Speaker 0 00:00:00 I mean to me, an indie creator is someone who is, I mean, quite simply making it work on their own. They, they might have, they, it might be more than a one person team. It might be 2, 3, 4 people. I mean, it, it could even be more it's someone who is not tied to a larger organization that is funding their project.
Speaker 2 00:00:27 You know, that's sky Pillsbury talking about independent creators. And to me, Adam Curry embodies that independent creator spirit. I think as well as anybody, by the way, you're interested in sky, you'll hear more from her and our, and our next episode, uh, because she's got a lot of great insights as well, but independent creators, typically it's small teams. You and I are both are both independent creators. I mean, we have our job with Casto. You are more involved than I am, but we're, we, we have our job with Casto, but even Casto is a pretty small scrappy team. And we're really, I think there to, I think, empower and help independent creators and small organizations. And all that's to say is I think an independent creator I think has different needs. And I think central to that is RSS. And the ability to distribute your show to many different platforms and directories
Speaker 3 00:01:20 When we were talking about podcasting 2.0, uh, with Tanner Campbell in the last episode, Adam Curry is the, the lead he's the C if there were a CEO at podcasting 2.0, <laugh>, it would be, uh, Adam Curry. Uh, you can tune into his podcast, uh, podcasting 2.0 every Friday, that's called the board meeting. And it, in the essence of that in open source fashion is that he and Dave Jones who one would say, would be the CTO, uh, of podcasting 2.0, they get together and literally talk about the, the issues facing, uh, the code from the code to the, you know, to the, the community, to the industry. So when we start talking about value for value and with Adam, that for the small creator to me, is the essence of rolling up your sleeves and putting in the hard work to monetize your show because a platform like a Spotify will do it only for a little bit, for a big chunk of money.
Speaker 3 00:02:23 I can't call up apple. I can't call up Spotify and say, you know what? I don't like about your podcast directory. Like, you know, if you could just add this website link to my profile, that'd be great. There isn't any of that. And with podcasting 2.0 that there is right, literally there is you can join their social network. You can talk to them there. Uh, you can help contribute to the code. It is a, I keep using the word essence, the essence of value for value. You're getting value from podcasting 2.0 as a creator, you can give value back in terms of either money or support or help. And that's what I really like about the podcasting 2.0 movement and value for value,
Speaker 2 00:03:03 Right? And part and parcel all that is the pod father himself, Adam Curry. So you guys had a wonderful conversation. I was lucky to have a front row seat to that. Let's, let's sit in
Speaker 4 00:03:21 Having a million listeners is not as important to me as having 10,000 who are really engaged with the product, with the production of it. That's just how I happen to, to, to view podcasts. I like my listeners to be producers and I'll address them as such and support me financially. So that that's a whole different lifestyle. That's a whole different way of looking at what success means in podcasting. I've always just wanted, wanted to have complete freedom. I want that feedback loop, and I want to be able to pay the rent. Not necessarily in that order, <laugh> the rent might come sooner than, uh, the, than the, you know, it was close to the top of the list. So there's this, I think fallacy that growing your podcast will get you to that end point, what, whatever that end point is, because typically in order to grow your podcast big enough to have sustainability, uh, you're going to have to have a lot of people listening.
Speaker 4 00:04:17 And I just don't think there's enough hours in the day for humans that are, uh, capable of listening to be able to do that for everybody. Now, is there a lot of room for a lot of podcasts to have smaller audiences and for it to be quote successful for them? Yeah, most definitely. And you know, it's way below the, the trend of, um, of population growth. <laugh>, you know, so as long as the population grows over time will probably be okay, but to hit, you know, seven or 8 billion, you gotta have a lot of podcasts with small amounts of listeners. So growing your podcast just sounds like an empty phrase. And the, and what always comes along with that is here's how you grow your podcast. And then there's all these places you gotta put your podcast, you gotta manage your podcast. You've gotta do newsletters and pod, all these different things.
Speaker 4 00:05:08 And there's all these solutions which are algorithmic and you know, or we hope and discovery. This is the big thing is discovery. Discovery is something that we need and YouTube provides discovery and Facebook, this type. And I've just, I just, I've never seen any evidence that that's true. Growing a podcast, really, to me works by telling your existing audience, Hey, turn someone onto this podcast. Now you have, let's say you have a thousand people listening. Now you have, ah, maybe let's say in a small group like that, you'll probably get 10% that will do it. But I think everyone will have it in the back of their mind. Oh yeah. I should probably tell people about this podcast. Now you have hi, you got human intelligence out there. And as we call on the no agenda show, hitting your friends in the mouth like, bam, dude, you should listen to this. That's I have tons of evidence of that being a way to grow your podcast. And what that means is people typically take a recommendation from their friend or family member very differently than an algorithmic recommendation that pops up somewhere in an interruptive way
Speaker 3 00:06:15 At Casto. Since we have so many newbies coming onto the platform, I think a lot of this like, uh, throw my hands up and just give it to Spotify. And YouTube is because people are so exhausted after they figure it out, which microphone, how to connect the stuff up, record the show, edit the show, find people to do this stuff, cover all this thing, all this critical thinking. I think there's a big swath of amateur newbies who come into this and like, God, now I have to think about marketing and growing this thing, are you serious? And I think that's where a lot of, um, folks that we've actually interviewed for this series who think Spotify and YouTube will be the vehicle to monetization for a lot of us. I think they look at as like, yeah, all that stuff is too hard. Nobody wants it, right. Nobody wants to do all the, all the stuff you have to do to create your own organic outreach. Just letting an algorithm let's Spotify. Tell us what to do,
Speaker 4 00:07:11 What we already knew inherently. But what we learned really by starting podcast index.org is, you know, we have a real good overview of what's out there. And we have a lot of very smart people in the group. And you know, the, the entire database is downloadable. You can, you can sift through it. You can get anything you want from it, except for the, uh, email addresses associated with the RSS feeds. We're not totally stupid. We, we know what you want spammers, but you'll see that the majority of podcasts I'm talking overwhelming majority probably 80 to 85%. They're not, they have no business model at all. They're just doing a podcast. So that's fine. Now I think there's a misrepresentation that says, well, you know, if you get, if you get on all these platforms and you manage your, and, and just look at the, the hosting business in general, there's all these connectors, you know, we'll connect you to Spotify.
Speaker 4 00:08:04 This become a, it was a unique selling proposition. Now it's a little more commoditized, but it's like, oh, you know, uh, this hosting company we'll make sure you're everywhere, you know, but is that really the answer? I, I just found out that two of my shows MoFA and no agenda haven't showed up on apple iTunes for, you know, a couple episodes and just something wrong, or maybe who knows what's going on. We'll figure it out. But I didn't even notice that <laugh> no, you know, it's just a few people like, oh, you know, cuz you know, people are like, oh I'll just use this or I'll do it some other way. And you know, it's, it's, uh, it doesn't seem to be the most important thing. If you look at France, most French podcasts are not even submitted every even submitted to apple. They don't wanna be in it.
Speaker 4 00:08:46 So the idea that everyone deserves to make a business out of this as in, you know, like a traditional media business where the, the actual it's the actual product. So, you know, you have a program that is not serving a specific community as kind of a community chat, you know? So, you know, there is a knitting podcast and they may have some sponsorship, but it's not really a media property that is going to take sponsor. You know, it's going to be actively soliciting sponsorship from Verizon and Pfizer and you know, and any autumn BMW it could happen. But you know, it's, it's highly unlikely particularly with, with the scale that they have. So this it's, it just it's like blogging in the beginning. It's the same thing. And it took years for people to figure out, yeah, there's going to be a few bloggers who, you know, make a million bucks or do very well and whether it's subscription or whatever it is, but it's not just, uh, because they wrote on a blog and some algorithm got you advertising.
Speaker 4 00:09:45 I think slowly people are starting to see that that is just not something that's really true or sustainable, even YouTube now and Twitch. I mean, all these different places are cutting the revenues. They're giving less to the creators. There's no, uh, insight. There's no transparency. Uh, you don't con control anything except your uploads. You don't even know if the counts that they're showing you're right. You don't know any of this stuff. And I think people are slowly starting to see, well, it's really not worth it. So if you're interested in, in making a sustainable living, we've figured out a couple of ways to do that. Um, without necessarily having an audience that you grow to a size large enough, and I don't know, what are we talking with CPMs these days, 23, 20 $3 a CPM. So if you wanna make $2,300 a month, I would say, you'd have to, let's say you do a show a week.
Speaker 4 00:10:38 So that's four. So I mean, how many people do you have to have like a hundred thousand people that even get close? You know, so maybe it's maybe it's 30,000, uh, and you can, you can get 'em, but you know, will the ad be counted if they, if the same person hears it twice? And I mean, there's a whole bunch of parameters to that. So unlikely. That's a lot of people, you know, it took me a long time to get where, where we are with the, with no agenda. It took 15 years, you know? Okay. Now we're 1.3, 1.4 million. We don't really actually know, but we also don't care <laugh> we can pay the rent.
Speaker 3 00:11:12 I wanna talk about value for value next. I don't wanna define it because I'm sitting in front of you and I'm way too nervous to define it. <laugh> so you do it best. I say, it's the thing I always wanted from cable TV. Like I don't wanna pay for all of these channels and I quite literally only wanna pay for the minutes I've spent watching these shows, um, define value for value for us.
Speaker 4 00:11:36 Well, value for value is something that John C Devork and I kind of stumbled upon by accident, you know, 14 and a half years ago when we started the no agenda podcast. And it was just basically us just talking for half an hour. Uh, and as the show progressed and we were only doing once a week, uh, it turned into be a lot of work cuz we were deconstructing media. You know, this is 14 years ago. So we're starting to get clips and starting to record those. And a lot of effort went into this and we said to the audience, you know, this is really, we're having a lot of fun here, but you're gonna have to send us some money cuz this is not working. You know, it's, it is too much work. We're putting a lot of value out and we have no way of getting anything back.
Speaker 4 00:12:13 And we know we can't take advertising because the stuff we were discussing it, the way we were discussing it, it was just not brand friendly. And I was at the time running a, a podcast network, which I through partially through the no agenda experience learned that podcast network don't work different conversation for, you know, different time maybe. But so we started off with the typical, I think it was give us three bucks an episode. You know, if you give us three bucks an episode, we'll be real happy and we set it up with a PayPal form, three bucks click, you could do a subscription. And uh, we got the typical disappointing results. You know, we got, uh, about a hundred people, three bucks. That's not really gonna work for two guys doing four shows a month. And as we were discussing this, we were talking about the value and the value we felt that we brought we're very arrogant, the value, the value we felt, we brought to the table and we said, you know, this is, and, and now we're doing an hour, an hour and a half show.
Speaker 4 00:13:04 And I say, you know, if you went to the movies for, uh, and took a date and had some popcorn and a drink that would be 50 bucks was our hour and a half worth 50 bucks. Or did you just waste your time? I mean, is it had to be worth something if you're listening to me after an hour and a half, so what was it worth to you? This is an intangible product, you know, it's, you can't really say this, this type of, you know, rare earth minerals wet into it. You know, this much lithium and oil generate power generate it's, you know, it's hard to value it that way. And traditionally Silicon valley has always valued intangible media products. In fact, at the time the iPhone was just about to come out and um, and we had, or we already had the iPod of course, and you know, Silicon valley, I E apple G Steve jobs priced it.
Speaker 4 00:13:52 He, he, he ripped the album apart, which was part of the big problem for the music industry. You're no longer buying an album product you're buying per track and the price was fixed at 99 cents. Man, if, if you really ask me, what would I pay to hear the Beatles? I want to hear hold your hand. I think one of the best love songs ever written I'll pay $99. You know, if you ask me, so the next show we looked at our PayPal and sure enough, there was a lot of $3 still, but there was also people sending $5, quite a few sending 50 and a couple 500. We never looked back from that moment on, we just refined what this meant and what this value for value was. And when you zoom out after these 15 years, value for value is a monetization model. It's also a program content format, cuz there is a specific way you, you apply it with variations and it ultimately can become a lifestyle.
Speaker 4 00:14:47 But as we refine this model throughout the years, it has become incredibly successful, but it has one really high barrier. And this is the barrier of asking and we've studied all kinds. In fact, we're, I'm writing a manifesto together. We're writing a book, you know, it will be it'll come out value for value it with examples and ways to do this. But the, the hardest part is the ask. And it's counterintuitive to any type of media you've ever seen except for maybe public broadcast when they do the, the big fund drive. And Hey, if you send us money, we'll this corporation will match it. Uh, we'll send you a tote bag and all this stuff. Now this is not the point you're you're asking people specifically, did you get any value out of the product we made? If so, just tell me what that is and send it back.
Speaker 4 00:15:37 And, and people take that to an extreme. They, they start to get in numerology and, you know, sending, uh, sending money with, you know, certain, certain numbers that are meaningful and there's a note reading aspect to it. So there's a recognition. And my wife is, um, you know, Csuite level communications, professional. She most recently worked for, uh, Ronald McDonald house charities. Uh, so she works a lot with donations and she said, you know the number one reason why people don't give to a good cause I said, I had a lot of different ideas you said, because they never were asked. You'd be surprised if you don't ask people don't think about it. So you have to get over the hump of man. This feels weird asking people to support me. So I always say the value for value model is not asking for support. It's saying, this is what I delivered in value.
Speaker 4 00:16:26 You can give me nothing for it, which means you didn't value it. But then you need to question yourself, you know, why you're listening. If it's of zero value, if it's $1, that's fine. Some people, you know, they've gotten they've changed, careers, changed relationships, whatever it is they attribute to listening to a podcast I do and they'll send thousands of dollars and you know, and then, so that now becomes a format that you can base your, your show upon, which also monetizes it. And as I said, you start to kind of live that way in and you know, then you expand from money to the three tees, which is time, talent, treasure. So it's just as valuable for me, for someone to set up a server infrastructure so we can host the show and they need to get credit for that continuously as it is for someone to help me pay the rent, it all has to go somewhere. So, and total transparency is key. You know, someone donates, we're gonna tell the world how much it was that also turns into gamification because that also excites a lot of people. So there's so many aspects to this, that as we write the book on value for value, we're actually gonna figure out what that is because we haven't really codified everything for ourselves.
Speaker 3 00:17:34 Yeah. As long as we don't call it tips.
Speaker 4 00:17:36 Well, well you can, if, if you wanna say it's the exact same mechanism. If you want, if you say, Hey, just tip me, guess what? You're gonna get tips. You're gonna get tips. You're not gonna get the, you're gonna get 15 to 20%. You're not gonna get a hundred percent because you literally ask someone for a tip. If you say, Hey, what was this worth to you? Like I was just consulting. Literally consulting is a big word, but a friend of mine in the Netherlands, uh, he went from mainstream big television show, uh, completely value for value and he's refining his pitch. And uh, people said value for value. Wouldn't even work outside of America. Oh, it's only a typical American thing. And so I was hell bent on seeing if we could make this work for him. And he started off with merchandise, you know, some typical ways and, and he started to slip a little bit into, Hey, you know, if you can support us, that'd be great.
Speaker 4 00:18:25 And then just the other day I heard him and he started off by saying, Hey, I'm doing all this for free. Can you support us? And I called him up and said, bro, no, you're not doing it for free. You want people to give you value back? So instead of saying, Hey, here I am. You know, basically he was saying, tip me, you know, tos toss a brother, a dime. I said, look at your professional. You gave up an entire career to do this. You're delivering this value and people can determine themselves what they want to pay for it. And immediately he saw a change. And this is in my mind, the only way forward or forward for media products, really of any kind music, books, video, movies, podcast, whatever you want to call. It's all a podcast to me really. There's no way that we can continue to pay multiple subscriptions to all these different services.
Speaker 4 00:19:14 So kind of coming back to what you were always looking for is, Hey, I'd really just like to play it, uh, or, or consume this on a per minute basis or per episode basis. The drawback there is again, you have all these disparate financial systems, you have to recreate a profile, put your card down everywhere. Um, maybe use different players as all these things. And again, the prices will be set. And you know, you may just not feel like one podcast that you pay, maybe a dollar an episode. You know, it's like, if you have 10 of those, you are gonna eventually drop one of those two. So, you know, maybe this one episode of the no agenda show didn't excite you don't give us anything. You know, Hey, that's fair. And that's the way it should work. How sure holds me accountable when donations are down, I look deep inside myself. I'm not, I'm not thinking these people are dicks. I'm thinking, what did I do? Did I do something wrong? Hey, you always look for external factors, but it's typically, you know, a mix of a whole bunch of things. And it's, it's very exciting now, is it scary for some to live that way on, on that kind of scale? Yeah, I'm sure it is. It was scary for me too. But over time it becomes exhilarating and incredibly rewarding
Speaker 3 00:20:29 Platforms will never support this. Right? You're never going to have this thing that Spotify wants their cut. Apple wants their cut, et cetera. Podcasting 2.0 we're really? Or you guys are really setting not only the, the mindset for it. Uh, but the, the infrastructure for it. I say podcasting 2.0 is an open source movement for powering RSS for podcasting. Is that a fair statement, Adam? Or do you look at podcasting 2.0 as something wholly different?
Speaker 4 00:20:58 Well, so this is, uh, an as always an ongoing conversation. What is podcasting? 2.0 well is it's the whole idea of calling it podcasting 2.0, which in hindsight is very poor because you can't get a good URL for it. You know, a domain name doesn't work. It doesn't work in searches. It's like the stupidest thing I could have come up with, but the idea was it's, it's a version better of one point. Oh. And what specifically did we set out to do in the beginning? It's it's turned into a much bigger beast. We set out to, uh, protect podcasting from de platforming. Since we now had apple had just become the default on ramp to podcasting. No, no, no, that's not. And it's okay because they were good stewards for 10 years longer than that. But you know, wait a minute, you're gonna start kicking people off.
Speaker 4 00:21:43 And you're doing that in coordination with other tech companies. Now you, so you can't be the OnRamp. There should be no OnRamp, which is why we luckily have, uh, a hosting, uh, uh, community of companies that is, is quite, uh, distributed, decentralized. You know, that's, that's really part of the beauty of podcasting right there. And we always need to, to maintain that in some form or there. And ultimately all you need to do have is some server, somewhere, a text editor, you can make an RSS file with and, and a, and an audio file or whatever it is you want to distribute. That part is the protection so that we wanted apps to be able to be created with a solid base. So an app developer can just go crazy, be creative, create an app that they want to and have all the data at their disposal.
Speaker 4 00:22:29 We'll create the end points in the API or whatever it is you need developer. We're gonna give it to you. We want you to be successful and create cool stuff. So the second part of that is what's successful as we were going through this anti-D platforming, uh, infrastructure that we're building, which is podcast index.org. I saw the need to also have an an uninterruptable payment system. And I just started learning about the lightning network, which allows you to transfer well, I call it broadcasting money, cuz that's what I saw. It's like, I can actually send a stream of money to anybody who has a wallet that's compatible. I don't need permission. I can just send it to you. Like here's some money. Well, if I can do that, then why not combine the two things and, and actually do something very revolutionary in the, uh, in the payment world, which has put the payment button right above the play button.
Speaker 4 00:23:24 In fact, we've connected the play button to the pay button. When you click on play in a podcast in 2.0 app, you are immediately streaming money. The amount is at your discretion to the podcaster who is, is giving you that value in MP3 form. At the same time, this was the revolutionary concept. Now we added to that. Something that was desperately needed is the success for the entire ecosystem. So what, what, what is the upside for an app developer who develops a, a podcast app? Well, you can sell a subscription to it. Maybe if you got lots of features, but that, you know, that does require quite a lot of work really. And you know, Marco overcast does it full time. He's created a career out of it. There's not gonna be a lot of room for many people. Again, you're back to subscriptions. You can purchase premium features, but a podcast app never saw any money of the money.
Speaker 4 00:24:20 You know, of the ad money going to the Rogan show. They never, they never got a piece of that. So how do they fit in enter the, uh, distributed digital royalty system known as the splits? So as a podcaster, you can determine at your discretion, what percentage of every single payment goes to you and anyone else you want. And automatically again, at the discretion of the person using the app, they don't have to, uh, 1% goes the podcast index to keep our operation running and the app can decide whatever they want, by the way, it's typically between one and 4% for using their app and the amount of people who have protested this idea. And in fact, it working now for almost two years is zero. No one has ever everyone's oh, I'm totally happy to do it. What? I'm helping the app guy out. Sure. I'm helping this infrastructure. Sure. What, what is, do you
Speaker 3 00:25:14 See that as a thread? Do you see that as a thread of value for value? So like people just
Speaker 4 00:25:18 I's incredibly important. Yes. Because, well, <laugh>, I call it value for value. If we wanted to go raise and venture capital money, a call it web three, you know, cuz that's really what it is, right? Everybody's contributing with their own agenda with no contracts, just, you know, here's an API, it's what we offer you hook into it. You create an app. That's what you offer. Podcaster comes along, says, here's my content. The listener comes along and says, dude, just gimme an easy way to, to make the whole system work. What one push of the button. And it all goes and flows. That's what we've created. So, uh, to protect, enhance and extend podcasting is truly our mission statement. Now what happened with that is when we made this API available that that software developers could come up and develop and, and potentially get, you know, a piece of the money that's flowing through the system unleashed was over a decade of creativity, which, which never was able to come to fruition because we were stuck in this paradigm of, well, if the apple app doesn't do it and then the posting companies aren't gonna do it.
Speaker 4 00:26:22 So just never gonna happen. Let's go, uh, form a nonprofit to talk about it. You know, <laugh>, that's, that's all that podcasting had become. And, and we still see remnants of that today while there's this group just working really hard on bringing new features. So once you have, once you extend RSS to enable the payments, the, the value for value streaming payments that we discussed, well, then you can add chapters and transcripts and person and geolocation and all these things that PE alternate enclosures, all these things that people have been wanting for years and years and years. But there was really, you didn't have both sides of the equation. So we just started doing it on the receiving side. And then luckily we saw forward thinking forward looking companies and people like yourself, Matt and Stewart, who said, yeah, why don't we support this? Why don't we get on board?
Speaker 4 00:27:13 You know, okay, everyone has their own timeline. Uh, infrastructure changes can be messy and dangerous. So it goes slow, but you know what we're we got our 1% coming in the servers are, are still humming. We make no money, but that's okay. That's not what we're doing it for. I benefit indirectly from my shows being podcasting 2.0. And so this is building and I think we're even getting to the point where people are looking at using this value for value model, with podcasting infrastructure, for other types of media. In fact, we have, um, a tag, a new feature tag in the podcast standards, which is the medium tag. So an app can recognize, Hey, this is a track from an album and it might change its appearance into more of a music player, but with the same properties that a podcast feed off offers, including the streaming payments. So you can break down a song and you can have a portion go to each musician, a portion, go to the song writer to the composer. And that will be that way in perpetuity. It will be different payments for the next track. And so all these things kind of start to, to, to Mel together and, and you see a future where for, for intangible media products, this is a very good way to go.
Speaker 3 00:28:27 This is a tough question for me to frame, cuz there's a lot of moving parts here after running a bunch of other companies, some of which were public. How is this different to you where it's not like it's just an RSS feed man. <laugh> right. Like there's not these, all these other huge moving things. It's a lot of herding people. You are sort of corralling a bunch of developers and we all know what developers are like, or I've heard you have empathy on shows for the newbies. Don't poke fun that somebody doesn't know about Bitcoin or the lightning wallet. Cause we need these people to adopt this. How different is this for you? Just leading people, empathy. It's different than just like go build a widget, let's price this widget and let's just sell it for profit. Do you feel that difference? I, I feel a difference for you, but I don't know if you feel the same. <laugh>
Speaker 4 00:29:16 Uh, first of all, when I look at all the people who've just shown up with their own expertise and, and, and their own agenda, you know, we have people who are or are helping build this, but they're more interested in aggregating data for something or more, you know, this or interested in the music side. This is everyone has a different re some people are just, this is a great hobby. I just wanna hang out with some interesting people. Uh, when I look at all the people and what they're contributing, I see a group that if you could even assemble this group, you could not afford the payroll because they're that talented, that smart, that motivated. And when I look at it, you sometimes do developer JY call and all get on a call and we'll chat about stuff and that's not organized by any particular person.
Speaker 4 00:29:58 That's usually we have one thing. I think the one thing I did that really made this community is instead of it all being GitHub oriented, that's where we have discussions. And we have a email list. I created a, a Mato on server podcast, index.social. So it's kind of like a social network without the annoying algos. And which means that discussions can be had threaded discussions, but also, you know, it was like, when something scrolls off, then it's either the topic is done or there's no more flame war or it's over, you know? So it just seems to work really well. As a, as a tool, a collaborative tool, a non-structured collaborative tool, it's the best company I've ever been involved in the best company I've ever started. The most fun I've ever had in my life, working for a company. And Dave really is in charge of all of the engineering and, uh, and managing all of the, you know, all of that stuff.
Speaker 4 00:30:49 So he's, he's not really managing anyone either. He'll say, you know, someone shows up all of a sudden, Hey, I'm a professional documentation writer. Can I help? And Dave says, yes, here's what I need. And then we have the XML and S definition and all this stuff is all done. And, and, you know, the documentation is incredibly detailed. Exactly what a software developer would expect to see from a mature pro uh, project. So Dave really does all of that. My job, if anything, is to break things, because what I bring to the table is Uber user. So, you know, I have feeds that total over, you know, well over a million, uh, listeners or downloads per week. So when I do something, it can matter when something breaks with my shit, it's it also matters. So N we call it running with scissors. That's what podcasting 2.0 is, you know, we're just running around with scissors and sometimes, you know, someone's eye gets poked out, but it's okay.
Speaker 4 00:31:42 We can pop it back in. We can continue. So we're, we're doing just all kinds of dangerous stuff. And I have dreams, you know, I, I dreamt up the, the, the, the concept and actually part of the technology 18 years ago. So my dreams now are very well defined. And, and the only thing that, that I do to quote unquote manage, which is not managing at all is the exact same thing I did at podcasting. 1.0, cause I started a podcast and the podcast is all about this project. So we're talking about the people who are involved in it. We have the people who are involved in it, on the podcast. We've had you on Matt, you know, so this, this is what make, this builds a community and low and behold on this podcast, we ask for people to support the project and we're, and it's working.
Speaker 4 00:32:30 Um, we have the people, not just people who like, like, like what we're doing from the outside, but internally also supporting it. There's there's people who are getting money from Satoshi, from the streaming value for value, putting it right back into podcast index. So it's a self-sustaining system. Um, I'm opinionated. I have some standing in certain areas. Um, but, uh, but I'm certainly not right. And I love the pushback. I love people thinking they're right. Um, there's no hierarchy. The, the only, ultimately, yeah, I guess Dave and I can turn it off or on, but even that is not true because everything's open source. You can recreate podcast index tomorrow. You can take the existing index. And, you know, we have a very small set of rules that we live by, which is actually Dave Weiner's rules for standards makers, you know, do a, do a quick search and, and pull that up. And we follow that and it works incredibly well. So to answer your question, I am living my dream right now. I really am. I'm podcasting. I get to make podcasting better with this group of other people. Uh, I get to secure my future, but more importantly, I get to work with a lot of people who are in an upcoming generation who need this shit who need, uh, an avenue to make sure they can actually communicate and not be taken down and get compensated and make it, keep it sustainable. Basically.
Speaker 3 00:33:54 Are you able to look at value for value and podcasting 2.0, I, you know, there's, there's three things, right? Like you are the champion of podcasting, hands down the pod father, and then we have value for value. And then we have podcasting 2.0, I guess, do you ever look at these and say, this one thing satisfies me the most, like I have left an impact on the world because you, I never gave up on podcasting. I created this value for value thing or this podcasting 2.0 technology. Do you, do you ever look at it that way? And do you have a favorite that you've achieved? Does that even make sense?
Speaker 4 00:34:29 <laugh> in general, I'm just the pod father, whether I invented created did the first one. Well, it doesn't really matter. You kind of understand what that means. It doesn't matter that much to me either. I'll take that. And if, if people say that's what he did, fantastic, I'd love for it to be value for value, because this is the thing. And I, even though I've been living it for, you know, for a decade and a half now to see it available at everyone's fingertips, really within grasp in podcasting, because we've been able to, to bring it all into one interface and, and, and we can really, and we've been able to add the, the, the payment system. Uh, but also, I'm just proud of the fact that Dave Jones and I sat down and we've done this. We've been friends for 12 years. Like, Hey man, I got this great.
Speaker 4 00:35:20 It's always the same. Hey man, I got this great idea for this product. This is gonna be great. Let's make this. And Dave goes, okay. And then he makes it, and then, uh, we play with it. No one else cares. And we've been doing this. And you know, we've had products that I lo I mean, I cannot live without the freedom controller. No one knows what it is. No one, no one understands it. When they see it's like, what the hell is it? It's a Swiss army knife built basically for Adam and Dave. And some people get value out of it. Uh, but podcasting 2.0, that was the one that hit, but it was the same pitch, Dave, Hey man, Apple's doing this shit. And we should build our own index. Here's how we, I think we can do it and look at this lightning stuff. And I think we can do, you know, like real time, uh, value for value. Cause the term was known and Dave went okay. I mean, that's literally how we worked and, and for it to, to pay off this way for podcasting, it is the culmination. You know, this is the last thing I'll do, but I'll probably do it for the rest of my life. So pod, father value for value. I don't know. I'll just all I ever want. I just wanna plaque.
Speaker 3 00:36:25 So I really appreciated, uh, the time that Adam spent with us, uh, again, value for value and working in the, uh, call to actions. I think anyone who, who listened to, to this podcast just now, like, you know what I want to try this, uh, number one, you can do this stuff at Casto FYI, but number two, the value for value thing is it's, it's a mindset. I, I hate to say it's, uh, uh, it's a, it's a culture. I don't wanna make it sound like you have to like shift everything because in terms of podcasting do value for value, do advertising do direct sponsorship sales, do everything like as a starving artist, myself, do whatever you can, uh, to get paid. But again, the value for value thing is something that is not just about the money, but about connecting with the community and, and finding the people who wanna support you as, as an independent creator in ways that are not just exchange money. The money helps of course, but they, other folks can, can jump in and do things like promote the show, build a community, connect with others. And that's what really drives me to want to Institute the, the value for value stuff with, with what we do at Casto and with our creators as well.
Speaker 2 00:37:39 And you know, he also mentioned something, cuz you said, you know, things beyond money, a Adam made a, a passing reference to something that I think is actually central to a lot of the conversations we have about ownership and autonomy and, and distributing your art. And that was when, when he mentioned, you know, people getting de platformed. Now I think actually there's a lot of nuance there. And that would actually, when we talk about like de platforming and people's perception of what they think censorship is, that's a whole other conversation. And I don't even know if audience is the best place for it, but I'll give an example. I once worked on a project that did get de platformed from Spotify, actually for a reason that on the surface was pretty legitimate. We were repurposing an artist, an artist I was working with repurpose his own music.
Speaker 2 00:38:25 And you can't just distribute music via an RSS feed where Spotify will take it down. The reason being that artists depend on the plays on Spotify to get whatever, whatever small percentage Spotify gives them again, a whole other conversation. Anyway, the, the logic behind it was actually pretty sound, I would think objectively actually. Yeah, but it was this guy's own music. And all of that was to say was we never actually got to talk to another human being at Spotify. So it sucked. We just got taken off of Spotify. Was it the end of the world? No, it was still distributed on, on apple and Stitcher and Amazon and Google and all the other ones that pull from Apple's directory and it lives on his website. All of that is to say, is had Spotify been the only place that was playing podcasts? We would've been screwed.
Speaker 2 00:39:15 So I think there's things again, you know, the money is important and don't leave any stone unturned when it comes to funding your podcast, grant funding as well. That's something we've talked about here on audience too, but you know, there, there are, there are things beyond money, I think to consider when you D when we talk about centralized versus decentralized. And to me, that example, I think lives in my mind as, as an experience that thought, wow, if we're gonna go towards more centralized podcasting, there's gotta be a little more transparency in why shows get taken down. But as creators, we have RSS in our back pocket to be like, oh, well fine, Spotify doesn't want us. We'll just, we'll push this somewhere else. It's not ideal, but it's, you know, it, it is an option and a tool for, for creators.
Speaker 3 00:40:00 Yeah. I mean, hopefully you heard the difference, uh, the points of view, especially in the broader topic of centralized, decentralized versus decentralized, uh, between, uh, this episode with Adam last episode with Tanner,
Speaker 2 00:40:13 This has all been very instructive to me. I lean more towards the value for value open source for, for the reasons I just, I just laid out. I, I don't think you want to be at the whims of an algorithm because I like to believe in the situation I just described with scattershot symphony, the name of the, the podcast I was working on. I'd like to believe that if I got to talk to another human being, we could have come to a, to an arrangement, but like, look, I get where you're coming from this, you know, this is an extenuating circumstance
Speaker 3 00:40:41 Coming up in the third part, uh, of the story we have, Juka LWA of L WC studios, sky Pillsbury from the squeeze podcast newsletter and Sam, Seth cohost of pod land. What we were after here is having this sort of well rounded approach. Uh, we've sort of started with Tanner from more of the Spotify closed sourced advertising side of the house, right. Algorithms, data, giving it to the creators, but tax us, you know, tax platforms. And then we had Adam Curry, of course, pod father helped get this whole industry moving value for value podcasting, 2.0 open source. We really saw both sides of the spectrum, but with some good crossover, I feel like I, I think we're all like saying the same things for the creator at the end of the day, but maybe taking two different, uh, paths to get there. And I think our third episode is really going to maybe glue all of these perspectives together. You heard a little bit of Juka on the first episode, uh, of, of the series and then sky, uh, sort of right up there against, uh, with Adam. And, uh, now you'll have Sam and all of them come together here and wrap this, wrap this up.
Speaker 2 00:42:01 I feel comfortable saying we did. I guess everyone will decide for themselves after a hearing for here in all three episodes. But I think we, I think we did a good job.
Speaker 3 00:42:11 Hey, there, listener it's Matt, before you go, I want to offer you the aspiring podcaster two special items. Number one, if you haven't started a podcast yet, or you want to find a better podcast hosting company, start here at casts. Use our coupon code audience 20 that's audience two zero. When you sign up for a new
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