated than that because it's more about sharing amongst all the players involved. So like if you have, let's say, like a fountain app that connects to this, and there's a Satoshi exchange in that app. And I'm sure you guys may be having the plans for a mobile app as well. So it could be that case as well, that the— some of the Satoshis or some of the value is exchanged with the listening platform as well as the content creator. Yeah. Is that correct on how it works? And, and yeah, so you gather Sats that then you can incentivize your loyal users of that app to continue to consume more that will generate more sats for everyone. Is that a good kind of synopsis of how this works?

Yeah. So what we do is we take a percentage of the sats that come through the system. So at the moment it's 5%, but we can vary that. So what happens is if you pay 1,000 sats for a boot or you pay 100 sats per minute to stream, We will take 10% of that and then the rest goes directly to the creator. Now a creator like you and Todd, two hosts might have a split that you've set up in the RSS. And again, we will in the backend, which I can show you in a minute if you want. Um, you will then have that split whatever way that you as the host have determined. You can also have a split go to guests so you can set that up for an episode level. You could say, right, if this was our show, we might say, right, me and James have got 40% each, and therefore that leaves 20%. We'll give that 10% to each of those two guests, right? And that's how we could set up our splits. And then what Podfans does is take our percentage at the top and then what's remaining splits it to whatever has been set up by the creator. The one last bit that you talked about, which is really interesting, is we also, because of the activity stream that I just showed you, We allocate points to every user, and those lead to, of course, leaderboards and badges. So achieving certain levels, etc. But what it means is for, let's say, the New Media Show or for PodNews, we could identify who your number one fan is at an episode level or as a podcast level. And at the podcast level, you might say, you know what, we're going to give 1% of any that we earn to our superfan. So again, splits are really cool because it allows you to set up in advance how you want to share the value you're receiving from your listeners. You might even, you know, go further. I think Adam and Dave have got 12 or 15 splits within their setup in their RSS. So they've got people who create their chapters, people who are, you know, creating editorial content, etc., etc. So the micropayment system, why— if we go back to your first question, Rob, why is the micropayment system so important? Because if I tried to do this with a credit card through PayPal or through my bank, they wouldn't allow me to put 10p here and 15p there and 12p there. They just wouldn't do it. Or if they did, they would take so much. On the transaction through the payment gateway, but actually it negates the whole value. So this micropayment system, irrespective of podcasting, just for the internet is critical going forward. But again, in our podcasting world that you and I live in, I think this is an amazing way for value given to creators. It comes from— do you remember Kevin Kelly and the essay, uh, 1,000 True Fans?

No, actually I didn't see that, so that's okay. Why don't you tell us?

Yeah, so Kevin Kelly, um, is a brilliant, brilliant futurologist, and, uh, he probably 10 or 15 years ago wrote a really great blog post called 1,000 True Fans. And he said, look, instead of, say, chasing a million likes or a million hearts or whatever it would be, Why didn't you focus on just getting 1,000 people to pay you $10 a month and you've got a £100,000 business? And it was that whole idea of focusing back down onto your niche rather than chasing the Joe Rogan, 200 million listeners type model. And that was the penny that dropped. And then what happened was everyone then said, okay, great, but how do I get people to pay me £10 a month or And eventually we've got here today, which is, look, you don't need £10 a month. I think this show is 7,400 sats. That's probably $1.20, right? If you listen to the whole show, you might only consume 20, 30% of that show, in which case you've probably paid only 50 cents. So if you've only paid that, but you multiply that up by 1,000 listeners, that's a decent chunk of money that you've made on an episode. Roll that up across a month. And that's more money you'll make through CPM advertising. And that's a way of sustaining your business through listener paid donations, the value for value model. And that, as we've seen with Dave and Adam's show and other shows, that initial, oh, I'm not sure I want to pay 100 sats per minute, I'll pay 20 sats per minute, is now going up to people going, I'll pay 1,000 sats per minute, or they will give a boost, which is a comment with a payment, and they're giving 100,000 sats. My, my regular donation to Adam and Dave on a Friday night is 101010, which is basically, it's a fun joke. It's, it's the number 42 in binary, which of course was, uh, you know, um, uh, the meaning of life. So again, um, you know, I think we are in the super early days. Again, just, just to take a step back, sorry, Rob Greenlee, I will be quiet in a minute. It's okay. So take that back, Rob. Do you remember when we were all trying to produce, um, the browser? And the problem was— there was two problems. What was the— people didn't know HTTP was, people didn't know what a URL was, so they didn't know what www meant. And then the second problem was chicken and egg. How do you get a browser without having a browser on your laptop already, right? You could just click a button and say, oh, oh, there's— I'll go to the internet and I'll pull down, you know, right? So we all have to go and get computer with the floppy disks on the front or whatever and plug them in and, and then load TCP/IP. And then, so getting on the web in the very, very early days was super geeky, super hard, and it was very, very— but Nowadays, if you said to anybody, what's your URL or what's your www, what, what, what is it? Everybody knows what that is. And I think we're in that same situation today. We are trying to educate an early adopter audience as to what's a digital wallet, what's a micropayment, what's a Satoshi, what's the Lightning Network, how do I pay for this? Um, when I pay for it, what happens to it? All of these things are really vocabulary issues rather than technical issues. But the challenge that, you know, Fountain, Podfriend, Podfans, all of us have is that we've got to make it so, so simple that, you know, the user doesn't have to know a lot about what they're doing. They just need to step that from a guide Oh look, as James likes to call it, we've got funny tokens giving in order to play or support this podcaster. And eventually I think people will understand what a sat is, but again, I admit it's very early.

Yeah, I think it is kind of early, but I also, I, I wonder about it from the perspective of Bitcoin, right? Because it is based on the Bitcoin kind of crypto of sorts. And it's, it's a very controversial kind of— I don't even know if it's right to say it's a currency. It's, it's basically a store of value. It's— this is how I equate it to— it's almost like buying ounces of gold, right? So you're basically investing in, in something that isn't really something that's easy to exchange like a Satoshi, right? So that's why they came up with the Satoshi was to have a derivative currency that could trade off of— I don't know if this is an accurate term, but fractional Bitcoin, which would be micropayments of Bitcoin, right? So you're talking about thousandths of a percent of maybe a $30,000 per Bitcoin kind of valuation, right, for each Bitcoin. So you're basically exchanging just a fraction of that one Bitcoin, right? And I mean, as low as like a dollar of that Bitcoin, right, of its value. So it's, it's an interesting model, but I know it's a very controversial thing. I own some Bitcoin myself. I've been buying it for many years now on like a weekly purchase type of scenario. And I think it's important for us to talk about this kind of merger between Bitcoin and Satoshis. Now, I think Satoshi is the only, I think, exchangeable currency that's linked to Bitcoin, that's directly linked to Bitcoin. And I think there's a lot of friction right now in our government, around the world, around the long-term viability of Bitcoin, right? Are our governments going to war against Bitcoin because they want to have their own digital currency? And that's what we're seeing increasingly happen. And, um, yeah, and it's complicated to acquire Bitcoin, it's complicated to manage it, and it's also complicated to set up like an Alby account, which I went through last night and, and did that and, and found it to be a very complicated process. Um, lots of ID, and this is the same thing. I mean, it's nothing new based on what I experienced with Bitcoin. Trying to acquire Bitcoin, there's— it's almost like buying a security, right? There's a lot of kind of government kind of wants to get involved in that transaction, right? And especially if you're using US currency or if you're using like a Visa card to actually buy some Bitcoin, right? They don't necessarily like that. And that's what I ran into because I hadn't been using a Visa to buy Bitcoin in the past. I was doing a direct withdrawal out of my checking account. Every, every week to buy a little bit of Bitcoin. So I used this, this, a couple of different Visas that I have, and, and one, one was a debit card Visa as well. That one appeared to work. The full credit Visas, the multiple ones that I have, were declined by the bank. So yeah, and as part of this setup process you have to acquire a certain amount of Bitcoin. So the minimum purchase that Alby has for, you know, some Bitcoin, which can be mapped to Satoshis, is $35. That's the minimum amount that you can buy. And so anyway, once you talk about that process a little bit, and do you see it as a little bit of a headwind to the adoption of this?

Yeah. So, okay, let's take a couple of steps back. First of all, Yeah, Bitcoin is not like— it's not a cryptocurrency. And there's so often I'm watching the BBC News mixed with that. Yeah, everyone's going, oh, it's, it's a cryptocurrency. Oh, it's like Sam Altman-Friedman. It's, it's FTX.

It's—

no, it's not. It's spammy. It's, it's corrupt. It's all this. Um, it's not. It's, it's not an NFT. It's none of that rubbish that was being spouted by Elon Musk, Dogecoins, and all these altcoins. None of that, that is what you are talking about here. So Bitcoin is a fixed number. 21 million Bitcoins exist in the world. Uh, not all of them been found yet. Um, but the majority are out there. And what this 100 millionth of a sat to a Bitcoin allows you to do is create that micropayment system. And the government doesn't like it so much because it is an alternative to fiat currency.

And yeah, it goes around their, their financial transaction models that they're— especially we're in a frictional time right now because I know that this whole FedNow platform that isn't really being talked about in the media at all is in the process of being rolled out. And that means that every transaction is going to be run through the Federal Reserve.

And it's bad. It's a bad idea. These central bank digital currencies, CBDCs as they're called, I think the American one's going to be called the Eagle. That's the name of it from what I understand. And who, who wants the government to see every transaction that we have, right?

One. Well, it's going to be done on the blockchain, but it's going to be a government blockchain. It's going to, you know, this model has been kind of captured by the government and said, well, you know, we can use this to have greater control over transactions. And the benefit of this is that the transactions will be really fast. Or they won't happen at all. That's the other side.

That's the worry. I mean, we've seen this in China. We've seen it with the social score. So in, in, in China, you get a gamification, a bit like we did in Podfans. You know, they see all your activity, uh, and they can reward you with, hey, you bought nappies, you must be a fan person, therefore you get more points. Oh no, you bought an Xbox and games, therefore you're a waste of time, you get negative points. So then we want to go and book a hotel. It looks at your social score and says, no, sorry, Rob, you're, you're negative. Or Sam, sorry, you're associated with someone negative, even you don't get to. So this total domineering top-down control from government is awful. Bitcoin is outside of government control, which is why they don't like it. But, you know, we will see what people do. I mean, Worrying scenarios have been that eventually, because it's programmable money, this CBDC as well, you might have your boss turn around and go, you know what, Rob, I want you to come into work on Monday so you're not having alcohol. Your credit card won't buy alcohol on a Sunday night. It could get to that point. And again, you know, I don't want that overbearing government control of everything I do. And that's the worry of CBDCs. But going back to Bitcoin, Yeah, um, the challenge is, yeah, banks are, uh, fundamentally not really trying to block it. What they're doing is they just don't understand it, one. Two, they're trying to make sure that you're not being scammed again.

Yeah, no, I think that that is part of their justification for not allowing it to happen, is that there's some risk of a you know, scam transaction or something like that. But that may be just an excuse not to support it too. So I agree.

Yeah, I think we're beginning to see Cash App, which is Jack Dorsey's company, MoonPay, Strike. There's a couple of other ones that started that are beginning to allow a, a, one, an easier transaction of. So the limit is £30, £35, maybe minimum. Um, that may go up or down eventually as, as confidence. Look, do you remember the early days of Amazon? Right. I, I do.

Oh yeah.

So you'd put stuff in your basket and then you go, oh, I'm not gonna put my credit card on like, no, that's right. So you pick up the phone.

Yeah.

Yeah. So you pick up the phone. Hi, is that Amazon? Yeah. Hi. Uh, I've put all these things in my basket. Can I give you my credit card? Right. And for some reason, giving your credit card over the phone to a call center felt safer than putting it on the internet.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I totally get it. And then the browsers came up with this, you know, encrypted connection with the little lock in the upper right-hand corner of the browser. I remember that when that happened, and, and all of a sudden e-commerce took off because people felt like they could trust that, that their information was going to be encrypted passing between their computer and the servers where the e-commerce transaction was going to happen.

Right. And I see the same thing happening now. It's a case of, look, we, we, we have, we all have this fun thing. You know, when you do a first, a video call like this, first thing you'll go, can you hear me? That's the first thing you always say, right? Right. And with a, with a Bitcoin payment, a Satoshi payment, I've seen it. Somebody sending 1 sat with the, with the words, did you get it? Right? As in, have you received my 1 sat? It's like this test thing. And then eventually they go from 1 sat to 10 sats to 100 sats to 1,000 sats. And once they get that confidence that the actual system works and it's seamless, then they get bigger and bigger amounts. And I think when you transfer, I think you can, as you said, $35 into sats, that's probably 300,000, 400,000 sats, which is a lot in your wallet. Okay. So then you can start to, you know, really start to support podcasters. And this comes back to the, the one thing I'd say is we pay for music, we pay for books, we pay for films. For some reason, we still think paying for podcasts is an anathema, and I don't know why.

Yeah, I think it's interesting. So I want to share what, um, the screen looks like for an Albi account. I set up one last night and I signed up for PodFans, and I see that you transferred you know, 100 sats. So I have 200 sats.

Arrow on the right next to 100 sats, Rob, you'll see why you got that. Yeah, that one there. So that one there is you joined and because you joined, we gave you 100 sats. And if you click on the one below, it's because you've activated your wallet.

Yep.

And we gave you 100 sats. And as I said, the goal from my point of view is as you onboard to Podfans, we will give you 10,000 sats. As you complete all the activities. That negates your initial need to go and have to get your credit card out and to top up your wallet and make any payments. So we think that you should have a good user experience of having some money in your wallet before you get to the point of having to go and top it up again.

Yeah, because I, I did try like 3 or 4 different cards, and eventually the I think it was, um, was it— what's the company? Blue Moon? Um, yeah, you mentioned Bluebeam. They were the transaction engine that was allowing me to buy Bitcoin, and they kept— I think they declined like 2 or 3 credit cards that I had, and by the time I got to the, the 4th one, um, they said you tried too many times, so you have to come back in 24 hours to try again. I haven't tried again, but, but that's— but I guess if you transferred some sats into my Alby account, that means that my Alby account is already funded. So at some level, right, it's not funded at the full amount of a $35 transaction, but, but yeah, we have a place to start.

We can, we can transfer in real time from Podfans to your wallet because when you onboarded you set up the wallet, we then saw your wallet identity and we can make those payments in real time. The transaction you are talking about is topping up your wallet from fiat currency, right? Dollars and euros to sats. And we have no control over that because, um, you know, we, we can't, for example, we can't make a payment, uh, from your bank account into your LB Wallet. That is totally secure and down to you. So yeah, the problem is each bank is gonna be different. They, that some banks in the UK I've heard have asked for a passport ID, others. But once you've set it up on that one-time transaction, uh, with your bank, then topping up your wallet becomes second nature. You can just go in and get $30 here, $30 there, or $10, and, and, and, and you know, it works, then it works really well.

So what you were just looking at there was my Alby account, and that's a place that you would go to sign up. And what's— how does Alby fit into the ecosystem of this? Because you have the purchasing process to buy Bitcoin, which is— which was obviously a different company. And then the actual Alby is basically your digital wallet, right? Which stores sats. But it doesn't, it doesn't store Bitcoin, right? Is that correct? Or does it?

It can store Bitcoin if you want it to, but it's normally SATs. I mean, you could go all that way up. So let me, let me say, so there are two types of wallets. There's a, what we call a cold wallet and a hot wallet. Um, a cold wallet is where you have your own personal wallet, you run it yourself. It's like running your own server and fundamentally, you have the keys to your wallet and you control it and no one else can access it.

And I have a little, like a little USB key. Yeah, I have it in my, my drawer down here.

And it means you can literally, like you say, take that USB key with you, plug it in, plug it out, do what you like with it. Yeah.

And that's the cold storage, right? Is the one that's kind of like stationary. Nobody can get access to it. It's kind of a— it's almost like putting it in a safe of sorts is what it is.

Right. And then a hot wallet is where it's a managed wallet. So there are many wallet providers just like—

Right, it's online. Yeah. And which is what Alby is, right?

Yeah, it's a hot wallet. We have partnered with Alby, so many others in the podcast industry— Podfriends, CurioCaster, Castamatic— all, all the main players have partnered with Alby. And the idea is that Alby provide an API to me, the developer, to allow me to do real-time payments in and out of your wallet. So as a good example, we've put 200 sats in your wallet because you completed tasks that we wanted you to do. You will then pay, if you choose to, maybe some of those sats to a podcast you want to support because Again, that will be from your wallet, but that's a real-time transaction in and out of your wallet. Now, Alby was the company that we partnered with. They were one of the first companies who set all this, uh, wallet up and put it still through an API. The reason we don't want to do the wallet ourselves is because then we come across FSA transaction or, uh, financial transaction issue with the FTC, maybe in America. The FSA in the UK, other bodies in other countries. And by handling the money ourselves directly as Podfans, we would get into that regulation issue. By Alby doing it and being the one central wallet controller, they can deal with all the federal recommendations and regulations around money, and we just simply are using their API to go in and out with your permission. So when you sign up to Podfound, one of the first things you had to do was authorize us to have permission. We couldn't just do it. And so that authorization was the step that you said, yep, I'm happy for you to have input and output to my wallet for transactions through Satoshi. And Alby provide all of that for us.

Yeah. And I guess Alby is, is considered to be a, what, a a, a wallet and a Lightning connection kind of built together into one, right? Correct.

So they use— so the problem you had with Bitcoin, because it's built on the blockchain, is that although Bitcoin is great as a digital storage, as you said, like gold, it was gun, the person on the counter, well, what do you want to do? And what you'd go, oh, let me shave some of my gold off and give it to you. It wouldn't work, right? Um, and the problem with the way that the Bitcoin transaction worked on the blockchain was that of course you[No speech] The Lightning Network sits above it as a sort of level 2 transaction transport layer that says, hey, Rob has just paid Sam 1,000 sats, and it holds it in a semi-ledger, and then it does the arbitrage slowly to the Bitcoin— sorry, to the blockchain. So what you're doing is you're seeing a fast transaction layer called the Lightning Network and then a slow record layer called the blockchain, which actually then is placed in there, and it's called non-repudiation. Sorry for all these technical terms, but non-repudiation simply means you can't roll it back. It's a record transaction of a point in time, and that's what it is.

Yeah, it's interesting. I pulled up on the screen, uh, the, the Alby site. So this is a critical piece to be able to participate in. This is to go to a, you know, a company like an Albi. I think the Albi is the one that is preferred out there right now. I know I've talked to representatives of theirs at like podcasting conferences, so they're, they're very active in the podcasting community because they can see this strong connection of trying to drive this value-for-value model forward. And I think, you know, I was impressed by it. I I think it's a, it's a very good site. It also has a, I believe, a Google Chrome extension. Yeah, also. So they've been kind of working on this and it's, it's a, it seems like a compelling and trustworthy company to work for or work with.

Yeah, they are. And Lumi and Moritz run it with a lot of other people helping. You can go and see what payments you receive. So if you click on your dashboard there, Rob, in the top right-hand corner, you could go and see what payments have been received. Okay, so these are the ones from earlier. Yep. And again, I can make— what's— Rob, what's your old B address? I'll do one in real time. What's your old B address?

Uh, I believe it's here. Let's see, it's, well, the Lightning address. Is that the one you're looking for?

Yeah, so the one at the top, it said Rob.

Rob W. Greenlee at getalby.com.

Yeah. So Rob W. Greenlee at getalby.com. That's your address. And I'm going to pay you 1,000 sats. There you go.

I'm going to—

thank you very much. Now, if you go back to your dashboard now and have a quick look, uh, and refresh that page, uh, so go back to your payments, which is—

okay, right there.

So I've just literally sent that to you, and it's like sending an email. All I need to know is your Alby Lightning address, which was— now I know it— robgreenlee@getalby.com, and I can send you via the Chrome extension money.

You could see how fast it was too. It was instantaneous.

Yeah, right. It is. It's peer-to-peer instantaneous over the Lightning Network. And then in the background, that'll then be recorded on the blockchain later on. And so that's, that's how quick this is. And that's why when people get it into their heads how this works, it's like an email. It's, it's a simple wallet-to-wallet transaction. The amount you send can be small or large. Um, so I could have sent you a million sats, I could have sent you 10 million sats. The number is not just having to be quite small.

Okay.

Um, and because of that, uh, and, and, you know, the, the fact it is instantaneous, um, I think this is what's going to change the, the web going forward.

Yeah, it's interesting. And it's, It's free to sign up from what I could gather, except for, you know, you do have to fund your wallet, which will take some kind of funds somehow. Or if you can get some Satoshis like Sam has shared, that's the way to get this thing started. But, you know, it's pretty easy to sign up. I was impressed by its simplicity. It was a little complex to actually buy the Bitcoin, though.

That was the part that That'll become easier, Rob. It will become easier with time.

As you can see on this page, it says add browser extension, so you can add that to your Chrome browser and it will be kind of built into that, so you'll be able to more easily get to the Albee experience right, right in there. So, so anyway, um, so is there any other part of this that you wanted to, to share to help kind of round the circle of sorts on this topic of of the value-for-value model?

No, I think, I think people really need to experience it themselves. So, you know, you create a, you create a, okay, from Podfans point of view, you create a Podfans account, you create an Alby wallet, you have some sats in it, and the first time you send sats or receive sats like you just did, it's a wonderful magic moment, right? Yeah. And people suddenly go, oh, that's so nice because it's real money. The amount is small, but it's real, right? It's better than a heart or a like, and that's, that's what it is really.

So that's, that's actually one of the reasons why, you know, I wanted to really do this show with you is to run through this, because I think that there's a lot of, um, I guess confusion about how this all works, and it's helpful to, to kind of connect up the dots here. And that's what I was hoping to do in this show today was to was to do that.

Yeah, and I think again, you know, the, the other bits that we talked about, the, the more complex side of it, um, yeah, again, that is like peeling an onion. You can get into boosts and zaps and splits. These are all just terminologies, right? A zap is the word we're using for a like with a micropayment. A boost is literally a comment with a micropayment. And so people are going, oh, what's a boost? What's that? Well, eventually people are just going, oh, I'm just going to zap you, right? I'm going to zap you with 10 sats. That's all it'll be. And suddenly people will get that language and that terminology and it'll just be second nature.

Do you think that over time what we'll see— I mean, I've seen some interesting signs that the establishment may embrace Bitcoin. I did see that the BlackRock folks, which are one of the largest kind of corporate investors in the world that own a lot of major corporations, banking companies, and they— did I hear this right? I think they want to start up a Bitcoin ETF or something like that, which means that it you know, a large entity that has a lot of influence in the financial sector has an interest in supporting Bitcoin. And I didn't really want this episode to be all about Bitcoin, but, but I think it's an interesting kind of connection to all this. And, and it really, I think, um, for me is very critical to what's happening with Satoshis and how, how this value-for-value model can actually convert monetization and podcasting to a new model. And I think it needs a new model. I'm not sure long-term that advertising is something that's going to work as well as a lot of people think it will long-term. And I do think that this relationship, this value relationship between listeners and the content creator needs to be built upon, right, in a different way going forward into the future. Especially if what happens in the world, this digital currency direction that we're going, enables a lot more kind of flexibility in transactions and the speed of the transactions. Because up to this point, transactions are typically pretty slow.

So you saw how fast that was, didn't you?

Yeah. And, and I do know that this Fed now platform that the Federal Reserve is rolling out with cooperation with the CDBCs will ultimately create instant transactions too, because it's built on a government blockchain, right? So these transactions will be instant. Now granted, we're all fearful of this, but Bitcoin is kind of like the, the alternative, right? And it's the outsider in this game. And I'm just not sure how these worlds are going to come together and if, if the government's going to embrace this or they're going to weaponize it against those that have it. Um, I just don't know that yet.

I think, I think you're just going to have to see them as alternative payments, right? You, I mean, just as you could pay in dollars, you could pay in sterling, right? Um, I think what you'll find eventually is some people will want, for example, Podfans to support CBDCs. I don't want to buy Bitcoin, I want it to come out of my current account, right? I just want to come, I just want to pay for it with an eagle, right? And I don't know what a a millionth of an eagle's gonna be called a feather, maybe, who knows, right? Whatever it's gonna be called, you know, maybe—

Pluck that bird with that—

Exactly. So, you know, maybe there's an API and eventually we support your local API currency to your CBDC. I mean, that could be one track, but the alternative could be, I also have this external system, cold wallet, hot wallet, where I control my money. And it's just Bitcoin. I mean, MicroStrategy, a company I used to work for, um, Michael Saylor, he, he's buying millions and millions of Bitcoin, right? He's one of the largest holders in the world of Bitcoin now. And one of the things he said was two things. One, Bitcoin is not subject to inflation. There is no inflation affected by Bitcoin because it's fixed in the number of coins available, unlike central government currencies where they are doing quantitative easing printing money with no backing.

It's going to be even easier for them to invent money once we convert to digital currency, right? It's just a number in a computer.

But the value of that will, because of inflation, will come down in value. The more they print, the less your currency's worth, right? Whereas Bitcoin has no inflation built into it because it's a fixed amount of coins.

Well, it's kind of, it's, it's very similar. And I think this is a great way to think about it, is that it's very similar to gold. In its kind of concept. As far as we know, there's a limited amount of gold in the world. Exactly right.

And we think—

and yeah, we don't really know, right? It depends on how far down you dig. And then there's a limited supply of real estate, right? So you start thinking about the parallels between Bitcoin at 21 million bitcoins as the potential pool. I have heard talk that there, there could be a point in the future when more Bitcoin is added to the pool, but I'm not I'm not sure if that's really a fact-based supposition, but I have heard people mention this.

I would be surprised because there's nobody who runs Bitcoin. This is the joy of Bitcoin.

Well, yeah, right.

So whoever he, she, it, or they were, Satoshi Nakamoto, is fundamentally not gettable. Governments can't get to that person to change the rules. Whereas with ETH, which is an alternative currency or coin, um, they can get to the person because he's alive and they can say to him, no, no, no, no, no, print more or print less or do this or change the value or split this. Yeah. And there's been numbers of splits in ETH already, right? And, and NFTs, we know, don't work. I mean, I think the famous one was Jack Dorsey's first NFT, I think was sold for $1.2 million, was on the market for $2,000 the other day. It's, it was, we, we know that that was it was a scam. We know ETH feels like a scam. We know Dogecoin is a scam. We know all of FTX, what Sam Bankman-Fried did, was a scam. Right. Bitcoin, because of this unknown entity who created it and because it's fixed and because it just works on a peer-to-peer basis. Well, it's also—

I mean, most of it is stored offline. In these, these cold lockers, these little USB-type sticks that are not really USB sticks like what people realize, but they're encrypted storage capsules for a, a key, right? It's an encrypted key that unlocks a certain quantity of Bitcoin, right, on the, on the network if it's ever uploaded or transferred. The, the question that I have about it is that you know, converting cold storage Bitcoin into a usable exchange of value, that may be where the government gets involved and limits the ability to do that. And that's, that's my worry about it.

Right. Yeah, I think that, that if that ever came about, do you remember the Silk Road 2.0? It was a, it was a marketplace, a black market marketplace. And again, people will work out ways.

It's like barter, right? It's kind of like a barter situation. People will create this whole underground transactional marketplace for, you know, unconverted to currency Bitcoin. Right. And probably Alby is a good example of that, trying to convert it to a Satoshi makes it usable. But yet people exchanging Bitcoin I know Tesla tried, tried to accept, you know, some of these currencies to buy, buy a Tesla. And I think what they found out was that the price of Bitcoin fluctuated too much and they, they weren't getting their margins on their vehicles if the Bitcoin ever went down. So they kind of dropped that.

Yeah. I mean, look, you know, famously the guy who bought a pizza with 4 Bitcoin because it was worth $0.18 a Bitcoin.

Right. Back then, back in the day.

Now it's, I think, $216 million equivalent or something crazy. Right, um, so look, I— Web 1.0, if you know, again, you and I were around then, it was, it was the Wild Wild West. That's what we all joked with WWW about it, you know, it was the World Wide Web, right? And, you know, prices of companies were through the roof, you know, £400 million for this, £500 million for this, and then the next week the company's gone, you know. Remember Bebo, Friendster, Friends Reunited, MySpace, right? Pets R Us. I mean, the list goes on of overhyped valuations and crash and burn companies, right? Um, yeah. And now we've come out of that into Web 2.0 when Amazon was born, when Google was born, and all these companies have now become the valuations that people thought would happen in Web 1.0. They are the trillion-dollar companies. And again, I, I see where we are today in, in a mirror image of the early days of the web. You know, terminology's complex. How do you use it? I'm not quite sure it's secure. This feels very, very early. Again, some companies are making lots of money on the back of it, like the, the Dogecoins and the FTXs. So I think it'll all settle down. It is beginning to settle down. And again, I think as user adoption. There's 49, nearly 50 million wallets that support Satoshi payments. Um, if you liken that to the number of browsers, that was roughly around the same number of browsers as 1996. There was about 50 million browsers in the world. So we're in that sort of pre— uh, we haven't really had that takeoff yet, I still think. Now Here's a question for you, Rob. Who do you think made the browser take off?

Uh, well, if I think back to the early days of it, it was the Mozilla browser, um, was really the first, first entry. Netscape, and then, you know, the Internet Explorer from, from Microsoft really kind of blew the doors open.

Exactly. And that's what happened. So although I left Microsoft to join Netscape, Netscape was struggling to get mass adoption because it was, you know, can you get it off a PC magazine or an FTP site or whatever, right?

They couldn't. I think they were also charging for it, I think, in the early days for it, I thought.

No, I mean, AOL tried, I remember, right? Um, and then there was a charged version, so it went from Netscape Navigator to Communicator.

But anyway, Right, exactly. And that's actually— that's what the whole kind of issue with Microsoft coming out with a— well, I guess the issue with Microsoft coming out with Internet Explorer was that it was default installation on all Windows machines. Exactly. And in Netscape, you had to download it, right?

Yeah. And so that adoption by Microsoft of the browser into the operating system meant it was one-click access to the internet. For setup and usage. And although I would fight vehemently as a Netscape person against Microsoft being monopolistic, and eventually that happened, you know, the FTC came down on it, or DOJ, should I say. And eventually there, I don't know if you remember, there used to be a bar of 5 or 6 browsers that you, you went in Windows setup, you could choose which one, you know. So there was like, you know, Firefox or Netscape Navigator or IE, right? But it was that Microsoft thing. And I think actually, you know, Twitter has just been renamed X. I know that. But one of the things I think is interesting is I'm not sure who's going to do it, but I suspect it could be Elon Musk. Could be the person who takes micropayments from what we call the early adopter phase into the mass market. Jack Dorsey left a payment system inside of Twitter which uses Bitcoin and micropayment Satoshis that link to Cash App, right? So he did that and it exists today. You can see it and it works. If you see a little dollar sign next to someone's profile, that's what it means.

Yeah, I know that he does have an existing kind of relationship with Elon Musk, and I, I know in the early days of him considering buying Twitter, uh, there was a lot of group discussion with Jack Dorsey in, in combination with Elon about this whole model. And I, I heard Jack say in a couple of interviews, he said he's dedicating his life to developing technology around the Bitcoin economy of sorts and wanted to see that grow and, and proliferate. And I can definitely see him in some sort of a partnership with Elon. I don't know that they're business partners, but I I would say that they may have some sort of a technology common ground between the two of them. I agree with you.

Yeah. So I think X was originally Elon's company that he sold to PayPal, right?

I think it was the original idea of PayPal, but PayPal is what started, started him down the path.

Yeah. So I think if you look at— he— I think a few months ago he stupidly put the Dogecoin dog in the top corner of Twitter. He's—

I saw that.

Yeah, he's talked on many occasions about creating a WeChat-like all-in-one app, right, where you've got payments.

And oh, way, way, way back to the '90s he was talking about this, right?

Yeah. So I think he's bought Twitter, renamed it X. He has hinted or teased that he's going to bring a micropayment system into it. Now, everybody who I know is involved in Lightning Networks and micropayments who are hoping he chooses Satoshi's, and we're hoping he chooses the Lightning Network, he chooses those two. And whether you say there's 300 million or 100 million because everyone's left, whatever number, but, but let's say 100 million people will suddenly wake up to Twitter being a transactional platform with SATs over the Lightning Network. And that learning curve or mass adoption could come from Twitter. I'm not saying it will, but one of those sorts of events like that will jump from the early adopter phase we're in now to the mass market.

Well, and what's interesting about this is that there has been talk about Twitter becoming more of a podcast consumption platform.

Yeah.

And he is, or Elon is increasingly adding video multimedia capability to Twitter. You know, we're seeing the growth of Spaces, which is becoming a fairly significant presence in the X experience. And that will, I think that will, you know, continue to grow. So it'll be X Spaces now. And then he also has SpaceX. So you can kind of—

He also has the X car, which is—

Right, right, exactly. It's not going to be Twitter Spaces, it's going to be X Spaces. So, so it's funny, that connection with, I know, with SpaceX, but it's, it's kind of, you know, it's hopeful. You know, I think I, I agree with— I think the bigger trend of your, your, what you're saying here is that if Twitter supports this, then it kind of blows it all open.

Right. Yeah. And I think, I think that's what's really needed. I'm not saying it has to be Twitter or X, it could be another company, but I think that mass adoption phase will come from a big network taking it on board and saying, look, this is the standard. Um, and that's what I thought Microsoft did.

Microsoft said, look, here's the browser, right?

Yeah. It's built into the operating system. Now, of course, what happened was they wanted to make it monopolistic and proprietary, which is why they ended up in trouble. But outside of that, um, well, you remember ActiveX, um, outside of that, I mean, I think that's what got the mass market to understand what was— I mean, I remember being asked, you know, what's the difference between the internet and the web? You know, most people couldn't understand the difference. Um, and again, you know, and then with browsers. Now look, let me, let me, let me Um, one of the other topics I wanted to talk to you about is what's going on in podcasting regarding the Podcast Standards Project. Yeah. And also, um, a little idea I've got about how the open internet, uh, ecosystem can take on the closed ecosystems of Spotify and Apple. And, and that's through what I call versioning. So let me, let me try and— so you and I know what the Podcast Standards Project is. It's a, it's a group of companies in our industry who've got together to promote the Podcasting 2.0 namespace, which Adam and Dave are the key drivers behind. And brilliant. I was so excited when that came about, but it sort of seems to have dissipated. And by the way, this is not because I'm with you on the show. I've said this on Pod News Weekly. I've said to James, I reckon you should run it. I reckon you should head that up. It needs somebody with energy to take it on because the problem you've got is Todd started it, Kevin at Buzzsprout's done a lot with it, and others, but they've got their daytime heads in other areas. And, and, and again, because they're co-opetition hosts that compete with each other, I'm not sure they want to really promote a uniform area where they want to be ahead of each other. So I think, right, given you're giving a A, you've worked for most of the companies in this industry, or you know most of the companies in this industry. B, you understand this space. C, I think it needs a figurehead. And I, I'm just putting it out there for you, Rob. I, I would certainly second it if you were given the role of running the PSP, because it needs somebody to take it by the bull by the horns and make it a marketing arm for the podcast namespace. You know, A, what is Podcasting 2.0? If you asked 90% of people consume Apple or Spotify podcasts, they couldn't tell you the difference between what they consume on Apple as a podcast and what they consume on other platforms. It's just a podcast, right? Mm-hmm. But the namespace, the metadata, the tags, the features that, that we've been adding, which is what Podfans does, which is what Friend, Fountain, or the others do. It, it, those are the differentiators between what's going on with Apple and Spotify, who, who have that data, but they, they lock it up and consume it for themselves and the open ecosystem. So first of all, I think the PSP, the Podcast Standards Project, is a marketing arm of the podcast namespace, needs somebody to run it and drive it. The second thing, and this is where you and I can then talk about, when I was at Netscape, you were still at Microsoft. You remember HTML, right? And there was HTML and it was called the browser wars and there was HTML 1, 2, 3, 4, and now currently at 5. Mm-hmm. What would happen is one week Netscape will come out with a new browser feature. Next week, Microsoft come out with a new browser feature. And eventually the W3C said, look, we're going to grab HTML and we're going to make it a standard and we're going to set what goes into HTML. You two can't keep adding proprietary features to each of your browsers. Um, but what really was exciting was there was a, a time when developers were wanting to get that competitive advantage, so they would go, I'm on HTML 3.1. No, I'm on HTML 3.2 now. And, and you'd have this sort of fight between who's got the better feature or browser set. People would switch browsers just to get that new feature, if you remember. So, you know, Microsoft came out with 3.2, developers would put more time and effort there because it was that one feature they'd been waiting for. I don't know, you know, and vice versa. What we don't have in the podcasting industry today amongst hosts and apps is this understanding of the differentiation between them. So if I said to somebody, what's the difference between Blubrry and Buzzsprout and RSS.com? Nothing.

Generally nothing. Yeah, there's not a big, big difference between all— I know I've been studying all of them, um, for, for the last few months since I've stopped working for any of the podcast hosting platforms. And, you know, it is rather, you know, it's rather commoditized. I, I know that the more more recent movement is around AI integration that is starting to differentiate here. But also, you know, the embrace— I agree with you with the bigger, bigger thought around the Podcast Standards Project, which I'm also a member of, but that's kind of being led by leaders from the hosting companies right now. And in some ways, the policies of that organization are to kind of exclude anybody that's not involved in integrating their, their technology agendas. So that's the, that's the part that has me a little bit concerned about what's going on there, because it isn't becoming as inclusive of a project as it needs to be, I think, for it to be successful in the long run. I know that some of the larger companies have thought about embracing it, various elements of it, And then the Podcasting 2.0 namespace is one that some of the larger companies have said, yeah, well, we'll think about embracing, you know, this tag or that tag or whatever. But it hasn't been something that they've been willing to plunge into, not unlike what happens when Apple decides to change their namespace. You know, people are falling all over each other to get to making those changes to the namespace. On their platforms. So, you know, that's the contrast that we have. If it comes from the industry, there's more of a lackadaisical approach to adoption of these new tags. Or if it comes from a big player like Apple saying, well, I'm adding these tags. And, you know, the truth about Apple is that they'll even launch namespace tags that they don't even support on their own apps. So that's kind of what happened here with the, you know, with the recent announcement of the new iOS operating system with the new Podcast app where they're gonna support episode-level art. After all these years of them having episode-level art in their namespace spec that everybody adopted, but yet they didn't support it in their own apps. So this is the challenge in the industry, I think more broadly, and it does get to your point, is that somehow there needs to be an entity or people that are behind this standards project that don't have a business interest in its outcome. Exactly right.

But also, right, the PSP has a label you can put that I've got on PodFans. I know others have got it which says we support the PSP RSS standard, right? So the, the namespace tags. I think it's just 3 or 4 tags, right? So far there's about 25 tags, but the PSP has only said we, we validate 4. Now here's the thing, I remember in the day, um, websites would have, uh, this website works with HTML 3.x or 4.x or 5.x. Imagine now that you could have apps, Fountain, Podfriends, others saying we support version 2.01 of the podcast namespace, right, which is phase 1. So person tag, um, and whatever was in phase 1. Now if you support the tags from version 2 or phase 2, you could name it 2.02, and version phase 3, 2.03, and so on. Imagine if the Podcast Standards Project said, right, you're allowed to have this badge on your site Host X, because you support all of these tags currently from the namespace. And Apps, you're allowed to have this tag or this badge on your site because you support all of these tags. Now what that builds is a wonderful competitive marketplace between hosts. So imagine one host only supports 4 tags and the other one supports 10 tags. Well, that host can't put a badge on their site that says they support 10 tags. They can only put the earlier badge. Users need a shorthand for what host or what app is the most advanced. And in the same way we did that with HTML by calling HTML 3, 4, 5, we didn't go HTML 3, oh, let me list that. Now HTML 3 has these 25 new features. We didn't talk about the features, we just called it HTML 3, 4, 5, right? In the same way, the iPhone. 3, 4, 5, up to 13, 14. Doesn't say, oh, by the way, here's all the features in that version. They just simply— you as a consumer know, well, if you've got an iPhone 11 and I've got an iPhone 14, mine's more advanced than yours. And we need to be able to differentiate. It also means we can put Apple and Spotify in a box which says you support none of these features. So the best you can be, Apple and Spotify, is 2.0 compliant, but you're not 2.01 or 2 because you don't support any of the phases. Again, it's just an idea, but we've got to create something in the consumer mind that makes them understand that other apps and hosts exist and they support more features than Apple and Spotify. And I think the shorthand for that could be a simple badge labeling system from the PSP that says, here's what this host or this app supports, and this is why. And when you click on the badge, takes you to a site like this that you've got up, which tells you what features that's— that host or app supports.

Yeah, so the, the screen that I have up right now is an active website off of the, um, the podcastindex.org website and it's at newpodcastapps.com and it does list all those podcast hosting platforms and new listening apps. And at the top of the list is PodFans and it does list the elements or of the, of the namespace, right, that are being supported by those platforms. So there is a resource that you can go to right now to be able to see who is supporting this. And who are adding what tags. And if you adopt one of these platforms, you will be supporting the growth and the adoption of some of these more, you know, progressive— or I don't know the right word to describe it— is new capabilities in the podcasting space. So I don't know, is there any of these that you wanted to call out, Sam, at all?

Or no, no, but what it is, is, okay, so let's take an example. So Podfounders was at the top because we support most tags, right? That's why we're at the top, right? But if you took a competitor like Podverse that happens to be on the screen, they support a whole bunch of tags, right? But, but for the user, the consumer, they don't know the difference between Podverse, Podfounders, right? Unless they came to this page. And even if they came to this page, what you're saying to them is look at all the features that this app supports and look at all the features that that app supports. But maybe they just don't understand it. The consumer needs a shorthand understanding. So I'm not saying Podverse is or isn't, but just briefly looking at it, you might say Podverse is RSS 2.0.3, because it only supports up to phase 3 of the namespace. Whereas Podfans is 2.0.6, because it supports all the phases up to phase 6 of the namespace, right? That's a shorthand way of saying this app may be more advanced than that app. Now that may not be fair because there's things that Podverse support that we don't yet. And so, but what I'm trying to say is as a market, I'm not trying to talk with my podfans hat on. I'm trying to talk as a marketeer in the market. How can we get the 95% of users who default to Apple and Spotify to come over to the open ecosystem and choose any one of these apps or any one of these hosts. And if all we're going to say is we do RSS and they do RSS and we do podcasts and they do podcasts, guess what? The average consumer is not going to know any different, and therefore the average consumer doesn't see any reason to try any of the apps. The early adopters do, but again, if we want to get to that 95% who use the closed ecosystem apps of Apple and Spotify, Then we've got to give them a reason why. And these are the reasons why all of these namespace extension tags that we've been working on for 2 years, these are the reasons why you'd want to try something else. But if you're not even aware that there's a different version of RSS, it hasn't progressed beyond 2.0, then you're not going to think, oh, I must try something new, because you don't know there's something new. And this is why I think we need a naming convention and a badging system that users see very quickly and hosts and apps can use on their site to differentiate ourselves. And that's one way. So then we can start to talk about Apple. Oh, Apple's just a 2.0 app. No, but you know, Podverse or Fountain's a 2.04 app, right? It's a bit like saying your phone's old because it's iPhone 11 and my phone's newer because it's iPhone 14. I don't need to say it because I've got a better camera or because I've got more storage, because I've got this feature. It's just the number tells me mine's more advanced. I don't think we're going to get the mass adoption that we want to move across. It just— I've seen it in the browser wars. I know it works. I think we need to adopt that same mentality.

Otherwise we'll just be the same. Yeah. The Podcast Standards Project does have a, like a little button or icon that is available to companies that are supporting its initiatives, right? So, you know, this is like, it's like, it's kind of like the same thing that was done with the IAB with the podcast metric standards, where there's like a little button icon that you could put on your website saying that this, we support the standards for the podcast a measurement process that is standard across the industry. And I think this is being rolled out from those folks. I'm just not sure if it's fully hit, hit its full potential on just what you were talking about. But I think it is part of their strategy. But it, you know, it is taking a long time. And that's been my experience with, you know, because I've been a part of all these organizations over many years. There's been a variety of them that have grown up and, and have faded away and started and didn't go anywhere. And because there's a lot of reasons for that, but those aren't really important to get into. I think that the bigger question is here is why is this important to listeners? Because really, listeners can really drive this, right? And unfortunately, even a website like, like this is, is more of an industry thing. It's not so much gonna drive adoption of Fountain or drive adoption of these new listening platforms that are embracing this, but it will certainly help. But it's just, you know, there's so much momentum behind these big players. Like we were just talking about, it is an example of Microsoft with the Internet Explorer browser, right? There's just so much momentum behind that. And to get one of the players to break through, and that's what I'm hopeful with Twitter. And I'm not sure if anybody is talking to Twitter about this, You know, and are they planning on embracing podcasting? And if they are, um, I do know that YouTube is gonna be supporting RSS at some point too, and I don't know if they're gonna want to play ball with this either, but that would be a significant one as well if they ever take on taking on RSS feed that has audio in them. But, um, but yeah, you know, there's so many questions here, it's hard to have answers.

I think going back to what you said, look, um, the person tag, let's take a really simple tag, the person tag, right? If you go to Apple and Apple has deigned to allow you to have your avatar on your podcast, that's totally proprietary to Apple. That is something you've done. That is what they've done.

The person tag. Yeah. And I've heard that they've, they've kind of pulled back on that too. Um, yeah. They're not embracing it as much because they saw it, I believe, as a little bit of a security hole for them for some reason. So I'm not quite sure what that rationale was, but, but it's, it's kind of weird that they, they roll things out and then they, they, they embrace them halfheartedly and then some of them go away.

Yeah, right. But, but in, in the Open Namespace 2.0 podcasting, there is a person tag. So you and Todd have put your chosen image in your RSS feed that you own and control. And you've said, if your app supports the person tag, like, or Fountain or CurioCaster or whatever, then you can display Rob and Todd's face to tell listeners, this is what Rob and Todd looked like.

Right.

Um, equally, if you look at some of the other tags, again, chapters and episode artwork and all of these things, right? You can literally set up your RSS feed that you own and control with all of these different tags. So for example, one, one really interesting tag is called the update frequency tag, which tells apps what day and what time does this show, uh, drop the latest episode. Now we're, we're broadcasting this podcast live. So in Podfounders, we support a tag called the live item tag. So if you went to the, um, uh, page now, for example, for a new, new media show in Podfounders, it would now tell you the show is live, or previously it would have told you when the show was about to go live. No, none of these things are available in the proprietary closed ecosystem of Apple and Spotify. But these are user benefits, which is what you're asking. These are user benefits. I now know the person tag who Rob and Todd look like. I now know what time their next show is. I now know what all these other things I can do, right? And then this metadata, these extensions, these features, these tags, whatever word you want to pick, allow the user to get more data about the podcast. So the transcription tag, one of the best tags ever, right, is a transcription of the audio. And you can then literally get a word-by-word translation of what's going on. So in Podfans, we do, um, we highlight the words if you play it in real time, you can do searches on keywords, et cetera, et cetera. Now Spotify and Apple don't support that. But that is a benefit feature for users. So our job has got to be to explain to users why they should use one of these new apps or move to one of these hosts that support these features. But I think the PSP doesn't do that today. And I, as I go back, I think that was its job to be the marketing arm for the namespace. And unless we do something. That gives the end user a reason to look outside of their default Spotify, Apple ecosystem, then we'll forever be playing in the 5% pool and not playing in the 95% pool. And I don't ever understand. I love Adam and Dave, but when they say we don't need to market the podcast namespace, I sort of blow my head.

Well, well, I agree with you. I think that it, it does need to be marketed, but the problem is who's going to lead that? And that's where— You! Well, that's where the conversation all comes in towards the site that I'm loading right now is the Podcast Standards Project. Now, granted, this group that has been meeting for probably a good year has wanted to keep a little bit of an arm's length distance from the Podcast 2.0 project, just because they want to be an advocacy group, not a group that is seen as, um, kind of like advocating directly and completely for the Podcast 2.0 project. They want to be seen as more kind of like cross the industry, right? Of, um, and as this site says, it says advocating for open podcasting, which is a fairly broad thing. It's not advocating for Podcasting 2.0, right? It's the Podcast Standards Project, is a grassroots industry coalition dedicated to creating standards and open practices that can improve the open podcasting ecosystem for both listeners and creators. So that's kind of like their, their kind of mantra or their, their mission statement of sorts. And that's, that's what this is. And I did share up here the address if you wanted to go visit that. This is a project that's been underway for quite a while. I think there has been quite a bit of cooperation from, you know, some fairly large players in the industry, so it's a good group that have gotten together, I think. But your point is well taken. The Podcast 2.0 project is something different than this. It's not the same.

So, well, if you look at the get involved or the proposals, which either one of those, Rob, if you click on the Get Involved, you'll see some, you know, big names. As you said, you scroll down. So that's the badge.

Yeah, that's the new tag, you know, or the new badge that they've, they've come up with. And so you can see, it's probably hard to read on the screen, but, uh, there's individuals as well as companies, um, from some of the largest folks in the industry. I'm on the list there as well. I've been involved in this group since the very beginning. So it's just a matter of kind of this group finding its, its, its footing in the podcasting ecosystem. And I think the foundation of it is there. And it says at the very top, it says, to the folks working on Podcasting 2.0, we thank you. This project launched by Adam Curry and Dave Jones has proven that there is a strong community of podcast enthusiasts that are willing to put agendas aside for the greater good. So, and that's what, if you really want to sum up what the Podcast Standards Project is, it's, that's the mission of it. Now, whether or not it can achieve that under its current structure is, is I think something that needs to be talked about, right?

So yeah, and look, I, I think this is the right vehicle for it. I just think it needs a bit more drive and leadership, but this is the right vehicle. I think that certificate badge could have a numbering system on it. And I think if you look under proposals, you know, they've got 3 or 4 tags they support. Well, why aren't they supporting 5 or 10, 10 or 15 now? What's stagnating that? What I don't know, I really don't know what's stagnating the—

Well, I think there is a certain amount of practicality that's coming into this on the part of the group. This isn't to say that they're doing something wrong here. It's more to do with, I think, the composition of the group tends to be a little more, I think, pragmatic about it because they're representing hosting platforms and what they're— what people are willing to embrace versus what maybe they feel is too early to embrace. Right. They could spend a lot of development resources building something that isn't embraced across the majority of the distribution of podcasts. And I think that's the real friction that's going on here. And I think there needs to be, like we talked about, one of these bigger platforms that kind of breaks through and says, oh yeah, we're going to start thinking about this at a 2.0 level, right? And start to embrace this. And that will give fuel to this and get more people adopting it over time.

I tell you one company who really needs to adopt this is Spotify. I don't know if you saw their financial results, you know, and, and their share price that's just dropped off a cliff, right? They are, they, they are, um, well, they're in big trouble because they've got a fixed revenue model. That's in a fixed price at the bottom. I know they're increasing that price, but their average revenue per user has dropped from last year. They've increased the number of users, that's great, but the average revenue they're generating from each user has dropped. Um, their share price has dropped because they missed their revenue goals. They're still trying to get rid of more people and they're going to announce more people leaving Spotify soon. Of their podcast industry teams that they, they acquired, they've got rid of 200+ people. They've got rid of their exclusives, although they've got a few more back on. They have changed the leadership of the podcasting group. They're a mess. They are a mess. And the record companies are renegotiating right now the amount of revenue that they will generate in commissions and royalties. You've got a complete basket case of a, a top-down, uh, pressure from the companies that, uh, want more money, uh, as a lion's share of what the music and the podcasts give. And at the bottom you've got a fixed revenue model where they cannot change the price. And if they put the price to $29.99 or £39.99, right, guess what? We'll all go to Amazon or Apple, right? They can't. The elasticity of price is very, very limited, which is why they've only increased it by $1 or £1 because they know they can't do £3 or £5 or £7 cuz people will abandon ship. Right. So they've got to increase revenues because the market's saying, hey, come on, you're not profitable. They're still a loss-making entity, right? $242 million this quarter. They have not made a profit. Twitter never made a profit. Eventually the IPO money and the VC money runs out. And when that runs out—

that's exactly what's happening.

Exactly. When that runs out and advertising's taking a bit of a tanking, then suddenly everyone's abandoning ship and going, help, what do we do? Now, the one company Spotify should really look to do is embrace the Podcast Namespace 2.0. It A, would differentiate them from Apple, and B, would give them a variable pricing model because they could go and use SATs. So they could say, you, if you consume more music or you consume more podcasts, you pay us more. But then as an individual, I'm not getting what we call bill shock. I'm not paying in advance for my consumption, I'm paying on my consumption, right?

And there's a connection between the two, right?

Yeah, right. And so I don't know if you've ever heard the term bill shock, which is, um, BT, uh, use that a lot when, when your phone bill comes. They don't want to give you an annual number, they want to give you a breakdown into a smaller chunk so it doesn't feel so big. And so again, with, with paper listen type models, they don't give you bill shock because you know what you're consuming because you're consuming it at the time and only paying. Whereas upfront payments are when we all go, oh, I don't know if I want another subscription. Oh God, they've increased the price. Let's, let's cancel that. And Spotify, I think, is the one company who really need to take a massive look at themselves and say, hmm, we're going down a really bad road and this is not working. We've tried all these different tricks. And none of it's working. Yeah, we're getting more users, but we're actually not making any more money and we're running out of money. And they will run out of money.

Right. Yeah. Well, Sam, thank you so much for spending so much time with us today and explaining all this stuff. Hopefully it helps a lot of people have a deeper understanding of what's happening with the Podcasting 2.0 initiative and what's happening with the Open Podcast Standards Project and Satoshi's and, and all this you know, new ideas in podcasting. And I, I do like the ideas. It's just that there's some inherent industry resistance to it, and that's just because I think they're either confused about it or it's too complex, or there's just elements of this that need to be gotten over. But, but I do think that the bottom line here is that there needs to be a breakthrough at some point with a big player that can kind of make an example, right, that is tenable for people. And I think we do need to work on taking the complexity out of this as much as possible. That just may not be practical to do. There is going to be complexity, and increasingly that's what we're seeing in the technology world today, is complexity is coming in fast because change is happening so fast. So But anyway, Sam, thank you so much. So how can a listener, um, or a viewer of this find you?

Yeah, I'll say one thing, my favorite expression, complexity is failed simplicity. So, um, that was from a guy called Edward de Bono. And if you want to find me, I'm on Pod News Weekly with James Cridland. I'm online on Twitter and all my socials at Sethi. And if you want to join PodFans, come along. We've got a waitlist still, but we're letting people in now. Podfans.fm. So yeah, come and join and have a play.

Yeah, well, thank you, Sam, and, and, um, good luck with the Pod News Weekly Report. That was a great show that I was lucky to, to be on with James out there. So it's, um, it's great. Well, thank you. And I don't know if you're going to Podcast Movement or not, or you're not.

Not this one, no. I'm going to be in, uh, fiery Greece in 48 degrees. I'm, I'm I'm stupidly— we booked a holiday in Catalonia, so I don't know whether I'll be going there because it might be canceled.

But, uh, no.

Yeah, I'll see you in LA, uh, Rob.

Um, well, there's a good chance that, um, Mr. Dan Franks will join us, um, um, here, um, in, in the next episode of The New Media Show, so to talk about, um Podcast Movement that's coming up in Denver here and toward the end of August. So I'm excited to see what that show is going to look like this year. So it's going to be interesting. I've gone to a few conferences here in the US and it's been fairly soft as far as the attendance. And I think it has to do a lot to do with the economy and, and people losing their jobs across the industry. So it's, it's, there's a lot of change going on right now. And that's kind of what this episode is really all about. Is that we're— we are in an environment now where we all need to take a deep breath and say change is now with us and will be with us going forward in a, in a probably a more significant way than we've ever been used to experiencing.

And you come to London?

I did not come this year, but I went the first year. So I was over there. There was overlap with, um, Podfest. So I was only at the podcast show for one day, and then I hopped on a plane that night and flew to Orlando for, um, Podfest. So, so, but yeah, I've been there once. It was an impressive event.

I mean, I have to come next year. I mean, the energy, the energy. Oh, I know, size of the audience, but also the professionalism. This is what I loved about the London show. You had BBC and Sky were big stands. You had, you know, all of the podcast hosts and the podcast apps there, and they're a big thing. But you know what, unlike the American model, which is like sprawled at 15 million—

yeah, giant hotels, right?

Yeah, which, you know, you have to walk 10 miles to get to the next lecture room, right? This was all tight and neat and it was busy, and, and people had made a commitment to be there. And so I, I think, you know, with Dan, that's one of my things. Podcast Movement is good, but it needs to up its game a little bit more. But also, I think it needs to be a little bit more tighter, um, so that everyone feels a bit more buzzier.

Squeeze them together a little bit more so it seems like there's more people there, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, because I know— I do know that they have held those Podcast Movement events in some gigantic hotels, which— and then also in Las Vegas, and which stands tends to scatter everybody all over the place. So, and doesn't, doesn't build community. And that's what that, that conference was built on, really, the concept of building community. So it's just, I, I think that, you know, these venues haven't really supported that goal. So, but it's, it's a tough place to be. It's hard to find a venue that supports 2,000 or 3,000 people at the same time, um, giving that room. They tend to go into hotels that can support 10,000 people. So, and that's the unfortunate thing that's happened. But Sam, thank you so much. I, I think we need to get out of here. It's been, uh, what, an hour and 42 minutes? And that's a, that's a long episode for the New Media Show. But I, I want to thank everybody that's stayed with us and, and, or at least watched, uh, some portion of this and got, got some value out of it. And so thank you, Sam, and Goodbye to everybody out there.

Goodbye, guys. See you soon, Rob.