Dave Jones is with us and Dave, for our audience, can you kind of give them a background of
who you are and what you do? Yeah, I mean for my day job, I'm a sysadmin. I've been a sysadmin
slash programmer for 25 years going on. And I guess that's relevant to what our project is now,
just because Adam and I got to know each other, gosh, about 10 years ago, at least now, maybe a
little bit earlier than that. And so we were in the same circles of tech stuff. And so we got to
know each other. And because I was a sysadmin and a programmer as well, we ended up just doing a
bunch of projects together. And that's kind of my background as it relates to the podcast index and
that kind of thing. So how does the conversation about this podcast 2.0 and podcast index, how does
that all get started? Just Adam giving you a call or sounded, at least in one of the podcasts, like
there was a couple other people involved too, or was it just the two of you? It was pretty much the
two of us. Yeah, we brought in a third partner just to help us. Both of us are very disorganized.
And we were like, well, there has to be money involved here at some point. So we need somebody
that will keep us straight and not let us do crazy things. So we brought Eric in and he just does
back office stuff and helps us keep everything legal and straight. And he's a business guy while
we go out and try to wreck things. But yeah, we got started. Adam just called me one day or texted
me and said, hey, I've got an idea. Which if you know him is not an uncommon thing. He's got a
million ideas at light speed. So that wasn't out of the ordinary. So he explains to you
what this idea is, which was what? Well, his thing was, and I don't know how familiar you
or your audience would be with No Agenda, I'm sure you are in a little bit. So his show has always
been possible because he shuns advertising and just goes directly to his audience. And the value
for value model is what he calls it. And so, you know, the idea being that if you're directly
supported by your listeners without an intermediary, then you make yourself yourself and your content
safer from censorship. And so he had the idea first to make podcasts to give all of podcasts
all of podcasting that possibility to try to essentially break podcasting free from this layer
of censorship that it has, which really is advertising that like most media, podcasting has
ended up in an advertising model for funding. And so he wanted he's like, you know, let's let's try
to take the value for value model that No Agenda has been so successful with and get make it doable
for all of podcasting. So that was that was one of his ideas. And that, let's see, the other idea was
to have a, a censorship free index, which can make that possible. So a directory, a podcast directory,
where you could take that value for value model, and not just apply it to podcasters,
but also apply it to app developers. And our feeling has been since day one, and this is what
we discussed, when he very first brought this up, is that app developers have been left out of the
value chain. And so you've got hosting companies that can make money and do you have podcasters
you have podcasters that have various degrees of success with podcasting, but at least a fair
percentage of them do make money. And but the podcast app developers, you really only have a
couple of independent app developers that make any money at all. And the rest of the app, the
podcast app landscape really just has survived on in app purchases or 99 cents on an app store.
And so we tried to, we tried to basically make all of the podcast world accessible to that value
for value direct donation model. And so that required us to have an index for that reason,
but also an open API for the apps to hook into. So that as we developed these technologies,
the, you know, what we're kind of loosely calling podcasting 2.0, as we developed that stuff,
we could have a place to push it and, and allow people to hook in and get early access to cool
technology, like chapters, funding, the value block, all those kinds of things that we've been
that we've been involved in. And so that was kind of, that's the framework that we talked about from
the very beginning. So what's your vision of how, how this plays out? Right now, it looks like you're
gathering podcasts and getting the information out about what it is. So what is your vision of how
is it a website that people go to where it's easily understood or, you know, how, how, how,
you know, how do you get it so that the masses can easily understand it? What do you,
what's your vision for that? We may be the worst possible people to create something that the
masses can understand and easily hook into. That is not a good track record for us. But I think, so
the goal here is to, is not a website. I mean, that, that's, it's almost, we almost have one by
necessity. The real goal is the API, which is what the podcast apps hook into. And so that really
doesn't need any, you know, to be functional, it doesn't need any sort of presence on a webpage at
all. So at the application level, we're pushing us, we're, we're pushing data to those apps and
to allow them to function as a podcast player. The issue here is that podcasts, the podcasting world
is open and decentralized by its nature, which is what we're trying to preserve through technologies
like RSS. We're trying to save that aspect of podcasting to keep it from being taken over by
Spotify or these siloed private companies that want to basically take podcasts and stick them
behind a paywall. So we're trying to, we're trying to take that technology and put a free API in
there where app developers can hook into that and not have to run their own infrastructure.
Because the downside to the open decentralized podcasting world is that it can be very difficult
to aggregate, let's just say a million and a half podcast feeds. That means you have to have servers
that are constantly reading those feeds as fast as possible and indexing them into a database and
then serving them up in a way that your app can understand. And for a lot of independent app
developers who have no promise of making money at all, other than maybe 99 cents if they're lucky,
the idea of running enough infrastructure on the backend, which may cost them four or $500 a month,
that would be tough. That would be a tough sell because they, who knows how long, how many months
they're going to have to go like that before they get any audience buy-in at all. So we said, well,
why don't we make the infrastructure and then we're going to give it away for free.
And just sort of eating our own dog food, that value for value model, we'll give it away for free.
And then if it's helpful to app developers, if it helps them to get customers and it works out to
where they're making money, well, maybe they'll give back to us and donate back to help the whole
ecosystem. Is it a big investment for you guys to get this thing going?
It's not cheap. It's costing us roughly around $300, $350 a month right now of hosting fees.
And the first couple of months we paid for that out of our own pockets. And then in the last few
months, last three months, we've had enough donations coming in to cover our costs. Now,
the goal here was never to walk away with a lot of money. If we're able to cover our costs with
hosting, that's really what we're aiming for. We just don't want to lose money, obviously.
But so far, so many people have stepped up to the table and given donations and we've
not had to pay out of pocket for the last three months. And so it's been great.
That's great. So from the podcast's standpoint, how are you going to make it easier for them
to get donations quickly from their listeners that they're in a position where they don't need
advertisers, or they don't need to go through programmatic, or they don't need to figure out
who to call to get somebody to help them sell ads because they're busy putting their content
together? How do you make that work? Yeah, and that's the moonshot aspect of this.
So the idea here is in order for that to really happen in a way that's... Well, let me back up.
There's two parts to that. Number one is you have to take the payment processing out of the
flow as much as you can because that's where the hit happens. That's where your PayPal's,
Patreon's and those guys, when they get involved, you're looking at 10% off the top. And so that...
And you're also looking at a potential point for censorship. And we've seen this, I mean, look at,
to use an extreme example, lately, look at Pornhub. They got completely demonetized by Visa.
And it's not just a Patreon or somebody like that that can demonetize you. In their case,
it was the actual credit card processor themselves. And it didn't matter who that intermediary was.
That's going to go all the way up the chain to where to the actual bank processing. And so
our idea is in order to make a decentralized support, donation support model work, you really
need to take all of that out of the chain if you can. And the only thing that does that really is
crypto, is Bitcoin. And so Adam had been reading about a technology called Lightning, which is
basically what they call a layer two protocol that sits on top of Bitcoin. And the Bitcoin Lightning
network allows you to do very fast transactions, very small transactions, because it works, what
they call off chain. So these are not standard Bitcoin transactions. They are transactions that
happen off of the blockchain in small increments, and then they get settled up later in what's
called a channel. And so he was reading about this technology, and we started putting some stuff
together and just checking it out to see if it would be viable. And about, it's about a month and
a half or so after we launched the index, we were able to prove out that that type of system would
work. And so the idea here is that in your RSS feed, the way this looks in practical terms to try
to speak clearly here, is in your RSS feed for your podcast, you can put a tag in there that lists
out all of the various Bitcoin Lightning addresses that need to get paid as somebody listens to the
podcast. And so the idea would be that app applications, podcast applications, player
applications would read that tag in the RSS feed. And then once a minute, they would begin to stream
payment back to the podcaster, because the podcaster has put in their, his or her Lightning
payment address. And so once a minute, you're getting however many fractions of a Bitcoin,
the listener has determined that your podcast is worth what they want to pay for it.
Let's just say that's 10 satoshis, a satoshi is 100 millionth of a Bitcoin. So let's just say that's
10 satoshis. Well, every minute 10 satoshis are getting paid back to that podcaster directly into
their Bitcoin wallet. And so we've proved that out that it works. And through some guys that we
that we have hooked up with at the Sphinx.Chat app, they have a Lightning, they had already had a
Lightning chat app. And so they just dropped, essentially just dropped podcast player into
that app. And immediately we were able to hook up everything to the API to the index, the podcast
index, and begin streaming money. And it works. I mean, we're doing it every single day. Now it's,
it's a future, it's a future looking technology. But it also works right now. It's just a little
complicated to get into. Are you going to be able to make it work with cash being that a lot of
people not only don't understand Bitcoin, they probably don't buy any or have any or exchange
any. So how do you how do you make that work with cash for the podcast? That's kind of universally
known in the, you know, in the Bitcoin world is the onboarding problem. It's like, there's so many
cool Bitcoin things that are hampered by the fact that it's a challenge to get Bitcoin in from cash.
So we decided at the beginning, you know, we're not going to try to get into that if we can help it.
Now, that doesn't mean that we're completely avoiding that because one thing that we're doing
right now is we've been talking to somebody that it's not right. I'm not ready to talk about it
publicly. But we've been talking to a lightning provider. And the ideas here are for them to handle
a a dollar to Bitcoin conversion process. So the the the great thing about this
is the Bitcoin community is is so zealous, you know, they love things like this, anything that
causes cryptocurrency and specifically Bitcoin to be more accessible and more usable. They love a
challenge like that. So as soon as you know, it became known that we were involved in this space,
they the Bitcoin guys just jumped in there like, you know, with both feet and we're like, yeah,
we want to do this. And so we've just been contacted by everybody. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't
think that I think that's going to be a solved problem. I think it's going to be a solved problem
fairly quickly. Great. So the you mentioned the podcast apps also making money in this new,
in this new way of doing this. So how how how do they do they are they taking a piece of the
podcasters revenue or is it some other way they'd be making money? Yeah. And well, that's
one thing that we've that we've talked about since the beginning is that it's not this doesn't work.
If everybody doesn't get a piece of that action. I mean, everybody in the podcast world, nobody,
nobody needs to be left out of that. Because the the the truth is everybody contributes to this in
some way, the app, the aggregator, the index, the the podcaster, the hosting company, there's so many
people in the chain, that everybody needs to be able to be to have a piece of that. And so the way
that the the value block is what we call the way the value tag works in the new podcast namespace
is you can just specify this you specify, okay, these four, you know, lightning addresses are
going to get paid every minute. And one of them may be, you know, 98, and you specify percentage.
So let's just say 97%, you say 97% of this of the payment each minute is going to go to the podcaster,
which is which is me, 1% is going to go to the app, 1% is going to go to the hosting company,
1% is going to go to this API that I'm using. And so you you can specify all the different
people in the chain that you would like to see get paid. And yeah, and so for the apps, what we're
we're recommending like a 1% split. And but the interesting thing is, it's a new market. So who
knows what that will end up as you, you know, if you if you leave that in the in the listeners hands,
they may really love your app. And they may say, Well, yeah, I want to give you an extra,
you know, 5% on top of that. And so as soon as you take, you know, that is an interesting thing,
too. As soon as you take out this idea that there's a set price for this one particular service,
and you move to that mindset of the value for value, where you say, I'm going to give you this
value. And you give me back what you think is worth whatever that is, if it's five cents, or if it's
$500, I'm not going to tell you what to give me you give back to me what you think it's worth.
When you when you put those tools in somebody's hands, it's amazing what people will do. I mean,
we just in the short lifespan of our show of our podcast that we we do a weekly podcast on
Fridays called podcasting 2.0. That is basically just a running Adam calls it the board meeting,
because we don't usually we don't usually talk during the week much. But if you take that show,
for example, that's been running since August, I mean, some weeks we get, you know, $10 of donations,
and another week, we may get, you know, 1500. But it's just a matter of what people heard that week,
what they saw us do, and how much they thought that was worth to them and the rest of the ecosystem.
So we've been you guys have been gaining some some traction with the whole with the with companies
like I think Libsyn is one and companies like that to get more podcasts in the index. Correct? I mean,
what is what is it that you can talk about it in terms of companies that are that are known right
now? Yeah, that's pretty much I don't think there's anybody that's not known at this point. It's
Buzzsprout, Libsyn, blueberry, they're they're working, they're developing, they're, they're
spending some dev time right now to get hooked into to our stuff. Captivate transistor fireside.
Felcom leaving somebody out. We there's they're listed on our on our website under there's an
apps page there that lists out everybody who has connections to us. But one of the things that
that we're trying to do is, you know, it seems a little weird to have Apple be sort of the main
directory for podcasting, when they're also a private company, you know, a big humongous private
company. And so the the idea is that for Apple to be sort of the default directory for something
that's supposed to be an open ecosystem that nobody owns and controls, we're trying to shift
to that center of the universe back to something that is open. Now we're we're not a nonprofit, but
all like you can literally listen to our show and hear how much money we have. I mean, we we
spell it out every week. So we tried we're saying, well, we're not a nonprofit, but we're extreme,
like extreme transparency in our financials. So if you listen to to the show, you can see exactly
what's going on, we're transparent, we build everything in the open on our podcast index.social
is the name of our social website where us and all the developers that are in the project
participate. So if you were trying to shift that universe back from having a private company,
sort of running podcasting infrastructure to putting it back into a more open community led effort.
I heard Adam teasing Apple a few times, do you need to have them in there? Or does it really
matter if they're in there? Because really, you're gonna have all the other hosting companies anyway,
and they're all basically feeding Apple the same stuff or does it matter?
Yeah, well, you know, Apple's very interested, they know they know what's going on here.
And, you know, Adam's talked to him a few times. And there's no there's absolutely no animosity at
all. You know, those those guys are great. And they're going to get involved whenever they feel
like it's right. And so but we you know, we're not we don't have any real need for them to be
involved at this point. Other than just it would help with adoption of the namespace,
because there's sort of two products. These are two kind of, I guess, parallel projects
that that feed off each other. There's the podcast index, which is the API. And that's
the effort to make a decentralized, non Apple centric, or really, it's not just Apple non
corporate centric index that can't be that's free of censorship. And then there's the podcast
namespace, which supports that effort, but also is usable way outside of us, like all the technologies
that we talked about, like the value tag, the transcripts, funding chapters, all these things
that we're doing, everything we do is all in the in the podcast namespace. And that doesn't depend
on the podcast index, that's completely usable outside of us. Talk to talk about the tags a
little bit so that people that are listening or that are reading this understand what you're
doing with tags and why it might be important to the average podcast. Yeah, and that's that's
interesting, because it's a RSS is an old technology. And it's very extensible. You can add new things
to it very easily through name through what they call namespaces. And but the funny thing about it
is that that that technology is so hidden from the modern podcaster that a lot of times they just
don't even know about their feed, or what's in it or anything like that and don't care, which is fine,
you know, that's not for them to care about necessarily. But when you begin to add new
things to RSS to extend it, you do have to have some sort of knowledge about about that, because
that may be stuff in there that you want. So the podcast namespace is our effort to take a lot of
the things that the podcasting world has been wanting for many years, and just do it. Because
what we found early on was that podcasting has the decentralized nature of it that we've talked about
leaves it open to just no progress. There's a lot of people that sit around and talk about, you know,
hey, podcasting ought to have this, but they don't ever do anything. Or a lot of times things get
tied up in standards groups, or, you know, standards bodies or working groups or 501 seats,
the nonprofits are formed in order to look at doing something, but nothing ever actually gets done.
And so we said, well, let's just do it. I mean, why not? Let's try it. And so we put together
namespace with five of the tags that we knew immediately that people had been talking about
and wanting for a long time. And one of those was the lock tag to, well, that wasn't one that had
been wanted for a long time. That's one that we kind of cooked up. But that was an idea of being
able to lock your feed so that people can't import it or pirate your feed. There was the
transcript tag, which Buzzsprout had already been working on, and already had sort of a working open
spec for, but it was only usable between Buzzsprout and one app. So we said, okay, well,
let's refine that and stick that in the namespace and then everybody can use it. So we've got the
transcript tag, the funding tag, which is an attempt to simplify a few other tags that existed
to try to point people at donation links like PayPal or Patreon. And then the, see, you got
log, funding, transcript, oh, and chapters, the chapters tag. And the chapters tag is our effort
to take chapters out of the MP3 file itself, because that's typically the way it's done now.
If you want to put chapters in your show, you typically have to bake it into the MP3 audio file.
And so that's fine, but it's a little bit inflexible because once you upload the show,
if you want to remaster it or something like that, it can be difficult, a lot of heavy lifting to
rearrange the frame headers and that kind of thing in a way that doesn't break. So we said,
well, let's take the chapters out of the MP3 file itself and stick it in a separate file that can be
included with the RSS feed. And so now this allows for rich chapter building tools to be created
that don't have to touch the audio. They can exist alongside the hosting company's user interface
tools and allow you to create the chapters after the fact, after you upload your audio. And so you
could listen along and add the chapters as you go. So that was the other tag that we came up with.
And that was what we call phase one of the podcast namespace is putting those tags in.
Before you go on to the next piece of what you wanted to say,
let's just say I'm a podcaster, I use Spreaker to host my site and I want to insert chapters
into my show because I don't have chapters. Tell me how I do that now with your technology.
To use the podcast namespace with Spreaker, you would have to beg them to do it.
But essentially, you have to get them to adopt because we have not heard from them.
Currently, Bussprout, let's just say you want to do chapters, Bussprout supports that.
Fireside supports that. Transistor supports that. Captivate supports that. Or I think Captivate's
doing it right now. Blueberry. So one of those hosting companies we mentioned before have all
committed to adopting those namespace tags. They either already have them or they're about to have
them and they're going to have the tools to do it. If you're with Spreaker, we just want to contact
them and tell them to do it because that's how they need to find out about this stuff. They need
to hear from their customers. So if I go on to the website, can I upload my show myself and become,
even though it's hosted on Spreaker, it doesn't work that way. The hosting company has to be part
of this. Yeah. We do not do any hosting or processing of the podcast anyway. All we do on
the index side of things is we're an aggregator and a backend for apps. And then we also have
spearheaded the namespace project. So basically what happens is once a new tag is finalized,
we put support for it into the index software so that now we pick up that data and we're able to
hand it back to the apps that use our service. But we don't process or manage the audio or hosting
or any of that stuff. So if I was with Lipsyn or Blueberry and we were down the road and everything
was humming, then I would go on their website where I upload my show and something different's
going to be there that wasn't there six months ago that will help me figure out chapters and figure
out transcripts because they're going to make it easy for the average podcaster who has no clue how
to do any of this. They just want to do a show. It's going to be on their site. Yeah, that's exactly
right. That's the way it is with, if you're hosted on Buzzsprout right now, all those things are
there. Because of you guys, because they've incorporated your technology. Right. That's
exactly right. And so you have all and same with Fireside. If you go to Fireside, all that stuff's
there. Transistor, if you're logging into your account, you'll see those things there available
for you to put into your show. Yeah. Got it. So take us like what's down the road here. I mean,
how do you feel like it's done or, I'm sure it's never going to be done, but what is your vision
of saying, we've got it to the point where is it going to be that it's being mass used by all the
hosting companies or is it going to be something that you've finished writing? How's it going to
feel somewhat finished? I think it's the way I envision it going. And I think you've seen this
already is that there's a flurry of activity at the beginning because a lot of this stuff is just
pent up demand. People have been wanting like a location tag, a way to put your, let's just say,
if you're doing a podcast about Western Africa, people want to be able to somehow tag West Africa
in their podcast so that other search engines, podcast search engines and podcast indexes can
aggregate that stuff together and say, here's all the popular podcasts about West Africa, or here's
all the podcast episodes that have talked about the Eiffel Tower. So you have this idea of location
tagging within podcasting is something that has been wanted for a while. And so we've put that
into phase two. So that's going to be a tag that will be finalized within the next couple of months.
And then people within the user tools of their host can tag a location in their feed. So there's
things like that that are pent up demand for information to be included that we just are saying,
okay, let's just do it. Let's push it in there, make sure it looks good. And let's, let's get the
ball rolling on that. But as those things, as those sort of low hanging fruit, you know, as those
as those things come get in there and get baked in and get finalized, there will be fewer and
fewer of those. And so then I think the activity will fall off. But that'll be good though, because
that'll let at least for us, for our vision, that will let us focus more on that second goal, which
is trying to get the podcasting world less dependent on advertising. So that, and that's
a harder problem to solve clearly than put some tag in the namespace. But I hope, I really hope by
the end of the year, I hope by the end of 2021, that we'll have a very robust namespace. And
that we'll have, you know, I hope that we have a lot of hosts on board, we already do have a lot.
But I think if, if at the end of the 2021, if we had a really nice namespace with a lot of
accessible new things that people could put in there, in their podcast, and let's just say 50%
of the hosts on board, I would be very happy. Great. So do you think there's really a big
desire for transcripts and chapters and things like that? Is it really something that's important
to podcasters? Or is it a small group of podcasters and people in the industry that are that are
asking about those? And, you know, what's your, so what's your thought on that? And those,
or, or to the users, is it good to have a choice for them to be able to put it in there so that it
will help grow their show and they just don't know it? Or, you know, what's the reason for
including those things? Well, what we've seen, it's an interesting question, because I think,
I think it's sort of a mix of all of that. Because what we've seen is, number one,
hosters are going to do, they're going to implement what their customers are asking for. And so, if
their customers are not asking for location data to be in the podcast, well, they're probably just
not going to do it. They're not going to put that, they're not going to spend the developer time
to put that stuff in there. And so there's, that's sort of one way to answer that question.
Another thing to think about is that the more, how do I say this? The podcasting ecosystem,
the open free podcasting ecosystem is sort of locked into trench warfare right now with
specifically Spotify, because Spotify is buying up, you know, they're buying up large portions
of podcasting right now. And those private apps that don't play ball with the rest of podcasting,
they have the potential to do all kinds of interesting things in the app. They can do
these things like location, person search, people search, transcripts, they can do all of those
things. Now, a lot of them don't yet, but they will. And if the open podcast ecosystem is not
prepared to have feature parity with what the private siloed apps can do, well, then that's a
problem. It will kill slowly the open podcasting world. So there's, the other way to answer that
is just, we need these things just to maintain relevance and feature parity and innovation in
this space. And then I guess the final way to look at it is, yes, there are plenty of customers who
are podcasters who want this information. But there's also plenty of podcasters that want it,
but don't know they want it, because it's cool stuff that they could put in there, but they may
not know that they're missing it. So lastly, what do you want the average podcaster to know or do
that will help? I would say that number one would be good, go check out some of the apps
that support this stuff. One would be Podfriend, which is a web based app. I think it's just
podfriend.com. Another one would be podverse.fm. Another one would be hypercatcher that's on iOS,
podcast addict, support some of the tags already. Go check out some of those apps that support the
tags and look at how they work and look at the cool stuff that they can do. Because it's kind of a,
it's really a different experience. So when you're looking at, let's just say, if you're looking at
no agenda show on hypercatcher app or on podfriend, you're seeing in real time, as things
are being talked about on the show, you're seeing pictures come up or images that they're talking
about, articles come up. I mean, it's almost like being in a, being in a slot in a PowerPoint
presentation is pretty amazing. And once you get like person in the person tag, the new person tag,
or the location tag, you can come up with all kinds of rich, immersive data in a podcast.
And it's just, it's a different, it's a real different experience. And so I think one thing
I would say is go, go check out some of those apps and what they can do. And the other thing would be,
if you think that that stuff is really cool, and it's something that you would want to put
in your podcast, well then ask your host if they're not one of the ones that participate yet.
And then what we have seen is it does not take much to convince a host to jump on board with this,
because the host, the podcast hosting world is very competitive. And so if somebody's wanting
something, and you know, if let's just say that you're at Spreaker, and one of your customers
are seeing all this cool stuff happening over at Buzzsprout, well then you need to support that.
You may lose customers that way. So I would say those things, go check out what it can do,
and then go talk to your host. And make sure that, please push the podcast so people can listen in.
I mean, every Friday, I think comes out right, or once a week, you and Adam talk about exactly
what's going on. So let everybody know what that is again. It's Podcasting 2.0 is the name of the
show. We're not on Apple or Spotify. It's an RSS feed. So we're eating our own dog food, man. So
you'll have to go get the RSS free from our homepage, which is podcastindex.org,
and manually plug it into your podcast app. Yeah, it's every Friday. That's right.