← THE Bitcoin Podcast
THE Bitcoin Podcast
Podcasting 2.0: Lightning, Nostr & The Future of Decentralized Media - OSCAR MERRY (THE Bitcoin Podcast)
01:49:08
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- [00:00]
Oscar Merry
A result of people being sick and tired of these kind of media train talking heads, like giving non answers to questions on, you know, whether it's the news or mainstream interviews, like people can just see right through that and they're just frankly sick of it. And that's why real conversations in a long form setting where you actually get to understand the truth behind an individual because you listen to them talk for an hour, two hours, hours, three hours. Like that's why podcasting is so powerful. And it's no wonder that we're in this situation now where Joe Rogan has this much power of influence and influence. And I think it's a great thing. I think it's an amazing trend that we've seen. And that's part of the reason why within podcasting 2.0 we want to preserve open podcasting because it means that this precious thing that we have in terms of these long form conversations that brush aside all of the drama of social media and actually get into the nuance of the conversation, like that's precious to us and we want to make sure that that's not controlled by one particular Centralized platform like YouTube controls long form video.
- [01:19]
Walker
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin Podcast. The bitcoin time chain is 86849 and the value of one bitcoin is still one bitcoin. Today's episode is Bitcoin Talk where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin and whatever else comes up today. That guest is Oscar Mary. Oscar is the founder of Fountain Podcasts, a podcasting 2.0 app that rewards both listeners and podcasters for the value they bring to the platform. We dig into exactly what podcasting 2.0 is and why it is so important. The value for value model fountains, recent noster integration, the power of podcasts, and decentralized media, why Spotify sucks, Bitcoin adoption, and a whole lot more. Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin podcast wherever you're watching or listening. Hopefully that's on Fountain. Check out bitcoin podcast.net for episodes and additional resources. Head to the Show Notes to grab links for my sponsor Bitbox or go directly to Bitbox Swiss Slash Walker and use promo code walker for 5% off. Send an email to helloitcoinpodcast.net if you have feedback or if you're interested in sponsoring the Bitcoin podcast. And if you find this show valuable, consider giving value back by giving It a zap on Noster or a boost on Fountain. I really appreciate it. Without further ado, let's get into this bitcoin talk with Oscar Merry Zap stream makes it pretty nice. I don't like doing it for YouTube, so I've never live streamed on YouTube or X. But I figure if I'm going to do it, I may as well do it on Noster.
- [03:01]
Oscar Merry
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And yeah, you don't need to necessarily livestream all the episodes. And yeah, for me personally, like a lot of the podcasts, I listen to do live stream the show and I rarely actually listen to the live stream or what's the watch the live stream, but I do find it valuable having the audience there participating and you know, adding to the conversation, pointing out things that are related. So I definitely think it adds something.
- [03:32]
Walker
Yeah, it's. You know, I was, I was actually listening to the show that you did on Bitcoin review with nvk and you guys had Kieran Hodelbod and Odell on there as well. That was a great, great show, by the way. I love that NVK is doing that. And you know, if he wasn't such a successful entrepreneur, he could really just, I think, make a go of just the podcasting because he's excellent at it. But no, you know, I was listening to what, you know, Odell was saying just about the live streams that they do because they've obviously been doing live streams for a long time and it is. There's something different about having folks in the chat that can interact live. Like it adds a different element to it.
- [04:15]
Oscar Merry
Yeah, exactly. And yeah, no, that's. That series from MVK I think, has been incredibly useful as a starting off point for people to learn about Noster as well. I definitely found it really valuable listening to all of those episodes. And yeah, when you have those deep dives kind of on one particular area of Noster, it really, I think, yeah. Shows you how much is happening and there's so many areas that I'm excited to see the developments over the next couple of months.
- [04:46]
Walker
Yeah, it's amazing too. I'm not sure. Do you remember when did you first get on Noster? And by the way, I, I do say Noster, not Noster, so don't hold it against me. I'm going to, I'm going to continue to pronounce it that way for, well, forever. But when, when did you make it onto Noster? Noster.
- [05:06]
Oscar Merry
Yeah. So interestingly, I was looking at Noster as a developer, long before I was an actual user of a Noster client. Because to give you kind of a little bit of background and context into Fountain's Noster integration within the podcasting 2.0 community, you know, there's been this goal since the beginning to find a way to have Cross app podcast comments where, you know, a listener on one app can leave a comment on an episode, another listener in a different app can see that comment and go in and reply to the comment. And that way, anyone on any of the multiple podcast apps can kind of add value to the conversation. And it's not siloed in a walled garden. And we've been discussing this within the podcasting 2.0 community for, you know, basically since the beginning, almost three years ago. And we were. We looked at a bunch of different technologies and ideas, and, you know, we even came up with some ideas ourselves in terms of, you know, podcasting specific, like, open comment protocols that we might be able to use to solve this problem. And so when I can't remember where I first came across Noster, but, you know, when I saw it, I was looking through the spec as a developer to figure out, okay, could we use this for Cross app podcast comments? When I first looked at it initially, I was like, okay, yeah, this could work, but it was still such a small project. And also at that time, I didn't really see how we could connect podcasting into the Noster spec because it just seemed a little bit too challenging. So, yeah, I spent some time looking through the spec and looking into it as a developer way before I started actually using a Noster client as a user to follow other people and find content. And then I guess as I saw Noster develop further and also saw the flexibility of which people were submitting new things to the Noster protocol, it made it clear that, oh, actually, you can go in there and propose something. The nips are very flexible. Clients don't need to adopt all of them. And that was really great. And that kind of gave. That built my conviction that actually Noster could be the solution that we'd been looking for. And so, yeah, jumping forward a bit to. It was definitely over a year ago. It was maybe just over a year ago that I kind of seriously sat down and was like, okay, we want to use Noster for Cross app podcast comments. How are we going to do this in a way that integrates with RSS and bridges with rss, as opposed to having to go and ask podcasters, sorry, you need to go and sign up to Noster. Because for me, if the cross app podcast comment system doesn't work for a Joe Rogan without him having to do anything, then it kind of is dead on arrival because it's just going to be so slow. So, yeah, about a year ago, I kind of started a discussion on the Noster Nips repo, just posing the question, how can we reference podcasts in Noster events as opposed to host podcasts on Noster? And maybe that will happen one day in the future. But for me, the kind of intermediary step was always, can we reliably reference podcasts in Noster events? And luckily, one of the things that the Podcasting 2.0 community had put forward again at the beginning, maybe three years ago, was this concept of a podcast guid, which is essentially a unique ID for your show that won't change even if you change your RSS feed URL or change your hosting company. So that GUID should, as long as the hosting companies abide by it, and many of them do follow you from hosting platform to hosting platform. And so once you have a podcast, that GUID sticks with you. And that concept was what I kind of thought would be the glue between Noster and rss, because we can use those show level guids and the item level guids to kind of reliably reference podcasts and their episodes into the future without anything having to change. And so, yeah, that was a year ago. And then it took a long time of, you know, back and forth conversation with people in the Noster community to figure out, okay, what is the right way to do this? You know, some people didn't like the approach because they wanted it all to be on Noster. They wanted the podcast to be hosted on Noster and the episodes to be Noster events. And again, maybe that will happen one day, but you're not going to snap your fingers and have every podcaster, you know, switch to hosting on Noster today. Whereas you can snap your fingers and have a way to reference every podcast on Noster today. So that took, yeah, that took a long time to kind of finally work that out. And I think part of the way we were able to do that is show that there's other use cases, not just podcasting, where you have this like global ID that you need to reference. You know, another example is like books with ISBNs. Another example is like movies that also have this globally unique id. So we finally managed to get that merged into the Noster repo. And obviously until we had that, as I'm Sure. You've seen, being a longtime Fountain user, the Noster integration was a massive change for us. It was, you know, we rebuilt everything. We changed so much. And we did frustrate some of our users as well because they were like, where's the old Fountain? I don't want a Noster profile. I just want to use the app as I have been. So, yeah, I think I'm going on quite a long tangent or maybe just sharing random thoughts. But yeah, hopefully that's interesting in terms of how this all came about.
- [11:56]
Walker
No, it definitely is. And I always say this is a safe space for tangents, for rants and any digression. So, no, you're in a good place for it. I do want to back up a little bit because there's a lot of stuff I want to get into with you today. And again, I've been using Fountain since long before I was podcasting. I was just. Honestly, I'd used Apple podcasts forever because it was easy. It's there when you get a new iPhone. It works fairly well. I noticed it does take forever for new episodes to actually get pulled into Apple podcasts. I don't know why that is. Whereas on Fountain, it's like instantly, because I always check, like, I'm always grabbing links from different podcasting platforms and it's like for some reason Apple just takes the longest. Fountain's always the fastest. Spotify is somewhere in the middle. We can get into why Spotify is a piece of shit later. But I always appreciate how quick it is on Fountain. But I want to back up just a little bit because I'd love to just know a little bit of your kind of story about how you actually got to the place where you are building a podcasting 2.0 bitcoin and now nostr integrated application. And I'll just phrase it in this way. Who are you and how did you get here today to be doing this? What was your journey?
- [13:24]
Oscar Merry
Yeah, great question. So it actually all happened quite randomly and not 100% intentional, which I feel very lucky for how things happen to give you like, high level background. You know, I've been a software engineer for most of my career, so I've always kind of worked in, in tech and around tech and in. I guess it was at the start of like 2021. I was kind of like in between things and, you know, thinking about what I wanted, wanted to do next and had always wanted to expand into mobile development to like learn mobile app development and give that a try because I hadn't really tried it before, and I've always been fascinated by the audio medium. I think it's a really powerful medium because you have all of the, you know, tone, emphasis and personality of the human behind the words, as opposed to just reading the words in text form. And some projects that I've done in the past had really made an impact on me around that as well. I also had a big belief that audio was lacking in discovery compared to other mediums on the Internet. Like, if you look at whether it's short form text or short form video or long form video, you know, all of the platforms that we consume those mediums on have social discovery built in, whereas podcast never did. Partly because of the way podcasting has been historically fragmented across different apps and hosting providers, and partly because audio is much less browsable as these other mediums. Like, it's hard to sample a podcast episode. So I kind of like had all of this in my mind. But really the origin of Fountain as an app was just me saying, I'd like to have a go at building a mobile app. I'm interested in audio. Why don't I build a podcast app that allows you to create clips and have people follow you and see those clips? So that was like the first version of it, but there was no intention to necessarily do it full time or try and run it as a business. And then so I had this app that I built, and it was a terrible app. It didn't work very well, but it was a podcast app. It did do that fundamental thing, even though it was very janky. And then just as I was like playing around with that in Test Flight, no one else was using it. That's when I came across Adam Curry and Dave Jones and their Podcasting 2.0 project. I can't remember how I came across them, but I then heard that they had introduced this new specification into the RSS feed, which was the lightning value block that allows podcasters to receive bitcoin lightning payments. And I've been a massive believer in bitcoin for years before that, you know, was a bitcoiner. Never thought I'd work with the bitcoin technology. I thought that was like over my pay grade as a developer and I'd never really be involved with it. But I was a bitcoin. I was a massive believer in it. I thought it was the future of money. And so it was kind of this weird thing where my interest in audio, my interest in podcasting, and then all of a sudden, just as this app is kind of like Half there. I listened to Adam and Dave, and they start talking about Lightning payments in podcasting. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. This is going to be the future. And so that was the kind of. That was the tipping point to be like, okay, well, maybe we should actually try and launch this as an app and add bitcoin payments and try and turn it into something bigger than just a random little thing. And so, yeah, decided to do that, added lightning payments to the app, polished it a little bit, and then we launched it. And it was still a pretty terrible app when we launched it. But I think within the Podcasting 2.0 community and within the bitcoin community, people did see that it was something new and cool, the fact that you could stream money for every minute that you listen to content. So, yeah, that's kind of like the backstory to it is quite random in terms of the timing. But, yeah, I'm really happy that it's this natural combination of two of my interests in terms of podcasting and bitcoin.
- [18:23]
Walker
I mean, randomness and serendipity are very close together, I think. Right? Like, serendipity requires randomness. And it sounds like, you know, there's that very, like, cliched quote, you know, luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. But I think that's. It is very. You know, there's a reason that it's oft quoted because it's very true. It's like, had you not been in a place where, okay, you have the technical chops to build out the application, you also have the interest in bitcoin where, okay, I believe in this, I've studied this, I am all for this. And then having that kind of technical chops, audio interest, and bitcoin knowledge meet up with right place, right time. Hearing about podcasting 2.0 early on, and obviously it's still very early on, but very early on, that's just kind of like. It's kind of beautiful. Could you talk a little for people that maybe hear this term podcasting 2.0, and are like, what. What does that actually mean? Can you just explain a little bit about a kind of that backstory of like, okay, here's podcasting 1.0. You know, you mentioned Adam Curry already, the pod father. And then what does that mean, that Transition to Podcasting 2.0? What is the jump there?
- [19:40]
Oscar Merry
Yeah, that's a really good question, and happy to kind of explain what that means. So, obviously, podcasting has been around for a very long time now. You know, two decades. And Adam Curry was actually one of the inventors of podcasting. So it was, you know, he played a massive part in taking the RSS feed format and, you know, saying, why don't we put an MP3 in this so that people can, you know, listen to audio? Um, so he played a massive part in inventing podcasting, you know, 20 years ago or whenever it was. And for the past, you know, 15 years, what the podcast, what a podcast is, hasn't really changed that much. It's, you know, a way of distributing MP3 files in an RSS feed with a bunch of metadata around those MP3 files so you can understand what the episode's about. Also, during the past 15 years, you know, Apple were very much the kind of stewards of podcasting. You know, they maintained a directory of all of the podcasts, and that directory was used by many of the podcast apps, not just the. The Apple podcast app. And, yeah, I guess podcasting, you know, didn't change much. It maybe fell behind some of the other, you know, media interfaces that we use today, whether it's like YouTube for video or social media for other sort of kinds. And that's why you.
- [21:31]
Walker
You.
- [21:31]
Oscar Merry
Some. You've seen over the past 10 years, a lot of podcasters will put their podcasts on YouTube just so that they. They get access to the YouTube comments, you know, and people listen to a podcast on their podcast app, and then they'll go and check the YouTube comments afterwards just, you know, to see what people are saying. So that's kind of a bit of a background to podcasting. And then Adam and Dave Jones, I think about three or four years ago, two things started happening. Number one, Apple's podcast directory API started being a bit flaky and wasn't really working for some of the other app developers. And also Spotify was making a big move into podcasting and trying to essentially be the YouTube of podcasting. And I guess Adam and Dave saw those trends as a bit of a threat to open podcasting as it had always been. And so they decided to set up the podcasting 2.0 movement with kind of two main goals. The first goal is to preserve and protect open podcasting. So ensure that, you know, the directory of podcasts is open, any app developer can access it, and the standards around what is a podcast is also open, and it's not controlled by any one company. Because also at the time, the definition of what a podcast is was defined actually by Apple from their Apple Itunes namespace. So that was the first goal of podcasting. 2.0. Protect and preserve the openness of podcasting, because that's one thing that's great about the medium, right? You can choose what hosting company you want to use, you can choose what app you want to use. They're all different. You don't have to use Apple Podcast. And then the second goal of podcasting 2.0 was to advance podcasting and try and bring it into the future and extend what's possible with open rss. So as well as Adam and Dave, and as well as them maintaining this open index of all the podcasts, and that's podcastindex.org where you can go and find all of the podcasts podcast, they also started to develop the namespace, which is essentially the specification for what a podcast is. So introducing new tags into the RSS feed, introducing new features, coming up with new ideas that can help push open podcasting forward and bring it up to the level of, you know, some of the more centralized platforms like YouTube. So they've been consistently. And this is a community effort as well. It's not just Adam and Dave. You know, there's many open discussions on the podcast index, GitHub about, you know, what we should do. But one of those new features was what's called the value tag. And this is what allows podcasters to put their Lightning node information into their RSS feed. And that was the kind of key innovation that enabled decentralized payments within the podcast industry via Lightning. So, yeah, that's kind of a background and I guess the goals of podcasting 2.0, the movement, I think it's really.
- [25:04]
Walker
Helpful to kind of have that background. And it's really incredible to see the, I guess, the importance of podcasts in terms of like, the actual dialogue in larger society. Like, you'd be hard pressed to find a person nowadays who's like, nope, I don't listen to podcasts. I've never listened to a podcast. Like, I'm sure you can find them, but you're gonna really have to search for that. Like they, that is what people do. Like, you've got a long drive. You, you know, put on a podcast, you're cleaning the house, you put on a podcast, going for a long walk, put on a podcast. Like it is what people do. And it's also just beyond just, you know, it is in no way uniform. Like, I mean, like true crime podcasts, for example, are, I think some of the most, like, most listened to podcasts because people really love true crime. Maybe I need to do like bitcoin true crime. I don't know, to really get myself out there, get out there in the algo, somehow work that in there. But no, and it's, it's fascinating that you look at even what's happening in the US like, you know, Donald Trump just went on Joe Rogan's podcast, right?
- [26:17]
Oscar Merry
Yeah.
- [26:18]
Walker
And now you have Joe Rogan saying, well, yeah, I in talks with, with Kamala's team, I'd love to have her on, but I want to do it in my studio and I want to have my usual full three hour podcast and if not, I'm not going to do it. And like, that may sound crazy to people. Like what do you mean? This podcaster is dictating terms to the Vice President of the United States of America, but it's like he has the biggest platform in the world. He can dictate terms and that's kind of an insane place to be at where it's like this, this, you know, Fear Factor host MMA fighter who has a podcast can dictate terms of that podcast to, you know, the Vice President, United States. Like that's just kind of like an incredible cultural moment. I hope she does go on there. I think it would be quite fascinating. But I want to kind of understand too, in terms of this podcasting 2.0 space, how many apps are there out there? How many Podcasting 2.0 enabled services are there? Where obviously Fountain, you mentioned podcast index, but where else can people use this right now? How widespread is this functionality of that value tag? It's pretty amazing that you can zap me Bitcoin if you find this show valuable directly on Fountain or on any Noster client. And thank you to everyone who has done so. You can also support this show and get a great piece of open source Bitcoin hardware by going to Bitbox Swiss Walker and using the promo code walker for 5% off the easy to use Bitcoin only Bitbox O2 hardware wallet, then get your bitcoin off the exchange and into your own self custody. The Bitbox team is fantastic and they build easy to use secure open source solutions to keep your Bitcoin safe from government confiscation. But also Bitbox is one of the only two hardware wallets to actually address the dark Skippy vulnerability. So if you have a bitbox you are in luck. And I really cannot emphasize this enough, but the Bitbox O2 is super easy to use whether you're brand new to Bitcoin and it's your very first time setting up a hardware wallet. So you're understandably a little bit nervous or you are a well seasoned psychopath. Again, it's bitcoin only and again it is fully open source. Head to their GitHub and verify that for yourself if you want. There is no need to trust me or bitbox. When you go to bitbox Swiss Walker and use the promo code Walker, not only do you get 5% off a great piece of bitcoin hardware, but you also help support this show. So thank you.
- [28:53]
Oscar Merry
Yeah, great question and definitely just to touch on like what you said about the power and influence of podcasts. I couldn't agree more. And I think, you know, it's a result of people being sick and tired of these kind of media trained talking heads like giving non answers to questions on, you know, whether it's, you know, the news or you know, like more mainstream interviews, like people can just see right through that and they're just frankly sick of it. And that's why real conversations in a long form setting where, you know, you actually get to understand the truth behind an individual because you listen to them talk for you know, an hour, two hours, three hours, like that's why podcasting is so powerful. And it's no wonder that we're in this situation now where Joe Rogan has this much power of influence and influence and I think it's a great thing. I think it's an amazing trend that we've seen and that's part of the reason why within podcasting 2.0 we want to preserve open podcasting because it means that this precious thing that we have in terms of these long form conversations that, you know, brush aside all of the drama of social media and actually get into the nuance of the conversation, like that's precious to us and we want to make sure that that's not controlled by one particular centralized platform like YouTube, controls long form video. So yeah, it's fascinating to me. And also the other thing, and you touched on it as well, it's like podcasts also don't have this, they're not competing with this overly crowded, attention driven social media screen based app experience, they're just a totally different thing. So you can jump in the car, you can stick on a podcast, you don't have to look at your screen, you don't have to look at a social media feed, you're just listening, you can do the same. Yeah. While you're out on a walk. So yeah, I think the podcast medium is really something special. It's precious and we need to make sure that it stays open. But yeah, to answer your question specifically, podcasting 2.0 is way bigger than just Fountain, and Fountain is just one small part of this bigger movement. And there's many, many different apps and services that contribute to podcasting 2.0. So there's a bunch of other podcasting 2.0 apps like fountain that support value for value, that support lightning apps like Podverse and Podcast Guru. The beauty of what Podcasting 2.0 is doing is that it's not constrained to one app. And if Fountain's not around in the future, I'm hoping we will be. But you can always switch to another app, and you can bring your shows with you, and you can still support your favorite podcast with Bitcoin. So, yeah, it's open, there's many different apps and services. And then in terms of the adoption, it's important to note that the hosting companies are also adopting the new podcasting 2.0 features. It takes time, but slowly the hosting companies are starting to adopt the new features. And so, you know, I spoke about the podcast GUID tag and how important that is for what we're doing with Noster. Like, most of the hosting companies now support the GUID tag, the new transcripts tag that allows any episode to have a transcript provided by the podcast that most of the hosting companies support. That now even the Apple Podcast app now supports that tag that was introduced via podcasting 2.0. So, you know, it's not. It is gaining adoption, and because it's an open specification, hosting companies can choose, you know, which new tags to adopt and when they do it, and it is having adoption within the broader podcasting industry when it comes to the value tag and Bitcoin and Lightning, obviously there's that mainstream, you know, kind of hesitation around Bitcoin, which I'm sure you've come across before. And so that has been slower on the hosting company side, but we feel like that's our opportunity to show the rest of the podcast industry why Lightning is such a good fit for open podcasting and what you can do with it. And that's like our number one focus with Fountain. But, yeah, my view for the future is that the way that we keep podcasting open and stay, you know, protect the precious medium that we have is to help podcasters get paid with this open payment protocol called Lightning. And also now with Noster, to help listeners and, you know, podcasters and whoever's interested in podcasts to kind of share episodes, discover new episodes, have conversations around episodes without that being locked to any one app or platform. Or service. So yeah, I think the addition of Lightning for open payments and noster for OpenSocial, when you add that into what was an already amazing system, which was open content by rss, I think rss, Lightning and Noster together are just an amazing fit. And we can actually, you know, keep podcasting open, but elevate podcasting to where you have the same kind of, you know, useful features as like you see on YouTube.
- [34:41]
Walker
It's interesting to me because ultimately all of this stuff comes down to a better user experience, right? It's a better user experience for the listener, it's a better user experience for the podcaster themselves. Like all of these Podcasting 2.0 initiatives are striving to make that experience, whether you be listener or you be host, better for you. And so it's kind of this amazing thing where if you want to remain competitive as a podcasting app, podcasting service, platform, whatever, it's in your best interest to adopt these things because you are going to have happier users because of them. It's not like you don't need to force this down people's throats. It's like it's fairly self evident why these things are good and why people would want them. Like transcripts. Yeah, that's. It's pretty obvious why that, that's, you know, useful. Perhaps things like the value tag and Bitcoin over Lightning are maybe not as self evident, they're self evident to bitcoiners, but maybe not as self evident to as you touched on kind of that larger population. Yet I think we're getting there. As the Overton window shifts, as bitcoin becomes a part of just mainstream discourse, we're seeing that shift where it becomes kind of impossible to ignore. And the fact that you can do things with Bitcoin over Lightning that you just can't do effectively with Fiat Rails. You're streaming these sats in a way that is frictionless, does not involve middlemen. It's quite beautiful. And I'm curious, you know, I want to get into the Noster integration specifically a little bit and just kind of go down that. Because when I heard you guys were doing that and I was thankful I got a chance to play around on the beta a little bit, which was just awesome because as soon as you guys said you were doing it, I was like, oh, this? It was kind of like, oh, duh, of course that makes sense. But I didn't really see it coming that you guys were going to implement something like that. And you did it in a relatively Kind of short time. And I think for you guys it was incredibly forward thinking and also solved a problem for you in terms of not wanting to make yourself a walled garden. So can you kind of talk about a little bit? What, you know, Fountain already had some of these social components built in, so people may say, okay, well then what's. And maybe you had some users say, well, why did you add Nostradis? What's, what's the point of doing that? Can you talk a little bit about why that was important to make that shift and kind of what additional things it enables for users beyond what you guys already had before, which was. Was really great, but you've taken it to another level now.
- [37:27]
Oscar Merry
Yeah, there's so much to talk about here, but yeah, I'll get into all of it. Yeah, I guess the first thing to cover is, as I said before, the concept or notion of cross app podcast comments is something that everybody within the podcasting 2.0, like developer community and you know, those that, you know, participate in. There's a, There's a podcasting 2.0 podcast that Adam and Dave do every Friday and you know, there's like a die hard group of listeners and developers that listen and participate every week. And we've been talking about cross app comments for years, since the beginning. And the reason that is so important is exactly as you say, because if the content is open and we manage to keep open RSS as the bedrock of podcasting, the payments are open because we use the Lightning network and can work between any app and hosting company without having to do an integration. It just works without permission. But then you have social features that only work within one app, then you're kind of like falling at the last hurdle and you're not actually achieving what you set out to do, which is keep podcasting open. Because I do believe, and I think everyone else sees this as well, that social dynamics within media are important. You know, it's nice to be able to see someone you follow and respect recommend an episode, and that's why you know that that's a useful thing. And we want to bring social features to podcasting. But again, if those social features only work in one app, then it defeats the point of keeping things open. So we've always had this idea in our head of cross app podcast comments. And yeah, over the years, we've tried a bunch of different things. We've looked at many different protocols. We've even come up with some really bad protocols ourselves. And yeah, for me, the more I learned about Noster it became clear that Noster was the way to go because it's incredibly simple, it is decentralized, it's flexible, such that we can introduce new things that are needed for podcasting specifically. And also there's the natural affinity to Bitcoin and Lightning because, you know, it is a challenge to onboard people that have never purchased Bitcoin before if you ask them to, you know, buy Bitcoin so they can use it in their podcast app. It's confusing as hell, and it is, you know, a difficult experience. And Noster clients have the same issue whereby they're trying to onboard people to use Bitcoin in a. In a kind of social way. And I think that the Noster Clients and Podcasting 2.0 apps that support Lightning can learn a lot from each other in terms of how to do that in the best way, how to communicate it, and also which tools to use for things like on ramps. So, yeah, over time, it became clear to me that Noster was the right solution for this cross app comments for podcasting. And yeah, then for like, since, like over a year ago, I was kind of like, heads down, planning to just rebuild Fountain using Noster. And that was, you know, a big challenge for two reasons. One, we had to propose this change to or this addition to the Noster spec to be able to reference the podcast episodes and shows in a way where any app can query them from any relay using the existing Noster tagging system. And that's really important as well, because obviously we don't want to just build. We don't want to use Nostr in a way that is only being used by Fountain because again, it defeats the point. So we spent a lot of time figuring that out and making sure that the specification was correct. And then the second part was just rebuilding the app because again, that, you know, we had social profiles, we had follower relationships in Fountain, we had comments in Fountain, and we had activity feeds in Fountain, and we had. We had all of this, you know, data and to rebuild all of that. You know, it's hard enough rebuilding your entire social system in an app, but if you have to do it when you actually can't create the new data until a user has their key in the app, then it's even harder because you can't just run a migration script to change the data. You need to wait for the moment that that user chooses to join Nostr. So it was a really difficult thing to do, and we tried our best to do it in the right way, but it was really hard and so there were some aspects to it that frustrated the users that weren't as convinced as us that Noster was the right thing to do for open podcasting. But, yeah, over the past year, we managed to get it done, get it into beta three or four months ago, and launch it a couple of months ago. But, yeah, for me, there's two sides to it. One is what I talked about, which is preserving open podcasting because we think it's such a brilliant medium. But the other side is for Fountain. I think it is amazing, too, because it adds so many cool layers to Fountain. Like, one of the things we've heard time and time again from podcasters is that they really love receiving boosts, not just because of the money and the encouragement that it. You know, it's the money. Obviously, getting paid is always good. It's the encouragement, which feels really good to know you're not just speaking into a void as a podcaster and people really value what you're doing. But also because of the way we highlighted the boost in the home feed in Fountain, it would also generate discovery for those podcasters, and other people would discover the show. But obviously, only people that are already using Fountain would discover the show that way. And now we have Noster. It just kind of accelerates that dynamic because every boost that you send goes out into the wider Noster network, and anyone can see it, anyone can repost it. It can be surfaced in any client. So, yeah, it's massively beneficial to Fountain for that reason. And also it makes it easier for new users to join Fountain, because joining a new app and rebuilding your social graph is kind of a pain. You don't really want to do it. You don't want to go and invite everybody out there. So, yeah, for those two reasons, not only does it help us in our goal to keep podcasting open, but I think it's also great for Fountain and for Fountain users and their experience of the app. And I think, you know, there's still. It's very much like a V1 of the noster stuff we want to do in Fountain. And I want to make things so much better, especially with, like, the home feed and the way you discover episodes. But I think already we've seen that there's, like. There's some really, like, cool things that are happening in terms of discovering episodes that were shared outside of Fountain in Fountain.
- [44:58]
Walker
I mean, that was the amazing thing for me was the first time trying out the beta was okay. I just boosted a show, and now that show is also published as an event or I should say my boost, my comment, whatever. I said, oh, this is a great episode that's also put out there on my published from my end pub. That's awesome. And it's, and it's just, it's seamless. Right. And I'm also sending value as a part of that. And then the other thing is the fact that you guys are, you are basically Fountain becomes, you know, a Noster client that is audio centric and enables people to. Okay, I want to, like, I can use Fountain for podcast discovery from my network because I can go into my feed in Fountain and it's going to pull out basically and correct me if I'm wrong here, but it pulls out all of the, any content that doesn't have an audio related, you know, podcast related episode in it and just leaves you with anything related to a podcast. Or now you guys have music in there as well. But that's pretty cool because it's like, you're right. Discovery. Podcast discovery is really difficult. Like, okay, you open up Apple podcasts and they give you, here's the ones you should listen to if you like politics and it's like up for up first and whatever other NPR shows there are and that kind of thing. And that's fine. But that really, all that does is make the already big shows even bigger and kind of hinders any sort of small upstart from having a chance at being just randomly discovered. Like, it's just not going to happen. But when you put the social graph layer in there, that's then allowing all of your network to be in service of you finding great new content that you may not have seen before. Like that's, that's putting that, you know, kind of like a hive mind discovery tool into effect. And do you guys, I don't remember, do you pull in also? Like, if somebody posts an Apple podcast link on Noster, do you pull that in as well? Like you pull in any podcasting content, basically, right?
- [47:09]
Oscar Merry
Yeah, so yeah, that's exactly it. And we haven't got this working 100% yet, so it doesn't always work, but we're improving it. But yeah, what we do is we look for episode links and show links from any podcasting platform or app. And then we kind of determine that, okay, this post from one of the people you follow on Noster is related to podcasts and we'll include that in the home feed. And then if we can determine what the episode is, because again, podcasting is open, which is so amazing, then what we can do is even though that person that you follow on Noster shared an Apple Podcast link or a Spotify link, we can actually insert the Fountain content card in the app so that you can just add to your queue or star or download to play. And we'll keep the Apple podcast link in there because that's what the person intended to share. But yeah, you know, the thing that I love about this, and actually it happened to me like a week after we launched it and I was so happy that it did because again, it's very much a v1 with the noster features and there's, you know, there's so much more that we need to do to improve it. But will from Damascus, because the other thing is it's about frequency of posting. If you look on a micro blogging app like Twitter or any of the Noster clients, generally you're only going to see content from like the last 24, 48 hours because that's the way these apps work. There's like a recency bias. But obviously people share podcasts a lot less frequently. And so, and also you don't necessarily, you're not necessarily looking for a new, something new to listen to every day. Maybe once a week or maybe even a couple of times a month, you'll look for something new to listen to that's not already in your queue. And so what you really want is you want to filter only the podcast related shares from your main social media feed so that you can go back in time more because you know, if you shared an episode last month, I might want to see that in my home feed because maybe it's interesting to me. And you know, obviously we could never do that with Twitter because, well, number one, it would probably cost us a crazy amount. And number two, they could always turn off their API like we've seen in the past. But with Noster, the data is open and so we can do that. And yeah, it happened to me with Will shared an Apple podcast link, hopefully we get him on Fountain one day. But he shared an Apple podcast link and it was some physics podcast that I'd never heard about before and the episode looked really interesting to me and we were able to reverse engineer what episode it was, display the Fountain content card in the app and I just added it to my queue in, you know, one tap and, and he'd shared it like a week before as well. So I totally missed it on Noster because of that recency bias. But I was able to see it in Fountain. So yeah, that's another example of how Noster doesn't just help us with our kind of mission to keep podcasting open, but it also just allows us to create these really cool discovery experiences. And again, we really need to make the app so much better and allow people to have these experiences more regularly. And there's a lot to do. But, yeah, I think stuff like that is just so cool.
- [50:58]
Walker
Are you at a stage right now with Fountain where you feel, okay, you've got the Nostra integration was obviously a big. That was a lot of work, but you've got that integrated now. Do you feel that you're at kind of a polishing stage right now, or are you still looking to roll out new features kind of. Where are you at from just like a development standpoint?
- [51:17]
Oscar Merry
Yeah, so we're definitely in a polishing mode. We're not going to be launching anything new very soon, although we do have an interesting thing coming in the next two weeks, but it's not really a new thing. But, yeah, like to give you a view into what we've been working on since the Noster integration. We actually completely rebuilt the content library architecture to make things more performant in an offline mode and use less data and things like that. So, like, we want to. You know, I'd love to spend every day working on these cool Noster discovery features, but, you know, I'm very aware that Fountain is also a podcast app first, and we need to make the podcast listening experience as good as it can be. So we've worked on rebuilding the library architecture that's now live, and we're also currently working on improving the audio interfaces, so things like carplay work better. Things like scrubbing speed, all of these small things that you probably would never think about, but we want to just make sure are as smooth and reliable as possible. So we've been working on all of that. And then, yeah, the next few months, probably into next year, I don't think we'll be necessarily launching anything new. But we just want to polish the Noster experience and make sure that it provides more of those unique discovery moments where you can find something cool. Because that's the thing. People are into really niche and interesting topics. And it's fascinating. If you ask somebody, like, what niche podcast are you into right now? They will tell you something different every time. You have never heard of the show, you have never even maybe heard of the topic, and you go and check out those episodes and you are probably not going to be interested enough to subscribe to the show or follow the show. And get every episode. But there is probably something fascinating in there that you would really enjoy adding that single episode and just exploring another part of the world. As we talked about driving or doing the chores or whatever. So, yeah, we just want to make it easier for people to do that and also just continue to improve the app. Like I said, things like CarPlay, things like Just the basics that we're getting close, but there's still more that we need to do on that.
- [53:49]
Walker
I mean, I've got to say, the fountain carplay works very well for me. I'm sure there's like, little things that you notice that I would not notice. But, like, from a user perspective, I mean, I use fountain all the time in my truck and it works great. So excited to see what even more polishing would do to that. But speaking of niche podcasts, is there a. So what niche podcast are you into? Or niche to podcast topic?
- [54:17]
Oscar Merry
So my, like, niche topic is history. I'm a massive fan of, like, you know, and I listen to a lot of, you know, history audiobooks as well. But my number one recommendation is there's a podcast called Fall of Civilizations Podcast, which is amazing. They release very infrequent episodes, like, maybe only every six months, but they do like, three, four hours on, like, the collapse of an ancient civilization. So whether that's, you know, the Romans or the Byzantine Empire or the Han dynasty in China. And it's amazing. I actually hate to admit this, but it's. It is a podcast, but it's actually better to go and watch it on YouTube because they do have some. Some good visuals in the video versions. But again, another thing that podcasting 2.0 is pushing is the adoption of the video alternate enclosure tag so that, you know, you don't need to go to YouTube to get the video version. You can get it in your podcast app. So hopefully one day we'll have the video version of that in Fountain as well. But yeah, Full of Civilizations podcast, I would highly recommend. Even if you're not that into history, they're quite like, obviously they're three, four hours, but, you know, they're just done really well. As well as the historical information, you really, the narrative is really good, so you feel really drawn into the people of that time as well. So, yeah, I would definitely recommend that.
- [55:47]
Walker
I'm going to have to check that one out because Carl and I take a decent number of longer drives. And so, like, we always end up searching for, like, okay, we want a new podcast to listen to for this. We don't just Want, like a, you know, necessarily always, like a talking head type one. Like, we go for, like, history deep dives as well and sometimes find ourselves way back in, like, super old episodes. Because that's the thing. Like, people have been putting out really incredible podcasts for a long time now. Like, there's a lot of stuff that, like, if you're only looking at new stuff that's come out, you're going to miss some really great stuff that's been around there forever and been downloaded countless times off that RSS feed. But no, I'm going to have to. You said Fall of Civilizations.
- [56:29]
Oscar Merry
Yeah. Yeah.
- [56:30]
Walker
Okay. I'm gonna have to check that out. And, you know, I'm. I didn't know actually about the video part that that was part of the Podcasting 2.0 initiative. So is that basically, like, this is kind of a good transition a little bit into. I did want to talk about some of the problems with places like Spotify, for example. Now, Spotify obviously, like, very famously brought Joe Rogan, you know, signed. I don't remember how big that deal was, like, 100 million. It was some absurd number for him to be exclusively on Spotify. And obviously his show is audio and video, and Spotify supports video as well. I'm assuming they're not doing that on any sort of open podcasting 2.0 standard. That's all Walled garden. Something that blew my mind from your. When you were on Bitcoin review. I think it was maybe Odell was mentioning this, that in Spotify, you actually, if you're like, So I use RSS.com for my hosting because. Because when I was creating a podcast, I was like, well, let's just go to RSS.com that seems like an easy way to do it, and I've stuck with it and I like it. But you mentioned that.
- [57:41]
Oscar Merry
Yeah.
- [57:41]
Walker
If you're looking at any of your podcasting metrics, they're probably not really giving you accurate numbers from Spotify because Spotify keeps a lot of that, like, in house. And so I went in there and I tested that today, actually, and I found that I had, you know, like 70 or 60 or 70,000 downloads that Spotify's dashboard was showing me, like, just in there. And I'm like, oh, well, that doesn't jive with the numbers that I'm seeing allegedly from Spotify and rss. So is all that Spotify's building, like, completely closed off? They are just literally a walled garden of a platform.
- [58:16]
Oscar Merry
Yeah. That is the direction they're going in, unfortunately. And, you know, it. It's an interesting. It's interesting how it happened. So Spotify moved into podcasting in a big way a few years ago, and they did so through acquisitions, both in terms of content with, you know, exclusive deals with people like Joe Rogan, but also through acquiring other companies. And one of the companies they acquired was Anchor, which was a free podcast hosting company. And it's really fascinating because the CEO of Anchor, a few years after joining Spotify, wrote this blog post explaining how RSS was like an old protocol that, you know, couldn't move the podcasting space forward. And that's why Spotify have had to kind of like, sidestep RSS and build all of this custom stuff that only works in Spotify. And I think, you know, and he wrote that just as podcasting 2.0 was starting to emerge. So, you know, I'd love to have a conversation with him one day and say, you know, look at what we've been doing in OpenRSS, which is recreating all of the features that you have built in your own walled garden within Spotify. And do you still think RSS is a broken protocol? Because it seems to be working for us, and obviously the things that it can't do, we can use other protocols like Noster and Lightning to bridge into it and fill those gaps. But, yeah, I think they internally, through this acquisition of Anchor, looked at rss, didn't think that they could change RSS because it's difficult for one company to change a protocol. That's why the podcasting 2.0 movement is so important, because it's not controlled by one company. And I think that they just decided, okay, we're just, we want to be the YouTube of podcasting, and there's no point doing it on open rss. We're just going to build our own kind of layer. And so that's why, you know, video on Spotify only works on Spotify. Even, you know, the transcripts that you get on Spotify, because they do support transcripts for some podcasts, they don't follow the open standard. They just have their own transcripts thing. And so, yeah, they're kind of like going their own route. And, yeah, I guess it's our job in the open world to try and make sure that there's an open version of all of the features that they have. And obviously, video is something that we do want to get to eventually. So, yeah, hopefully one day soon we'll have that.
- [61:07]
Walker
It's such an interesting kind of, like, polar opposite from what you guys are doing at Fountain, because, okay, they are building a walled garden and they are building the walls really high, right? They are trying to make sure that they do not want. They want to keep everybody within that Spotify ecosystem. They want you paying for your Spotify membership. They want you to not leave that app and go somewhere else. So they've got the video in there, too. So you don't have to go to YouTube, right? Exclusive partnerships so that you can only find, you know, certain types of certain people's content on there. And then there's Fountain, which is saying, oh, we're going to, in fact, pull in to our social feed that we now have enabled through another open protocol, Nostr. We're going to pull in. We'll pull in that Spotify link and we'll pull in that, you know, that Apple podcast link or wherever it might be and will enable. But you can still watch in Fountain, but we're not going to try to hide that and building out. What I think is so brilliant about you guys taking this kind of jump and building on Nostr is that Fountain, not only do your users benefit, that's very obvious. Not only do podcasters benefit because discoverability of their show is easier, but you, as Fountain, benefit because you benefit from Nostr's network effect. So as that Noster network grows, that you guys are now basically a, you know, a podcasting micro client built on top of Noster. And so anyone that is joining that Noster network as that network grows, you're not saying, oh, we need to get more Fountain users, like, you will get more Fountain users by Noster simply growing as a network. And I think that's ultimately, like, for a smaller company, such a smarter move. Maybe, maybe this is the, like the classic battle of just centralization versus decentralization. Right? It's like centralization kind of seems to be winning at the start, but you wall yourself off so much, you end up creating an experience that's not great for the user. At least that's. And I've never been a huge fan of Spotify. Maybe I'm a little biased. I just. I don't know. I've never particularly liked it. Still use Apple music for, for my music because I like to make my own playlists and don't like.
- [63:23]
Oscar Merry
Yeah, me too.
- [63:24]
Walker
Having having them all, you know, I think I've got better taste in music than most of the people making playlists on Spotify. This is again, just tooting my own horn. But my point being, it's such an interesting dichotomy like it is literally could not be more polar opposite. You've got one trend towards ultimate centralization. Control your platform, keep everyone there and force people to stay there. Versus hey, we're going to open this up, we're going to pull in all of the social interactions that are possible with this new blossoming open protocol. And we're going to use that both to our benefit, but to the benefit of the users and of the creators on there. And I think it's like, it may be a slower way to start, but I have to imagine that in the end that decentralized approach ends up winning out. At least I sure hope it does. You know.
- [64:13]
Oscar Merry
Yeah, I think it will. I think because ultimately people are different. You know, people want different things in terms of how they discover new content on the Internet and how they consume content on the Internet. And for one company, one product, one app, to kind of have the almost arrogance to say, we know how every human in the world should discover content. You know, learn new things about the world, you know, laugh about like some, you know, funny stuff that the podcast they like is talking about or like connect with people. Like, one company cannot do this. Everybody's different. Everybody has good ideas and people should be free to experiment and try different things. Like music is another great example. Like the music UIs in Spotify and Apple Podcasts, they're not that different. They're pretty much the same. And the reason that no one has really innovated in the music space is because the content library is locked down. So you can't easily go and build another music client for the Apple Music Library or the Spotify library. It's really hard to do. And I'm hoping, you know, I'm a massive fan of what Wave Lake are doing. And you know, with music, that's another example of how open RSS and Noster are working together. So, you know, every artist that uploads their music to Wave Lake is available to play in Fountain. And, you know, we're doing things slightly differently in terms of the ui and there could be a third music client that pulls in the same library. So, yeah, I really believe we're not going to. I think the days of these massive companies dominating a specific medium, like YouTube dominates long form video, I think those days are over. And I think that the apps and services that we use to consume media on the Internet are going to be smaller, they're going to have a lower kind of overall market share and that's going to give people more choice. And it's going to be way easier to switch between them because your library is going to follow you around on Noster and your followers are going to follow you around on Noster. And I think that will be a much better world. It's almost like harder as someone building a product in that world because people can really easily leave and go to a different app. But ultimately that is better for the user and, you know, it keeps everyone on their toes and also it does lift everybody up as well. So I'm looking forward to that world. And I also think with the introduction of Lightning, we can also like just make these experiences much more valuable. So, yeah, I'm hoping we do get there and, you know, maybe one day, you know, Apple podcasts integrates Noster and Lightning as well, you know, and that would be great because then, you know, if Tim Cook from Apple recommends a podcast and I follow him on Noster, then I'll be able to see that in fountains.
- [67:38]
Walker
I mean, ultimately that would be better for users of Apple Podcasts, right? Like having. I don't think it can be overstated how, like how much better it makes the experience to be able to have a conversation with people and not people that are just in one particular app, but anyone on Noster about a specific piece of content. Because like that you, you listen to a. You know, like there's a reason that like even on just random blogs back in the day, comment sections would blow up and you know, be these like, yeah, long drawn out things. It's because when people read something or especially I think when they listen to something, they want to talk about it. And if you're listening to it alone, you're just, you know, in your car driving. Well, you don't nobody else listen to that with you. There's nobody for you to talk about it with. Like you want to go to the Internet, right? That's the beauty of the Internet. It connects people from all over the place who are into the fall of Civilization podcast, you know. Yeah, but you want to be able to have that conversation. But if you're doing it in a walled garden, that conversation is by definition going to be just truncated or not possible at all because the comment section doesn't really enable that or I think on Spotify because again, I literally just for the first time logged into Spotify for podcasters today, you have to approve comments to see if they can be added to your show. So if somebody says, fuck Tickcoin podcast, I hate that guy. Real, you know, just a giant douche wad. Like, I could Be like, oh, no, don't want people to see that on my. On my Spotify page. But like, on. No, you can say, tcoin podcast sucks and that Walker's a giant douchebag, and that's okay. No one can stop you. And I think that's the way that it should be. I encourage people to say, fuck Tick Coin podcast. I hope that I'm not too big of a douchebag, but, like, you know, there's a little bit of douchebag in all of us. Perhaps. But I'm curious because I think something that we mentioned, that the whole Spotify Joe Rogan deal, right, that was a very concerted effort by them to pay a ton of money to bring over the biggest name in podcasting, because why? Because there are people who love Joe Rogan's show so much that they will go and watch it on. They will sign up for Spotify, they will get a membership, they will go there just for that show. So, like, they did the calculation and that. That seems like a good investment for them, right? Probably it was because he's got a massive show. I did not pay for Spotify Premium just for Joe Rogan. I just figured, you know, it won't be too long before he's back out in the real world. You know, I'll see clips of this elsewhere. But I'm curious on for Fountain or just for Noster more broadly, Obviously there's not like this massive pool of. Somebody in the Zapstream livestream said it was actually. Thank you, Sarah. 250 million that they paid for Joe Rogan. There's not this massive pool of, you know, quarter of a billion dollars sitting out there that can be deployed to bring over some big name to. No. To help onboard. More people like no. And Fountain must compete on that experience. Right. But I'm curious, you know, to me, I see the cool things that you're building with Fountain, and as a. As a podcaster, I love it because I have. I just checked today, I've earned like 1.74 million SATs from people boosting on Fountain. Like, that's amazing. It's incredible. There's 504 people that have supported this show on Fountain. So if you're listening, thank you for that. I really appreciate that. That is awesome. It's insane to me that more creators, more podcasters don't try and take advantage of these podcasting 2.0 initiatives. Do you think that the reticence to that. What's holding people back is it just not knowing that this stuff exists? Is it that if they're a really big name, they've signed some exclusive deal? Is it that they think bitcoin is a total scam? To me, it just becomes like, why wouldn't you want to take advantage of this awesome opportunity not just to, to, like, make money, but you have a way to connect with your fans in a totally organic way where they are giving you value because they think what you made is valuable. Like, that value for value model is really beautiful. Like, why don't more podcasters take advantage of this?
- [72:05]
Oscar Merry
Yeah, this is a great question. And I think, like, we have to be honest with ourselves. As, you know, the bitcoin community, and this is, in my view, the barrier to adoption, that there are a lot of people out there in the world that don't know anything about bitcoin, have never purchased bitcoin. And the only time they've ever really heard about bitcoin is when, you know, the price either massively goes up or massively goes down. So in their heads, bitcoin is just this really volatile, you know, cryptocurrency, and that's all they know about it. And they've also read the headlines about FTX and, you know, they think that there's massive risk around it. And when you. So, like, here's how it works. And we've spoken to podcasters and we've kind of heard this again and again. The idea of value for value, where people listen to your content for free and then support you after the fact if they feel like it was valuable and they want to support you. Podcasters love that. And you can see this, this happens with Patreon. You know, a lot of podcasters get support on Patreon, although there's many reasons why that is a bad experience. But so they love value for value. They understand it. They also love the kind of experiences. They also love open podcasting and they love the kind of experiences that we're building in Fountain, where the payments are social and the payments drive discovery to new listeners and, you know, you can have conversation around the episode and that conversation can also happen on Noster. They love that as well. But the reality is that the first thing a, you know, non bitcoin podcaster will do when they hear about this is they will go through the user journey that they're expecting their audience to go through. And currently within Fountain, what that involves is getting some bitcoin into your Fountain wallet. And the easiest way to do that right now, if you've never purchased bitcoin before, is through our moonpay integration, where you can purchase stats and have them go straight into your Fountain wallet via a bank card. But the reality is it's a terrible experience. It's just a really bad onboarding experience. To Bitcoin, you have to do KYC. You have to wait 30 minutes for the block confirmation because the purchase system through Moonpay is only on chain. And then we swap it to Lightning after the fact. And also it's just you have to leave the Fountain app to do it. And if you compare that painful, painful onboarding experience to something like Apple Pay, you know, these podcasters are thinking, my audience are never going to do this. This is too difficult. And so I think that is the number one barrier. And we have to be really honest with ourselves. I'm a massive believer that through these, you know, social micropayment experiences, whether it's in podcasting 2.0, fountain or the other Noster clients, I think this is going to onboard millions of people to Bitcoin and they're going to be using Bitcoin for the first time. Not because of number go up or the, you know, monetary value that we all believe in, but just because it's fun. And for those people, we need a new onboarding flow to get your first sats in your wallet to start playing around. And until we crack that, we're always going to be fighting this uphill battle. Now I think this is starting to happen. I think what Primal have done with their purchasing sats via in app purchase is brilliant and I think it's something we're looking at. Obviously there's like, regulatory stuff that we have to think about, but I think that going down that path is the right thing to do because also people don't mind spending a 30% premium on their first sats because they have no idea what the sats are worth because they don't know what bitcoin is. So for them it's just, oh, yeah, 5,000 SATs. Yeah, I'll buy some of those and send them. So honestly, to answer your question, that is the barrier to more people adopting Bitcoin in a social way, whether it's in Fountain or these other apps. And we need, need. You know, I hope that all of the, you know, I, I hope that all of the, whether it's exchanges, all of the on ramps to bitcoin, I hope they're all kind of aware of what's happening in, in Noster and in podcasting 2.0 and these other social lightning experiences, because I think It's a huge opportunity to onboard millions of people to bitcoin in a completely new way.
- [77:16]
Walker
I appreciate the honesty there because I think I agree, like, the friction in onboarding is always going to be the biggest deterrent, right? But I'm curious. I would challenge a little bit too. Another question I always have is when I see bitcoiners and of course everybody's free to do whatever the fuck they want, right? I'm not going to tell anyone what to do. But when I see bitcoiners that are like still using Spotify, still using Apple podcasts, still, you know, whatever it may be, when something like Fountain exists, it kind of blows my mind because I'm like, guys, there is an app here that you can use that literally aligns with your entire ethos of bitcoin. It is built by bitcoiners. You can zap and you can both send value for something you find valuable, but you can also earn bitcoin for listening to the podcast you're already going to listen to on Apple podcasts or Spotify, where you're not getting paid and they're taking a ton of your data and whatever else. It blows my mind that more bitcoiners don't jump at these opportunities. It blows my mind that more bitcoiners aren't just balls deep into noster, because again, it's like you have bitcoin as this native currency of this brand new protocol, this brand new network. And I don't even know if I have a question there. It's more just like expressing, expressing surprise that more bitcoiners don't jump at this. I mean, do you think that's just because, like for bitcoiners, because again, these are people who understand bitcoin, they have bitcoin. There's so none of that onboarding friction with bitcoin exists, but there's still some friction. Is it just. I've been using Spotify Apple podcasts for so long that I just, I don't feel like. I don't feel like doing something new. Like, is. Is that all it comes down to?
- [79:09]
Oscar Merry
I think that's part of it, yeah. And I think, you know, fountains been around for a couple of years now and you know, the. Maybe, maybe someone tried Fountain a couple of years ago and thought it's not really, you know, it's not really as good UX design, you know, functionality wise compared to Apple podcasts or Spotify, it's a lot better now. I feel like when we had our 1.0 release at the beginning of this year, I finally kind of like now feel comfortable, you know, putting it out there that, yes, Fountain is as good as Spotify or Apple podcasts from a UX and design perspective. So maybe they tried it, you know, when we first launched and thought, no, I'm not going to use this. But it is difficult. You know, it's difficult. You listen to podcasts every single day, every single week on Apple or Spotify, and it is difficult to make that switch. And I think for any bitcoiners, I try and communicate this as part of the adoption story. There's people out there, and actually there's a massive number of people out there that are just. They haven't understood Bitcoin and they're probably not going to for a long time. And this is another way in for those people. It's about making it fun. It's about new product experiences that weren't possible before. And we see this all the time. We have a lot of users that don't know that sats are bitcoin. They think sats are just podcasting money. And they love it. They love the SATs, they love earning the SATs, they love sending the SATs. And I think there's just a huge opportunity to onboard more people to sats in a fun way. And it can happen on Nostra, it can happen in podcasting 2.0. And yeah, so I think it's part of the adoption story. We just need to continue to push the product forward, make the onboarding easier and help people understand that that is part of the adoption story. It's not just, you know, number go up that's part of the adoption story. It's the new product experience. It's. So, yeah, hopefully anyone that's listening to this can, you know, help us spread this message as well. Because, you know, if Bitcoin is the global currency and we get this to a point where it's used for payments, then social payments within apps are going to be a huge part of it. And, you know, Noster podcasting, 2.0, Fountain, these are the early signs of that. And whatever you can do as a bitcoiner to help, you know, kick the tires, you know, make suggestions like, we're like, you can always contact me directly and whatever ideas you have. But, yeah, this is part of the adoption story. You know, it's just as important as the ETFs. It may not sound as important, but, you know, I don't know how many people the ETFs are going to onboard to Bitcoin. But if you have a really fun new social app that, you know can explode to tens of millions of users, then, you know, it's just as potentially important for bitcoin's adoption.
- [82:32]
Walker
I couldn't agree more. And to any bitcoiners who are listening to this show who are not using Fountain, I would really. I would challenge you try it out. Because even, like, okay, bitcoin adoption aside, it is a better experience, in my opinion. It is a better user experience for me as a user. I'm not talking as a podcaster. I'm talking as a user. I prefer the user experience. And I remember I was still using Apple podcasts and Fountain kind of like side by side for a little while. You know, a while ago when I first started using Fountain, just because I had, like, the, you know, the feeds, I was subscribed to an Apple podcast. I was just adding, like, you know, one here and there on Fountain that I, you know, wanted to check out. And eventually I just. I realized because I was using them side by side, oh, Fountain is literally just a better user experience for me. And this was before, like, long before the Noster integration, obviously, which has taken that to the next level. And so I would really encourage people to. To check out Fountain to try it, because I think that if you compare it side by side, bitcoin aside, like, we don't even have to bring the value component of how awesome that is to be able to send value frictionlessly and receive value for listening to shows. Take that out of the equation, and it's still a better user experience. So I would put this out there as a challenge to bitcoiners to really try Fountain. And again, it's like, man, if you're a bitcoiner, why do you not want to be using a bitcoin native podcasting app? It just blows my mind. So I hope anyone listening to this who's not listening to it on Fountain makes that switch over. And if you're still stuck inside the walled garden of. Of Spotify, try walking out into the freedom of the open air for a little while and see. It'll feel better, I promise. But I wanted to know, too, from you and just being conscious of your time here, I'm kind of curious because I know you've talked to, like, you've talked to a lot of podcasters throughout this process. Do you have, like, an elevator pitch that you kind of give to podcasters? Like, you know, okay, let's say you bump into Joe Rogan in the hallway somewhere. You Know, maybe it's at the gym, you know, he's just gotten done tearing it up in there and you've got a very limited amount of time to be like, hey, here's why this is interesting to you. What do you say to somebody like that?
- [84:57]
Oscar Merry
Yeah, I would say that. Well, firstly, I think that, you know, going back to the start of this conversation, the beauty of the podcast medium is that there's a lot of nuance and it's a long form discussion where you really get to know somebody and what their views are. So, you know, part of me realizes that this is going to be a slow journey, just like bitcoin adoption. And, you know, you really need to understand the history of open podcasting. You know, the nuances of how closed social media is actually a real drag on your time and attention and your potential in terms of discovering, you know, and learning new things on the world. And then also, you know, the nuance of value for value and why that's a good philosophy to live your life by, especially when there's, you know, content that you're consuming that is actually having a profound, like, effect on you in terms of what you think. So there's a lot of nuance there. And I think, like, it's sometimes difficult for me to pick the one thing, but I would say for podcasters in particular, I would say that every podcaster wants to grow their audience or at least every podcaster that I've kind of met. And I think that, you know, currently there is no discovery that's native to podcast apps. So there's no way for a podcast listener to discover your show or one of your episodes in the app that they use to listen to podcasts. It just doesn't exist. People might discover your podcast on other social media platforms like Twitter or TikTok or Instagram. Someone might share an episode, link in a tweet, or someone might clip the podcast and put it on TikTok. But the discovery of podcasts on those platforms is competing with the US Election cycle or the latest, you know, war that's happening in the world, or whatever else it is that this attention algorithm is like shoving into your face on that particular day. And so having a discovery mechanism within the actual podcast app, I think podcasters can see that that's a better way of doing things and is a great opportunity to reach some new audience. So that's probably what I would say is that, you know, we want to have podcast discovery in the place where people listen to podcasts, which is the podcast app. And here's the reasons why this hasn't been possible. Because of the way podcasting is developed. Because of the fact that it's open and fragmented, because of the fact that in order to do it properly across all the apps, you need an open social protocol like Noster, and then you can get into some of the new technological developments. But, yeah, it's hard. It's hard and it's dependent on the person. And I think, like, yeah, someone like Joe Rogan, you know, you know, maybe not this year, maybe maybe a bit further out into the future, we'll finally get him. But I think that if you could, you know, sit down with him and have a conversation with him in long form, I think he'd totally understand it and totally get it. Now. He probably wouldn't, you know, walk away from his hundred million dollars from Spotify just because of this, but you never know. So maybe one day we'll get there, but until then, you know, Joe Rogan is not the only person out there. And, you know, he's just one podcaster, and he pioneered the. The format in many ways. But there's plenty of other people out there. And the great thing about podcasting is that, you know, everyone has an interesting perspective, and it doesn't need to be the biggest podcaster in the world. You can listen to smaller podcasts, and it's still just as valuable as a medium. So just hopefully we can just bit by bit, you know, one by one, make the app better, make the experience better, get the message out there about open podcasting and just, yeah, like, bit by bit, continue to push it forward.
- [89:34]
Walker
And I think especially for smaller podcasters, like, because you're exactly right, you know, Joe Rogan's definitely not the only podcaster out there. I don't know how many podcasts there are now, maybe, you know, off the top of your head, but I mean, like an unfathomable number at this point. I know a lot of them don't make it past, like, there's like a 25 episode or something kind of like, cut off, where like 90% of podcasts stop after that. But if you're a smaller podcaster and you're trying to get up and, you know, started and you don't have a huge social presence on other networks, that's really, really hard to do. Like, I mean, basically impossible. Like, you're, you know, unless you get really lucky, like, you're not going to find a good way to do that. I was fortunate because I already had a bit of a platform Both on. On X, formerly known as Twitter, and on Noster. And so it's like, okay, starting a podcast, I have a decent channel to push that out to already, but if you don't have that, that's really, really hard. And so, like, I think that for smaller creators, especially, Fountain is just a wonderful tool for that, because, again, without the discovery, you just. You don't stand a chance. Like, you're. You're just not going to get served up on the Apple Podcasts home feed. Like, it's just not going to happen. And so, like, I would, you know, whether big or small, there's a lot to be said for trying out these podcasting 2.0 applications. I, you know, personally, again, I dig Fountain. I'm really happy that you guys are building it, and I was really happy to see you integrated Noster. And I, you know, I'm curious, do you think, like, maybe a different question. Do different podcasting application companies talk to each other? Like, do you guys have, like a. Is there like a pod comp? Like, do you guys, like, ever get together and like, talk about, like, hey, here's what we're building? Because it is like this open standard kind of thing. Is there anything like that? Like, do you talk to any other founders who are like, oh, we're looking at integrating Noster, we're looking at integrating Bitcoin. We're just not quite there yet. Like, what's your sense for where the rest of the industry is at for ones that have not yet implemented these Podcasting 2.0 initiatives?
- [91:50]
Oscar Merry
Yeah, we definitely do. I think, like, the first, the thing I'm trying to do now is, I guess, like, you know, there's always this. There's this phrase, right, the talk. Sometimes. Sometimes you need to, like, show rather than tell. And for me, with Noster, like, that was very much the case. I wanted to show the rest of podcasting 2.0 and the podcasting industry that Noster can work for us. For a cross app commenting system, Noster can bring better discovery to podcasting because of the fact that it's open. And as a user, you don't have to make a choice between leaving a comment on an episode or sharing the episode link on social media or sending a payment. You can do all three at the same time. So I wanted to kind of get Fountains Noster integration out to show that. But yeah, I'm speaking to the other podcasting 2.0 app developers, and I want them to integrate the same Noster specification that we have used so that, you know, Someone can leave, someone can send a boost on podverse, and you can see that on the episode page in Fountain, and you can reply to it and we can get that interaction going. I think that's the first step. And then from there, you know, moving to some of the more established players. But yeah, that's definitely the goal. Like, the whole reason we made this change, so that other apps can do it as well. And as we've talked about, that makes the experience in Fountain even better. And each app has its own different ways of doing things. So, yeah, definitely aiming to have that happen.
- [93:37]
Walker
And do you think the value for value model, overall, we're obviously still very early in this. A lot of podcasts are monetized by sponsorships, my own included. I've got a great sponsor, bitbox, who's been with me since it was very small, and I'm very grateful for that. But this value for value model, do you think that this is something that it really scales and that that's also just a function of the larger network effect of Bitcoin of Noster, that that model becomes more like. That could be, you know, you don't need to take any sponsorships at all because you could actually sustain, like, have an income from this. Do you think that that's something that we can actually see, like, in the next number of years as this network effect grows?
- [94:27]
Oscar Merry
Yeah, 100%. I think that. Well, there's a couple of things here. Yes, is the answer to your question. I think that, you know, Patreon is the proof point. You know, there's many podcasters out there that make a living solely off their Patreon subscribers. Now, our view is that doing that in the app, where it also generates conversation around the content and discovery for the podcast and other users of the app, is way better than doing it off on Patreon. So we think that's better. But yeah, I think Patreon proves it. I also think if you look at some of the live streaming platforms like Twitch and Kit, you know, they prove that this model works. I think there's always going to be a mix of monetization for content creators, and some of that is going to include what I would say is like ethical sponsorship, where the values of the company or the brand really align with the values of the content creator. Like in the case of you having bitbox as a sponsor. But I do think as we solve the onboarding challenge, as I talked about, make the product better, make it easier to support, increase the feedback loop with the support payments that for Content creators that want to, they can make a living purely through value for value. But yeah, I think sponsorship will always be there and play a part.
- [96:06]
Walker
Yeah, I think that's a really good point about kind of value for value may not completely replace sponsorship, but hopefully it gives people a little more optionality to be pickier about the sponsors they do bring on.
- [96:20]
Oscar Merry
Exactly.
- [96:22]
Walker
This is not my full time job. I really love this very much as a, as a hobby and it's one that I spend a lot of time on obviously. But I do have a, I do have a fiat mining job and so I, you know, I would still do this podcast if I only was receiving the zaps that I get on. No. Or the, you know, the boost that I get on Fountain simply because I like doing it. I like the opportunity to talk to people like you. I, it's, I feel very fortunate to be able to do that. But for people who are making this their entire career, like, you can see why they would maybe occasionally take some sponsors that perhaps do not have the best interests of their listeners at heart. And I think we've seen some of that, you know, it can happen with bitcoin podcasts too. They're not immune to it. And especially I'm sure as we get into this next kind of bull cycle, there's going to be a lot more money getting thrown around. It's very tempting. I had a, you know, plenty of folks who reach out that I would never in a million years agree to letting sponsor this show because I wouldn't want to taint the message of this show or screw over my, my listeners. Like I'm, you know, I don't, I just don't want to do that. I'm in a position to say, you know, you know, kindly fuck off to those people, but maybe some people aren't and you know, they go down a different path and that's a shame. But hopefully with this value for value model becoming more prevalent, they have a little bit more of a cushion to be able to say, you know what, I'm going to be a bit choosier about this. Like, that's. Nope, that's not worth it. I don't want to do that to my listeners. I really hope that that's the case.
- [97:59]
Oscar Merry
Yeah, 100%. And I think, you know, one of the key things to get across is to communicate that, you know, we talk a lot about the value for value ask. And this is what Adam Curry talks about all of the time, is, you know, if you don't ask for support from your audience, then people are probably not going to support you. And part of the ask, when you ask people to support you, optionally, if they found the content valuable, is to. Is to explain stuff like that. You know, I do have a sponsor, but your support, if you find an episode valuable, you don't have to support every episode helps me, you know, main make sure that I will never, you know, compromise, you know, distrusted relationship that we have as, you know, podcaster and listener. And I think, you know, sometimes it can feel a little bit, like, weird to talk about that on the show and talk about that with your audience, but that's part of it too, you know, the honesty around that. And I think that definitely helps a lot. So, yeah, it's important to have that out in the open and just, like, communicate that value for value is completely optional. You don't have to support, but, like, it means so much in so many ways if you do. And it's really easy if you're using an app like Fountain. So, yeah, it's complicated, it's nuanced. And also, we're all kind of. I feel like we're all just learning this over the past couple of years. We're still learning how it all works. You know, luckily we have legends in the space like Adam Curry to kind of, you know, learn from, but we're all still figuring it out.
- [99:42]
Walker
Yeah, the Ask is the hardest was, like, the hardest part for me to come around to because it feels like. It feels weird to do it. I just did it in the Zap stream. I think it was like. I think Gigi, like, phrased this really well, and that's the one I've used since then. It's just, if you find this valuable, consider giving value back. And I think that's a nice way to phrase the ask, because again, it's like, no, you don't have to, but, like, maybe you didn't find it valuable. That's okay. But if you did, just. Just consider it and like it. It's a weird thing to get yourself around to. Like, you know, it almost. It feels like, like begging somehow. But then it's like, you have to remember, it's like, no, you're putting in a lot of hours to this to try and bring value to people. And I think the other thing is that what I've found is that people genuinely do want to give value back. Like, they want to give value when they find something valuable. Like, I know I do. And, like, it's cool that Bitcoin enables us to do that in a really frictionless way, and we happen to be exchanging the most incredible money that humanity has ever discovered. So, like, that. That's pretty nice, too. Like, that's a. That's definitely a bonus.
- [100:55]
Oscar Merry
Yeah, 100%. And also, like, as a listener, you know, if you don't hear that first value for value ask, you probably are never going to send a boost or support a podcast, but when you do, you realize that it feels really good. It feels like it adds to the experience because it's another way for you to, yes, show appreciation, but also influence the direction of the show that you love, you know, because you can, you know, if one episode out of the last 25 episodes that you produce gets like 10x the amount of boosts and sats and messages, there's such a good signal to you that that's the kind of thing people want to hear. And so for me, as a listener, that's why I like sending boost, because I feel like I can. I feel like it deepens the connection between me and the people that I'm listening to. And it, and it makes the production of the podcast something that's more of a shared act rather than just, you know, podcasts are over here, you know, doing whatever they want it. It makes it more of a shared thing. And interestingly, you know, with Adam and his shows, you know, he doesn't, you know, talk about his audience as audience or listeners or anything like that. He talks about them as producers. So everybody listening is a producer of the show and contributes back to it. And so that's another part of this that, you know, in the app we want to try and make more obvious. But that's another part of the philosophy which is, you know, yes, you're sending money, yes, you're sending appreciation, but you're also helping shape what is this podcast and how. What direction can it take? And, you know, so there's. There's a whole bunch of different layers to it. But, yeah, if you don't send that first boost, then you'll never know and you won't take that first step.
- [102:59]
Walker
It's a great point just about shaping direction, because value is the best signal, right? A, like, doesn't really mean anything. That's free. But if somebody is sending you value, that is a very high signal action letting you know, wow, they really did find it valuable because they are giving me value in return. They're giving me a little chunk of finite 21 million Bitcoin. Like, that's. It must mean that it meant something to Them, you know, that's. That's pretty cool.
- [103:28]
Oscar Merry
And ultimately, like that. That is what I think is so profound in the long run, because at the moment, any media platform or social media platform, and all of the media platforms are social now. You know, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, all of these platforms are driven by an attention signal that goes into the algorithm that ranks the content and serves it to everybody else based on that attention signal. And that has so many negative downstream effects on the whole of society. I think everybody can see this if they browse their Twitter feed. And by replacing the attention signal with a value signal, I do believe that we can create a better Internet and ultimately a better society, because all of our world views are built upon social media these days. And so, yeah, it's also about changing the way we surface content so that the attention signal that is also. That's often associated with something like outrage or, you know, disagreement or conflict is replaced by a value signal. And instead of, you know, browsing Twitter and seeing all of this, you know, terrible stuff and people, you know, shouting at each other, instead of that, maybe you'll go and see an episode of Fall of Civilizations and you'll, you know, expand your mind on the history of the world or something like that. And, you know, I reached out to the guy from Fall of Civilizations podcast and I was like, hey, you know, we're doing this. Like, would you want to, you know, set up your show to receive value? And he was like, no, not sure about this bitcoin thing. Not today. So I hope one day he will, you know, enable value for value, because I'd love to show him my appreciation for all the value I've got and, you know, help people discover that content, because it's super niche, but it's incredibly valuable. And I think that's also the kind of bigger vision for this whole thing is let's get away from these attention algorithms that are kind of a drain on everybody's soul. At the end of the day, let's replace that with a value signal, and I think we'll have a better Internet. So, yeah, hopefully we can get there, but we're just very much at the beginning, and there's lots to solve. But it's cool what's happening, and I'm happy to, you know, try and play a small part in it.
- [106:05]
Walker
Oscar, I think that's a. That's a beautiful note to end on, and thank you for. I think you're playing more than a small part, and I love what you guys are doing there. And so again, I would like to encourage everyone who, if you made it this far, if you're still listening, I know we've still got people on the Zap stream on Noster, so thanks for being here. But check out Fountain. You can go to Fountain FM on the web or just search Fountain in the app Store. Anywhere else you want to send people. I'll link your, your Noster, of course, your centralized X as well, but definitely the Noster. But anywhere else you want to push people toward.
- [106:43]
Oscar Merry
No, I think that's probably it. I would just say yeah, for anyone who's, who's listening and does check out Fountain, you know, you know my like ask would be please just reach out to us and let us know what we can do better. You know, if you're coming from Apple Podcasts, if you're coming from Spotify, if you're coming from Overcast, just let us know like what we can do better in terms of the app and we'll happily, you know, work on that for you. So you can reach out on Noster or Twitter or you can also just send me an email oscarountain fm. And you know, we can try and like if you agree with what we've talked about on this episode, like we can all like work on this together and try and build this future. So please do reach out and yeah, thanks so much for having me on Walker. I'm a big fan of the show so I'm a regular listener and yeah, it was great to chat today.
- [107:35]
Walker
That means a lot coming from you because I know you do podcasts all day long for work, so it's nice to hear that you're listener, I'll say a producer of this show as well but and thanks so much for sharing your time with me. This was, this was a treat. And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast. If you are a bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring the Bitcoin podcast, head to bitcoin bitcoinpodcast.net sponsor or send an email to helloitcoinpodcast.net if you are enjoying the Bitcoin podcast and find it valuable, give it a boost on Fountain, a five star review wherever you're listening. Or better yet, share this show with your network so more people can learn about bitcoin. Or don't. Bitcoin doesn't care, but I sure do appreciate it. You can grab links in the show notes to watch or list this show wherever you get your podcasts or go to bitcoin podcast.net podcast and you'll also find the links to follow me and the show on no and on X. Bitcoin is scarce. There will only ever be 21 million, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to the Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.