Episode 207: We've Got Weather!

Podcasting 2.0 for January 17, 2025, episode 207. We've got weather! Oh, hello everybody. Shiver me timbers, it is very cold, even here in Texas. It is time once again for the board meeting of 2.0, the podcasting 2.0, that is. Everything going on with podcasting, what has been, what it is, and what is to come. We are the only boardroom that stacks sats for liquidity and love.

I'm Adam Curry, here in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and in Alabama, the man who put the L in medium equals music L. Say hello to my friend on the other end, the one and only Mr. Dave Jones! So, just to clarify. Please do, please do. We are not banned in the U.S. By the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court, our show is still, the board meeting is still fine. Yes, we are not, we've never been on the App Store, but we're still not banned, yes. Right, yes. We're good to go.

You can't ban RSS. No, you can't, it just can't happen. It can't happen, they can ban apps, there it is, you build your audience somewhere and you take it with what it is. It's just what it is. I think we'll start something off new here today, Dave. Oh. Yes, I think we'll start. I think we need to start with a new category. Wait a second. Known as... We didn't have a meeting about this. No, we did not have a meeting. This is Podsage Words of Wisdom. Quiet, quiet, quiet, I'm doing it.

Shh, don't ruin it. Do it again. Podsage Words of Wisdom. Sometimes, you code a thing and it works, but you don't know why it works. Sometimes, you code a thing and it works, and you know why it works, but you're wrong. This has been this week's Podsage Words of Wisdom. I don't know who this Podsage is, but I wholeheartedly agree. I think this is a beautiful new segment. I've read that. I'm like, wow, that's so deep. I think I may have had some...

It's like, how many double negatives can you stack into the same... Work for me, brother. I've not done much software development myself, but I'm all in on this. That seems just about right. This came after an attempt to build some queuing into the Godcaster thing. At some point, your eyes just go crossed. It glaze over, I'm sure. Yeah, you're like, man, this is all just garbledygook. I don't know why. Then it starts working, and you're like... Cool. Cool. Back it up. Back it up.

Save. Exit. We're good to go. It worked. You want to do that, but you're in your heart of hearts. You know that this is just wrong. This is a fake. This is a fake. You need to be posting more of these, because these are awesome. In fact, I smell a book. It could be a book. A calendar. A calendar. A daily calendar. Words of wisdom from PodSage in development. It's like those old SNL skits of the, what was it, Deep Thoughts. Yes, by Jack Handy.

My favorite one was one day your son asked you, Dad, why is it raining? And you say, well, son, it's because God is crying. And he'll say, why is God crying? And you respond, it's probably because of something you did. Exactly. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's see. Before we bring in today's guest who is hanging on diligently, is there anything we need to talk about before we get started? Anything? I don't reckon. No, we can pull the host of Spotify Weekly Review right into it.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome into the boardroom, the CEO of True Fans, co-host of The Power, Pod News Weekly Review, the one, the only, the inimitable, there it is, my favorite word, Sam Sethe. Wow, wow, wow. I'm going to frame that, clip that, and have that as my intro to any room I go into next. Hey, Sam, happy New Year. How are you doing? I'm good, brother, very good. And happy New Year to you both.

Yeah, so the, I mean, right before the show, the Supreme Court TikTok ban, I mean, I think it's really, I think it's worth mentioning just because if it does go through and it is banned off, you know, app stores and that kind of thing in the U.S. and, I mean, I have my own thoughts about it, but I do, I mean, that could be a significant sort of ripple. Precedence, really, precedence.

Well, you know, just avoiding the legal part of it, you know, the precedent part, which I think, you know, it like, it could ripple through pretty much all of the media landscape, including podcasting. Oh, yeah, all you have to do is say that you have connections to a country or a government that's on the list and that's it. That's it, you're done. And I do think other countries will follow suit if this goes through. I mean, I think the U.K. probably would too. Do you think so, Sam? No, I don't.

Really? Yeah, I don't think they will. I think the way that it's been framed at the moment, I don't think it's going to get banned. I think it's going to be the 19th, it will shadow out maybe for a day. The investment from one of Trump's major partners or backers, he's in TikTok, I think it's a turn around. It's either going to be, look, a presidential executive order, day one, TikTok's back, hurrah, or it's going to just shadow out. The actual order doesn't say that it's banned.

What it is is it's not allowed to be in the app stores anymore, so you can't download anymore. And if that's the case, TikTok have said themselves, then if we can't get more new users, we will take it off. So I suspect it'll be a day. Weirdly, it's the 19th, the day before the inauguration. I just find that timing really weird as well. Oh, that's very typical politics in America.

I would have to say, I want to reiterate my stance on this, that TikTok does not track any more than Instagram or YouTube or any app in the app store, certainly if they're using Firebase. It's like these were bills that were put in by people who were heavily sponsored by Google and Amazon. And to me, it was just good old -fashioned, let's get rid of the competition. They're eating our lunch.

They're taking billions of dollars away in revenue, particularly Amazon, actually, which is what people don't realize. The TikTok shop is wildly successful, wildly successful. And they're selling, and I just know a couple of the products, but they're selling products way under price. So you can get your Baofeng handheld 2 -meter ham radio for $12, which is at least $3 cheaper than through Amazon.

And I know that people who are doing TikTok videos with 8,000 followers within two weeks, selling these handheld ham radios made $10 ,000 in commission. That's some serious coin right there. Yeah. And, you know, you can say all you want about, oh, we'll just, you know, Red Note or, you know, maybe Musk will bring back Vine. It's not that easy to copy a service. Forget the algo. I don't think the algo is actually so difficult. What they do very well at is tagging the content.

And they may have 100,000 anonymous Indians walking around or Chinese. Sorry, just putting the word in for the brothers. What's wrong with that? Well, this is why I say this, Sam. And, you know, that's really their magic is how they tag the content. The algo just gives you all the stuff you want, the stuff you're interested in. I don't think it's that spectacular.

But Silicon Valley has time and again tried to copy successful formulas and the biggest companies with the most resources, Google being the number one, have failed. They always fail at it. There's something happens. There's some magic. It kicks in. It grabs hold. And you can't, like, get that lightning and put it in your own bottle. You know, it's just there's too many examples of that not working. Now, I've said, I think I said in the last board meeting, we need more short -form video.

We need more chicks in bikinis with guns. This is what America's good at. The GDP has been helped by Taylor Swift and all this nonsense. You know, that's good for us. We need to be doing lots of stupid media. I'll be voting for this on the board. I'm sorry. I'm voting for that. We're having a board meeting. I'm voting for that, yeah. Babes in bikinis with guns, yeah. Absolutely. Of course. Of course.

Well, I don't want to spend too much time on it, but my most cynical view of this is, so it's every number I've seen is ByteDance is currently at like a $300 billion valuation. Yeah. But the ban itself, the numbers I saw would knock it down to around $40 billion. That's the exact same price that Elon paid for Twitter. Yeah. This could literally be, this could let, Trump could let the ban go into effect, kill the valuation, and Elon could snatch it up and integrate TikTok directly into X. Boom.

Yeah. Again, no guarantee of success. There's just no guarantee of success. And the executive orders, I mean, there's a lot more important things that we need executive orders for. Oh, yeah, for sure. And, you know, to override Congress with an executive order is a big deal. To override a Supreme Court opinion is a big deal. You know, does he want to spend all that political capital right there, or does he want to blame it on Democrat representatives?

You know, there's a lot of stuff he could do with it. For TikTok, just as a number that we should all understand, how much revenue do you think TikTok, what is the revenue share of the U.S. market for TikTok? What do you think that is? For the U.S. market specifically? Oh, I don't know. 170 million? No, percentage of their overall revenue. Revenue. Oh, gosh. Probably 60 percent? 20. 20? 20 percent.

And the oil baron, my friend the oil baron, TikTok has six floors in his building, and he says that as of last week, no one's there. So they may have already decided. They're like, you know, whatever. Okay, we don't need to be in America, which will solidify that it was never about tracking and passing American data onto the CCP. That was all nonsense. It's truly nonsense. The App Store is very particular about what you track and see what they do with Facebook.

They totally hose them on the advertising tracking. I'm not sure exactly what that technical piece is. But it costs Facebook billions of dollars annually in revenue. And they don't let any app just track you anywhere. I mean, actually, they do, but not more than the other. Everyone has an equal playing field. It's just nonsense. And the competition will be gone, and that's 20 percent that goes back to someone else. There is precedent for this. TikTok was banned in India a couple of years ago.

By their own people? The people doing the work? This is an outrage. Yeah, but that was because, you know, Modi fell out with Xi Jinping. Right, right. That now is coming back to India. So they've had a powwow meeting in January, shook hands, realized that the actual economic value of trading between the two countries is higher than the value of fighting over Nepal, which is where the idea was about going away. TikTok will go back there.

So if they ban it in America, they'll just go back to India, which is a massive market anyway. But this is an interesting point. Trump could use it as a bargaining chip. He could use it. But, again, the issue is these products, they come in and, you know, it's all very – we have certain – we have odd rules in America. But if it's under a certain amount, it just kind of flies through customs. It flies through, and there's no tariffs, and they don't look at it.

And so all this stuff under – I don't know what – it's something like $50 or $100. Anything under that just shifts right through, and they're dropshipping this stuff, and it's coming in very quickly. And that's actually a problem, although we don't make any of this crap in America. And it is purely crap, all of it's crap. That's our biggest problem in the United States. We buy crap. We're addicted to crap. Yeah, the iPhone, I agree. That's more than $100.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what happens. But, Sam, I am glad you are here, my friend. When is the last time we had you on? It's been at least two years, maybe? No, thankfully, about a year. But, no, I think at the beginning of last year, yeah. True Fans is, I find, a very exciting project because it flows with something that I've been talking about. Obviously, I like it. You're doing something different than a typical podcast app. Trying. You're trying, yeah.

The thing that I would like to hear from you, just to get us started, do you have a positioning statement of what True Fans is? Yeah, I do. It's RSS Marketplace to help creators monetize their content and connect with their fans. Hmm. RSS Marketplace, I like that. I don't know if, as you would say, Joe Punter would know exactly what an RSS Marketplace is. No, and I probably haven't got that messaging right. But you know where I am in the cycle right now, which is talking to VCs.

And that's the message that I'm resonating with them because I have to play VC bingo, right? So Marketplace is the word they want to hear. Bitcoin's another word they want to hear. Oh, they do. They want to hear Bitcoin? They like that? They like that, the VC guys? Suddenly Trump, Elon Musk, and everyone else is talking about it. You're suddenly hearing a lot of mainstream media, even made the 10 o'clock news here in the UK.

So now everyone's going, oh, yeah, you know that thing we didn't like a couple of years ago? Now we like it. We love it now, yeah. Because when I think of TrueFans and marketing position, and Marketplace is a good word, it feels to me like if you could tell people that this is where you can build your fan base. I mean, it's in the name already, right? TrueFans has a bit of that OnlyFans vibe to it, which that just sticks in the back of your head without you even really knowing it.

But that's kind of what you're doing because you have, besides podcast feeds, you have all kinds of extra bits and bobs you've built around it. Can you just go through the list? Yes. I mean, the ones that are related directly to podcasting, pod rolls, publisher feeds, but we added blogging. We added events, ticketing, secure RSS, audio books, music. We're talking to a film company at the moment.

Your idea that you came with about three or four weeks before Christmas about the Rachel Maddow portal, we were moving slowly towards that by adding all these other things around it. It's the original thing that Mike Homer at Netscape created, which was the Netscape portal using RSS as the means for delivery. I remember it well, yeah. So we're going full circle, and I think that that's the bit that we're trying to get to.

And I think if we can connect all the parts, create customized domains, allow a bit more creator customization of the platform, we could, and I'm saying with a big question mark, create portals for creators that drive traffic from their fan base to their page. And it doesn't, as you said, look like true fans on every page. I look, that's probably six months out, but that's the direction I think we're heading in anyway. Yeah. Instinctively, that feels right to me.

Yeah. The interesting thing, one of the reasons I wanted to get you in the boardroom quick, Sam, is because- Because it's dry January and he's not drinking, so he would actually be useful. Yes. We've got 12 days left to get good stuff out of Sam. Like, you know, James is the radio futurologist, but you're like the radio, like I really did it recently-ologist.

You're probably the only person I know that has this convergence of like recent experience running a hyper-local radio station that was heavy in podcast distribution and now you're running a podcast app. I mean, you've seen every side of this thing with the recent radio experience sort of as icing on top.

And I think the thing that like, as I'm hearing you talk and as we've been talking the last few weeks and then when we started the Godcaster stuff, it's sort of like, it's kind of like crystallized a lot of stuff in my head where the issue with, and I think this is related to what Adam was talking about with the Rachel Maddow page, is that the problem, one of the problems with podcasting is that I think in the mind of the public, of people who are aware of it, it just seems

like a big cloud of content. It doesn't seem like, when you say radio or television, people know you get a, you form a distinct picture in your head. When you say podcasting, you don't, it just seems sort of like a fog of all this content that you have to go search out somewhere. And while the statement, wherever you get your podcast is a powerful statement because of what it means. It means it's distributed and decentralized. It also means it's not one particular thing in the way that radio is.

And so, you know, like if we, I feel like this convergence of podcast and radio, whether you can say like radio transitioning to podcasting and podcasting trying to adopt what's good about radio, to me that, I think you could meet in the middle with something that's a little more distinct. Yeah. Look, just as a quick recap, I mean, River Radio was 40 live shows, one hour long every week for two years.

They were then broadcast over FM, DAB, Alexa, web, mobile, but they were then turned into a podcast via Wooshka taking the Icecast server that we had to feed. And that all worked very well. We were just too early. People didn't get what hyperlocal meant and they didn't understand what we were trying to achieve. We couldn't get the funding for it. And, you know, I couldn't sustain it.

But what I think with the closure, you know, that you talked about last week of local radio in the UK, I think there are a lot of people looking for, where do I put my content? And I was trying to explain that the separation of content from delivery is what people have to get in their heads. The content could be live or it could be on demand. That's irrelevant. The distribution could be DAB, you know, old transmitters, very expensive, or it could be, you know, through an Alexa.

But also now with Podcasting 2.0, it can be lit. And I think that's where people need to understand what we're trying to do here with Podcasting 2.0. And we need to get case studies out there pretty quickly for people to then jump on board. Well, yeah, like live doesn't have to be live, you know, it's kind of a stupid thing to say, but I mean, a lot of live radio is not actually live. Most of it is not anymore.

Yeah. But you still have this thing that people assume is, you still have the notion of a live broadcast or a feed of information that is coming to you. Like you just, you have the concept of tuning in. Maybe that's a good way to say it. You tune into the radio. You don't really, while there's good things, while there's great things about so-called on demand, if everything is on demand, it becomes just sort of like this fog of content.

And you don't, I think the powerful thing about radio is that you have this thing that you go to. And like that requires, I think it requires making opinions for the platforms, like true fans, like you would say, okay, we're going to host these particular shows or these particular podcasts because they sort of have the qualities that we want. I mean, like they have live streams.

We're going to choose to, we may have other stuff, but we're going to emphasize these because they are like, they create the experience we want our customers to have. Maybe, is that fair? Yeah. I mean, we just don't have enough of them yet to create a landing page. But when we do, we will focus on it. But yeah, I think people will understand very quickly that there's a schedule around a podcast 2.0 radio station.

You know, that's not a really catchy name, but the idea is there that people will have a schedule. You will have a schedule of shows that go out. I will be able to see that schedule and I'll be able to dip in and dip out of your stream, which is live 24 seven or whatever you have it live for. Those shows may not be actually broadcast as in live. They may be recorded shows that you are pushing through in the schedule time slot. I'm going to give you a free resource, Sam.

For over 15 years, No Agenda has had this live stream and it has a IRC based chat room, which has been up for just about as long. And every single day there's a schedule, there's a schedule manager, Sir Bemrose. There are live shows. There is enormous interaction, boosting interaction. There's all kinds of boost bots and leaderboards and all kinds of things. And it's a relatively small community, but there are at least several live shows per day.

And there's handovers like on Sunday, as an example. From nine to 11 is this bluegrass show. And then the bluegrass show hands over to the rock and roll pre-show and the rock and roll pre-show hands over to the No Agenda show. And the No Agenda show hands over to whatever is next, which for instance, last week was Satellite Skirmish, which was a live music bonanza, you know, Boobery and all these crazy cats are putting that together.

And if you could take that community, which is just sitting there in an IRC chat, and you could give them an entirely new interface, all the pieces are there. And I'm sure that they'll be more than willing to work with you on building something and really building out what you have because they also, you know, they have merch, they have concerts that they do. So ticket, all this stuff, it's all there. And it's just been sitting there for over a decade. I'm totally open to it.

I mean, you know, we build really fast. We take any idea on board and we try and develop it. So what you've got there is a radio station, right? Exactly. You and I would know that. The handover, we were all taught how to hand over to the next presenter, there'd be a jingle, maybe there was a news at the top of the hour, whatever. But we all know how to do it, or who've been in radio. That's all you've got there now, which is brilliant.

Even on Fridays, I think it's two good old boys, they're live, they stop at around noon-ish. You know, so we're not big on top of the hours and hitting the news. But then when they're done, they disconnect. And if I'm not ready, which I usually am not, then some tracks start to play, value for value tracks. And then I punch in around 12.20. And then after we're done, Oisín Berga comes in with Mutton & Mead music. I mean, it is exactly what you're talking about.

And the beauty of it is, this would be a great way to get chat working, because they're already there. It's IRC-based, and there's a lot of different ways you can incorporate that. It's been so logical to me, and I'm amazed by it. I'm amazed that we have these handovers, that Darren disconnects, I reconnect. I mean, it's really, every single Thursday and Sunday, I'm amazed at how awesome it really is. I've never even met Darren. You know, he's in Chicago somewhere.

And it's a really beautiful, beautiful ecosystem, which is completely run by the community itself. Yeah, I mean, look, we added a feature. Look, we add too many features, but we added a feature called Co-Listen, which was, as you listen to this show, and if anyone else was on True Fans listening, and I was a follower, so we followed each other as a social model, then your avatar and my avatar would appear on the episode page, so that I know that you're there.

So that was like a step one of trying to make people aware that other people were listening at the same time with them. We need to develop that much further, and that moves forward towards XMPP-based chat, fully built in. But, you know, again, that's just on the roadmap. We haven't got it yet.

I don't think it's really about, like, when you talk about radio, I don't really think it's about saving the tech of radio, because, I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but I think a lot of stations, radio stations wouldn't, they would like to not have to run, you know, broadcast hours and that kind of thing, but it's about saving the idea of what a station is as an independent sort of, like, distribution funnel. But they already gave that up. They gave it up when they dropped local programming.

They've given up what it is to be a station. Most broadcast organizations with transmitters are now just distribution. That's what I'm saying. Like Sam's sort of concept of River Radio, I think he's right. I think he was too early, because unlike newspaper, local newspaper. Which are also falling quickly. Well, I mean, they're gone. I mean, they're basically just gone. And the only ones left are the national newspapers.

The local newspapers got, the internet came on board, came online, and we lost local newspapers before people really even understood what was happening. It was so fast. And you turn around and you're like, oh, wow. I mean, you know, I've told that story before. The Birmingham News built a gigantic, millions of dollar facility. Yeah. You know, in like 1995. Neumann Mike's, yeah. The whole thing.

And I mean, like within three years, they were out of that building and it had to sell it to an insurance company. Yeah. Because they were dead. And so, like, it happened so fast. But the radio thing has not, people say radio is dying. But if that's true, then it's been this sort of slow, like, very glacial decline for many, many years. And so we've got all this, like we can watch it happening and like adjust to what is happening.

And so if there's a, you know, like saving the idea of a station, I don't think the idea of a station is necessarily dead. Because like river, like the river radio concept to me, that is, it's almost like you could spin that around. Sam, you were running, you were running the radio station and then chopping up those things into podcasts. You could almost do it in reverse, run the podcast and then chop in, and then synthesize it into a radio station, into a podcast. Yeah, it could work both ways.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm just saying, Sam, there's a community there. And it's, particularly if you're raising money and you can show an active community actually living out your dream and who are self-starters, they're nut jobs. And I say that with a lot of love in my heart. They do crazy things. They are not afraid to experiment. They're just sitting there waiting for you to help them, man. The hardest thing for newcomers is understanding how to register for IRC.

That's the hardest part of it. But on any given Thursday or Sunday, we're doing no agenda. There's thousands of people listening to the live stream. Thousands. Thousands. I'll ping you after, Adam. I promise. Yeah, no, hey, and I'm not the guy running it. I can just point you in the right direction. No, exactly. That's what I'm saying. To give me the right lead. For sure. Yeah, I see, I see, we got a local weather guy, James Spann, who, I think he does radio weather for other markets as well.

But he's based here. He's on the, does weather on the television here. And he's really sort of done this hyper -local thing so well because they do a podcast. He does two, two forecasts each day, one in the morning at like 5.30 a .m. and another one at like 3 o 'clock p.m. And it's all based on just the weather in Alabama. And like it's, he still has this radio and television presence. But it's, it's really his sort of hyper -local brand. And it's so different than like the algo chasers.

You see, like that term you used, Adam, you still see, if you go on TikTok, we have a winter storm. We have some weather coming up probably Tuesday of next week. Breaking news, they've got weather. Yeah, you know, snow is a big deal in Alabama. It shuts everything down. It's a big deal in Texas if they get snow. Yes, exactly. And so we've got something coming through probably Tuesday or Wednesday.

And every time this happens, the Twitter TikTok people just start going nuts, wanting to do click bait. The Southeast is going to be shut down. It's going to be, you know, not as they just go nuts trying to get clicks. And, and then, you know, there you have James Spann saying, hey, hold on, that's not accurate. You know, here's the actual models. Here's what we know. And it's like this, this calm, you know, explanation of what the actual data looks like.

And we don't know this and we don't know that. And it's, it's like, for that reason, he's become this trusted voice here in Alabama. I mean, everybody listens to this guy and nobody pays attention to any of the TikTok weather nonsense. And that to me, that's like, that's using the power of like a radio, um, presence or a trusted voice, but then taking it over and just plugging it in, uh, to the, to the podcast world and digital.

Uh, I just see there's just so much that I think people just, they've, they've written off a lot of people written off radio, but if we don't stop and watch, uh, I think we're really going to regret that. And I'm talking about when I say we, I mean, people in podcast tech also podcasters themselves. I think we're really going to have to pay some attention to radio and, and figure out what they were doing, right.

Because otherwise, um, you know, we're going to turn around radio and broadcast televisions, perhaps like it's perhaps the last industry that's not fully captured by Silicon Valley. Those two industries are good point. We just can't see that ground to the major platforms who are then going to turn around and dictate financial terms and content terms based on their own financial needs. You know, Sam, you and you and James talked about this on the show on your show, Spotify with the music podcast.

They're like, we don't care if you have, if it's your own music, if you have a license for it, you can't put it in a podcast or we're going to take it down off our platform. And that's purely just because they don't want you to compete with the spot, with their Spotify music service. Completely. Yeah. But I'd say a couple of things. Okay. So I'm helping you. We need to boost scram live just before Christmas.

He met up with Mike Hamilton from a rogue network and my James connecting me with him and I'm helping him put a live server together. Now we went to rss.com. We went, we spoke to Alberto. Um, they've got all of the lit support built into RSS. But they haven't got an HLS server and that's a little bit frustrating. So we're having to find a third party to get that put the URL in and then make it all work. Um, you look at, uh, Russell Harrell, he's got his own radio station.

He's got a hosting company pod too, but they broadcast radio station over the web, but not over HLS. They don't do it live. I'm trying to get him to put an HLS server in. We haven't seen. Is HLS necessary? I'm not, I'm not making the connection. no, you need a server. You can have a shout cast, ice cast HLS. It doesn't really matter which one you choose. Um, you need something if you want to put lit live, um, to broadcast with. Right.

And so, um, we're just trying to find what I would, I was hoping for was, uh, cause blueberry talked about it for a little while. Todd about having time sharing on an HLS server that they would have, uh, RSS.com after the, the Mexico event last year or the year before said they were going to go and have an HLS service for their customer base where you would pay for a premium to pay and go live. And I think the problem is none of that's happened. Right.

And this week sub stack of announced, they're bringing out their live capability. James and I are guessing, but with a strong hint that Spotify having got events tickets and had green room. Well then go to live. That's the next logical step for them to go and put, uh, Oh, you want to go and see, um, Taylor Swift. Oh, tickets are all sold out. Don't worry. Come to Spotify, get a ticket, watch it through our platform. Is the HLS. Is that necessary because of video? Only if you want video.

Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. Because see, see, I think when we're talking, because you know, you, I think we have to be careful, um, because I use ice cast, uh, everywhere and it works just fine. And it's, uh, and the complexity of video is enormous. HLS is good for audio as well. And the BBC use it. And one of the values in using HLS is you can rewind live shows.

So if I wanted to go back now, if you were using HLS and listen to what David just said 10 minutes ago, I can rewind the live stream, listen to it and then go and catch up to the show in live as well. Okay. Well, I can tell you what's working for me. Uh, I started a hyper local radio station. We live in Fredericksburg, Texas, 12,000 people. It's called hello, Fred, hello, Fred. Dot. Fm. And I've chosen in this case to, to compete with Caleb.

Uh, Caleb is the largest Christian contemporary Christian music, uh, radio station. They have radio stations everywhere and they have a live stream. And I don't know the exact numbers, but I'm pretty sure most people listen to it on the live stream. Uh, but older demographic, which they also, which I definitely speak to, I'm sure still listen to the radio. And so I just play music. I have, you know, $300 piece of software. It's what every radio station uses and I schedule it.

And now luckily I understand these things. So I had a relatively short ramp up to getting it all running. And in it, I promote podcasts that are local and it's been working so well. Sam, that I just got an email from one of the local high schools. They're like, Hey, uh, we want to start some podcasts here for our students. Can we get on your platform? And that's their words that they use. And so I'm like, yeah, and I will promote their podcasts and point people back to hello.

Fred. Dot. Fm. So they can then go and listen to the podcast. So you have this continuous stream that you can needle drop in whenever you want and you'll hear, Oh, there's something new going on. Oh, you know, and someone, I know that someone else is going to show up and say, Hey, I've got the city council stuff. Can I do a podcast about the city council? That's the, that is the type of community based stuff that I think is, is the future. And it's much more bottom up than it is top down.

Yeah. I mean, we, we, we worked with local schools. We had 19 year olds and 16 year olds as training presenters. Um, we created every show. So we had the politics show for the area was called politically correct. Um, you know, and we just tried to make the names of the shows to Dave's point, a bit of fun. They were easily or hoped they were easily branded and memorable. Um, and so, yeah, it all works. Adam, it all works. You know, it works, Dave, you know, it works.

It's just when somebody says radio still their expectation is car radio or turning on their Alexa. Right. I think that's still a weird expectation. I remember when we were where the mobile only, and I'd say, Oh, I've got a radio station. And people go, Oh, what's your frequency? And I go, no, no, no, we haven't got a frequency. that may be a little, I think the UK has a, a different type of, um, radio culture. But I think here in the U S it's all streaming. Everybody listens to streaming. Right.

I mean, sure. It's just, they're all just listening to, Oh, screaming, listening to streaming. Um, so they, you know, and I see that with Caleb's like, Oh yeah, I listened to Caleb. How do you listen? Well, I, I listened on my app and I connected in my car and I, and we know that the automobile manufacturers, even Tesla's kind of given up, just connect your iPhone. Yeah. That's what everybody's doing. That's that's where it's at. And that's how people listen to the thing.

And if it's not now, it'll be that way in two years, five years. I mean, we might as well work ahead for the future. Um, but I'm just happy that you, that you have that mindset. And as Dave and I discussed, Apple are crazy not to support the, the lit tag. This is so obvious. It's such, it's such an obvious thing for them to support. Uh, because every single rate, there's not a single radio station, maybe in the world that doesn't have a stream. They all have.

It's actually, it's actually easier to support that tag than it is to support a standard enclosure tag. I mean, a standard item tag, because you don't, you don't, there's no expectation of a download. It's purely a stream. Even crazier. HLS was invented by Apple. By Apple. Yes. This always drives me nuts. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the, like the, uh, per item episode art, Apple had it from day one in their spec, but never implemented until what a couple of years ago.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what's going on at Apple. I, I call them, you know, missing in action. I mean, I'm waiting for the one feature that we get this year from Apple. Cause it's only one feature a year and I don't know what it will be. Hopefully it's lit, but I don't know what they're doing. They are seeding the market to YouTube and Spotify. They have video capability. They just don't talk about it. They have HLS. They don't talk about it. You know, everything they have, they have ready.

They just don't do it. And I don't know why. Well, it sounds like what you're, it sounds like what you're saying. And, and I, I think you're right. That's that, that 2025, it can be the year of, of live, of, of lit in the podcast world. I agree with that so much. And it sounds like what you're saying is that. We can make that happen just by pushing the same way. This always has to happen just by pushing the content we have to get.

If, if you get some credit, some sort of, some level of critical mass of the people of hosting companies, supporting the live stream and hosting companies, that could be, it could be pure podcast hosting companies, or it could be like pod two. That's a high sort of a hybrid hosting company and radio company. If you, if we get some, you know, critical mass of that out there, then the apps will begin to feature it and pick it up. Is that sort of your strategy?

Yeah. I mean, look, DRM one does what you were saying. They take podcasts and they aggregate those podcasts into a schedule and then broadcast them over the web. And as I keep saying to Russell, go HLS, go that extra step, or it doesn't have to be HLS, go Shoutcast, go Icecast, whatever you want to do, but go lit, right. And as another means of distribution. And again, I'll go back to Alberto and Ben at rss.com.

You know, they've made it really good that all the fields for lit are available and you just press go live, but it's still confusing to an average user. Where do I get the Shoutcast, Icecast or HLS URL? Where do I find that bit? And it's, it's they've basically written that you go to a third party, get this URL, plug it into this field and then press. No, it's got to be literally brought the bit like StreamYard.

You know, we didn't have to understand if you were in StreamYard, I want to go on to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. What do I do? I just press those buttons, go live and magically it all happened. We've got to make lit that easy. That's a good point. That's a very fair point. Well, we're doing our part with the Godcaster thing of giving, you know, every station that comes on board. Also we push it back. We push their live stream back out as a live item.

And so all those feeds, all the station feeds will have them.

So that's, you know, that's going to be a bunch of fees, but then it feels like if a company like maybe, uh, uh, Blueberry could put that into maybe, uh, PowerPress, PowerPress had the ability, I think it already has the live tag, but if it had to be able to do what you're talking about, where you just like click a button and it goes into a time and it just spins up a time shared shoutcast server, like, like a one click or two click process, that would be amazing. Todd talked about doing that.

And I was really excited. This was at the beginning of 2024 and it was all going to happen. And then nothing happened. And I, I don't know whether that was your fault. It's your fault. It's your fault. It's your fault, but you know, it could be no demand. I mean, maybe he did do it and you know, nobody actually wanted it or, um, he didn't do it. So that it was simplistic enough for people to understand. I don't know. I don't think it would. Am I crazy here?

It wouldn't cost a lot of money, right? I mean, shoutcast. I mean, clearly there is a bandwidth issue at some point of scale, but, but at a small, if you're, um, you know, talking about like rss.com, they, they've, if, you know, if, if you had 50 of your users that were 25 to 50 that were going live or trying to experiment with it at any one point in time, that doesn't at, at speech level bit rates, it doesn't seem that bandwidth intensive to me. Maybe I'm crazy. Just make it a premium service.

Charlie, like pod home offers it. Pod home offers, uh, lit. That's true. Yeah. I forget about that. They offer that as a built in feature. I know, uh, I think Dovey does. It may not be, uh, a, a click plug and play type, um, feature, but I mean, he's been intimately involved in all these things. The knowledge is definitely out there. Certainly, uh, Dovey does has done all the video stuff and the life switching of wallets, et cetera. But if I look at pod home.

FM is right there, it's under features. It says, stream your podcast live, live podcasting, go live, uh, use our streaming server. We can, uh, ice cast. We can record your live session. We can play pre-recorded audio as a live session schedule, live episodes, and more dot, dot, dot. So it's starting, it's starting, it's getting there. I think just like everything else, we're going to have to, we had, we just have to get, you have to start at the content side.

I think when you guys, when you guys go more public with what you're doing and people can use you as a case study, I think then people will start to look at how did they do it. Then, you know, that's going to like all these things like booster ground ball was a case study. I think we just get these case studies out. Then people can start to see, ah, that's how I do. I go to these people. I do this thing and it just works. That makes sense. Yeah. Switching gears real quick.

What Spotify open access. So this, do we know, do we know if this is an open source? Did, am I crazy? Am I misremembering that they open source to this? I'm not aware of it, but they may have done somebody in the boardroom. Okay. Do you mean the OAuth part? Yeah. The OAuth part. I thought they released a spec for this, you know, in the real have a spec for their own platform for people to integrate.

But I don't know whether it's open source as in somebody could take Spotify open access and reuse that on their own platform. I doubt it. Cause if it's just OAuth, like Nathan in the boardroom saying that it's just OAuth, but it's not open source. I mean, if it's just a, an OAuth thing, it feels like that could be sort of reverse engineered.

What I'm getting at is, you know, Russell's been doing the work on L402 with, with lightning and Fiat and you've, and secure RSS, you've, you've been collaborating with him on that.

And it feels like at this point, if we don't, rather than reinventing the wheel, if Spotify has this OAuth spec of how to do this, then we could write reverse engineer that, write it up into an, into an actual open spec, not re-implement something from scratch, write it up into an open spec and then other apps could use the same tech. Right? Yeah, completely. I mean, look, I've been trying to push for the verified tag for two plus years as an app.

When you come to Truefans, what I need the creators to do is to verify ownership and then they can access the dashboard and any other features we want to then build into it. We can't do that because the emails, nine times out of 10 have now been removed. And most users don't want to click a button, wait, wait, wait for popping, then try again, try again. Oh, and now it's there. Oh, by that time they're bored, they've moved on, they've gone, something else has caught their attention.

So, you know, and we tried to put in the TXT field because Apple had it and that hasn't worked. And so, yeah, when I talked about it this week on pod news weekly, it was like Spotify creating an ecosystem around getting content in from other platforms. And then they're aggregating that around their platform. We could do something similar where hosts and apps in the podcasting ecosystem could partner, but we don't have that. For some reason, we still don't have that.

Yes, we do a lot of things together. And I think, you know, you've called it co-op petition in the past and that's fine, but we don't have that deeper integration. And, you know, people are asking for first party data from podcasting to the apps back to the hosts for analytics. Well, how do we pass that back when we're not verifying anything and we're not, you know, integrating with it. I think there's more we could do together.

And I think Spotify, again, sadly has, you know, come up with the spec that allows third parties like Patreon, like, you know, Substack. Yeah. To integrate. And, you know, they are building more and more of that. We need to do something. And I don't know what that need is. If it's, if it's just, you know, if it's just some, Oh, all flow that results in proving owners, proving that you're a subscriber and then you get the content out of the feed into the app that it just doesn't sound that hard.

And if something like, so if a company like Substack has already done the work to integrate with Spotify's open access with their flow, then if we just mimic that flow, then this very, they don't have much data. They wouldn't have to do much work on their side to also now you can get this content in true fans or, you know, in, in some other app, because I was thinking I have this exact need because I'm a subscriber to, I'm a subscriber to a show that's behind the Substack paywall.

And right now they give me a private RSS feed, which is fine. And I don't mind that, but it is, it is some friction. And so if I had, but of course I'm not gonna list it on Spotify. It's a crappy podcast app. So the, if I, but if I could get it in my 2.0 app, then that would be great. I just don't in the spirit of not, not wanting to reinvent the wheel for something that already works. And if it's truly OAuth, then it's probably open already in some sense.

We just may not know what the spec is, but it's gotta be fairly easy to follow. I just think, I don't know. I think we should do that. It may require reaching out to Spotify and asking them if they're willing to point us in the right direction. I don't know how well that would go, but I'm just trying not to be, you know, I'm trying to like think the best about it. And I don't want to always just be like, come on, screw those guys. Come on, be like that.

Okay. Dave, I tend to agree with you slightly. I mean, one of the things I've always said is, you know, the tail can't wag the dog. When I was in corporate, we could not wait for tags. For example, if I was say in Spotify to be verified before we implemented, because we're too big a public company, you've got to go with what you're doing.

Now, when we've got critical mass and the apps are starting to get traction and we're starting to see momentum, then they'll turn around 360 or 180 and then start to look at what we're doing more. I think right now you've seen, and I hate being, I'm not a fan boy, but I'm an admirer of their strategy in the sense that they executed so well last year by, yes, they did events. Yes, they did ticketing. Yes, they did audio books. Yes, they did.

You know, all of these things that we talk about doing in the podcasting to the community, they executed proprietary, but they executed. Now, can we get them to, to change? I doubt it, but can we get Apple who should be the champions for us? They've opened the door slightly. I don't know what stops them becoming the counterpoint to Spotify by actually adopting more tags. Apple intelligence has stopped them from doing everything else. It doesn't work. All hands on deck.

By the way, I just need to say one extra thing about the live, the live feature only really works, only really works when you either have the ability to get booster grams, but more importantly, I really feel the chat is pertinent to the experience. Yeah, it is. Yeah, exactly. It is very, very big part of it. In fact, YouTube has that, you know, that's exactly what I, I work with.

I have a long, an ongoing chat, and then someone can send a boost and it'll show up in the chat as, you know, just like, um, uh, what is it called? Uh, super chat. Yeah. Just like a super chat shows up as a boost. It says from who it says, how much it was, et cetera. We have all those pieces. We just haven't quite put it together yet. Correct. I agree. Well, and even we've got it in the spec, the spec has, uh, within the live has a chat field.

So yeah, Alex Gates actually said, yeah, Twitch, Twitch of course does a great job. Now Twitch, Twitch doesn't do a great job. I don't think people don't go back. Well, maybe they do. I don't know. I don't know crap about Twitch. Maybe people do go back and watch old recorded stuff. I don't know. Yeah, they do for sure. Yeah, yeah, they do.

And that's the, the, it feels like the difference between Twitch and YouTube in that regard with the chat is that YouTube added it sort of added it later, but you can tell that Twitch integrated it as a first class citizen from day one. Like it was always going to be part of it. So it's almost, it's almost like, it's almost like the chat is co-equal with the video as far as importance goes on something like Twitch.

I couldn't imagine doing, I couldn't imagine doing the boardroom without the chat. Like it's just, it just doesn't feel right. You know, I mean, you might as well just not even be live at that point. Um, but I think, you know, as far as you like, as far as co-listening goes, like you're talking about, you know, Sam, like the chat feels like that's an actual way to tell that it's not just an icon there. It's actually a human being.

Yeah. It was a step one towards what we wanted to do, but you know, and it's not perfect, but it was just an idea that I had. Um, what are you thinking about as far as chat goes? Like what, what is your, if you can talk about it? Yeah. Yeah. We, we want to fully support and integrate an XMPP, um, interface into TrueFans. So if I was listening on a Friday night in TrueFans to this show, there would be an icon.

There is now already an icon there, but that icon takes the link that you've provided and drops them into a separate tab window so that you can sign up to the chat. But we want to integrate that. And so that it's part of the UI and it's natural. Um, again, it's on the roadmap. Uh, it's not something that we can do. You know, we've got, we've got to be native apps. You, you asked, I think a few, few months ago, you know, is Sam still doing native apps? A hundred percent.

We have to now we, we, we, we won't, um, deprecate the universal web app, but we will, and that will be our first class app, but we will put native apps because too many people say to us for two reasons. One is, Oh, uh, true fans where you are. I can't find you in the, the, the app stores. Right. So we just got rid of that problem. The second one, the performance that, um, Apple does to the platform for a universal web app is just horrendous. You know, it is the best.

Yeah. And, and I get people going, Oh, you know, I, I, I've got my iPhone and I've got the, uh, player widget playing. Um, but I can't hit play and get to your, your app. You have to open the app to get it to play. Yeah. Apple's have disabled it. We can't get them around. I mean, Zuckerberg on Rogan talks about the airport protocol. They can't get it on the glasses because Apple won't allow it. And so, yeah, you know, if you can't beat them, you sometimes have to join them.

And I think, uh, you know, we're going to just be multi-platform. We're just going to be native and web and just let people choose which way they want to go. I don't think if you've not developed a PWA before, what, what Sam is talking about is it's, the problem is not that it doesn't, um, it's not a binary problem. It's not like it just doesn't work or it does work.

The problem, the fresh, the frustrating part on the Apple side of PWA support is it looks like it's working, but it doesn't like you, you'll, you'll do something as simple as, as tap, uh, a play button. And after the PWA has been running for a little while, it just stops responding to tap sometimes. And, and you, you can't, it's like, you can't forget for the, you can't figure out why this function isn't working, kill the app, relaunch it. It works fine.

Or sometimes the media session API that's supposed to show the artwork, uh, on like CarPlay or even on the lock screen itself, the media session API, you'll, you'll play a podcast. It'll show the artwork on the lock screen. You start listening. And after a while you go in the artwork is just not there anymore. And you can still hear the pot here at playing, or sometimes it'll blink. It'll come on to the lock screen and then go off and then come on and go off.

It's so buggy and it's, it's so buggy to the point that it almost feels intentional. It is intentional. It is intentional because, you know, they know, I mean, just a simple thing, add to home screen is the sixth or seventh item down on the menu. So it's below the fold. It's done intentionally. That could simply have been add app, right? They could have called it instead of add to home screen. Um, they could have done that. They won't do that. We know they won't do that.

Um, the interesting thing, um, because, uh, we have a, I call it a universal app, um, for marketing purposes. Yeah. And I, as a part of the marketing purposes, I say, uh, you, it, you download it once to all your devices and it always works. There's no pesky app store updates. People go, Oh, that's great. I love that. They have no idea what I'm talking about, but once, once I do it for someone and install the hello Fred universal app on their iPhone, they love it. They just think it's an app.

Yes. Literally is that ones. And even on the iPhone, it works perfectly fine. Um, or at least fine enough for, for what it is. And once they have it, they're like, Oh yeah, I got the hello Fred app. They don't know any different. I, the stupidity of the user. And I say that with respect and love has been built in. I mean, I, if I just say, I think we talked about this. Hey, just to go to hello, Fred dot FM. They open up duck, duck, go or Safari. The search is, is at the bottom.

Like that seems to be standard. Now it's at the bottom. I just type in hello, Fred dot FM. They have no idea that there, what a URL is. This is, this is gone. They're all going through search intentionally. Of course, because Apple and Google both benefit enormously from that. How are you? Which is why go. I'm sorry, Dave. No, no, no. I was just going to ask, how are you going to get a sort of through the gauntlet of the app store? I mean, you can't just wrap.

Well, you can't just wrap the, the, the web version of true fans. We can in a container, but do they allow that? We're using native react. So we built next JS. So next week, we're sort of doing a feature freeze right now. And by the end of this week, next week, we're going to do an upgrade from next. Yes. 11 to 15 react. Going to go to you. Version 19 framework upgrades. They're hell on earth. We're doing refactoring of the API APIs. We're doing all. We're looking at website and popping again.

We're looking at the validator. We just going back to clean up all the mess that I think we've had, which is, you know, technical debt over the last two years. And then we will use native react to then build the native apps and then submit those and see where we get to. I mean, it's not quite a rapper, but it's using the same code base pretty much. So we don't have to start from scratch. That's the goal anyway.

You're trying to get sort of like a unified code base so you can build the native react app. And then that kind of mimics it mimics what the web apps doing, but in a native. Correct. Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. Good luck with that. I think that, you know, that's, that's been, that's been everything about app stores is frustrating, but that minimum functionality. It's a special kind of frustrating. Yeah. Yeah. But I think you're right.

I think you kind of have, if you're going to be an app, you, you, you have to do that because the thing that makes like word and Excel and the office apps, the things that make the thing that makes them also be okay as web apps is the fact that they were native to begin with. It's because they have a native counterpart. And so people just accept, okay, this is the web version of that thing.

But if you're web only, and you don't have a native app, it's, it's difficult to get because you're just not there, you know? I mean, Oscar's done a great job with fountain. So you go to fountain and on the web and it will come up with the iOS banner because that's the way Apple does it. It says, Oh, you're on a web version of an app that's already in our app store. Why didn't you load the app?

And I think Adam, you were asking that as well, which is how'd you get this banner at the top rather than the pop -up, you know, which you have to program. So Apple have pre-designed it so that if you put in, you can, you know, in the, when you build your native app, you can actually have it so that when it detects your web app, it'll then put an Apple banner at the top where you have one click. And strangely it does say install the app. It does. I know it's amazing. It's amazing.

So, you know, Apple are trying to drive you away from the web, back to the app store. But I think in that case, fine, let's just play their game. We're not going to beat them at their game. So we're going to be in both places. That's it. As a, as a way to just shift gears for a second, I am now receiving during this live broadcast, I am receiving booster grams and they are coming through both on my helipad.

So that means through key send and with the booster gram on my strike account from Curio caster. Is this the split box? I think so. No, it may not. I don't know if it's the split box or if it's just Curio caster. Steven B and Eric PP have been testing this out and it's working. So that means that we have splits going to Ellen address or in this case, Ellen URL and to key send and it's functioning. Oh, nice. It's very nice. So it's not, it's built into Curio caster.

Okay. Okay. Cause I have a one split in the, in our value block that is a test Ellen URL address, Adam courier strike dot me and it's just working. Sam, are you, are you, you're on Albi hub, right? Still? Yes. Yeah, we are. Yeah. Okay. But we think is Albi hub there's, I think this should work through that too, right? Yeah, it still does. I mean, um, we, we're supporting both key send and Ellen address.

I mean, we are asking, um, Bumi, if he can do batch processing for Ellen address, cause that's the biggest problem we're finding right now. Uh, with key send, it was easy to batch everything. Uh, we can't do that, but we, you know, for example, fountain radio, when Oscar coded that up as a test, um, we jumped on that really quickly. We made it work and we checked with Oscar. And that all worked with an address. So that was fine. Um, and then it's been deprecated.

So we still use LNURLP, which is okay. But again, that the problem is the batching. So if you've got splits like you have within this show, um, the processing of those splits is really, really slow because it's the single API. So Stephen B says he's using Albi hub, uh, to make this all work. And he's, what he's doing is he's adding, uh, the booster gram, the content of the booster gram to the comment feel for the, uh, for the invoice request.

And I did get a note from Oscar that Ellen address splits capability will be coming very soon to fountain, hopefully within the next week or so. And that should probably move things along when that starts to happen. That'll be huge for value for value, because I mean, uh, just looking at the information we have 98% of the V4V stuff is, is now pretty much coming. it's number one is, uh, fountain. Number two is pod verse.

And that's probably people who are savvy enough to have upgraded, uh, their, uh, their Albi wallets to a hub or something similar. So, so I'm happy to see this. Uh, and, and I love the Curio casters just, it just works. Yeah. Yeah. So that would mean if, so if, if the Albi hub is doing that, that means true fans works. Curio caster works. Then fountain would work. Um, and then, uh, I don't know. And we're only at January 17th. Not bad gentlemen. Not bad for two weeks after Albi apocalypse.

I think it's very good. Actually. I'm very, I'm pleased. I'm very pleased. That's good. Yeah. I don't, I still, you know, the, I don't know about, I don't know what pot versus doing though. I don't think pot versus change anything. I just, people are, uh, are using it with Albi hub. I presume. With Albi hub. Yeah. Mitch. I'm, I'm worried about Mitch. I, I hope he's not, I hope he's not dead. I don't think he's dead. Now he, whenever we say this, he pops up and he says, I'm not dead.

Okay. Which is good. It's good news. What, what is the biggest, um, I don't know. What, what do you, what is the biggest thing that true fans needs tech wise? Well, what, what is podcasting in general, but as far as 2.0 goes, where's, where are we turning to? What, what do you think is the biggest need right now? Um, what's the biggest need? Good question. Um, I think, I, I, I, I think we just need more, more case studies. We need more marketing. It goes back to the PSP.

It goes back to, um, the industry combining, you know, the sum of the parts is greater. Uh, you know, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I just, I just feel we're not pulling together. Yes. We're doing some great stuff and we're putting some cool tech together and we're making the micro payments work. And, um, but I, I, I still feel that we're not talking to the mainstream. We're not talking to the normies.

I think we've got a, a, a bubble where we are brilliant at talking to each other. Um, we are brilliant at developing tech and we are so far ahead of where other people are that maybe I worry we lose them if we can't bridge that gap. Um, you know, and that's where I think we are. I think we've, we may have got a, uh, ahead of our skis, uh, a little bit. Yeah, we have to, but I think we're, we're not bringing along the mainstream crowd.

Now, one of the things that, um, Russell and I talked about with secure RSS is we are talking to music companies. We're talking to people like Pushkin industries, um, audio book providers who now are saying, okay, um, I wasn't keen on V for V because I've got a value that I've set to this piece of content. Um, and I'm not going to wait for somebody to value it for me. I've set my value. So can you guarantee it? And we're saying, okay, we can now. And, and that may be one way.

If I look at my children who are in their twenties, right? Um, will they come off Spotify? Not really, not right now. Cause the driver is the music. They're not there for the podcasting or there for everything else. So how can we get the music people? I mean, I, you know, again, if you want to have a conversation, had a great conversation with Julia Costello this week. Um, I think David has done something brilliant. He's added the license tag to RSS.com, RSS blue now.

Um, so we, we, there's things we can do more and more. We talked about, you know, Twitter. Hello. Nope. I'm sorry. It bled. Is that bleeding through main channel? Oh, that's not supposed to happen. Let me see. Are you hearing it now? Yeah, no, no, no, no. That's no good. You can edit it out in post. Yeah, I was never going to do that. I was trying to get the ISO ready, but for some reason that's, uh, I'm sorry about that.

But on that, Sam, this is exactly why we do showcases like booster Graham ball. And the, the most recent booster Graham ball live was targeted towards what you would call normies musicians. And there were normal musicians who had never heard of this stuff. And every single one of the six bands that were there, six or seven came up to me and said, dude, this stuff makes a difference in my life. This makes a difference.

This value for value thing, this making five, $600 for, uh, for doing a set makes a difference. And, and we made a difference and that's what I think open mic is doing so brilliantly. And that's why I am, uh, reaching out to, uh, the Nostra community because they do bring people with wallets. You know, people have wallets and they can come in and whether, you know, whether we make it so they can zap and it goes through a split.

So whether they bring their wallets and, and use it for, uh, for booster grams doesn't really matter to me as long as we can get more people in, but you do it by bringing in this always the content, Sam, it's always the content and all this video nonsense will go away. And we have another fantastic audio show that catches fire. It, the lightning flashes. We have no idea what it is or how it happens, but it happens. And then everybody will be listening to audio podcasts again.

And that's all we'll be talking about. Oh, this is the, this is the next new greatest thing. It's always the same. I was listening to Buzzcast tonight. Kevin from Buzzcast made a brilliant point, which is, um, audio allows me to have my attention on the audio while driving, while walking, while running, wherever the video element has to be there. If it was just two talking heads, it's very boring. So they have to throw video that does things to keep my attention.

And he was saying the video element is added complexity to keep my attention, but that's not the driving reason why I want to listen to a podcast. And so I think he was so on the money that, you know, video is there to try and make you focus into whatever you're listening to, but you don't need it. It's not required. And, you know, we, if we just pander to the needs of video platforms saying that you need video, um, then we lose the value, which is what James was saying.

Podcasting is, it's that audio first capability so that you can do other things. That's why we love podcasts.

Yeah. I think, I think, you know, you, you and James had a good, an interesting discussion where you disagreed about, um, you know, about whether the driving for the driving force for revenue in the future for some of these big companies is going to be advertising or revenue sharing from subscriptions, you know, and he disagreed that people, you know, he said, well, we know that people are not skipping ads. I disagree. I couldn't say it.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't think we, I don't think we, I don't think we know that for sure because you can't, um, you can't measure it. Spotify. Now that Spotify have first party data that will be able to go to advertisers. Advertisers must be demanding first party data. How long did you listen to my ad? When was my ad listened? How many people, they will know that data hosts don't know that data.

Okay. But apps will know that data and Spotify's advertisers will be asking and I'm, I'm, I'm guessing now, but I bet you they're saying, uh, yeah, people are skipping it. Now I did a test, a podcast movement in a room, you know, with Rob Walsh, you and me and him went head to head. And I said, okay, Rob, you're selling advertising. Can you tell me how long did somebody listen to that third ad? He couldn't tell me. He has no concept of that information.

So then I asked the room, put your hand up. If you skip ads, the whole room, put their hands up. So the reality is no one's asking the users whether they're skipping the ads. They're not getting to that point. They're just taking the belief system. And, and James was quoting a company who was fundamentally, it was in their interest to not say people skip ads because they were an ad company. So of course they're going to tell you that no one's skipping ads.

It's, it's, you know, it's obvious they're not going to come out with another report. Well, his, his other point, his other point was that we know that podcast advertising is effective in, in both. I see. The thing is, both of those things can be true at the same time. People can be skipping. People can skip ads and the, and podcast advertising can be effective when it's heard. The problem is you, they're not, they're not connected.

You know, if the, Alex has a good point in the boardroom, he says that, you know, if people don't, if people didn't skip ads, YouTube wouldn't have a skip button. And that's, that's the truth because you know, the thing is, it's got unskippable ads now unskippable. That's right. The, the, so we, we had a recent experience. We ended up with who we, we bought, we had to get Hulu, which I've haven't had in years. We had to buy a Hulu subscription to watch one movie that was only on that.

And it was like an exclusive. And so we got, I was like, you know, I really don't want to pay for Hulu. We never watch anything on this, on this platform. So I'll just get the most cheap option there is. And it had ads. Now I haven't, I haven't seen ads on a streaming platform in years. And I don't watch broadcast or cable television. I haven't had a cable subscription, a cable television subscription in probably 15 years.

We, we got rid of cable TV in our house when we started homeschooling our kids, cause it was a huge distraction. But we, we, so we got this Hulu subscription and it was like, I think like nine bucks a month or something in like $20 was the ad free version. And I'm like, I'll just do the cheap one. So we had, we have it and we watched that movie. And so then a few nights ago, my daughter, we wanted her to see the BBC Sherlock series with a Benedict Cumberbatch.

And so we were like, we started looking for it and it was like, Oh, it's on Hulu. Okay, well we'll just watch it cause we have this Hulu subscription until the end of the month. I'm telling you the advertising is brutal. It's every 10 minutes, three in a row, three in a row, a minute and a half of ads. Every 10, every eight to 10 minutes. And the ads, the ads are, are the most bargain basement companies I've never heard of. It's, it's like, it's crap.

It's bottom feeder, crap, bottom feeder, crap. That's what you get. Of course it's bottom feeder crap. And I'm telling, I'm like, to me, what I said, what I told her last night is I'm, I'm going to go before. We're not watching another episode. We made it through two seasons. We're not, I'm not watching another episode of this on this platform. I'm going to go and buy the, buy the next season for 15 bucks off Amazon prime because I cannot tolerate this advertising garbage.

And I think, I think the anti-advertising thing is a social movement in the same way that people stopped smoking is a social movement or alcohol. People are reducing their alcohol consumption is a, is a social movement. You can't, you don't really know. You can't find like the organic ground zero of these things. It's just a movement. And I don't think the tolerance for advertising is going to stay. I think, I think they're going to, people will just turn off the content.

And therein lies the marketing problem, Sam, because of course there is no marketing for what we're doing. The marketing is all done by the advertising industry. They are, they have the money, they have the, the voice, they have all the different pieces that you need to talk about podcasting in general. They're the ones that have screwed up this whole video conversation. It's always about the marketing people and they have no benefit in value for value.

I mean, yeah, you have, we've talked about this. There's, there's different models. I got to tell you, in 2006, I started a company and I thought we would change the advertising business. And boy, was I wrong. You can't change those fuckers. Pardon my French. They are stuck in their ways and they're afraid. They are afraid. They are afraid. They're afraid to try anything new because it can screw stuff up. They can lose clients. It's just, and honestly, I'm okay.

That's why I focus on hyperlocal, hyperlocal value for value. Whether it's by geographic location or, um, location of interest works and no one's going to be a millionaire, but everybody gets paid and everybody goes home with a smile on their face. And if that's the future for me, if I saw ads on Hulu for businesses around me, I would, I would be okay with it. But if I watch one more grammarly ad, I'm gonna, I'm gonna scream.

I mean, I've literally seen 40 of them in the last four days and it really has no relevance to my life. It just makes me want to tear my hair out. But if I saw an ad for, you know, a company here in Birmingham, that might at least be interesting. Dave, I got to move us along because, uh, you know, you've gotten out. I've gotten out. We need speaking of value for value. I think we should thank some people who have been supporting the podcast index and the board meeting. Lucky for you.

I had a sheet of paper. Well, how about that? Uh, what I will do also, uh, let me, I just screwed up my booster, my, my helipad here. Uh, let me thank the people who've boosted in while we are doing this live as I speak a little longer and draw it out as my screen starts to draw. There we are. Uh, here we go. One, two, three, four from dreads. Scott from, uh, pod verse. He says regarding getting the word out, maybe we bring into the keeper to put together a marketing plan. Just spit balling.

Yeah. The problem is, uh, we have no marketing department. We have no marketing money. Uh, we have no marketing time. Um, that's, and we suck at it and we suck at it. Uh, and Dreb comes in with another one, two, three, four sats, banana splits. He says with little banana emoji. Thank you. Stephen B with a hundred and then a thousand sats testing boost from Curio caster. See if they come through. And I posted those in the boardroom and they did.

And I also posted the, uh, the split going into my, uh, strike wallet. So congratulations. That works. Pod two. There's Russell 3333. SOA is not secure. You can still access the audio file in the RSS. Yes, we are aware. Mm. Cole McCormick, 1111. I made a tutorial video for showing people how to go live using pod home. Check out podcast, Normie YouTube channel, and there's a dichotomy. Learn how to do it on YouTube. Uh, I have concepts of a plan to go live more often for my podcast.

More people just need to do it. I agree. So I'll do it. Salty crayon. One, two, three, four. Howdy Dave and Adam Dave named this Sunday's episode beef milkshake. I got it from you. It's a concoction of new and classic tracks. Just the beefy ones. He's the pod hobbyist. Go podcasting. I got it from you. Okay. And there's pod two, again, coming in from fountain with a thousand sets. Drn one uses ice cast pod two offers radio stations and ice cast server with a radio package.

The issue is music licensing, which the only platform that has solved that as live tricks, three 65 at the moment. Yes. Uh, we are also launching our YP directory, which will be open and only ice cast servers have that built in. Uh, shout cast streams. Can't add a YP directory for my chats with the team at shout cast. Drn one gets 120,000 listeners online each month by our app and by third-party apps. So there's definitely stuff working.

Nice. 1776 freedom boost from Lyceum coming in from true fans. Go podcasting with true fans. Comment with a Liberty boost of 1776. Satoshi's best premises says Martin Linda's cog is lightning address. Lyceum at true fans. Dot FM. Nah, there's tone record. 44, 44 boosting. The can't ban RSS reminder. Indeed. Um, there's Russell again with a thousand sats in Australia. We have doc, uh, dry July. Oh, well, that's because it's cold. You're upside down world, man. Upside down world.

Well, we, we do it in January. That's it. I hit the delimiter Dave. What do you have on your list? I'm going to do these in reverse. I'm going to do monthly's first. We've got, uh, Terry Keller, $5. Thank you, Terry. Uh, silicone florist, $10. Chris Cowan, $5. Yaron Rosenstein, $1. Derek J. Viscar, $21. Nice. Paul Saltzman, $22 and 22 cents. Thank you, Paul. Damon Castlejack, $15. Jeremy Gerds, $5. Gene Liverman, $5. Michael Hall, $5 and 50 cents.

New media productions, $30 and Jean. Oh, so there's Jean Liverman again with another $5. Thank you. Timothy Voice, $10. And, uh, that's our PayPal's. And we thank you all very much for the, for the Fiat fund coupons. That's highly appreciated. We've got Jean Bean, 22, 22. He says, I love the idea of the split box. Yes. Yeah. There's a lot of work going on behind the scenes. And I don't understand. I've lost track. I'm like, I don't get it anymore.

Okay. I'll just wait until, wait until when sad start showing up on my wallet. It's time to say, Hey, start showing up on my wallet. Stephen B. How does it work? Gene Everett, Satchel, Richards, one, one, one, one. He just says, boost, boost away, brother, uh, Jean being again, he says, I agree with dad, 22, 22. He says, I agree with day that we're not ready for LLM based fishing combined with compromised email accounts. That's kind of terrifying. If you really think about it. Yeah. Agreed.

Uh, and the delimiter commissioner blogger, 14, 14, 16, these backs, 14, six, 40 sas through fountain. He says, how do you Dave and Adam? I'm not sure under what circumstances audio served via RSS feed is not a podcast. For example, if is soliloquy a podcast is soliloquy as a type of monologue revealing innermost feelings or ideas to the audience.

If yes, then I recommend to one from Darren O'Neill with a strange URL, ran dumb thoughts.com and one from a, from Larry Blatner about fighting commies in the USA called thatlarryshow.com. Yo, CSB. Thank you, CSB. CSB always coming in with the boost for the other shows. I love that.

And if you want to support the podcast index, which is where the money really goes, and of course we do stack sats on our node for liquidity, those of you with an Albi hub, Albi hub is not easy to open a channel to, and because they basically have an address of 0.0.0 .0, so I'm not quite sure how we can, if we should be solving that or not, but I know there's a lot of - Surely there's a way. There's a, you'd think.

I mean, you can open up an outgoing to us, for example, and you could route sats around it, through it to have inbound, but I'm not sure. Boomi, I think, is working with people. That's kind of the whole idea of an LSP is you get one channel, but then people run out of these channels quickly because it's like a million sats, which is a lot of money to open that up. So it's, anyway, for those of you who have nodes that need liquidity, that's what we're here for.

Go to podcastindex.org, scroll down to the bottom. There is a red donate button. You hit that, you get our PayPal. You can always support us through that. And Sam, I feel like we've only scratched the surface today of true fans and all the things you're doing, but I'm sure you will post another eight section on the Mastodon so we can catch up. And I'll send you more emails, don't worry. I like your emails. I like them because I have to put them aside and then sit down and read them.

Like, okay, what is Sam doing here? I've got to understand, what is he into? What I like is that you get five emails saying, I need this, I need that. Can you please do this? Can you please do that? And then I get a Sam email and I'm like, ah. I just sit back and read. Let me just read. Yeah, let me read this. Followed by a Julie Costello tome. And it's just, my day is complete. My day is complete. Hey, Music Mama, we love you. And we love you, Boardroom. Thank you for being here.

Thank you for experimenting. Thank you for running with scissors. Sam, thank you so much, man, for all you do. You are pushing real hard and it's very much appreciated. Thank you very much. I know, I love doing it. So yeah, it's good fun. All right, Brother Dave, have a great weekend. You too, man. All right, everybody, that concludes our board meeting for today. We will, of course, return with another Podcasting 2.0 board meeting next Friday. We'll see you then. Until then, go podcasting.

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