Episode 212: A Song Is Born

Podcasting 2.0 for February 28th, 2025, episode 212. A song is born. Hello, everybody. Hello, podcasters. Hello, developers. Hello, interested people. Welcome to Podcasting 2.0. It is the board meeting that takes place every week where we discuss everything about podcasting, the past, the future, and what is yet to come. We are, in fact, the only boardroom that never reviews the meeting notes.

I'm Adam Curry here in the heart of the Texas hill country and in Alabama, the man who will squeeze a banner into any app. Say hello to my friend on the other end, the one, the only, Mr. Dave Jones. Is it the Fauci wheeze or the Fauci squeeze? No, it's the Fauci wheeze. There we go. That's what I sounded like two days ago. Yeah, man. So last week you were, there you go. You had the onset of the flu. The onset. I like that word, onset. Well, it was the onset. It makes it sound so dire, though.

You were an onset of something. Yeah, you were. What's the term they use during COVID? You were, honestly, pre-infection. No, when you're infected but it doesn't show. Yeah, yeah. It's a silent killer. What was that term again? I forget the term. Silent spreader. No, no, that wasn't it. It was. Pre-symptomatic. Asymptomatic. Asymptomatic spread. Asymptomatic spread. Yes, there it is. Asymptomatic spread. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, yeah. I was just spreading it all over the place and none the wiser.

You were typhoid Mary. Yes. Did you stay home or did you go to work? Well, I went back to the office Friday. By the time I got back to the office, I was running a fever. I stayed there for about an hour and then left home. Super spreader. Yes, super spreader. Exactly. You went ahead, contaminated everybody. How's the rest of the office? Is the office closed now? Is that the general idea? No. Then I was like, guys, I can't handle this anymore. I feel so bad, so I just left and went home.

I ran a fever through Tuesday and then it broke sometime Tuesday afternoon and now I'm kind of coming out of it. It's all just a bunch of congestion now. Well, if it helps any, you sound like crap. Thanks. Just to let you know. It's what I was aiming at. I hit my target. Mission accomplished. Yeah. So I was in Dallas all week. I haven't had any sort of debrief at all from you other than it was great. I figured I'd give you a debrief on the show as it pertains to podcasting.

Yay. So first of all, this is the National Religious Broadcasters Conference. There's 5,000 people at this conference. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people. How did it compare size-wise just based on your feel to something like Podcast Movement? At least twice as big. I mean, they had multiple ballrooms, a lot less of the small tracks really. I mean, this was at the Gaylord Hotel in Grapevine, Texas, a little outside of Dallas, which is a big hotel. It's like a biodome.

Is it one like in Nashville? Like in Nashville that has the whole – it's got like a river in it. Oh, yeah, the train set that runs through the whole place. Yeah, a biodome, air pumped in. You don't need to leave to go to a restaurant. They've got everything there. At a certain point, I walked outside. It had that kind of casino vibe, like I need to feel some actual air. I just didn't feel right. So I was there to do a couple of things. I was scheduled for two keynotes.

And the one that I did, I guess they were equally as big. They were in a ballroom. The ballroom was pretty full. Compared to Podcast Movement, we had at least 100 times more people. Yay, yay. Now, was this a keynote on a particular track? How did they have this organized? Well, they had keynotes every single morning for every morning session. So this one, although I was there Monday and Tuesday, the Wednesday was my keynote day. So I had a keynote in the morning and a keynote right after lunch.

Pay attention, Podcast Movement, right after lunch. So the first one was scheduled as kind of a fireside chat. It was my favorite format. Oh, nice. Yes, fireside chat. Is there a fire? The fire was in my heart, Dave Jones. I got you. So I had asked John Fuller if he would do that with me, which meant he would basically be chatting with me. Now, John Fuller is from Focus on the Family. We know him because he's been a podcaster since 2005 or 2006.

Their suite of programs reaches millions of people every single day. You've known him personally for a long time, right? Yeah, many years. And I met him a couple of times in person. And everybody in the business knows John Fuller, everybody. He's been on air for a long time. And I'm not quite sure what his title is. He's a big boss over there. I'm not quite sure what his title is. He and Rob Kirkpatrick, I think you met both of them at Podcast Movement. They were there as well. Oh, okay.

That is his title, Big Boss. Big Boss. I think it's actually Big Kahuna, I think is his business card. And I had told him many – I had given him my local pitch several times. And we had discussed this. He was really fantastic. I mean, this guy, he knows exactly how to do this stuff. He's a radio guy. So my whole pitch was about the future – well, the title of the session was The Future of Radio is Local. And there were a lot of heads nodding. Everybody was in agreement.

You know, how all radio pretty much has given up on local programming. They've succumbed, if you will, to national programming, which is all syndicated. They really don't have the budgets anymore in many cases to – you know, just for the nature of radio advertising. And, of course, many of these stations, probably the majority, don't actually have advertising. So I'll talk about that. It's an important difference with any other conference I've been to.

But when it comes to the importance of local, as I've said about podcasts, the radio guys get it. They're all like, yeah. And then when I tell them, hey, you know, for you, it's real easy to find a partner in local programming, and that's the content factory known as your local church. And it was really good.

And, of course, along with that comes our Godcaster solution, which I need to talk about because I learned so many important things, and there's so much that would pertain to what we're doing in podcasting 2.0 and people building podcast experiences in general. So it was, you know, Fuller was nice enough to just keep mentioning Godcaster because you're not supposed to pitch in these things. You're not supposed to do that. No, and he just kept weaving in there like really casually.

He knows what he's doing. That's sweet of him, yeah. So we were also there to present to radio stations this solution, and the solution is the transition to digital. Now, I learned a lot just by—we had some of our existing customers there. We're on over 235 stations. Well, we're more now after this week, but already on 235 stations using Godcaster. And they're seeing, in some cases, up to 50% of their audience moving towards streaming, which is a lot. That is a lot, yeah.

And everybody says our over-the-air numbers are deteriorating. They're going down. And up until, you know, really—well, even still today, what radio stations do is you go to their website, and there's a listen live button, you know, which just opens up a streaming player, and there's pretty much nothing else to do. And they always have an on-demand section. So they're seeing a lot of their customers go from over-the-air to digital station websites.

Also, every single station, almost every single one has an app, and that's where they're seeing the most uptake. So I thought that was interesting because people really— I mean, you just can't get around the App Store solution. People really understand apps. Like, what's your—oh, app, okay. And so now if they want to tune in, they just open up the app, which kind of validates the idea.

Also, when it comes to podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts is a very powerful statement, and it is definitely not so that a lot of people get their podcasts from podcast apps. That was a big eye-opener for me. And we kind of already figured that that was the way it was going to go. So they all have an on-demand page, and this has really been killing them. This has been killing these radio stations because people will hear a program. I'll just take Focus on the Family as an example.

They hear it on the air, and then Focus on the Family would say, you know, go to Focus on the Family to support the program. Or people might go to the radio station website or app, and they see the on -demand. If they want to listen there, they tap on it, and all of a sudden now they're at Focus on the Family. The radio station has successfully driven their listener away. Yeah, you just did a reach around to the, yeah. Just sent them away.

So the business, this is what I like about this group, and there's thousands of faith -based radio stations. This group, they pretty much all run on a value-for-value model, and it's really a sharing of revenue. So when you're listening to a station, the station will say, support the station. The program, these national programs will say, you know, support Focus on the Family.

And then, of course, the donation, the people go to Focus on the Family to support the programming, and then there will be a drop-down box, where did you hear us? Where did you hear about us? A lot of people, or I don't know how much, but there's also a portion of the audience that will call the 800 number, and the phone operator is supposed to say, what station did you hear it on?

Based upon that data, the national programming will share a piece of that revenue back to the station with predictable results. That's a long way around. Yes, predictable. That is not high fidelity. Well, so they call this attribution in the business. So on the webpage, there's a little drop -down box, and of course, almost nobody uses the drop-down box, so that field comes in empty.

So they don't know where this listener came from, and often these phone services will just forget to ask where the person heard about the program. So apparently, for the last 40 years, they've had roundtables and forums and all kinds of discussions about the problem of attribution.

Okay. So we solve that in one way by using the funding tag in all of the… So Godcaster, you can fill up your Godcaster player on the website and in the station app, and if the feed doesn't have an attribution, then we'll add the attribution link. So you can click on Donate right there from the station webpage instead of going away. You can also listen to the podcast there.

And then we mark that in the station stats as a donation button clicked for this program, this episode, and we send off a… What do you call that, the tag in the URL? A query parameter, the underscore from equals… Yeah, the refer tag, I guess. And the refer both, yeah. And we also say, so what station? Do we do by episode or program? I can't remember. Both, yeah. Both. Oh, who was that? Who's coming in? 10,000 stats. Thank you very much. 10,000. No, Lincoln. Lincoln. Lincoln. Oh, Lincoln.

Lincoln, 10,000 stats. Shout-out to Eric PP and team for bringing Dojo to Start 9. Absolute rock star. Dojo. I don't know what Dojo… What is Dojo? Dojo? Dojo? Dojo? I don't know what Dojo is. Trying to figure out what Dojo is. Anyway, I'll continue. So this solves a big part of the problem because now the station knows that someone clicked on the link and the program creator, I hate the term, program producer, also knows that it came from that station.

Now, this was like, I literally saw people's mouths drop open. What? You've solved this? And so… It wasn't that hard, actually. Well, here's what was interesting. The stations loved it, but the program producers loved it even more. You have to understand that unlike any other radio conference or… I mean, this is a community. They all want to survive and make it… Ultimately, everybody wants to spread the gospel, but they all want to survive, and they know that one can't survive without the other.

So they really all want to have this data. So we saw program producers saying, wow, how about this? Why don't I tag all my programs for each… They have ways of tailoring the outro on their programs. It's a system called… Oh, yeah. Like a… Dynamic ad insertion. Yeah, like a post roll. Exactly, a post roll.

So they all use this system called… Well, not all, but a lot of them use this system called AMBOSS, and so there's a thousand tags in there, and they'll say, thank you for listening to Focus on the Family on WDCA or whatever. Right. And these guys were saying, well, we'll just tag it saying, go to WDCA's website and click on the donate button so that… Smash that donate button.

Yeah, so they really got into it, and they're like, can I have a login instead of building a whole thing from scratch to parse out their server logs? They would love to have a dashboard. And it's interesting because the station's like, yeah, you should give them a dashboard. So, of course, there's another business line for us because we can now build a dashboard and serve this as a service to the program producers. They all love this. Interesting.

And they also want, well, even beyond that, they want to know how many plays they're getting because all they've had is the same tired old stuff. They got downloads, and they all said, we got a lot of people listening in Peru, but they never send us any donations. Yeah. So they all know how poor it is, and so when they could see actual play numbers because Godcaster has first-party data, they all got really excited.

And then, you should write this down on your notepad, they would love to have time listened, which of course we can give to them because they said, I want to know if someone's dropping out after eight minutes in Arizona but maybe listening all the way through in Ohio, you know, I can make better content based upon that. And the beauty of this is that both sides were happy in sharing that information.

So it was very interesting because now the station also knows what's working, is the placement of that program's player in the right spot. And they all realized that just having a sample size of a few percent is enough to determine what's happening on all these stations that aren't using our system. So it was really mind-boggling to see how something that to you and I seemed like something pretty simple, really, really made an impact.

Imagine that whole sort of scenario, I imagine that that probably replays itself in like the IAB, you know, this just sort of like entrenched way of doing things with like Nielsen ratings and all these kinds of, where they just find it so hard to move, just to just make a simple move to the next step. Because they don't have the data.

Yeah, or it's just like, because we look at these, we look at these industries and these things from the outside and we're like, well, you know, why is it so hard to just make a simple move like this? And, you know, I guess it's because, I don't know, I guess it's because... We're the right time at the right place. That's what's happened here. Yeah, I guess so. I guess you're right.

Because they all realize that they have to turn off the generators and transmitters and pull down the towers eventually. How long, let me stop you real quick and ask you on that question, how much money does it cost to run a transmitter? I mean, is it, how much power is that? You can actually, you can kind of calculate it. Let me see how much, let's try this. Does it cost to run a 100, one, two, three watt radio station in, okay. I know the AM transmitters are extremely expensive.

But, you know, there's a whole bunch of things that comes along with it. Let's see, for a 100 kilowatt FM broadcast package, transmitter cables and antennas could cost about $40,000, but $20,000 operating costs. So it's several thousand dollars a month. So several thousand dollars a month just in like electricity? Yeah, basically, yeah. Power. Power, yeah. Yeah, so that is a significant expense. If your monthly income is $20,000 or $25,000, I mean.

And they probably have to pay for the license too. Yeah, for the FCC license? Yeah, sure, yeah. Yeah, I wonder how much that is. I don't know. I mean, Sam had the right idea so long ago with the river radio model, you know, just distributing everything across, you know, work from home, people in a local, in a hyper local, and then you basically start podcast first, and then you transmit if you want to.

The difference is Sam was coming from a zero starting point, had to launch a new digital audio broadcast signal. So he was trying to do both at the same time, you know, building up in a very crowded space. Well, actually not that DAB. I mean, everyone has DAB, but there's so many choices because it's digital. And these guys, they have their listeners. They have the listeners, they have them on broadcast, they have the listeners on streaming.

And I'd actually seen this, but a lot of modern car radios, when you get out of range, the car radio will say, would you like to continue listening digital? And the car radio will go and find the stream, presumably in tune in, and then we'll switch over. And then actually, I think from that point on, you're just listening digital and not even listening to the broadcast signal. I never knew. I didn't know that was a thing. Yeah, yeah. I don't have it in my car, but I have seen it before.

And so a lot of them mentioned that. Anyway, so the point is that they all understood the three main things, which is incorporate your live stream into your on-demand. And they're already seeing people no longer clicking on the listen live button, but going into the Godcaster. It's the first, you know, tiles like listen live. So they're listening live there, and now it's just one tap away to the program they might want to listen to on demand, and they can start to measure this.

What I didn't expect is how excited the program producers would be about sharing that data. But they actually all love it because now they can have a real conversation about money, you know, what's really working. And some of these producers, some of them buy airtime on some of the really larger stations. And, you know, there's a share back, and there's all kinds of, you know, so they also need to know, is my money being well spent?

And I can imagine that there's probably, I mean, even though there's probably some that are close to accurate, I bet on balance, I bet most of them are undercounting. Probably. So it would be good to see, you know, better numbers. I mean, if you're having to go through this roundabout process of like calling a 1 -800 number and all this stuff to report your list, I mean, I can't imagine you're going to get a very good response rate. Oh, no. It's horrible.

And the beauty of this crowd is that they're excited about engagement and people listening. They don't care about the number. So they'll see 230 plays on one of their top programs on a Godcast they just installed. They're super excited because they know that each one of those people, A, received the message they wanted to send them, but B, you know, that could represent a lifetime donor of $500 a year.

So if they don't care about getting a million or 10 million downloads, that's irrelevant to them. It's totally meaningless. They all have very sophisticated CRM systems. They want to have a donor. They want to continue to message that donor, et cetera. And again, the big takeaway for me was their listeners, and they're not all old, their listeners are listening where they're being sent to.

So there's a relatively low number is how I understood it that are, you know, going, if they're hearing a focus on the family program, they're not necessarily searching for it in their app or subscribing to it in an app. They just go back to the focus on the family website or to the radio station website, or the radio station app is a big one. Most of these apps have, of course, very poor podcast, no podcast management. They'll just post a recent episode.

Maybe there's a couple of tiles in there that just go from an RSS feed, and some of them just pop you right out of the app to the producer's page. So, you know, it's a very inefficient way of keeping your customer. I wonder, this is all curious to me because I wonder what the psychology is there of not using a podcast app. And let me tell you where I'm coming from. Like my wife, she has, she's used Overcast for years. She knows, you know, she's comfortable with it. She knows how to use it.

There's nothing there on that front, but she oftentimes just doesn't. What does she do? Well, she'll just, you know, just Google for it or she'll, you know, click. She just finds this content some other way.

Yep. And she's even made comments before about how she just doesn't, like, she finds the whole idea, like, she doesn't like a podcast app because I think it goes back to something you said where you're like that inbox model where sometimes podcast apps can make you feel stressed out because you just see all these episodes. That you haven't listened to. Yeah. The un-listened to episodes. Absolutely. Yeah. And it feels like work. Yeah. It's not an enjoyable experience.

You know, there's something different about, okay, this is interesting because there's something different about launching, let's say, let's say Hulu or Amazon Prime or something like that where you have all this content. You don't get the same sense of stress. You're just scrolling through seeing if there's something you want to watch. But podcast apps stress you out because they make you feel like, oh, I was supposed to do this thing and I didn't.

And, like, I think I feel the same way because what's happened with me is, even though, you know, I'm always going to be an app guy, but what happened with me, though, is, like, during all this testing of Godcaster, you know, I've subscribed to a whole bunch of different stations and feeds. A lot of feeds. A lot of feeds. And, whoa, I mean, like, my Castamatic is blowing up. I mean, if I opened it up, I've got, you know, 300 episodes of Unless and Stuff.

Yeah. And I immediately feel this sense of stress. And I'll go a few days at a time without even opening the app. Now, I know for me, I just go in there and clean it out. But I think maybe other people don't, maybe they don't think about, they don't want to babysit an app that way. And maybe we're already, because what got me thinking about this is, you were talking about how they, people like the radio station app, but they may not necessarily want a podcast app.

But then again, the radio station app, if, like, let's say that they're firing up like a Godcaster or something like that, or, you know, some kind of PWA app, then they're just seeing sort of just the on-demand available menu. Yeah. The guide, so to speak. You're not seeing, here's all the episodes you haven't listened to yet. And it's curated. Yeah. I don't know. That may be a, that may be a really, that may be a significant defect to mass adoption when it comes to podcast apps.

I completely agree. And that is just a, it kind of reinforced for me the reason why YouTube is seen as a podcast place. It's not because you need to have video. It just isn't. It's because, oh, it's on YouTube. I just go there. Boom, I've got it. You know, if you tell someone, go listen to this podcast at WDCA.com, people will go there and they'll probably go back there. That's where I get this podcast. They don't think the way, where we're coming from anymore.

Yeah. You know, that this is, all podcasts are in this app. Because, first of all, they're not. They're just not anymore. Not all podcasts are in every app. My stuff is not on Spotify. It hasn't hurt my numbers at all. It hasn't hurt our donations at all. People just go somewhere else to get that particular podcast. So there is a change in psychology for sure. And that's really just the number of what people call platforms. Like, oh, no, I get that on Rumble. But I get Rogan on YouTube.

And I get No Agenda on noagendashow.net. There's a lot of people that use the player there. And I'm always amazed. And I know that Tina, she's listening to stuff just by clicking a play button on her iPad all the time. The only time she uses Fountain is when she wants to send a boost. Well, see, Melissa sent me a thing the other day to listen to an interview. And she sent it to me. And it was like a link to somebody's Substack webpage. Another place to get a podcast.

Yeah. And so I'm like, well, you know, because this is just something that's not in... It's just not in a traditional podcast app. You know, we had this idea with the... Not the idea, but I mean, we had this conviction with the News River that... Yeah. Freedom Controller. With Freedom Controller. Yeah, that we didn't want it to be an inbox style thing. That we just wanted to be this, you know, sort of river of news style.

And yeah, maybe inboxes just, you know, maybe that idea is showing its age. Well, I think so. I think there's a... We've seen a massive shift from people using email and corporations to using Slack. Although that has its own stressful issues because you can see how many unread messages there are. People are using Telegram groups. And they're missing stuff. But, you know, because Telegram group is basically a river of news, a river of posts.

You're never going to scroll back very far in that thing. No. Because it's just a pain in the butt to do it. No, and people repost stuff. You can catch up and you still have your ads and all that and your replies and stuff like that. Well, you know, we all have like... I bet every single one of us has, let's say, three podcasts that we just don't want to miss. And the rest of them, we're more like, eh, if I miss them, it's okay. I'll just pick it up next time.

You know, I'll jump back in some other time. But there may be just like maybe two or three that we really do want to listen to every episode. And if that's the case, it's really not that hard to like go to the website. And I bet it's easy for people to fall back into that thing of like, I'll just go listen to that thing. I mean, that's what I end up doing with... Like America This Week has a live stream every Monday night on YouTube.

And every Tuesday morning, I go to the Fire Up YouTube and start listening to the previous night's live stream. And it's not... I mean, I got to go to a different app to do it, but I do it. So this whole thing reminds me of the movie A Song is Born, which you've probably not seen. I've seen it twice. It's from 1948. Is that the one with Barbra Streisand? No, that's A Star is Born. No, A Song is Born stars Danny Kaye.

Oh, Danny Kaye. Yes. Well, so I'll read the... I actually pulled up the Wikipedia page. I'll read you the first paragraph here. In the Totten Foundation's Victorian mansion in New York City, mild-mannered professor Hobart Frisbee, that's Danny Kaye, and his seven fellow academics are writing and recording a comprehensive musical encyclopedia. They've been living cut off from the world for nine years, living without a radio.

And so then these two window washers, seeking help with a radio quiz, they discover that this group, who's been writing this full-on comprehensive musical encyclopedia, but have been cut off the world for nine years, without their knowledge, swing, jive, jump, blues, Dixie, boogie-woogie, bebop, all of this has exploded. And they didn't even know about it. Oh, I get it. You see the analogy? Yeah. Where we've been very heads down and concerned about video, but video wasn't really the issue.

It's people no longer seeing their podcast app as the only place to get podcasts, because I can get them here, I can get them there. So the question is, what interfaces can you build that work for that certain audience? And I come right back to, okay, this is God casters listening to a radio station, but there's also the Rachel Maddow universe where you need to have something else, including cross -app comments on Blue Cry, whatever.

And this was completely apparent when I did my second keynote, which was the future of podcasting. The first keynote was called what? The future of radio. Future of radio, okay, and the second was future of podcasting. Yes. Now, I started off by saying, I made very clear that local is a huge market that has been untapped and unserved, and everyone's like, oh, yeah, wow, hadn't thought of that one.

Then I took your Dallas PowerPoint and I deleted some stuff and I made it a little less technical here and there and added some screenshots. By the way, I learned an important lesson. When you are using PowerPoint and then on your own laptop you switch to a browser to demonstrate something, that does not show up on the screens that are looking at the PowerPoint. Not if you're in presentation mode, that is for sure. Well, I didn't know that.

Okay. And I'm like, look how cool this is, and I'm like, ah. And then Daniel J. Lewis was sitting in the front row. He's like, Adam, it's not showing on the screen. Thank you, Daniel J. Lewis. That was awesome. The savior. Yeah. So I had to quit out of presentation mode, show the browser, then go back to presentation mode. So it was a lot of alt-tabbing around, but got through it. Okay. And every single feature I showed, there were, you know, it was like this.

And then we have these things called crowd chapters. Cloud chapters. You know, and even, you know, the funding tag, like, you know, you can actually have a support button right here. You know, people just like audible gasps, audible gasps. And I also showed value for value. I mean, people loved it. And, you know, no one had any problems with Satoshis or Bitcoin. You know, they just saw money going because they understand value for value. This is what this crowd is.

And afterwards, that was the most exciting part. You know, there's always a line of like 10 people who want to come and talk to you. And they said, you know, I use Buzzsprout. And I'd seen this feature, but I didn't really know what it did. Oh, interesting. And it shows you about the education the hosting companies are or are not doing. I'm not saying they're not educating, but it's not getting through to everybody. It's not getting through.

Yeah. And so a lot of them were saying, OK, so I could make my own interface using these features and they'll all show up. Yes, you can. And or you can tell people to use a different app. This group really got it. They really did. And who was your audience here? Was this still radio stations in the room or was this podcasters? Radio stations, I would say program producers. Every person who produces a program for these radio stations, these syndicated programmers, they all have a podcast.

And so now they're thinking, how can I make my environment more interesting? And how can I make it more interesting on the stations? Because the stations ultimately, whether they're over the air or streaming live, people are listening to them and they're telling people what's coming. They're promoting the programming. They're saying, go listen to it on demand. So, again, that's the beauty of this group is they're not like, I want it all.

No, they need the station to be promoting them as much as they promote themselves. Because when the station promotes them, then people are much more or not much more are very willing to support the programming and the station because it's explained that way. You know, support our station, support the programming. So I'm seeing a lot of customization coming in from the content producers who are going to say, support me in this manner, i

.e. click on the funding button, the donation button, which is kind of a call to action for any podcast app developers who don't have that, who don't surface that. And by the way, why wouldn't you, as an app developer, track that and reach out to people? I mean, you can replicate that system that we put in there. You know, that's not that hard. And of course, a lot of the stations, they want to have this functionality in their own app.

They want to be a podcast app for the programming that they have relationships with along with their live stream. So, I mean, the meetings we had were people just literally going, wow, I can't believe you solved this. This is the future for us. This is the way we got to go. And very often you'd have like an older guy, you know, mid-60s to mid-70s who started the station. It's the owner.

And a lot of them have, you know, own multiple stations and certainly tens of repeaters, which they all localize. And then maybe a somewhat younger 40 to 50 general manager or program director. And it would be the older station owner who's saying, this is the way. Local content, drive them towards a website, drive them towards our app, make all the numbers available to everybody so that we can all get the support we need and have the tide rise all boats.

It was a phenomenal, phenomenal experience to see people kind of seeing for the first time what podcasting 2.0 features can do. Interesting. And podcasting in general. But the 2.0 features, that kind of was the extra special sauce, particularly the funding tag. I'm having my... And by the way, let me just say, when we talk about Christian programming, I want people to know that Glenn Beck is Christian programming. All right. It's Christian worldview. It's not all, oh, Jesus. Oh, Lordy.

It's not all sermons. I mean, it's programs you've probably listened to. Charlie Kirk, you know, totally contemporary Christian radio programming. Charlie Kirk crosses over way beyond that. So, you know, there's big, big, big shows that are in this arena, both broadcast and they all podcast. Did you talk to any of the publishers? What do you mean? I mean, like people like Focus on the Family. Yeah. That's what I call the program producers. Oh, OK. I see what you mean.

I thought you're talking about a job title. You're talking about the actual... No, the publisher. Oh, yeah. No. Those are the ones who are so excited. They're like, I'm going to change. I'm going to do local tags. I want to drive people towards the app. Tell them to click on the donation button at the station, you know, because they still get the numbers. They don't really care. You know, they're not trying to, you know, take the listener away from the station.

They have to work with the station because the station brings the new listeners in, promotes them continuously. Now, the one other thing that was interesting... You could say that the station is their biggest advocate. It's their pod role. The station is their pod role. That's exactly what it is. It's their pod role. And the station can also recommend stuff. And, you know, there was many, many ideas. Many ideas. The thing that...

As an interesting side note, I was talking to my buddy Matt Mundt, and I met him in Nashville. I met him in Dallas and in Nashville, two different occasions. And he's there. And then he does social media for contemporary Christian music artists. So Matthew West being the most notable, but he does many, many campaigns for people. And so music programming has become pretty much consolidated into one station called K-Love.

The other network of music stations owned by Salem Broadcasting, they just recently sold all their music stations to K-Love. Because, you know, when you're just playing music, you know, it's hard to, you know, do a donation drive and get people to support you. And the cost of running the transmitters was just too much. K-Love, they are a monster. I don't know how many, they may have a thousand stations. They own the Christian, contemporary Christian music space. And they also stream.

But they own all these transmitters. And the end result is that they do about $300 million a year in revenue. K-Love does? Oh, yeah. And they're very sophisticated because they have a ministry. And they, you know, they have all kinds of trips and cruises. And, you know, they know what they're doing. Let me put it this way. They really know what they're doing. The problem is they're a nonprofit. That's not a problem for them. But they pay very low ASCAP BMI fees.

And all of these artists now really only have one outlet. It's K-Love. And they're not making much money at all. And then they look at K-Love and say, well, K-Love makes $300 million a year. And they make it off of my music. And I'm not really getting anything. This is the spiritual Spotify effect. And, of course, these artists have the same issue with Spotify. They don't make money off of Spotify either. Right, right.

So this is starting to snowball where now K-Love, they've built this $100 million building in Nashville. And the artists can just come there to perform. They've got big studios, sound stages. And I would say 25, maybe 30% of all the CCM hits right now are written by Matthew West. It's just his time. And, you know, so he looks at this building and says, okay, after going to this building, I've got to perform like a monkey. And I just don't get anything out of it.

So I was talking to Matt Mundt and he says what this is snowballing into is the record labels, they no longer need national promotion people. So the record labels are starting to shut down. You know, the industry has been so consolidated, which is never good. I don't care if it's for Jesus or not. It's never good for an industry to be consolidated in that manner. And there is a strong interest in value for value music. I actually showed some of that in my 2.0 demo.

There's a strong interest in alternative methods. And I'm exploring that. I'm not sure how that's going to come out. If we can get a Matthew West to put a value for value song up, big deal. You know, but there's people look and certainly the newer artists who can't even get a label now anymore because what does a label get out of it? You know, they're not getting much either. You know, of course, probably why the labels does kind of stopped.

The labels have really just stopped like generating new artists and are really focused on buying older back catalogs of stuff now, just as sort of like, you know, annuities. Well, but that's the publishers, the label. So often the label is an arm of the publishing company. And so what the labels are now doing is they're just out there and they'll say, Oh, you got some pretty good songs. How many followers do you have?

If you don't have a million followers on your social media, they're not going to sign you. Yeah, this is specifically TikTok. TikTok, it's mandatory. I mean, even movie actors these days, it's mandatory that they have a TikTok and an Instagram account. They have to post. That's all part of what used to be the labels job has now become the artist job. And so artists, of course, are seeing that it makes more sense. Well, why do I need these guys?

So if I can get to a couple of them and I can show them, Hey, this is the new way forward. And I can point to successes such as Boostergram Ball Live and, you know, the Skirmish and Behind the Schemes. And Ellen Beetz also showed Ellen Beetz, you know, talked about all these different things. And people were just blown away. They had no idea that this was all possible. So we're making an inroad. Yeah, that contract between that old sort of contract between the label and the... It's meaningless.

It's meaningless. It's gone. It's broken. It's a broken... It doesn't work that way anymore. So we still need, you know, we still need wallets. We still need things to work, but there's definitely an excitement. There's a hunger or a thirst for new ways to do it. And just being there in that capacity, I have a lot of people to follow up on. So I'm very excited about it. And then Daniel Day-Lewis had a little chat with him, and he reiterated. He said, man, you need to be the

leader of Podcasting 2.0. And I said, I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure that, you know, A, I don't think it's... Until we have people branching out in different arenas with receiving side, doing different types of things, that's our... This comes back to the Song is Born movie. You know, we've been a little cloistered, and we need to expand our listening experiences.

So, you know, a company like PodPage, you know, they have an interesting opportunity because they're basically creating podcast receiving stations inside their websites. I mean, and, you know, True Fans is thinking so far out of the box now. Yeah, True Fans. And by the way, think about the activity stream that Sam is implementing. That's the kind of stuff that stations as well as producers want to see. That's fantastic. They love that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, I think this becomes like... Yeah, that inbox-style app. Man, I don't know. It may be... It's time to rethink that, I think. Yes. That's been abundantly clear to me. It is time to... And, you know, you can call it white labeling, but, you know, I've said before, pick a group, pick a demographic. Why is Fountain successful? Their demographic is Nostra and Bitcoin. Well, do you want to talk about images real quick? Oh, you know, I'm so excited, David. I'm so excited about images.

I've tried to follow the threads on podcastindex .social, and the conversation was so exciting to me. I know. You're dripping with sarcasm. Yes, I am. Because there's so much, you know, like noodling and rib-jabbing, and like... It was a little bit of... So, yeah, set us straight, PodSage. This... Okay. I mean, I think it's a good transition, because if... It makes... Listening to this makes this tag feel even more necessary. Because now you want...

If app experiences are going to be broader than just an inbox style with a piece of episode art, then, like, you're going to have to be able to deliver other artwork assets, right? To make a bigger... And now it's time for some hot namespace talk. Yeah, baby. We need something else besides just an image. And I want to say, I said right at the end of that sentence. That's pretty bad, yeah.

To my knowledge, I don't think I've ever done that before, and I think it was appropriate in the context, but it's still concerning. It's very concerning. If I do that again, you better call me down. I'll call you out. I want an immediate hammer blow. Let me just run where we're at real quick. How did we get here? So Russell from Pod2 down under has this podcast banner tag. Podcast colon banner. And it does exactly what it says. It defines a banner image.

Banner being something that's longer than it is tall, wider than it is high. Right. That an app can display. That's the idea here. And so when you think of banner image, think of something that's, like, at the top of Facebook, your Facebook timeline, or at the top of your Mastodon, or at the top of your Twitter. Some wide but shallow image. And so Russell created this thing, and he's using it, and that's the thing that exists. In the RSS world, so let's just dive in.

What I'm doing right now is just diving into podcast image delivery, okay? In the RSS 2.0 native world, there's an image tag, which has always been sort of a weird thing to me. It's just a weird tag. I don't understand what Weiner was smoking when he created this, because it's got, like, it's got child nodes that are, like, link and title. And the spec even says that they should be, that the title and the link should be the same as they are in the channel. Yeah. And then it has max.

The spec defines a maximum width up to, like, 144 pixels or something. The whole thing is just super weird. And I'm sure that's why Apple created their own image tag. It was because that one was just almost unusable. And so the iTunes namespace has an image tag, and it's only used for channel art or episode art, and that's going to be square art, sort of a one-by-one aspect ratio. All the tag has is an href, so all it does is reference a URL of an image somewhere on the Internet.

Then in the documentation for the tag, they give you their sizing requirements. So minimum of 1,400 by 1,400, maximum of 3,000 by 3,000. So stick a pin in that. We're going to come back around to this in a minute. Then you have the media namespace, what's called the media thumbnail tag, which defines a thumbnail image.

I mean, it's in the name, and it also, the spec describes it as such, and it says it has, like for instance, it has a time attribute in it where you can give a timestamp to reference a time code in the media enclosure, referencing which keyframe the thumbnail was taken from. Right. So this is a way to say, okay, here's an enclosure, and this image represents a thumbnail from that enclosure. This is what you're going to see when you hit play. So that's kind of the overview there.

So the art defined, like if you think of art in the RSS-based podcasting, really you're talking about other than a thumbnail, you're talking about square channel or episode art. I mean, that's what we're dealing with. And the RSS, you know, either using the RSS tag itself or the iTunes image tag, and then there's the banner tag defined by Russell. So into this sort of mindset came the podcast images tag a few years ago.

The podcast namespace, the podcast colon images tag assumed this paradigm that you would have square channel art because that's all we had. And it just tweaked it. It tweaked it to allow the delivery of multiple sizes and widths of art instead of just one. So you could now define a set of images and say, okay, this one's 512 pixels wide. This one's 1024. This one's 1400. This one's 3000. And so the idea there is the app could choose which image is most appropriate for its presentation.

So like you could have a small KaiOS phone screen or like a big monster iPhone Pro Max screen. And you're just going to pick whatever, the app's going to pick whatever is the most appropriate. That was the idea. And so then James stepped into this conversation a while back and said that the images tag was, to quote him, not fit for purpose, unquote. Whatever that means. I don't really want to get into all that because he was very upset with me this week for reasons I don't fully understand.

But I'll just say that we have a disagreement about that. But saying that I don't agree with him is not the same as saying that I don't think that I don't see a need to change it. Because James' point was that the image tag, James' point that the image tag is not good enough is still valid even if we don't come about it through the same steps. So I'm willing to accept that. So we're left with this need for a tag that can deliver images for different purposes. That's really where we're at now.

So, for instance, like a hero banner. So what you might call, what Apple might call, what Apple does call a channel logo. And that's Apple's terminology. So it's something that looks sort of like a banner, kind of. Or perhaps like dark mode, light mode channel art, okay? Yep, yep. Or an open graph wide card that's going to get displayed as a preview image when you post to Twitter. These are all different possible... All different versions, yeah, of course, of course.

Different types of art that you may want to deliver in your feed. Because at this point... So you're going to control your branding at this point. You're going to say, here's, you know, like to whatever degree you want to, you're going to say, okay, I've got 17 different assets here, image assets, and I want to deliver these along with my feed so that an app can receive it and know exactly all the different possible ways to show my branding to the user. That's kind of the best I can explain it.

Makes sense. So Nathan proposed modifying the podcast colon images tag. And you as project leader completely ignored him, you horrible person. That's what I do. I'm the ignorer in chief, yes. So Nathan proposed modifying the images tag. Let me just, on that topic, just because something doesn't immediately get acted upon doesn't mean that it's not the same as ignoring it. Like, it just came back up. Yeah. It just came back up. No human being can address everything at all times.

I mean, it's just not possible. There's not enough bandwidth to the human mind to solve problems on 25 different fronts at once. Things have to be ignored or set aside or come back to later. I hate that sometimes people feel that way. But it's just life. So Nathan proposed modifying the podcast colon images tag to serve this purpose. Okay. And let's look at it real quick.

So the proposal here is to add, what he's saying is add to the current source set attribute, which is the attribute that existed before. Add a bunch of other options, a bunch of other attributes. Source would be required. Source set would become optional. And the attributes would be as follows. Alt, which is what we're all familiar with, with the HTML image tag. It would just define some fallback text if the image can't be seen or shown. There would be an aspect ratio attribute.

There would be a purpose attribute, and that would be just a text-based purpose. There would be a source attribute, straight up just linked to an image. And there would be a type, so something like image slash JPEG or video slash MP4 or something like that. So the thing that's interesting here and makes this different from what you would expect from just a normal image tag is this purpose idea. I asked for this, and then he took it in sort of an interesting direction.

And this is where some of the problem, not a problem, but some of the confusion and concern has come from, as expressed by Stephen B. Yes, I saw that. True. And I want to say this. Stephen and Nathan are so pleasant to talk through this stuff with because it's just like it's sticking to the point and getting everybody's cards out on the table, and there's very little ego that gets involved in this wonderful.

So the purpose here, and Nathan gives a few examples, could be something like, we mentioned Apple's channel logo, so it could be something like Apple dash channel dash logo. Now, I'm just spitballing making these up. I'm not trying to be super specific. And the idea here is that you would pass through this purpose from one platform through to the app.

This sort of pass-through approach where you're saying instead of defining all of the allowable image metrics and use cases inside our own tag and spec, why don't we take the MIME type approach, why don't we take it one step further and use the purpose attribute to pass the platform's intent through to the app. So podcasting has sort of three spheres.

If you think about it, it's got hosting providers, Buzzsprout, RSS.com, Blueberry, blah, blah, blah, podcast player apps, TrueFans, Podverse, Fountain, et cetera, and third-party platforms. Episodes.fm, Podnews, Podcast.tech, Podpage, Podcaster, on and on. So you have sort of three different spheres here of interest in what is happening in different deliveries going back and forth.

So instead of saying in our spec, a banner is a three-to-one aspect ratio with a minimum of 2850 wide, instead you could say purpose equals Apple channel logo. Then if the app knows that an Apple channel logo, knows what an Apple channel logo's image constraints are and wants to deliver an asset somewhere in its UI that looks like that, then it can choose to consume that image. Or ignore.

Right, and if it doesn't know about it, or if it doesn't want to display something like that, it can ignore it. So that's sort of where he took that purpose idea. It's very different. It's kind of unique in one way, but it's not like we're totally unused to this. No, we have that with Medium, we have it with all kinds of stuff, don't we? Well, see, this feels more like MIME types to me. Because what you're saying is, with a MIME type, you're saying, okay, the MIME type is MPEG slash audio.

Well, we know what that means, but we don't know what that means because the HTML spec defines it. We know what that means because the MIME type leads us to the MP3 spec that defines what that means. And so it's sort of like a standard that points to a different standard. But instead of what's happening here, it's a little bit of a different use of that. And it's not necessarily a standard pointing to a different standard, it's a standard pointing to a provider's documentation of what they want.

And that's a little bit different than what we're used to, I think. And I think that's... The funny thing is that from my perspective, it all made perfect sense to me. I don't understand why it was an issue because I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. I want to use it for this, I want to use it for that. I don't want to, I don't use it. I think I understand. We had this discussion on the podcast index social. And I think it's really important. I want people to listen to me right here.

I am simply talking out loud right now and thinking these things through because these are new ideas. I'm not at the point of saying that I think we should do any particular one thing. I really am just thinking all of this out loud. That's what the boardroom is for, is to just bat this stuff around. So don't get too hung up on any one particular thing. But I think it's important to think about directives versus descriptives.

If you think about the HTML spec, the image tag in the HTML specification, that's a directive. That image tag is not telling, when you include a width and a height in the image tag of HTML, it is not telling you that that image is that wide and that high. It's telling you when you show it on the screen, show it in this width and this height. The image that it's referencing could be something completely different.

And you can see that when you put a 16x9 image and then you put it in an image tag in HTML that's one by one. It just gets all squished up and looks terrible. So that's a directive. What we're talking about and what we're assuming that RSS feeds are going to want to deliver are things that are descriptive. When the podcast colon images tag tells you the width and the height, we assume that it's telling us what the image is.

And that's a little bit different because it sort of changes your mindset as the app developer. You're saying, okay, I know I'm going to be getting an image that's this shape and this size. Then what can I do with it? And so that's when I say that now there's these purposes. The purposes are there because you're being described to what this thing is supposed to be. And that's helpful. Think about if you're an app developer and you just get an image in the feed and here's what you get.

You get URL, width, height, aspect ratio. What is that? Right. What do you do with it? I don't know. You have no idea. No. It doesn't tell you anything. And if we go into the spec and say, okay, anytime you receive an image that's three to one aspect ratio, that's going to be this thing. Well, every now and then it may not be because that doesn't stop people from putting whatever they want to in there.

But if you have an image that has a purpose of X, Y, Z, now at least you can see it and say, oh, okay, well, this is telling me that it's supposed to be a hero image. And I know what that is. What is a hero image? Because I've never heard that term before this conversation. It's like a big thing at the top of a website that's sort of like a background graphic. That actually has the name hero image? I've never heard that before. Yeah. Let's see. A term used to describe the full screen video.

Oh, web design. Above the fold page. I've never heard about that. Okay. Yeah. And so you can see, we want to make these rich image-filled experiences. So you need more to go on. What if somebody gives you, what if somebody gives you a 3,000 pixel wide, 1 ,000 pixel tall picture of themself? And what they intended it for was like an avatar. Right. But you don't know what to do with it. Yeah. So I think, so Stephen is concerned about interrupting complexity. And I respect that.

And I want to think about that. And I want us all to think about that. I mean, a tag doesn't have to define everything about itself as long as it references sort of appropriate definitions that can be found in other places. So like the enclosure tag. The enclosure tag has a mime type in it. We know that somewhere off on the internet, there's a mime. We can go find whatever that mime type is if we needed to. And, you know, I don't think Stephen's opposed to this, to that necessarily.

If I had to sum up his concern, I think it's that he feels the weight of like too many of these indirect references to other things that if he's like, well, I got to go look up this thing and this thing and this thing and this thing and I got to, that it's just sort of like it's going to make your brain spin and it's going to become too complicated to try to accept all these different things. And there's also like implementation difficulty. I'm sympathetic to that.

If it's just an overly complex, then it can be a real barrier to adoption. I mean, a tag like this needs to be, okay, so it needs to be fully usable with just like a minimum of attributes. So I guess here's my current thoughts at this moment about it. Names of things don't matter, but we might need to rename this tag to avoid just confusion and to make a clean break with the podcast colon images. We may need to just say, okay, this thing is not called podcast colon images.

This thing is called podcast colon image and just start fresh. That way we can drop the source set attribute and then go move and we will push the podcast images tag to some sort of deprecated appendix of the namespace. You know, that's probably, I think a good thing to do. And then also choosing to not account for optional attributes is kind of the same as ignoring certain tags you don't support.

So if like in Steven's case, like if Steven doesn't want to take on like the complexity of the purpose attribute, it is optional. And he could just choose to ignore that and say, okay, I'm only going to process images using just aspect ratio, width and height. And I'm going to just, that's what I'm going to look at.

And to me, that's really not much different than saying, if we're talking about optional attributes, that's not much difference than saying, I'm going to support the social interact tag, but I'm not going to support the chapters tag. I mean, you're just sort of, you're just ignoring the thing that you don't want to consume because it's backwards compatible down to just an image, just an image href.

I mean, really at its barest bones, if you think about, let's say we took Nathan's tag, rename it to podcast colon image. It's usable just with an href. So at that point, it's semantically equivalent to the iTunes image tag. Now you can, now you add the ability to have an aspect ratio, a width and a height. Okay, now you've stepped up the possible power of this tag to now be able to encompass these other things that are desired.

Then you add to that, you can go one step further and consume purpose. Now you've gone into the realm of, I'm looking at other people's, I'm looking at other specifications in the podcast world like Apple's spec, Spotify's spec, YouTube's spec, looking at what their art direction says and choosing whether or not to consume things that adhere to that.

Now I think that's sort of three, if you look at it that way, that is three layers of complexity that you can step up or down to as an app developer depending on how far you want to go. And so I think, because what's your other alternative? The other alternative is for us to start defining these particular pixel ratios and widths. When you see these in the wild, it's this thing. Now just, see, that's not the way these other things are defined.

Like what Apple says, I'm just going to use Apple as an example. Apple doesn't say that a 2850 by 750 image is a banner. They say a banner is 2850 by 750. See, I mean, that's a huge distinction. Do you get what I'm saying? I do. I'm baffled why this is so complicated, why there's a kind of religion around how this should work. I can see the analogy to the MIME type. I can see everything you're seeing. I'm not a software developer, so that makes it easy for me to say.

I'm not confused by why this is hard because I think it actually is hard. I think it actually is difficult because you're trying to solve for a problem that has two opposing sides to it and you're always going to fall a little afoul one way or another. You know, you're going to make it a little, it's going to be a little messy and complicated on one side or it's going to be weak, you know, too weak on the other side.

And so it's like, I mean, I truly am sympathetic to the difficulty here because that description really is the heart of the problem. And that's what it comes down to is you either have to define the spec as here's a banner, I'm just using banner as an example, here's a banner and a banner is this metric or here's this metric and that means it's a banner. There's a tension between those two things and one is much easier, but one is an easier spec, but it's error prone.

The other one is more difficult, but it's more rigid and you're more, it's almost like in programming terms having strict typing and compile time checking versus, you know, loose non-typing. It's easier to program in an untyped language, but on a typed language, once you compile it, you know that thing's going to run. If it compiles, it runs. And so there's a trade-off there and I think that's what we're running into.

I don't know the actual answer to it yet, but I think we can work it out and get a good spec out of it mostly because I really believe that the people who are involved in trying to get it done, I just think that they're capable people who are going to get it done. I'm not so sure, Dave. I love your confidence. I'm sure we can work this out. I'm sure we can. And I'm going to have to stop you there, brother, because I got to get you out in time. Oh, Lord, it's 1.57. Yes, yes, yes.

I'm just talking and talking. Yeah, well, we both talked. I don't even have time for a song. It's crazy. Oh, sorry, man. No, that's okay. Listen, everybody. Wow, this has been an intense board meeting. This is good. Well, it's intense. It's intense, yeah, because there's a lot of stuff to think about. We're rattling cages here with inbox discussions and this image stuff. I think it's going to turn out great when we have agreement on it. It always turns out great.

Ultimately, we're value for value. Help keep the servers running on the podcast index. You can do that in multiple ways by going to podcastindex.org. Down at the bottom, you'll see a red donate button. You can use that to send your PayPal to us. That's highly appreciated. Of course, we encourage using a modern podcast app. Go to podcastapps.com and sending us a boost. We got a couple of boosts. There's one coming in right now. Cole McCormick, 1111. Love you guys, he says. Podcasting is intense.

Yes, indeed. 420 stats from Cannabis Records. I see what you did there. Preview art is very important for us. On a marketing perspective, would love to see that on the images tag. There you go. 1107 from Salty Crayon. Howdy, boardroom. Tomorrow at noon to sometime late in the evening, local V4V artists in downtown Waco. Battle of the bands. Yes, that's going to be good. That'll be streamed live, I presume. Go podcasting. 54321, no, 5432 from Dreb Scott.

Boosted McBoost boost, hashtag go podcasting. Cannabis Records again now with 4,200 stats. Just checking in on the boardroom. The tech solutions here are mind-blowing. You bet. We did the 10,000 from Lincoln. Did the shout-out to Eric PP for bringing Dojo to start nine. I got to go check that out. 2112 from Eric PP. He says, 2112 for episode 212. Thank you. That's a show number boost expanded. 1234 from Dreb Scott with his pre-show boost. And 123 from Salty Crayon who confirmed the bat signal.

Appreciate that. And we are straight. Oh, wait, who do I have here? Let this come in. 420 from Lyceum. Let me see when this came in. Did this come in recently? Four hours ago. No, I'll leave that for, you have it on your list, I'm sure. Yeah, go ahead. Give us the list, Dave. This is going to be the, I'm going to do the PayPals because they're mixed up. I didn't have time to print them. We got, I'll do them all together. Cone Gloss Buck, $5. Thank you. Appreciate that. James Sullivan, $10.

Christopher Reamer, $10. Michael Kimmerer, $5.33. Dreb Scott, $15. Chris Bernardik, $5. And then we had a one-off from Daniel Noblog. He says, I've been, it's $20. Thank you. Thank you, Daniel. He says, I've been having fun building a podcast web app with your API. Thanks for running this project. Oh, let us know what it is. We want to check it out. Yeah, absolutely. And 99% of people who use the index never donate, so it's always appreciated. It might be 99.5, actually. Yeah, right.

And we got some booster grams. We got anonymous podcast guru user. I love that guy, 2222. Nice row of ducks. He says, thanks for being there, even when someone doesn't feel good. Enjoy the podcasting 2.0 updates with a professional but enjoyable casual way. Bruce from the ugly quacking duck. Let's see. Oh, we got, let me see if I've got Martin Lindeskog. I don't have Martin Lindeskog. You want to read him? Do I have Martin Lindeskog? You said you thought I may have him. No, no. It's a lyceum.

Oh, I do. Yes, yes. He says, 420 stats. I am flying high at this moment. I am now listed on the Superfans chart as number four, as being a superfan of the Mere Mortals Conversations, Mutton Meat & Music, Mere Mortals Book Reviews, Into the Dorfelverse, Diabetic Reel, and Disco Swag, a tune by the Dorfels. I have achieved 8,213 points according to truefans.fm slash fans. Total listen time, one day, 16 hours and 11 minutes. I have paid 58,019 satoshis. Where will I be on April 20th?

Martin Lindeskog. High five for him, podcast. Lyceum on truefans. All right, Martin. Very nice. See, that's what Sam's doing something interesting there. He's giving people bonus points and all kinds of things. I like it. Very cool. Gamification. Yes, that's what we call it. Brian of London, 10,948. Sass through Castomatic. He says, podcasting 2.0 has been so successful, it's become part of the background.

Podping is a brand-new internet protocol for notifications without any central control of the infrastructure. Infrastructure. We've barely even touched the future uses. Thank you, Brian. I will tell you, I showed the tiles .podping.org during my presentation. Did you? Oh, yeah. Then I said right up front, now, you don't know what could come through. The images you see may not be safe for this room, but luckily it was okay. But people were just like, whoa, what is this?

And I said, yeah, that's podcasting 2.0 features updating in real time. They were very blown away by that. CommaStreetBlogger, 18,720 through Fountain. He says, howdy, fellow Bitcoin bros, Adam and Dave. I am hobby cartoonist. That's my main hobby. So today I want to promote some of my stuff. My cartoons can be found at www.csb .lol. There is RSS feed there. And please follow me on X at handle at csb.

Yes, just three letters, C, S, and B. I bought that handle from a guy in Portugal a long time ago. And on the Fediverse at csb at poa .st. On an extreme free speech instance, poa .st. Yo, CSB. Wow. Yes, that is quite the extreme free speech instance. Oh, yeah. Whenever you get a mention from someone on poa.st, it's usually not good. You just run to the hills. And then you mute, mute, mute. Yeah. No, I actually never mute anybody.

I'm interested to see what people, I may not respond, but I don't mute people. I want to see what they're saying. I'm interested. I don't get triggered. That's it. Oh, thank you all so much. Thank you. That is a beautiful group. We appreciate you so much. Thank you very much, boardroom, for being here with us and for continuing the conversation at podcastindex.social. We'll get through this, people. There is a very bright future.

Just remember that we've been writing the encyclopedia while not listening to everything that's happening on the outside. And so, hope you're able to gain some wisdom from this Boots on the Ground report. Now, is this, is A Song is Born, is that a movie that should be watched or is it a movie that should just be talked about? I would recommend watching it, actually. It's quite interesting. It's a cute movie. There's cute girls in it. Yeah. Okay. Danny K, man, how can you go wrong?

It's Danny K, everybody. He's perfect. That dude can dance. Yes. Thank you very much, Dave, and feel better, brother. I hope you get through this very quickly. Thanks, man. And thank you so much, boardroom. We appreciate you. We will return next Friday to bring you another episode of the one and only Podcasting 2.0. Why is that so cool? You have been listening to Podcasting 2.0. Visit podcastindex.org for more information. Go podcasting! I want an immediate hammer blow.