Episode 215: Traffic and Weather on the 8's

Podcasting 2.0 for March 21st, 2025, Episode 215, Traffic and Weather on the 8s. Hello, everybody. Welcome once again to the only show that matters. I don't care what you like listening to. Is it politics? Is it about AI? It's all here. Of course, if you're here for podcasting, you're really in luck because this is the official board meeting of Podcasting 2.0. We are the only boardroom that makes guests bring their own lunch. I'm Adam Curry here in heart of the Texas Hill Country and in Alabama.

The man whose static global hash map is always up to date. Say hello to my friend on the other end, the one, the only, Mr. Dave Jones. That went faster than normal. I'm not finished tweeting. It probably didn't go faster than normal. It's the same every single week. I try to hit the post, but sometimes I scratch it, but it's always the same. Yeah, that's what it was. You didn't say my last name long enough. There we go. It's your fault. It's my one day a week I get to play DJ.

Yeah, especially since you hadn't done a booster gram ball in like three months. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm too busy saving podcasting. That's true. I'll give you a pass. Hello, boardroom. Good to see everybody here. Once again, everyone is all set and good to go. How's your week been, Dave? Oh, it's good. I found out I got a leak in... I drove my wife's truck this morning, the 67 Ford, and it was leaky fuel pump. Oh, no. I hate that. Well, I mean, it's got a 460 in it, so it's already...

Why don't you just put the tank right on top of the cylinder head in that case? Put it right in. You know, spray the fuel into the blower. She has a blower, doesn't she? No, there's no blower. I can just see Dave's wife with a blower on top, big chrome job. This is an F-250. It's a 67 F-250 with a three quarter ton axle. It weighs like 8,000 pounds. Is that a dually? It's got the big axle for the dually, but it doesn't have two tires.

Okay. Well, you should get her an extra set of tires for her birthday. Hey, baby, happy birthday. Here you go. Oh, thanks. Yeah, that's kind of needed. I've had a bad afternoon. Oh. Yeah. Well, my umbral, which I have... Yeah. Oh, yeah. Installed under Ubuntu, but never upgraded to 1 .0 because it just all kind of worked. I've been putting that off for so long now. Well, so the node quit and it was kind of my backup node. So I had, you know, I have two channels open.

One from my start nine and then one from the umbral. And then I have a channel between the umbral and my start nine. So, you know, it's two routes, more or less. And lots of people, because that thing's called Podfather. So a lot of people connected to it. And of course that stopped working. And then like, OK, restart. Restart the umbral. No, nothing works. Well, and this is where I went wrong. You just typed upgrade. No, no, it won't. It won't update yet. There's a whole process.

If you're not on, you know, if you're on Linux, there's a whole process you have to go through. You got to export all your data. Then you have to upgrade. And then, you know, it has to start for it has to boot from a USB. My mistake was like, well, you know, maybe you just need to upgrade Bitcoin Core and the Lightning. Yeah, that's it. So when it came back up, not only did that not come back up, it shows starting. But my vault warden also didn't come back up. Oh, so you run personal bit warden.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. How did that, how did that mess up? I don't know. That shouldn't even be anything to do with the other stuff. I'm assuming that's just a docker container. Yeah, well, you don't know these docker containers. There's all kinds of stuff that goes on with that. It's so I don't now I don't know what to do. Because now all my passwords, you know, and I'm like, oh, luckily I have it on the app. And the app's like, no, I can't connect.

I thought the app would synchronize it and it would just stick. Nothing like single point of failure to make your life interesting. Yeah, my life is very interesting now. But then for some reason, I have one Tor window open. Tor window? What's a Tor window? You know, a browser window under Tor. Oh, I see. Yeah. And so for some reason, I can connect to the vault warden with that.

But if I open a new window and try to connect to the vault warden, it says error in device or something, whatever that means. So this this means immediately export everything from that open tab. So I click export. Nothing happens. Can you see everything? I can see everything. I can search it. Of course, I'm deadly afraid to close it. I won't. For sure. So now I do have a vault warden running on the start nine.

So I think now I'm going to have to manually copy the things over that are new since the last time I installed it. So I'm in between like copy all the vault warden stuff over and let this whole thing die. And eventually the channels will close. And I can always, you know, it'll go back to the node and I can always get stuff off in the node with a different wallet. Can you control a that tab? Copy, paste. Well, unfortunately, no, because it only has the entries.

You have to you have to click each single. It's no. Yes. Hey, you can't get it. You can't get a page that just has everything, everything exposed. All the passwords are also hidden. No, no, this is this this is a this is a crop show, man. This is really bad. This is bad. It's bad. Don't you ever close that tab? No, no. This tab is going to stay open. You need. Yeah, this you need to you need to encase this tab in carbonite. Lucite. Yeah, lucite. Oh, man. Anyway. Well, it's kind of interesting.

I was listening to power. Pop up a power podcast weekly review. And I depend on you. That's your beat. Now I depend on you for that because I don't ever have time to listen to it anymore. I feel bad. It's not that I hate him. It's not. I'm not. No, you're not. I just don't have time. No, but I totally disagree with them 100 percent on this episode. OK. Um, and there was something James said, which did I say that we called this part this podcast podcasting to point to piss off Dave Weiner?

I don't think I ever said that. No, we never said that and never did that. That's not true. Maybe we said it as a joke or something. I can't recall it. I could totally see us saying that as a joke. But, you know, that had nothing to do with it. So James like this project is full of ego. No ego. My ego, my ego does not need satisfying. This project is a project of love, baby. It's all a project of love. But they did have Matt Medeiros on. I was not able to hear.

I didn't have enough time to listen because I was, you know, messing around with the umbrel. And I can't mess around with the umbrel and focus on a podcast. That's very difficult. Um, but this, of course, is, um, is all due to the article. Troublemaker Tom Webster wrote. Troublemaker. He's a troublemaker. This is where you say, yeah, he's a troublemaker. Yeah. Which I think I actually agreed with 99 .9% of, uh, of what he wrote.

And, um, you were smart enough as you are because, you know, I listened to podcast weekly review. You booked the guests and you said, Hey, I'm the booker. You're the booker, baby. Please. Welcome to the board meeting. Everybody. The one, the only from sounds profitable. The man with the golden voice, the pipes of lavender.

Tom Webster. You know, I, I'm, I keep going back to, uh, vault warden and I have actually not thought about, uh, my vault warden since I escaped from a Burmese jail back in 1992. This is what I mean. This is what I mean. This is a morning show guy. He's got the voice. You know, you need a couple, a couple of sound effects and everything. And it's not the same without your sidekick though. Carlos and the chicken. Yeah. All right.

Now I promised you when we got, when we first started this off the air that I was going to disabuse you of a notion and this is going to surprise you. Okay. I have never worked in radio a day of my adult life. Well, this is a travesty and a loss for the industry. And you can see the results. You've been in a radio station though. Surely. Oh yeah.

I've been in many, uh, you know, but as a, as a consultant, as an, you know, audience research guy, but, uh, like work for a station, get a check from a station. Never. Well, so what is your background, Tom Webster? Uh, you know, it's, it's really survey research and, and, uh, consumer behavior. And I, I started, uh, in the radio business doing that for a couple of radio. Wait a minute.

Were you one of these guys, one of these consultants who would come in, you'd have the, the rollaway bag, the trolley bag, and you come in and all this, all the DJs would go, Oh crap. The consultants here. Were you one of those guys? A hundred percent. Oh man. We used to hate you. Like, Oh, this guy's going to come in and tell us we're doing it all wrong. You got to keep your brakes to 3 .7 seconds. Well, it's given me thick skin. I will say that. I'll bet. I'll bet.

Okay. Well, I have mad respect for you, man. So when you show up, so when you show up, does that mean a format change is weeks away? Someone's getting fired. Your morning guy is no good. Yeah. It's never good when you see me on the door. No, uh, no, it was, it was more, uh, to keep a, you know, a check on, on how things were doing. And, you know, I've done that in radio. I've done that in TV.

I've done that in pretty much every major media, but I've been, uh, exclusively digital audio for the last 20 years. Oh, okay. So where did you start in digital audio? Was that the days of real audio? No, um, that was still kind of doing, doing the thing that I do. Um, and that was, uh, during my time with Edison research, I, I joined Edison in, uh, 2004. I had, I had, uh, actually gone back to school. I went back and got an MBA in consumer behavior. So I knew what I was talking about.

And, uh, when I finished that, uh, I went to work for Edison in 2004 and, and, uh, ended up really building that, uh, their digital audio practice, which, you know, podcasting was obviously a huge part of it. So this is the start of my 20th year in podcasting. Not quite as long as you have. Oh, that's awesome. Well, I'll have, you know, I have, I have a degree from the Connecticut school of broadcasting. So yeah, CSB. I know it well. Yeah. Uh, what was the guy's name who ran that?

Uh, bill bulbous bill, we called him. Did you ever meet him? No. Uh, I actually have never been on the campus there, but I'm, I certainly met many people, the campus, the campus, the assemblage of, uh, domiciles. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Bulb. He had this big bulbous red nose and we, and we just called him, Hey, bulbous bill. How you doing? And he, I forget he, I was at MTV and he said, Oh, come on by and do a seminar. I'm like, whatever. Okay. You know, I'm sure he loved that. Oh, of course.

Bill was a great guy. I don't know if he's still doing that or not, but then he, he gave me the, he gave me a, a certificate. I'm a graduate honorary degree. So here's another thing I'm going to drop on you, Adam, which you did not know. Uh, during that time, uh, when I was doing research for, you know, I was doing research for radio stations, for podcasting, audio books, you name it. Uh, at one point in the two thousands, I did music research for radio Veronica, which I believe, you know.

Yeah, wait, but I was gone by then because you were, you were, you were, you were gone by who was, who was your contact over there? Oh, you're asking me to remember something. Unico, Unico, Unico glory. Yeah. How funny. Yeah, no, this is, this is after, after Veronica left the, uh, the, the literal pirate ship, uh, and became a, you know, respectable organization. Yeah. Well, I was there when they were respectable organization, but this is when they went commercial.

They went, were they on am only at the time? Hmm. I don't think so. No, but again, what is this? What is radio Veronica? Um, you're leaving me out here. Oh, I'm sorry.

So radio Veronica was one of the many, uh, pirate ships in the North sea, um, in international waters like radio, me amigo, radio Caroline, and all the kids would be listening to it on, on their long wave radios because, you know, it's because obviously, um, you know, people have to have high fidelity to enjoy music, but no, that proved it because there was plenty of FM in, in the domestic countries, but there was, it was all, uh, government controls and it sucks.

And so they, these, they were these outlaws and the way you get into the public system in the Netherlands, you have to have, uh, an X amount of members and members were counted by you subscribing to their TV guide. So there were literally 15 TV guides and you had to be a member for, I think, five guilders at the time, maybe 10 guilders a month.

And so they, they were so popular that there were these huge demonstrations in the Hague where the government system, like, you know, make Veronica legal, bring them on board. And so they just collected enough people spending their 10 guilders a month, um, to become, um, uh, an official part of the Dutch broadcasting system. And they grew like wildfire. I mean, they had, they had, I think, 2 million members of their magazine for a country of 14 million. That's quite a lot.

At the time it was 14 million. And, uh, and so that's when I came in and they really only, they had radio and that's why they had only Friday and, but they were given TV too, and they didn't know what to do. So they said, well, we'll just do some music on television. That's how I started with the countdown show. And then later they went out when you could do commercial radio in the Netherlands, because I think, you know, be careful what you wish for.

Uh, so then they, they jumped out and they went as a commercial station and then RTL bought them is a whole mess. The brand is now effectively dead. So good work, Tom. On the advice. And it's, I was sort of consulting. Yeah. I was the Ted McGinley of radio. I, when I, when I, uh, when I came into your sitcom, you knew it was in the last season.

So what's really, what's really cool now that I hear all this backstory, uh, and I do want to, I want to hear about, uh, sounds profitable, but in essence we are getting a $10,000 free consultant to visit from a consultant who knows what he's talking about. Well, when you put it that way, uh, $10,000 or however many Gilders, um, the Gilder no longer exists. A lot, a lot of Gilders. Yeah. There aren't any more Gilders. So, so poor one out. So when did you start a sounds profitable?

Uh, so I did not start sounds profitable. My partner, Brian Barletta started it almost five years ago. And I joined up about three years ago. And you know, when Brian started it, it was, it was kind of an ad tech newsletter. Um, but we had this idea together that we could build the thing that podcasting really lacked, which was a trade association for the industry side. And well, and you, and you laugh because yeah, you laugh because, uh, it is, it's really been herding cats.

I mean, cats are more cooperative, uh, to try to, to put an organization like that together. So we just sort of built the thing, uh, until it got big enough that, that, uh, we just kind of declared it. Well, here's, here's an odd question then. How come we've never spoken before? If you're going to build a trade organization, I think you would have at least sent me an email. Well, see now. Not that I would have done anything with it.

Well, there's a, there's a very distinct focus, I think, to, uh, I think to where sounds profitable started. Um, and that, you know, it definitely started on the ad tech side. And that's, that's where it grew out of, but it's, it has grown out of that.

And now you and I are talking, I mean, ultimately my, my personal mission in all of this, and I've said this repeatedly is to do what I can to remove obstacles, promote the medium and grow podcasting so that it is actually a source of careers for people. I want people to be able to have a career in podcasting. And I, I, I remember a couple of years ago I was flying, um, back home from Toronto and I'd, I'd gone to speak, I think at, uh, radio days, North America in Toronto.

And I was coming back through us customs at Pearson airport. And the customs officer asked me, I was, and I had global entry cause I've had it for years. Right. And I, I'm going through the global entry line and the customs officer asks me, what do you do for a living? And, uh, I don't know, I was possessed by a demon or something. And I just said, I'm a podcaster. And he looked at me, he goes, and you, you have global entry. This is what I'm trying to fix. Adam Curry.

This is exactly what I'm trying to fix. Well, okay. Thank you for clarifying that because, um, when I, to me sounds profitable is I thought it was still ad tech. And so I guess it sounds like you're, what you're saying is that it's, it's grown into to be a different thing now. It has, you know, I mean, we put out a lot of, you know, obviously research is sort of the, the hammer that everything looks like a nail to me. So we do a lot of that now.

Um, and it's, it's really all about insights, advocacy, uh, and trying to promote, you know, and trying to get in front of buyers. And that is not necessarily your world. And that's probably why, uh, we have not necessarily crossed paths, but, uh, you know, we're trying to remove the obstacles that, uh, brands and buyers and advertisers have to investing in the space because the more money gets invested, the more careers can happen. So who pays you? How does sounds profitable become profitable?

Yeah. Well, there's, there's two income streams. One, uh, we have a very profitable, uh, methamphetamine. Oh yeah. You have been on radio, Tom Webster. You can't lie to me. These jokes are too good. These are good. They're, they're not that good. Um, no, I mean, this is sort of, I think the, the, the genius that Brian had when he started it, uh, there's a flat structure to sounds profitable. It's all partnership. It's a flat 500 bucks a month. That's it.

And it doesn't matter if you're SXM or, uh, just starting out production company or, uh, or, you know, an ad tech tool company. It's, it's the same for everybody. Wow. Okay. And what do they, and what, what do they get for that money? Just your, they get your, uh, industry, uh, sort of inter engagement in order to build the industry to then hopefully get to raise their ship as well. Is that the thinking?

Well, you know, they get, first of all, they brush up against, uh, my aura, which I think you're feeling now. Yeah. Uh, well, I mean, there's some, there are some tangible benefits. I mean, yeah, there are the altruistic benefits that, uh, you know, supporting us is helping to, you know, we've had a, uh, we've established a major presence at South by the last three years that keeps growing. We're footing the bill for that and we're getting, uh, all of our partners involved with it.

So we're getting, you know, we're getting podcasting in front of people. Basically, we're doing all we can in non -podcasting events. Were you getting USAID money? So, uh, no, no, I, I understand that's hard and harder and harder to come by. Uh, so we're not getting... Podcasting NGO is what they do. No, but do you, um, this, this is interesting.

So if you are, um, so if you're an advertiser, uh, you, you want something like Sounds Profitable to be what the Podcast Academy tried to be, but has regularly failed to come to fruition. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I, I think, you know, we are, uh, you know, personally in my, in my career, in my speaking and the things that I've done, I've tried to serve the individual creator, uh, as much as I can throughout the entire 20 years I've been in the space.

Um, and you know, I've, in some cases I've, you know, robbed from the rich to give to the poor. Right.

Um, but, uh, you know, ultimately in, in almost any agency, there's a champion for podcasting and we want to equip that champion with everything that we can with, you know, credible research, uh, industry insights to, to equip them to be able to go in and convince their, you know, whether it's the leader of their brand team or an, or an advertiser that the podcasting is a great place to spend your money. So that's a part of what we do.

Uh, partners also get consulting partners, get access to our research database, which is this incredible searchable archive of stuff that I've built. Um, and they get access to private events. They get access to our Slack channel, which has over 2000, uh, industry insiders in it. Uh, it's pretty active. Um, you know, we're all going to be a podcast movement evolutions.

We maintain a lounge there at all of the major podcasting events that our partners get access to, to, uh, you know, have meetings and things like that. Um, so, you know, we, we've tried to build a community that at least shares a common goal of promoting the space, even if they have different means and measures to do so. So I'm sorry, Dick, I was just going to say, it's being in the advertising industry.

It's like, it feels like being, um, like a tax collector, like the people benefiting from what you're doing, complain about the difficulty of the process and the complexity of, you know, the buying and all that kind of stuff. And then the people that actually pay for it, you know, by their listening or watching the ads, hate the experience. It's like, it feels like sometimes I'm just imagining being in the advertising industry in general, probably you probably get hate from both sides.

Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, you know, I certainly want to promote the medium and I want to talk about why it's a great place to put your money, why it's a great place to invest so that creators can get paid. On the other hand, it's not easy, right? Uh, it, you know, we still don't have great tools to monetize the incredible long tail. Most of podcasting is long tail, right?

You know, and we don't really have great tools to, uh, to open access up to that in a way that's, uh, you know, acceptable to a lot of advertisers. And that's something I'd like to change. Well, so this is interesting because when you say tools, that means measurement, I'm presuming, um, the, the feeling I've had for a long time, and I, um, uh, I used to be on the advertising or on the, uh, advertising based content side. I built a company, uh, didn't exit, didn't do so well.

It was very difficult for a whole bunch of reasons. Um, I, I'm always thinking that, you know, we started off with this horrible metric, this metric called downloads, and that's pretty much what the industry has standardized on. And the feeling I get is that people don't actually want to know the real numbers of people listening because it will probably be significantly less than the downloads. Yeah. You know, we've already been through a period of time like that, right?

I mean, there have been a number of, uh, haircuts that people have taken on their download numbers. And, and, you know, if you're with a podcast host that adheres to the IAB certifications for what counts as a download, right? You know, minimum of, you know, X number of seconds within 24 hours and yada, yada, yada. Uh, that, that measure gets better and better and better.

Uh, what irks me though, is when I hear these arguments from people and yet they're still buying radio and have you looked at how radio ratings are done or have you looked at how TV ratings are done? Oh, they're shambolic compared to what podcasting has. So, you know, a part of it is making them better. Yes. But another part of it is just like, come on, wake up. What's your real reason? So, okay. Well, that, that is my question.

What is the real reason that, is it because they can't get a single source? Uh, they feel more comfortable with a big company like Google. Uh, what, what, what do you see is the real reason? Yeah, I think, you know, there's the reason there's the stated reason. And then there's the actual reason. I think the stated reason, uh, single source does have a lot to do with it.

Right. And, you know, I'm sure Adam, you know, from your radio days, although, you know, I forget what the authority was in, in, uh, the Netherlands that, that was. Right. I know about Arbitron in the US. Arbitron, which is now Nielsen. And, you know, it is, uh, there are pluses and minuses. Yes. It's a single source of truth. Uh, but as a, you know, veritable monopoly, uh, it's sort of difficult to make changes for the better, uh, changes for the better do happen slowly over time.

But, you know, the, the way that radio is measured in, in major markets is with a, you know, a little, uh, passive listening device, uh, called the PPM. It's like a little beeper kind of thing. And, uh, the problem with it is that, uh, the sample sizes are really, really small and, you know, and that actually had a major impact on a lot of radio stations that used to survive with low audiences, but high time spent listening, right? Think like urban formats and smooth jazz and things like that.

And, uh, you know, the sample sizes went down with PPM and some of those stations became untenable because they wobble too much in the rating. So there's pluses and minuses. Now that's the stated reason.

But underlying all of that is the number one goal of, I think the average media buyer, the average, um, you know, sort of brand team employee, the number one goal of all of them is this don't get fired and doing what you have always done is safer than all of a sudden moving new money into this medium that you haven't invested in. So it's, uh, and that's not meant to, you know, sort of denigrate an entire industry people, uh, you know, all at once. I like to do it over time.

Um, but, uh, but it's, it's a valid concern, right? It's, it's a lot of times, you know, in bad times, people, there's a flight to safety in terms of what they invest money in. Um, and we're trying to make the case with the research that, that we're doing and everything else that podcasting is actually an incredibly safe place to put your money. So how do you get from that and that knowledge to it's the apps? Yeah, well, here's my concern.

Cause that's what you wrote about and I'm, I'm in agreement with you for a whole bunch of reasons, maybe different than yours. Uh, so were you just, uh, shaking the basket or what was the point? No, I mean, well, I guess I kind of was shaking the basket and I'm, I'm, I was doing it really to shake, uh, a number of baskets, right? I, you know, I guess I shook your basket a tiny bit, but I'm hoping that I shake some baskets at the industry level though. Um, and, and it's really because of this.

We're not industry, Dave, we are. You're not, you're not. Thank you, Lord. You're not, I don't, I don't think you, I don't think you want to be, um, but here's the thing, right? You're all putting a lot of time and passion into improving podcasting through the open RSS standard. And what I see every year is the share for open RSS declining and the share for closed systems like YouTube and Spotify, uh, growing and growing and growing.

And I think a lot of people have gotten hung up on YouTube, uh, being, you know, really the number one source for podcasting now. And by any measure, I think people have gotten hung up on the video part of that. And I don't think it's just the video part. Interrupt you for one second. Um, Spotify is part of the open RSS ecosystem. I mean, I don't actually participate in myself for other reasons, but you can just have your RSS feed going to Spotify.

So technically that's a part of the open system. No. Uh, I mean, are they, uh, how are they doing with all of the, uh, all of the tags you all are working on? Irrelevant. The content, the content, the content is, is to me, it always comes down to the content. Okay. So why work on podcasting 2.0 then? Well, we started the podcast index. Podcasting 2.0 is this show. That's an important differentiator. It kind of morphed into this is podcasting 2.0, but we started the podcast index for one reason.

And one reason only is that Apple had become the center of the podcasting universe and they were deciding what goes into podcasting or not. They were deciding what content was okay. And in fact, there was a, a recent example of, uh, Andrew Tate's podcasts or episodes being taken off of Spotify. And we simply won't do that. We're, we're just, unless you're breaking a U S law, we're not going to do that. So that's the main reason we did it.

And what came from that is all these developers who had ideas who said, I want this, I want this, I want this. And then Dave and I never set out to do this. We just rolled with it and went, okay, we'll kind of coordinate that and we'll see what we can do.

And that has become colloquially the, the podcasting 2.0 group, but really, and you know, with some apps that came along with it, but there was never a mission of we're going to do X, Y, and Z. Other than we want to have an open index where developers can come, can do whatever they want. And that's probably the most enjoyable. And at the same time, most disappointing. The enjoyable part is we've seen enormous successes with, uh, music, uh, Ellen beats being in my mind, a success.

Now, a success means a group of people who are happy. Um, the fountain app I think is a, is a runaway success for the people who want to use that and want to do value for value and want to use the lightning network. It's they're, they're running a great show over there. They love it. And the people who use it, love it. And that to me is success. I don't think we, Dave and I ever had the idea of, well, this is going to change podcasting knowing fully well that Apple is slow to move.

And quite frankly, I was blown away when they implemented the transcript tag. I was like, Oh, I would never expected that. So, but it, but when it comes to success, it's always the content that drives everything. And that often is left out of the conversation. You know, it's like, well, the apps are this now. I mean, there there's only so many good pieces of content that people listen to and people want to advertise on. And it's very segmented, just like everything else.

You know, look at the streamers, look at the networks, look at radio. There's so much choice now that you have to redefine what success is. And I think that's what I'm looking for is what do you call success? What do you call good? And well, here's my, here's my concern, Adam. And that is, and I say this not as a slam against YouTube, but really as an incredible compliment to YouTube. YouTube has built a hell of an app.

And the podcasting industry has gotten a little bit hung up on the video part of it and not the every single other part of it that makes it a great app. And the more, uh, you know, as, as people, more and more people discover podcasting, they never have to download a podcast app. They never have to even know that one exists. That's, um, that's right. They're just going to YouTube. And here's, here's my issue with that.

My issue with that is the future of audio and with the radio industry in incredible decline, right? It has declined every single year for about the fifth, the last 15 straight, uh, you know, numbers under 35 are really, really not great, right? The radio industry is going down. Spotify's focus is music. YouTube's focus is video. Uh, where, where are people going to get the audio habit?

How is spoken word audio going to remain a part of people's lives if it's not getting put in front of them every day? And increasingly it's not.

And so my concern is that the, that the podcasting industry such as it is, or those of us that have a stake in it, uh, do what we can to showcase audio and do what we can to showcase the communities that can build around audio and make those more visible, make them easier to use so that people don't just default to, to apps, which yes, you can get the content, but that's not their main job. It's fun.

I was, you know, if you think about, um, you can make the case that Apple is the number one defense against this thing that you're describing, uh, but merely by the fact that they have a, an app on the phone by default that just, that is called podcasts. But I mean that so that when somebody says, Hey, I was listening to this podcast and here's the name of it and here it was really cool.

And you flip open your phone, the first place you're going to go is you're going to tap on the podcast, but you know, app, because that's what they're calling it. They're calling it a podcast, but that's really, you know, so you can make, you can make the case in that framework that, that Apple has been the main bulwark against the sort of subsuming of podcasting into closed systems.

I mean, cause like I was reading your, I was reading your article, um, uh, the new one you put out this week and, um, you made this comment, you said, uh, that the shortest path, he said, uh, you were talking about, uh, Matt and you said he read my piece, had a reaction, then took the shortest path from idea to audience, meaning that he posted a video on YouTube. I think initially I disagree, I disagreed with you. And then I did.

And then later I did agree with you, but I'm not sure if it's for the same reason. And so, um, what did you mean by shortest path? Can you make a, define that? Yeah. So, um, basically all of the tools, you know, Matt had an idea pop into his head, right. And, uh, and I've, I've looked, I've shared this with him. It was, it was not what I wrote. So let's just establish that.

Um, but, uh, the title of what I wrote, I think triggered an idea in his head and the, he wanted to get it out as fast as possible. And the, and this was how he did it, right. It was very easy to turn on the camera and, uh, and boom, all of a sudden he's on YouTube and he's on YouTube. Uh, it was easier to put his content on YouTube. It's easier to find his content on YouTube and he has access to the largest potential audience on YouTube.

And so without even thinking about it, it was his default reaction. And I'm concerned about that for, for audio and for podcasting. Okay. Let me, I'm glad to hear you. I'm glad to hear you explain that because this is what, there's a lot wrapped up in what you just said. I think that for, when it comes to sort of, um, uh, the, like debundling some of that stuff into individual pieces.

I think some of those individual pieces really matter because it would, because if you think about it, um, what I was thinking initially when you said that was speed, I'm like, well, you know, I can, I can record an audio in, uh, I can record a 15 minute audio clip, upload it to, um, my podcast host and have it out in podcast apps in just as much time as, as YouTube as recording a YouTube video, perhaps quicker because I'm, I'm not so concerned about video edits, but then I'm like, well, but

here's the, it's really that last part that you said, you, you said biggest potential audience. And it's the last part that I think is kind of the killer and something that we're going to have to deal with is that if I record audio, upload it to my podcast host, and then it gets distributed out through the decentralized RSS ecosystem, then if I want to share it, I don't know what to do.

Like it's that last step in the chain, because what, like what, what Matt did just as an example, you know, record a video, post the link on social media to YouTube. If I record an, if I record my podcast, what link am I going to share? I mean, episodes.fm, a direct link to the Apple podcast web app. There's this really hard, almost sometimes like impossible idea of that you hit where you're like, well, how do I, how do I get a link out to this to people?

That's the benefit of the closed system is that it all goes through one entity. And so you always have one link. It's always a link to Twitter, a link to YouTube, a link to Spotify. There's this one distribution link and podcasting. You have all, what your best hope is to get all these little badges for these different podcast apps on something like episodes.fm because there's one, there's no one single, like, um, you know, we've complained about this before.

There's no one single handler for this thing. This like podcast colon slash slash, then something that opens your default app on every, on every platform. And so you, and you, you could say that that's a good thing in the sense that because there's no default podcast app way to specify that per device, that it's kept people from, it's kept YouTube even more at bay from taking over podcasting because they could just register themselves as the default podcast app on your phone.

And now the thing that, you know, now we're all screwed, but at the same time, it just really makes that last piece of the chain that you described. That's, that's where everything seems to fall apart in my mind. Yeah. And if I could, you know, let me just kind of shortcut to the end here a little bit. If I could wave a magic wand, let me tell you what I really want.

I would like, uh, the, you know, the publishers and the people investing, uh, money right now, all of a sudden to become video podcast publishers to devote a chunk of that money instead to collaboratively building an absolute showcase app for podcasting that everybody promotes. And right now, you know, a number of the publishers have their own apps, but in some ways, they're dividing up the pie before it's baked.

And if, if the industry could collaborate on, let's build a showcase for what podcasting could be. And that, uh, and that effort includes the people working on the podcast namespace and podcast index, right? That everybody's working together for this so that you have developers working to make the tools easier for creators. You have interface designers making things more, uh, more sticky for consumers.

And we have, and we start to build all of the trappings of the things that YouTube has been perfecting for years. And then, then we have something that really showcases podcasting for podcasting sake. And isn't just a feature on an otherwise music app like Spotify, uh, or, you know, or whatever it is on YouTube. But I just, I feel like we're getting distracted by video. Well, okay. Um, a couple of things. So first some history, uh, in 2008, podcasting was humming along.

I've told this story before people were like, oh, this is great. This is fantastic. I'm listening to all these different voices, all these different kinds of shows. And then YouTube comes and Facebook comes and Twitter comes and, uh, podcasting is page 23 below the fold and it, it lingers along, grows five, maybe 10% year over year, just kind of hobbles along.

Then all of a sudden 2014, 2016, uh, we get cereal and cereal came at a beautiful moment because we also had the streamers coming in and people were showing up at the office, bleary eyed because they had been binging five seasons of breaking bad. And here was true crime, arguably still the most popular category in audio, uh, not video, by the way in audio. And you couldn't binge it. You had to wait for the next episode became water cooler talk.

Um, the most powerful sentence in broadcasting across the spectrum is wherever you get your podcasts and my experience. Um, and I could easily, I could easily go with ads. It doesn't really matter, but there's 800,000 to a million people a week who listened to the no agenda show. And, um, we've only ever done audio, but if you look at the stats for whatever they're worth, um, 11% listen on our website.

Um, 17% listen on pod verse because I've talked about it and told them there's a better experience there. Um, but ultimately people are coming for the content back to the pirate ships. You could listen to all kinds of high fidelity stuff in the Netherlands, you know, uh, on your portable radio, but people would go outside, aim their antennas to get the long way version of the top 40 hits that they weren't getting. It's always about the content.

And I think what you're describing is a place where there's the long tail. So, Hey, you got some, you got something that 10 people like you're part of the long tail, you know, uh, the, the buy makes more sense. You can buy across, you know, this huge swath of, um, of content. It doesn't really matter what it is as long as you get, you know, the metrics done. And I don't think that's, that's really what's going on here.

Um, there's just like blogging, uh, people, you know, people started blogging cause they had something to say. And then we had RSS feeds of blogging of blogs. And, uh, then it became like, well, I'll just start a blog and I'll stick some ads on it. I'll make money. And it turns out that really isn't, that really doesn't work that way. People want to read or listen to, or watch things that they're genuinely interested in. And even, you know, your example of push button radio. Well, yeah.

I mean, you, you, you don't have one button on your radio. You've got five or back in the day. Now it's, now you have presets and, uh, oh, they're in ads. Boom. Want to click over here. Oh, I don't like that song. Boom. I'm going to go over here. I don't like what he's saying. Boom. And you know, it's back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Um, people come to content and content that is desirable will be marketable and will be interesting for advertisers.

Now that we've kind of gotten rid of all the, uh, the deplatforming stuff. I know you said a bad word or whatever. I think that's kind of gone by the wayside. Advertisers are smarter than that. Advertisers are smart, but there's, there is no easy way for them to buy because there's not a single platform. I think that's what you're describing where all audio goes into. And I just don't think that that matters. It's when people want some kind of content, they will jump through hoops.

They will beg, borrow, steal to get that content no matter where it is. And that's the thing that YouTube is not. YouTube is millions, hundreds of billions of videos of crap and an algorithm that keeps you stuck in it. And that's, you know, that's a great platform to advertise on because, you know, people are scrolling and TikTok does the same thing, basically Instagram. But audio is something that you sit down, you enjoy.

And I believe that if you take out the discoverability part, which you're correct on, there is no real discoverability other than what's always worked in podcasting is, hey, if you heard that show, you're going to hear it from a buddy that your research probably shows that. Rarely do people search for, I want a podcast that has X, Y, and Z and it pops up and they're good to go. The content is what is always left out of this conversation. I don't care if it's audio, video, or a blog.

The content is what matters. Here's the sad truth about that, Adam, is that, you know, you brought up radio and the five buttons and things like that. And, you know, I can tell you from years and years of looking at consistent data, if you are listening to something at home, if you're listening to something at home, right? Most of the time today that we spend listening to things at home, we are listening to streaming or podcasting. We are listening to digital audio, right?

It's well over half of what we're listening to, right? Same people, same universe, same humans in the car, overwhelmingly AM, FM radio. It's not just about the content. People act differently when the apps are different. People act differently in different environments. It's just not easy enough in the car. Well, that's what I'm talking about. Okay. Okay. Fair enough. I think we're in a transitionary period right now. And Sirius XM, they were very smart.

They got all the car manufacturers on board and probably a large initial portion of their listeners came for the playlist. We didn't really have an alternative. We, I think we had Pandora kind of at the time, didn't really have Spotify playlists easy, which of course is, you know, secondarily, it's killing the artist. But then Howard Stern, he was the big driver for Sirius. And that industry has always been in dire straits.

That's why they had to get together and they've got expensive satellites and there's all kinds of financial issues they have. But they were in the cars. TuneIn tried to do this with radio stations and they found out that they couldn't really make a business out of it. The in-car entertainment manufacturers, they tried a lot of different things. And I think we're just now getting to the point where people are plugging in their smartphones, but they don't have a way to get radio yet.

I mean, TuneIn kind of, but they, and I think the, it always comes down to the content in the car, which is what's the time, what's the traffic and what's the weather. I think that's why people are tuning into radio in their cars. A hundred percent. Yeah. And that is something that podcasting has not cracked yet. It's fun.

This is an interesting conversation because if you think about one thing that caught my eye over the last couple of weeks was this surge to, you know, these, these number ones, these charts from Apple and Spotify, they never really changed that much. I mean, Apple changes more than Spotify does because it's more of a popularity trending chart than a, than an actual total listenership chart and that kind of thing. But Spotify one, especially is just, I mean, it's Joe Rogan.

I mean, it's Joe Rogan every single week for years now is number one. And then all of a sudden somebody else goes to number one and that always catches your attention because you're like, Whoa, okay, wait, something happened. And the Mel Robbins podcast went to number one on Spotify and in Apple's chart. And so they caught my attention. I'm like, what, what is this? I mean, I've heard the name, but I don't know anything about this show.

So I go and just start doing a little bit of research on who this is. And, um, you know, find it, find myself on her website and just start looking through the content on the website. That's about her podcast content. And it reminded me. So what I saw immediately was, I guess, you know, this is a, this is a, the, the episodes were laid out in a sort of grid. Um, and then all the titles were, they look like they were right out of the YouTube playbook.

So one of the titles was six sneaky ways people are disrespecting you. And then another one was, if you're feeling uncertain and anxious, you need to hear this. And, and the next one was get back on track. Five evening habits to wake up focused, recharged, and in control. These are all, these are, these are made for YouTube titles. And it's like, you know, the, the listicle format, um, all it's, all it was missing was like the shocked face thumbnail, you know? Um, but yeah, it's like thing.

Yep. Right. But this, so what it reminded me of, let me indulge me for a second here. What it reminded me of is. So I went to a funeral a few years ago, the happy portion of the show. Yeah. This is where we jazz everybody up. I went to a funeral, um, uh, a friend that lives near me, um, had a family member pass away. So we go to the funeral. This is this huge, it's at a humongous mega church and I'm not a big church guy. I'm like, we, we've, I've never been in, in a big church.

Um, and so in one, I mean one like gargantuan mega church. And so this is a church that's around here and I knew about it, but never been. So the funeral's in this church and we go in and then there's like the, the viewing, the bot, the viewing of the bot, the wake and all that kind of stuff. And then later is the actual church service. And so the viewing and everything is in this sort of side, uh, chapel area. That's, uh, on one side of the parking lot.

And then once that was over, everybody walks across, uh, to the main sanctuary, which is gigantic. And so, um, there's this, I become aware of this like low level, um, there's speakers, speaker systems throughout the whole entire campus. And I get this, I become aware of this like low level, like, um, note, this just sort of like playing out, you know, call it a, you know, call it a C sharp. It's just playing all the time. Just so low, it's almost imperceptible.

And then we walk across into the main complex and there's this, there's still this, this note playing on, on, on this, uh, audio system throughout the entire church. We go in, we sit down, we start talking, uh, we, uh, they start doing the, you know, family start speaking, all this kind of stuff. And then at one point in the funeral, um, the praise band comes in and just, and, and goes into this, the first song of, of a few that they played.

And it was the exact key, exact chord to fit that note. And it was just like, boom, right. And you, you realize, I realized at that moment, I'm like, wait, this is all orchestrated. This is all one giant, like, this is all connected. Um, it's an, I've been living in for the last two hours in a connected experience. That's like so curated and, and sort of like manicured. And that's what I feel like with, with what I'm seeing with YouTube and, and, and its influences having a pocket.

What's happened is people have become so good at seeing the YouTube algorithm and what it wants that they've perfected it now. Um, and now it's, it's getting pushed into everything. So it's like, it reminds you of that Charles Taylor, the idea we talked about a few weeks ago of every sort of paradigm has built within it, uh, the ingredients that will ultimately cause people to shift away from it.

Like it's inevitable that like, like these behavioral and social engineering tactics eventually will be discovered and replicated. And then somebody comes along and brings it all together into this perfect package that just like drives your brain off a cliff. And that like, so that's what I feel like is happening here is the YouTube paradigm. I mean, we may be at, what I'm saying is we may be at peak YouTube right now.

It, if, if it continues down this road where everything becomes, you know, I said this on the, on the show last week is I'm, I'm just as consistently disappointed in my YouTube home feed as I am in my podcast app feed. Um, it just becomes like very quickly, I run through a couple of things and then there's just nothing else that interests me. And I think it's because it's most, it's becoming this kind of stuff, six sneaky ways people are disrespecting you. There's just tons.

There's so much of that because it feeds the algorithm, but it also dries out like meaningful content where, where people are doing things other than just trying to juice the algo. That's really well said. I mean, I, I enjoyed that. Thank you. And, uh, it also kind of exposes a truth, which is that I have trained myself to speak at C sharp for years, um, at that tone. So I'm hoping that I thought, I thought that sounded familiar, Tom.

Um, I, I, of course I, I thought about you coming on and, and how we can help and what ideas we can send out there. And I personally am someone who believes that we have, uh, uh, that we've, we're stuck in a direction of the inbox podcast app. And I think that's part of the problem. And I have advocated for quite a while now. It's like, have an opinion, have a podcast app that has an opinion.

And I always use the Rachel Maddow app as an example, uh, who has literally said, I want, you know, how come I don't have an app that shows me stuff I want to hear. And she, she nailed it. I wonder if we still have that clip. Um, she really nailed it. Let me see. Rachel Maddow. Um, I don't remember what that was called. Uh, but she was saying, Oh, the apps are no good. She was literally saying a version of what you were saying, because what she wants is she wants to see her shows pop up.

She wants to see Chris Matthews and, uh, uh, you know, and Ali Valshi and, uh, and the Midas touch and, you know, all the, that's the stuff that she's interested in. And there's a huge opportunity to create that. And it doesn't even have to be AI. You can just feature those types of, uh, those types of shows and have an opinion. Um, so that's what Fountain does. Fountain has an opinion. They have a social network. They've integrated with Nostr.

They have an opinion about how you monetize and that those money, then that monetization is a comment at the same time. Um, True Fans has an opinion. True Fans wants you to come here to be a fan of someone. And we need, I think we need many more like that, that, that content creators, I hate the word, uh, producers can point people towards and say, Hey, here's a great place where you can, where you can, um, you, you can enjoy this platform.

Now taking into account that there's really, and you just look at the numbers. Yeah, there's four and a half million podcasts, but over the last 60 days, only 427 ,000 have updated the last 10 days, 243 ,000. That's a pretty small pool. And I'd rather be in that small pool than, uh, than on YouTube. But what if we made your life, the podcast industrial complex is life easier. And I'm just going to throw this out.

What if all of the modern podcast apps, which account for, you know, if we could get pocket casts, I don't think we can get overcast for anything. It'd be great if we could. Um, if we took a stance and said, Hey, we've got to change something about the podcast, the advertising side. And what if they all reported in actual listen times into a nonprofit place where you could then have actual numbers.

These would be numbers that would be a sample, but it might be large enough to say, Hey, this is probably what's happening across the board. Would that be something that the podcast industrial complex would embrace and say, wow, now I really know what my ROI is because I know X amount of people heard my ad at this particular moment in the show. Or is that just pie in the sky? No, it's not. It's not pie in the sky. Right.

I mean, you know, one of the issues I think with the, uh, I have not been to the podcast industrial complex. It sounds like something in rest in Virginia. You are the cornerstone, my friend. What are you talking about? We are. Yeah. We are a small company of four humans, Adam. I don't know that we are in that cornerstone mortar. You're the mortar of the podcast industrial complex. We're, uh, I'm from, I'm in Boston. We're the bubbler on the first floor. So, uh, we're the bubbler.

No, I, you know, I, it absolutely would help because you know, right now, again, with YouTube and Spotify's share increasing every single year in podcasting, uh, those are closed systems in terms of the metrics that people have access to, right. You get access to YouTube metrics and they define, uh, you know, a view significantly different to how you and I might define a listen. So it would absolutely help and it would provide some, uh, some safety and some clarity.

It's not going to fix everything because again, there's a lot of inertia on the buy side. Uh, but you know, without a doubt being able to have player metrics, um, and that's something certainly, you know, we, we would love to get more and more of from Apple as well, uh, would help. And it doesn't have to be the whole universe, but if it's modelable, it can be a proxy for something. Uh, and it's a place to start. What, what is your daily driver podcast app, Tom? Uh, for me, it's Pocket Casts.

Pocket Casts. What, so what is your, if you were to think of an idea, is it, well, let me ask you this first, is it Pocket Casts your daily driver because you think it comes closest to the vision that you laid out or do you, or is it just sort of the best of the things that you don't like? It's habit. And that's, yeah, it's habit and habit is everything, right? The habit and default thinking are everything.

It's why when somebody tells somebody about a show and that person is interested in it and they say, where can I find it? The other person is very likely to say, oh, just search for it on YouTube. It's habit. What, so what is your, if you, can you lay out what your ideal podcast app would be? Yeah. I mean, I think it has a finite number. Do you see it in your head is what I mean? I do. I, I see it in my head. I have a vision.

Yeah. All those years that I was locked in a vault in Burma, uh, this vision came to me and, and to me, it, it, it smells an awful lot like radio and it is radio, but it is your perfect station, right? We can do that with music. Uh, we need to be able to do it with spoken word. And, and I go back to what Adam was just talking about, about having an opinion.

Um, you know, if I am interested in true crime right now, I can either assemble my own true crime network with, uh, you know, a magnifying glass and a bunch of searches, uh, or I can settle for one company or one publisher's version of that. Right. But surely there's another middle ground there. Surely there's a way that I could push my true crime preset, uh, and it's always filled with the content that I want. Exactly. Well, wouldn't this be a pot, an app, just an app?

Cause I, cause when you said push button, that triggered a lot of things in me and, and Dave and I are actually working on a project right now where radio stations are now all moving to apps. And I think they're right. Uh, the apps that they have are pathetic, uh, but they're moving to apps for their, uh, listen live and, uh, on demand.

And, and, and it's successful for them in many ways, you know, but as long as they have the transmitters burning, you know, oil, uh, to keep them running there, it's going to be hard for them. But wouldn't it, your push button be, here's my true crime app and you open it up and your serendipity and all the things you're looking for is right there because, oh, here's the latest episode of this one that I'm already listening to. Uh, here's something that is similar to it.

It would just be a bunch of, and this is what the podcast index was really built for to create these types of experiences because you can do that. You can, you can create an app, which is your push button and it will feed you stuff, uh, in a, in a certain category. Isn't, isn't that what you're asking for? Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of, uh, you know, a lot of the creator side of things is very focused on the lean forward listener.

Um, and I, I want to also focus on the lean back listener, not, it's not a false choice. Uh, it's a, it's not a, it's not a binary thing. Um, and I, and here's the thing, and I, I listened to the show last week, um, and I want to talk about the daily sticky thing a little bit, uh, just, just for a heartbeat, indulge me. Um, and when Dave invited me to come on this week after that, I thought, okay, there it's they're inviting a vegan to a steak dinner just to watch his face. Oh man.

We're lovers, not fighters, brother. We love, we love everybody. Um, here's, here's the thing that really, here's the thing that really concerns me. Um, in the, in the article I wrote last week, not this week's, I published a graph that showed the conversion of people who have, uh, ever tried a podcast to a monthly consumption to weekly consumption. And the ratio of weekly, not even talking about daily, the ratio of weekly consumers to those that have ever tried it, uh, it's 50%. Right.

And that smelled bad to me. And so I did a gigantic survey about it, which I just got back. And I'm going to talk about a podcast movement evolutions where I compared that exact ratio with 15 other types of media that we consume. And sure enough, it's very close to the bottom. And yes, Adam, you're right. We don't, podcasts are not the same thing as the radio. They're not the same thing as scrolling through your TikTok feed.

But if podcasting is, you know, 11th or 12th on that list in terms of actually a thing you try versus the thing that you make part of your regular existence somehow, uh, then it's very forgettable. Right. And I, and I would like to make podcasting more of a, more of a friend for people because people don't fire their friends.

It's just, it feels like podcast, you know, podcast apps originally, and they've always been this sort of like, it's, it's the radio and a little out of Adam said this before, it's the radio receiver. And, and your, the idea is that you just like a radio dial, you're just going to go find the content you want within your app. You know, part of the problem now is the, the dot, this dial is now 4 million ticks long, you know?

So you, I mean, it takes like 20, you know, 20 years to, to find the, the thing you want if you're starting from scratch with nothing. Um, but you know, the, I guess, I guess is there, you know, from that, from that standpoint, there's no, you're not really the entry point. It's not surprising what you're saying because the entry point into podcast, anything really, it, it's difficult. It really is just that podcast icon on your iPhone.

Because I mean, the whole debate about what is a podcast is, is tedious and, and it's boring. Um, I mean, really it's, if you, to me, if you say that, if you call your show a podcast, then when I opened my podcast app, it should be there. That's the bottom line.

Yeah. If it's not, then it's not, it's like turning on the radio and this radio show is not the then, you know, it's not a radio show, but it feels like if you're, whether you land on YouTube or whether you land in a podcast app, eventually, if you intro into podcasting through some route, eventually you're going to hit a show that's not on YouTube. And so you're going to go have to go find it somewhere else. And that somewhere else is going to weave you back to some sort of podcast app.

And then you're in the ecosystem in some way. Um, I don't know if that's ideal, but I don't also don't know if it's avoidable. You know, so, so Dave and I have an interesting proof of concept where we are creating, it's an, for all intents and purposes, it's a specific podcast app. You can get it on a webpage, but you can also, there's an app coming as well. You can get it in an app and it's specific to geographic location. And so I'll just take my own hellofred .fm as an example.

So I have, um, and just, just call it an app cause it will be, but it's on a webpage right now and it has a live stream. The live stream is music exactly like K -Love and there's promos for podcasts that are in this app. And the results of that is that of the 100 people a day who listen now, 100 of those no longer listen to K -Love. They listen to Hello Fred here in Fredericksburg. Why? And there's my app before. Why? Because they get the same music, but it's all, it has local content.

The most important thing of that, by the way, for them is it's 73 degrees right now on main street in Fred. But I find that they all are very happy because they know that if they want to find the latest podcast from something in Fredericksburg, they go to this app and they don't care if it's on their phone. They don't care if it's on a webpage. They don't care if it's on, uh, on hellofred.fm. They don't care if it's on the church website. They, and they all say the same thing.

I love it because all the stuff I want from local from here is right there. I don't have to think about it. I have to search about it. And so that's an app with an opinion. And I, and I, and the response I've gotten just from a few times, like I said, on Rogan, like I think hyperlocal podcasts is the way to go. I have hundreds, hundreds of emails from people saying, wow, I never considered that.

I never considered I could just do a podcast for my town, for my community, for my section of the city. I had to write up a page for people to tell them how to get started, hyperlocalpodcast.com. And then of course, directly point them to Dave Jackson school of podcasting because I can't, I can't teach everybody how to podcast. Um, I think there's a shift taking place now. I don't know if it helps the advertising side of it, um, but it may for local advertising.

But again, we've, we've gone astray. We've been stuck in our same inbox model, which can be handy if you just want to find something. But most people hear about something from their, from their neighbor, from their friend, from their family member. And the serendipity and the discovery is in a very small set of things that someone else has programmed. If it's a specific experience, which we should have a hundred of by now.

Yeah. Right down to, um, you know, and I can see you can have the true crime app. You can have the true crime with Gore app. You can have the true crime with, you know, with, uh, only, uh, people getting out of jail after 20 years. There's a million different experiences we can build. And now it come now, this is the big one. It all comes back to what's in it for the app developer. This is our major problem. App developing an app is hard. It's, it's tedious. It sucks ass. It's a time suck.

It removes you from your family. Um, there's, and the platforms pull the rug out from under you at regular intervals. There's that happens too. Um, although I, you know, I, I, yes, it happens. Um, so this is the problem. We're either developing stuff for love because we want to build this. And then, and I, I think most of the podcast apps that have a premium version, I think they're reasonably successful.

It keeps them, you know, I don't think know anyone who's quit their day job except for the fountain guys, but they did get a, they did raise, uh, some investment money. Um, that that's, that's the problem who is going to build. And we've been, Dave and I, we've been talking about this for a year and it's not happening because there's no money in it. And people are struggling just to build the app itself. We've made it very easy or much easier with the podcast index.

You don't have to do a lot of the heavy lifting, but how do we stimulate that growth? If it's the advertisers who want something, then they need to pony up. Yeah. I mean, your favorite podcast, like Tom's favorite podcast app, uh, pocket cast. I mean, they, they really had hard times. It's, they were lucky to survive financially when WordPress bought them. I mean, I feel like they were on their last legs because of, you know, NPR and all those kinds of things that happened with their history.

It's, it's not, especially at their scale, that's not, it's not cheap. And yeah, it really comes down to what we said a few weeks ago. I mean, there's you with, within podcasting, there's, there's this, um, you know, feast or famine thing. I mean, you're, you're not, you're either going to be doing it for the love of it, you know, or you're going to be doing it for, for, for, you know, or it's a full-time gig and you're making plenty of dough. It's, there's really no in between.

Well, I'll tell you the, the, uh, the thing that can, it concerns me and I want to step back just, uh, societally here, because I, I, Adam, I agree with a lot of what you were just talking about. Um, my, you know, one of my concerns about, uh, you know, again, circling back to Dave, you talking about the, you know, optimizing for the YouTube algorithm and all of that is it sort of creates one country, right? And we have been through this before.

It, it's something, uh, I've, I call it the Donny Iris problem. And, you know, Adam, as a, as an ex DJ, you may remember Donny Iris who had hit, uh, Alia, right. And, uh, when I, so I've done programming research for 30 years and, or, you know, back when I started, uh, doing a lot of research for radio stations in the radio industry, there were massive regional differences in music. And like at any time you would do a music test in Pittsburgh, Donny Iris was number one, right?

Those days are gone. And the regional differences in musical tastes have, have disappeared. Uh, that that's happened because of centralized playlists, uh, it's happened because of the kind of, you know, uh, spot of spotification of, of, uh, of playlists and national tastes and things like that. Um, you know, when Ed Sheeran puts out a new album, all 20 tracks become the top 20 on Spotify, that kind of thing. Uh, and so, you know, regional tastes actually disappear and that's not a good thing.

Um, and so when you talk about apps with an opinion, a podcast app with an opinion or something that's hyperlocal, uh, now's the time. Because those distinctions will disappear, right? If it doesn't matter where you're from, if you don't feel a connection, uh, to your local community, uh, then we are all going to get our media in the same way. And we are all going to start making the same choices and it's going to be increasingly difficult to break out.

But what happens then, and this is what, what I'm seeing, what we're seeing is there is an incredible hunger for it because radio specific radio's problem is not necessarily digital audio. Radio's problem is they've given up on local. Facebook has eaten up all the advertising from the local retailers. So they've, they've given up that it's, you know, Elvis Duran used to be the guy in New York now is in 15 markets. So the only localized part from New York is C100 New York and it's 73 degrees.

That's it. And I think people still tune in for the 73 degrees part and your local traffic, et cetera. Um, but I have proof, I have proof that people are desiring something that is local for them and, and it can be all kinds of, I mean, we have a guy here who does a five minute weekly podcast about what's happening in the state Capitol. And why do people like it? Because it's Matt, we all know Matt. He's a, he's mad. He walks around as Ben Franklin on July 4th and he does that.

And so, you know, and, and if I, I'm not doing it, but I know I could go out to retailers and say, I have a hundred people a day from Fredericksburg listening. I can get money for that. I can sell that. I don't, I don't desire it. I don't want to, I don't have to, but I could if I needed to. Um, so going back to local and having an opinion and somehow, somehow creating these, and maybe it doesn't have to be an app. I'm, you know, I'm just seeing that it doesn't have to be an app per se.

People will type in to what they think is their phone. You know, I got duck, duck, go. Do you have a browser? No, but I got duck, duck, go. Okay. And they type in, you know, hello, Fred, D O T F M. They don't even know how to type in a URL anymore. And like, oh, there it is. Click, boom. Oh, there it is. Listen. And there are, they're already off listening on experience. They don't realize that it's a, it's a PWA or it's just a webpage. They're able to listen to something.

They can lock their screen. They can connect it with Bluetooth. That's a stretch, but they do. Um, if they're, if they're serious enough about it, but they have to be interested in it and it only comes from experiences that capture people in that moment, but it's all going to be fragmented. The idea of a podcast app is your radio. I think that's just over. I've said this many times. It's just over.

You know, and yeah, YouTube, you know, the algorithm is kind of your, your app within an app, right? You know, that's, well, I mean, think about it, think about it this way. I mean, if you have right now, there's four and a half million, you know, total podcasts in the index, you know, we, and we, we understand that not all those update, but there's that's four and a half million. Imagine some future scenario where there's, where there's a hundred million.

Now there really is no way to centrally handle all this stuff. I mean, there, it just becomes, you, you're gonna be forced in that room, you know, in that scenario to, um, like niche yourself because there's no, there's not going to be a backend that has a hundred, 150 million, 200 million podcast directory for you to search through. Um, it's all, it's really only doable right now because it's small.

By the way, I volunteer to do a daily, uh, traffic report for hello, Fred with fake, fake helicopter noise. You're in, you're in, you're in flying above. I'm flying above Fredericksburg right now. You're in. Yeah. I mean, we can man the mic for every, uh, for every, uh, hurricane. Yes. I mean, I've all fake high school basketball games. Well, well, just so you know, the kids, uh, at the local high school, they're creating a podcast for hello, Fred.

And it's about the Fredericksburg Billies, our award -winning girls basketball team. And they're just, they're just going to put together a podcast and they love it. They're fine with it. And you know what they love the most? Like people come up and say, Hey, I heard, I heard your podcast. It's so much more than a like, or a thumbs up, et cetera. So the landscape is clearly changing.

I think the most, the biggest breakthrough that could happen for digital audio would be for all podcast apps to use the lit tag, the live item tag live. Yeah. It's astounding what kind of an experience that is when you can listen, you can, you can select, I mean, I've been doing live streaming, uh, no agenda for almost 17 years. And, you know, we have bat signals and stuff fires off and the podcast and people get the podcast apps just for that.

Like, Oh, well, when they, when the, when the boys go live, then I get an alert and I tap on it and my podcast opens up and boom, I'm good to go. You know, when you just check in with pocketcasts on that and see where the, because that's something that they would be riding up their alley. They've added a lot of 2.0 features that the live seems like a missing component. Yeah. Apple should add it. I mean, they, they could, they could capture the entire radio system.

Everybody could shoot down the transmitters overnight. Well, cause then you get your, then you get your traffic and your weather right there I mean, you know, you get all that stuff because it's live. Yeah. And then, you know, the combination of having a live stream in an RSS feed with podcasts, whether it's all the same or whether like we're doing where you, you have a feed of different podcasts that have been selected for you in the most recent episode is available.

These are the types of things that we have to be thinking about. And so as far as podcasting 2.0 goes, whatever we want to call it, it's really about the app development. You're right, but it's not about the features. It's about the opinions. Well, I think it's about shared experience. And that I think is what live offers you. That's one path to shared experience.

Whether that's, you know, the comments section on YouTube or, or everybody, you know, kind of checking in a chat in a chat room that they're sharing an experience and it's when an experience is shared in real time that it has velocity, right. And then it just doesn't sort of languish.

So, uh, you know, finding ways to make podcast content, uh, more vital and, uh, you know, that, that sort of knocks on your door a little bit more aggressively and, and, and gives you that kind of shared experience, I think are all good things. Maybe we're approaching this from the wrong direction. Maybe the hosting companies should be doing more of this work with app developers. Hmm. You know, maybe, well, yeah, yeah.

I mean, thinking about it in that regard, like if, if the issue is the apps aren't, if you may, if you make an app experience, wonderful people will, people will talk about the app experience and they'll, they won't just talk about content. They'll be like, Hey, you need to check out this app because this app is giving me a great experience.

And radio gives you live podcast apps, give you on demand, but there could easily, now that we have this live technology in 2 .0, there could easily be apps can easily add the live component in. And so, and then now you get both in the pod in, in your app. And now you've got, now, now you really do have a sort of like a, this natural transition over to, and, but see, that's where YouTube is hamstrung because they're not going to do the small niche live thing.

I mean, that's going to be a local, those are going to be local podcasters doing, you know, doing, doing their thing because it's for the love of it. They're not going to, they're not going to get, they're not doing this for ad for, for RevShare or whatever through YouTube. That really could be a way to drive podcasting, the podcasting apps as a sort of unique experience. Well, I'll, and I agree and I'll add to that. And I, I kind of forget because it's so normal for me.

Whenever I'm doing a podcast, I'm always looking to the right out of the corner of my eye because there's the, in this case, the boardroom during no agenda, it's called the troll room. And that is an ephemeral experience that people just completely. So on a show day, we have anywhere from two to 3000 people listening live. And a portion of that is in our chat room, which is just an IRC chat. It just scrolls by, you know, it's like, it's, you know, someone says something horrible.

I don't have to worry about it because it'll be gone in five seconds. And, you know, we have a tag for that actually. It's never been implemented. I don't know why, historical reasons. But these types of these types of things, even a replay of that, I mean, it's, it's all, it can all be built, but there's only so many app developers and they are set in their particular path. And I think it's scary for them to change, honestly.

And, you know, the more I think about it, the more I'm thinking, why isn't Buzzsprout the media company? Why aren't they, why aren't they, why aren't they attracting people like, hey, be on our true crime app? That's interesting. You know, they, they, they have the money. Yeah. They are the, those companies most consistently have, have revenue out of the whole deal. You know, I'm thinking about, you know, the troll room and things like that.

And, you know, I don't know how many research webinars I've done in my life, you know, a thousand, uh, and I always do them live and I always pay attention to the chat room and, you know, at least two or three times in the course of a webinar, I'll acknowledge somebody saying something in there. And it doesn't take much. Ultimately, people want to feel seen, they want to feel seen, they want to feel special.

And if there are ways that we can do that in podcasting, I don't think it's a, it's a very difficult lift. Just hasn't been tried a lot, right? It is part of live. It's a part of the live show, certainly that you do. Uh, but it's, you know, it has to become more a part of podcasting. If we're going to continue to create that shared experience that people want to gather around the water cooler or whatever it is and start to talk about what we do because no one else is coming to save us.

You're, you're caller number 12. Well, uh, we'll give you a, we'll give you that experience right now, Tom, as we are about to thank some people who've been boosting during the show, which is actually sending us money. It's sending us money through the lightning network. It's Bitcoin, which, uh, James Cridland says is a Ponzi scheme. So hang in there and see how it works because people feel special.

When I call out Cole McCormick with 11, 11 sats coming in from fountain says I'm live streaming Sunday nights. He's promoting something. I've been enjoying it more and more each time I do it. Yeah. All right, Cole. Uh, Marta Linda's code 1701. That would be the enterprise boost. Did the super comment spaceship booster Graham arrived to your spaceship location? Why? Yes, it did.

He says, go pirate radio, free radio, uh, from my ego netcast site, free radio history and pirate radio, uh, radio North Sea. Okay. That by the way, that's live interaction, Tom. That is boobery who just boosted 17,776 Satoshis, which is about 16 bucks. Then he says we're wrapping up the first season of the skirmish with the satellite skirmish streaming lit May 10th, 2025, four bands, longer sets, new artwork. And mama Bury is joining the fray as a boost alert artist. Beware of the blooms.

And Eric PP just came in with 33 33. Yeah, this, this is, this is see people can trigger these sounds live. I don't know if you ever listened to our show, but they can. Yes, I am aware of that. Yeah. Which you might've heard beeping here and there, uh, 22, 22 from salty crayon.

Dave, here's your beef Wagyu sticks courtesy of the beef initiative family owned and operated founded by first-generation farmers Sawyer and Abby Cottrell in 2021 transitioning from commercial Angus to premium Wagyu cattle, beef, beef initiative.com as a whole long URL there, which you can find on fountain. TJ band name, the beef initiative. Yeah, well, the beef initiative. Yeah, that's a good band name. That's sort of like a punk version of the style council. Oh, poor Paul Weller.

One 11 sats from sir. TJ. The wrathful don't know how you pick that Christian music plays on your hello Fred stream, but you should check out the DC talks album. Jesus freak. One of my top favorite Christian rock albums. Door fulls are around just busy surviving. Thank you for your courage. Okay. I'll check that out. Thank you. 202 from salty crayon bat signal activated. Yes, of course. And we're glad that you caught that. And I hit the delimiter there with comic strip bloggers.

So Dave will thank some of the people who have supported us with the PayPal's and the monthly's. Yeah, we got one. We got one PayPal this week from the guys at buzzsprout $1,000. Now you're talking. Shot Carla 20 is blaze on the Impala. How many? How many CPMs would you have to have for that? Tom Webster. I'm really bad at math. CPM CPM math go. Yeah, I'm really bad at math. So don't ask me that. We got a couple of boosts. Thank you. And we're and I've pinged Tom and Kevin.

We got to get him back on because it's been too long. Well, we have. We have something to talk about. We have something to talk about now. And it's like, hey, you guys should be making apps become a media company. See loss on Linux and it's 2222 through fountain. He says the problem is overcoming known habits. People know how a search engine and browsing the internet works, even though that may be more effort than when you have a podcast app set up. You don't need to learn the new thing.

That's why in e-commerce, allowing checkout without registering an account is super effective. People don't want to do chores like filling in your name and everything in a sign up page or learning what a podcast app is. What's RSS? What's a good podcast app, et cetera? Good points. Yeah, I agree. Very good points. We've got. Oh, and then the delimiter. We just had one boost from the from the weeklies. Comedy strip blogger. Eighteen thousand and ten sets through fountain, he says.

Howdy, Dave and Adam. I'm sure that among your listeners, there are people who could use fasting to get healthier, not just fat. So I recommend free financed by voluntary donations. Fasting app from easy fast app dot com called easy fast available for iPhone, Android and Apple. Watch the easiest, most beautiful, comprehensive and accessible app for fasting made by someone who actually fasts. Adam's gal pal DC girl recommended it. So it must be good. I use it to yoke CSB. CSB is an amazing guy.

He promoted that on Curry and the Keeper as well. He's he just boosts people and and buys the airtime. And if you're not into fasting, the beef initiative, don't forget about the beef. The beef initiative is the thing, man. It really is. It's you should look at it. You should look at beef maps dot com. You can find your local rancher and you can buy direct from the rancher. It's every every month, 20 pounds of ground beef. It's cheaper to is so it is very weird.

But for some reason, it's cheaper to get 20 pounds of ground beef shipped to me from Texas than it is to buy it locally. I know it's crazy. It's crazy. I know. I don't know why. I mean, like whatever. But they they sent me a note the other day and was like, would you like since you do this so much? Do you want one pound packages or two pound packages? They're like they're now they're like bespoking my packaging for me. Who was this? Was this KNC? KNC. Oh, nice. Very nice. Yes. Go ahead.

Well, that was it, right? You're done. No, I've got monthly. So I got new media productions. That's that's a boy. Todd over blueberry. Thirty dollars. Thank you, Todd. Thank you, Todd. Gene Liverman. Five dollars. Michael Hall. Five dollars and 50 cents. Timothy Voice. Ten dollars. Trevor is Satan's lawyer. Five dollars. Where's the six six six that he used to send? He's not doing the right numbers anymore. No, he's just he's his interest is waning. Oystein Berger. Five dollars. Jorge Hernandez.

Five dollars. And Michael Goggin. Five dollars. And that's our group. Thank you all very much. Oystein Berger will be on the live stream right after we're done with his his crazy music podcast, which you can, of course, boost on the modern podcast apps. And thank you all very much for supporting the podcast. This is the podcast in 2.0, but you're really supporting the index. It keeps everything rolling, keeps the the servers humming along. Thank you, especially to the bus bus sprout guys.

We appreciate those monthlies. That really does help. Tom Webster. I'm so glad that you came on. I'm glad that we got some radio experience. Finally, you got a little chance to talk with us. Get on the mic. It's a mic time. Get some mic time. It's a mic time. Yeah, I'm starved for it. Do you feel like we've learned anything from this? Have we have we gotten anywhere? Have we have we have we triggered some? Will there be a new article that you're going to write? I guess that's what I'm asking.

You know, if if we have done nothing more than pleasantly pass the time in a way where that pleasantry is passed along to the audience, that is enough. That is that is sufficient. But these things are continuing to to ruminate in the back of my head and they won't disappear. That's for sure. OK, well, we we really appreciate you coming on. Say hi to your partner, Brian Barletta. And what are you doing this weekend? I I'm entertaining two teenage boys this weekend. That sounds not really wrong.

It sounded really wrong. Yeah, no. Yeah, my yes, I have my wife's sons are staying with us. OK, OK, all right. So video games basically is what you're doing. Video games all weekend long at Tom's house. You know, and board games. We've we're really getting into board games lately, which I'm thrilled about. So I'm telling you, these kids, man, they're going back to some traditional things. Are they are these phones, board games? Yeah. Are they zoomers or they they got to be zoomers, you know?

Oh, for sure. Yeah. Very nice. Dave, are you going to have some downtime? Will you be doing sheetrock? Oh, no, I'm fixing a I'm fixing a mechanical fuel pump on the city. I'm already getting 11 miles to the gallon. So now I now I find out that I'm dumping an extra half gallon between tank fill ups on the ground. All right, Tom, we'd love for you to come back if you next time you write a scathing article. Be fun to have you. And I didn't scathe. There was no scathing.

No, I took it exactly the right way. And you're you're you're speaking my language with in to a certain degree. We may have different approaches to it. And I think that you'll see there are there are changes ahead. A lot is happening. And hopefully some app developers and hosting companies take this to heart. The stuff that we talked about, because I think there's a lot of opportunity and it definitely is not. You're right. It's not a video conversation.

That's that's the reddest of all herrings I've ever seen. Yeah. But it's fun. It's fun to do. You know, it sells a lot of video gear, I'm sure. Well, I appreciate you having me on and I will give you the the highest compliment I can offer is that this show doesn't suck. Oh, yeah, that's the that's the bar we wanted. That's exactly where I want to be. Thank you very much. Boardroom will be back next Friday, right here on podcasting 2.0. Podcasting 2.0. Visit podcastindex.org for more information.

I mean, cats are more cooperative.