Welcome to the Free Cities podcast.
My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast of the Free Cities Foundation.
Hello and welcome to this episode number 140 of the Free Cities podcast.
Today's show is, guess what, sponsored as always by our most amazing supporters and the purveyors
of the best luxury freedom-oriented communities in Latin America. That's right, Veritas Village
Coronado in Panama. And yes, I'm specifying their Coronado Village because they've just
announced a new community in Panama and that's the Cherokee Veritas Village. Only a few minutes
drive from the Costa Rica border this time. Same setup, solar powered homes, energy independence
close to nature and also amenities and full of freedom lovers just like you. This location has
a new hospital that's just seven minutes away and an international airport within 30 minutes.
You're living in the tranquility of nature with all the modern conveniences just around the corner.
www.ecovillages.life forward slash free cities for more info on their Coronado development.
That's Veritas Village Coronado.
You'll have to send them a message through that page if you're interested in the new Cherokee Village.
It's brand new and hot off the presses and they're just offering it out to their loyal customers currently.
and of course you guys. Right, next thing on the agenda, it's going to be about my subscribers
and this is not just another ad read this week, it's actually highly relevant to today's show
because this show is about the distribution of ideas and how creative people who like doing that
kind of stuff can fund their work. This is a subject that is very close to my heart, I'm someone
who began working in the analogue media many, many years ago, and I've watched the complete
transition to the digital attention economy during my lifetime. I've always felt that creatives have
ended up with a terrible deal during this process, and the current state of the online world of
content has basically trended towards a model that incentivises publishers to do whatever they can
to obtain free content from creators whilst unscrupulously selling their clients personal
data to the highest bidder and offering them very little in return the big game in the attention
economy is grab people's attention and keep them there and monetize them and it's a really really
insidious system so many thanks cb bullish mike matthias cousin really dovidas christopher
Albany's. I fully appreciate your generosity in choosing to subscribe to this podcast on the
Fountain app and thank you for being part of the solution as I see it. And please, if you're a
regular listener to this show, please think about hitting the subscribe button here on Fountain.
It's only six bucks a month and this gives you early access to episodes, bonus episodes,
which are not freely available to anyone else and a guaranteed readout of your comments in this
intro if you choose to do so and that's only actually happened once subscribers tend to be
quite quiet people by the sounds of it but also you just get the general good vibes that you'll
feel knowing you're supporting a show dedicated to promoting free cities freedom tech and liberty
in general what's not to like there right today's guest it's nick malster he's a former ad man
who basically burnt the candle at both ends got out and went on to co-found the hugely popular
podcasting app fountain which is where i'm hosting my podcast right now and no they didn't pay me to
do this uh if you're listening to this podcast on fountain well done you're also part of the
solution many thanks if you're not well fountain is a podcasting and music app which has bitcoin
and Noster integration and is focused on what's called the value for value version of media
consumption. This means you can easily pay creators directly for their content using Bitcoin
and fiat currencies if you so choose to in the form of subscriptions, boosts and what's most
famously about value for value streaming payments minute by minute in Bitcoin as you listen to
content. In a nutshell, you're paying directly for your content rather than getting your content free
and then hoping that the creator can generate his or her income elsewhere, normally through
advertising. Anyway, here's a quick lowdown on the episode from Fountain's episode summary,
key topics, co-working spaces and the changing nature of work, a critique of Gary's economics
and his popular appeal the journey to founding fountain and its evolution the attention economy
and monetization of content value for value versus traditional advertising the potential of
for content ownership and distribution and the future of content creation the role of community
and subscriptions yes that's what there is and yes there's a gary's economics rant in there
mainly from me it has to be said and just in case you've fallen for Gary's economics
may I point you in the direction of what I'm going to call Ben's economics that's Ben Gunn
to be precise he's he's the thinking man's Gary's economics start with episode number 97 of this
podcast then jump to 136 and 137 for the complete brain reset in economics and thank me later right
time to lock yourself in that we work meeting room that you love so dearly for the next hour
and a half really lock the door look busy so no one disturbs you whilst you sit back relax
and enjoy my conversation with nick malster
it's worth actually i think starting on that it's a bit of a moot point but
um we're in a kind of we work type what is we work is it it's actually called work.life
so it's like a similar thing yeah and like i don't come to london much anymore and i when i lived in
london london was like you know it was the london of the 90s noughties uh no co-workers co-workers
spaces wasn't a thing none of this stuff was a thing but now it's massive huge and in fact
i've done three interviews so far um this week and they've all been in these kind of places
and um it's it's bizarre it's weird it's like um it's a whole new way of working it's all i mean
like there's people sitting out like these are public bits right this is we're in a private bit
now so you kind of your offices are in here but you also have the option to rent out little rooms
for meetings and stuff but you've got an office somewhere as well have you we've got yeah we've
got a little glass box upstairs yeah so everyone can see in yeah how is that weird yeah i mean
these these these places are all the same um because we were in a we uh we worked before
over in shoreditch and yeah they're all exactly the same um interestingly enough actually our old
office there was actually another glass box next to ours and the lady inside she put up all this
opaque covering on the glass walls in between us and we were wondering what's going on in there and
we realized that she was actually sleeping in there she she'd got like a reclining chair she
was doing kind of micro needling beauty treatments or something and she was just sleeping in there
overnight that's bizarre no it is a bit weird but it is very um modern what's the generation that
that you find working in here is it's like i guess it's millennials millennials onwards
yeah and it's and it's totally acceptable now isn't it people people have no problem with
literally having a meeting on a,
on a couple of,
it's like,
it's like being in Starbucks and having,
doing a proper business meeting and stuff Yeah Bizarre So why didn you get an office out in the countryside somewhere Why didn you just rent a nice place in I don know the Cotswold
I don't know.
They're probably expensive.
I have no idea.
But it must be pretty expensive.
We were right in Soho.
It's the centre of what used to be the media district.
I don't know what it still is now, is it?
Yeah, I think it's just about, yeah.
Yeah, I think if we did it again, we maybe would do that.
I live just slightly outside London so I try and work from home as much as I can
I hate coming in really I cycle in it as well which is just manic it's crazy
but what's the thought process in start having a startup and then having an office in Soho
I think it's just kind of in between all of us really so it's kind of easy and you know if you
want to come here on the weekend it's nice because you can meet friends in town then you can also go
to the office beforehand it's kind of it fits into your life a bit better so it does it does
pay to still be in this world of like a digital communication and and zoom and all this kind of
stuff it does pay to still be able to meet someone in real life or not i mean your business is all
online right pretty much i mean most of the people i speak to are in the us so yeah i mean you're
actually the thing one of the first people to come into the office ever yeah well i mean i i
It's not like coming into the office, though, isn't it?
It's not how you get to meet everyone and stuff.
It's like I get to meet a bunch of strangers.
And there was a full-on board meeting going on next door.
I'm just looking in.
They could be talking about super important, like, I don't know,
something really private and important.
And I can literally just look in at them all.
Yeah.
I could see what one of the girls was looking at on her phone under the table.
I don't know whether that's a good idea in business, is it?
I think it's not down to the preference of the people who work here.
It's the owners who want to pack as many people as possible into the smallest space possible and get as much money out of us as possible.
So it's a function of the fiat monetary system.
I think you'll find it is, yeah.
Without going straight to the point there.
Talking of the fiat monetary system, I wanted to ask your opinion on something.
I mentioned this before we started talking.
But yesterday I was interviewing a guy who runs a gold company and he mentioned Gary's economics.
Right. Now, prior to last night, when I got back to my hotel, all I knew about Gary's economics was that one clip of him talking about Bitcoin, which he doesn't understand.
He had no understanding of Bitcoin.
So by default, then, I just thought, well, probably most of what else he's speaking about is bullshit as well.
So I didn't really give him the time and day, but this guy mentioned him and mentioned that he's really popular, especially amongst youngsters, millennials onwards.
you know so i did a bit of looking and the first video i came across was him talking about why how
why houses are expensive i saw that right now he what was really disturbing about gary in gary's
economics is that he's very um forthright he he says he says things very authoritatively
but he and but he's completely hypocritical about what he says so he was saying about houses he said
Like what normal economists do is they just boil it down to something really simple, like we need more supply.
There's not enough supply of them.
But it's not true.
And then he went into this long tirade about why house prices have gone up.
That started with him saying, you know, in COVID, I bought gold because I knew the price of gold was going to go up.
And everything's going up.
It's not just houses.
Everything's going up and people can't see this, that everything's going up.
And I'm thinking, brilliant.
you know he's gonna he's gonna start talking about the government and central banking soon and and
printing money and but no he stopped at it's the rich it's the rich buying everything it's the rich
buying assets he never stopped to take it back that another stage to how come the rich got so
much money during covid for example what was the what's the mechanism for that money coming and then
When you look a bit deeper, it's like, dude, this guy's a full on socialist.
Yeah.
He's actually like kind of, there's a funny program.
When I was a kid, you probably don't know.
It was called Citizen Smith.
Have you ever heard of this?
I haven't.
It was a BBC sitcom about this socialist guy called, oh, fuck.
I can't remember his name.
He lived in Tooting and he was like, his catchphrase was power to the people.
And he was just an idiotic socialist Londoner who was trying to get,
bring tooting out of oppression and stuff.
And it was pretty funny, but it would never happen now.
They would never allow it.
But he's just like that.
He's like the working man's Marxist who basically says it's all the rich's fault.
And the answer is to tax the rich.
So the answer is the government needs to be bigger, harder, stronger.
More interventionist.
Yes.
like but do you know what the saddest thing was and i'd like you're in i'd like your opinion on
this that video you're talking about it was on social media like one one million plus views on
twitter or whatever and underneath i thought right let's go to the comments then let's see
let's see how everyone's fighting their corner down there and it was so depressing because it
was mainly it was half and half it was half people saying oh gary you're amazing it's so true and the
other half was just idiotic bitcoiners not saying just just trying to kind of gotcha him and obviously
he didn't give up he didn't care he's not going to listen to any of that stuff i mean what's what's
going on man like how did that guy it makes me think he's a plant or something it really does
that's what people think i know not me i would say no but then after watching that i'm thinking
look this guy's obviously getting boosted because he's basically and could he make even easily
imagine a government department saying hey look this guy's seat kind of basically on our team let's
get him out there let's push him bigger government more interventionism taxing the rich and all you
i think i think he's just playing up to popular opinion amongst millennials and so the new
generation because everyone likes to have an enemy everyone wants to point at the rich and say hey it's
your fault um and you know that's that's what people want to hear like they want to they want
to point the finger at someone and i think particularly where these where these videos
travel on youtube they pick up on these sort of you know sort of shock headlines that he kind of
creates uh he plays people against each other and it creates tension it creates arguments it
makes the youtube comments go on fire and then the video goes even further but you said you read his
book right i listened i actually listened to his audio earlier this year before i even knew who he
was and you thought it was quite good well i was entertained by it i i find all that stuff
fascinating you know like inside the life of like the the financial world like particularly people
who have come out of it the other side and have an interesting story to tell which he does um so
but his book's not about monetary policy and stuff it's not what his life was it's about the the
lifestyle of being a trader in the city and he was uh yeah he was he was trading currencies and
And I think he was Citibank's top trader globally for a short period.
Which I did a bit of research on that as well.
I was telling people to say that's bullshit as well.
I don't know.
But I mean, you know.
But then you discovered that actually you looked into what he's actually saying about economics.
He didn't mention macroeconomics once in the book, really.
He didn't talk about Bitcoin at all.
There was really nothing controversial in there.
It was really just entertainment.
There were some very interesting characters that come up in the book.
And yeah, it was a good listen.
But then I came back and I saw these videos of him talking about Bitcoin, saying it had no value and whatsoever.
So at that point, I kind of felt a little bit, you know, stupid for enjoying his book because I'm like, this guy actually, you know, is maybe not all that great.
Well, you can be fascinated with the life of a trader.
I am.
I think, you know, like Wall Street, the film and all that kind of bye, bye, bye, sell, sell, sell.
it is amazing and fascinating and especially if you i think if you're a bloke it really taps into
some primordial urges to to sort of compete and make money and do better and and you know i think
you know i would have i could have done that job i think i just never ended up in that situation
and i you know like a lot of people um of the a lot of bitcoin as i know there was a point in the
last 10 or so years where they looked at trading because you you start wondering about economics
you start wondering about prices of things you start and you soon realize trading is something
you need to learn over a very very long period of time and if you don't have the right temperament
for it which I don't I can't sit on a losing trade for days I can't do that I just gotta get out I've
got it you know it doesn't suit my personality but I do find that fascinating and yeah I'm just
really disappointed that he's he was so well liked and yeah he he's like it's almost like
he one step away from realizing it true what he says all that stuff about asset prices going up and the reason is because rich people are buying them That is true But he just stops there and says right the rich are the evil ones
which is basically the same as Karl Marx.
Karl Marx did the same thing and ended up, you know,
Marxism ends up annihilating millions of people later down the line.
I don't know whether that could happen now.
Yeah, when he talks about Bitcoin as well,
I mean, there's so many people out there like him
which fall back to that argument of, you know, Bitcoin is not real.
I can't touch it like I can touch my gold, you know.
And I just think that I hear these arguments and it just makes me furious
because they just don't understand it.
And a similar argument is taking place right now about Rachel Reeves,
about whether she should sell the Bank of England's Bitcoin reserves.
I think we've got something like 6,000 Bitcoin in reserve,
which have been confiscated.
And she's obviously in a very deep fiscal hole at the moment
and needs to get out of it.
And people are writing all that.
I think the Bitcoin Policy Institute have written all these open letters to Rachel Reeves saying, don't be the chancellor that sold the Bitcoin.
You know, don't be Gordon Brown who sold the gold.
Like you'll go down in history as the chancellor that sold the Bitcoin.
It's interesting.
I don't know.
I mean, this current government we have is atrocious.
It's such a low value set of people.
It's unbelievable that it's an absolute symbol of how effed up the whole system is that the people that now rise to the top are kind of like the worst.
They really are the worst.
And we're going through that stage in the cycle where we're almost at the extremes.
So now, you know, like it's either a strong man to fix.
It's either fascism or communism.
It's like it's either it's one or the other.
We're kind of edging towards that thing.
And then there's all these people in the middle, mostly who don't really think about it.
But the ones that do unfortunately fall into the Gary's economics trap, which is, yeah, it's the rich.
I'm a victim here of the rich.
And then, you know, I don't know.
I find it bizarre.
Gary, because Gary's obviously rich, I think.
And so he knows he earned his money.
he knows that he's he's burnt his money and he he i i don't know i would it'd be interesting to see
whether he would back that the kind of things he advocates for in reality if i mean i would imagine
he wouldn't i think he's a classic example in a way of what we call a champagne socialist yeah
who who basically wants to predict wants to project the fact that he cares but when he actually came
to it he'd be on the other side of the fence he wouldn't be he wouldn't be one of the people that
kind of like at all the same as everyone else i don't know i mean he's he's in a very conflicted
position because he's trying to he's trying to push a very purpose-driven narrative and cause
but he's also trying to monetize his youtube channel and there's a book and yeah and sell
a book so there's there's conflicts of interest there i don't mind that i suppose like i i don't
I really don't care.
I don't want people to make money.
I want him to live his best life.
I really do.
I think, though, that what I really wanted to ask him as well,
because he was talking about COVID and he said,
I bought gold at the beginning of COVID,
which was obviously a good idea.
Everyone who's anyone in our world knows that when the government,
when the printer goes on and the government starts giving out free money,
asset prices go up.
We know that.
It's not the trade of the century to buy gold at that point or Bitcoin or real estate or Rolexes or whatever the hell you want.
But I wanted to know, he was banging on about that.
Did he tell anyone to buy gold?
Like, does he actually care?
Does he tell his listeners, hey, dude, come on, asset prices are about to rise?
Or does he just say it's the richest fault.
We need to take money away from them because they're basically doing what I'm doing, which is nothing wrong with you.
we're all playing the same game here i think you and me want a different game gary wants the same
game he wants the game to continue he just wants the government to take money off the winners
and give it to the losers which is socialism well i mean you know let's say that doesn't happen
really if he's going out on his youtube channel telling people to buy gold he's just basically
saying just use the same tactics as the rich have used to get their money you know if we can't beat
them join them exactly yeah i know i don't know why he yeah you're right he'll end up like most
socialists actually in a world of conflicting and ideas that don't make sense and you have to either
you have to be a champagne socialist at that point you have to be the person that secretly
isn't the socialist whereas on the face value is i don't know i i just i don't know i i went down
the gary rabbit hole last night when i got back in because i thought i better check this out
because i i hadn't given him the time of day i'd given him 10 minutes i saw him talk about bitcoin
and completely and basically lump all cryptocurrency coins and bitcoin in the same basket which is
mistake number one right off the bat and then say some absolutely idiotic things and i was like oh
god you don't understand cryptography you don't understand decentralized money you don't actually
understand money by the sounds of it right okay no point in really carrying on here but but but i
think probably yeah he's a relatively important person to watch in case that catches on that idea
that it's the richest fault because that's just one very small facet of the diamond it's not their
fault they're just doing what they're doing you know prices are going up because people are buying
things with money that they're getting where they're getting the money from that's the thing
that gary doesn't really want to go talk about yeah like you can earn money you can get free
money from the government you can get money from central banks you can sell bonds you know he's not
he's not really going there as far as i could tell i looked through a few of his videos but anyway
i think we're giving him too much oxygen at the moment anyway but it's worth mentioning so um nick
I want to ask you about how you ended up here because you,
I think you co-founded Fountain.
Yeah.
This is a five, four or five years ago, four years ago.
Right.
I was a, I was a, I was, I was, I joined Fountain probably not too long after you started it.
I think I told you this once on a call that I liked it.
I liked the concept.
I liked the idea.
um and then it it just seemed like i would never be able to monetize what i'm doing through it
because it's too early i think probably but but we can come back to that but basically for everyone
listening fountains that actually the platform i now host the podcast on but it's a um podcasting
app essentially which allows micropayments of bitcoin and it's now integrated with
Noster which I talk about a lot on this podcast as well which is another protocol which people
are using to have direct interactions with each other currently mainly being used as a social
network but but really new apps and new applications popping up all the time why don't you
start by saying where how you started where like what's been your trajectory to this point because
that's quite a weird business to get into yeah yeah i mean well when when we started the business
in 2021 um i didn't know about bitcoin really it didn't start as a bitcoin company um it was
me and my co-founder oscar who i've known since school we were just talking about ideas in lockdown
at the time i was working in the corporate world i was working at nike but i was spending most of
my time dreaming about what i was going to do next because i was just a bit bored of it um
what were you doing at nike so i was doing nike it's nike is it yeah jesus i've been saying it
wrong my whole life yeah no it's it's named after the greek goddess of victory nike yeah jesus there
are so many they have not made a public attempt at correcting that amongst people yeah well i think
a lot of people in the uk particularly call it nike just because that's phonetically that's how
it reads um but it is nike what were you doing at nike then whoops so i was doing brand marketing
so uh whenever we had a new product launch you know i was working a lot in in football so it was
generally football boots or you know club kits when we had a new launch we'd work on the creative
and the rollout for the launch um you know which was it was fun particularly when i was actually
in the office because i got to go traveling a lot i got to you know go visit different football clubs
to go on shoots with athletes.
I'm a Chelsea fan.
One of our clubs was Chelsea,
so I spent a lot of time doing shoots with Chelsea,
which was fun.
I was just hanging out in the car park
trying to harass Ashley Cole
and any other kind of Chelsea celebrities
that walked through until I got kicked out.
But yeah it was fun for a while And then before that I was working in advertising So yeah when I left university in 2012 I was in advertising for maybe six years
working in creative agencies, which was a lot of fun.
It kind of suited my lifestyle at the time, really.
I was kind of work hard, play hard.
I think it ended up being, you know,
I worked harder and played even harder, you know.
I think that's kind of where I ended up falling out of that.
um so in 2018 i was just just fully burnt out i was traveling back and forth to the u.s so much i
was doing 18 hour days trying to work across different time zones at nike this was before
nike this was in the agency i was working in um so my previous client was adidas so i've always
been in the sort of sportswear sports world so yeah i was just i was just i just burnt out and
i took i got a doctor's note i was off work for a month and in that month i decided you know what
I'm not going to go to another agency.
I'm not going to go back to my job.
I want to go into the corporate world.
I want to have a nine to five.
I want to just draw the line between work and life a bit better.
Really?
Sorry to butt in.
Normally at that point, people say something different.
It's like, I want to go traveling or I want to get the hell out of here.
I don't want to.
Yeah, I never did that.
I kind of, I regret that now because now I've got a kid and I'm married.
So it's harder for me to do that.
Right.
But your fallback place, which is interesting really,
because I wouldn't have considered the corporate world
a fallback from the advertising world.
And probably, it obviously is.
I think a fallback in a sense that there was more boundaries,
you know, because I was always in client services,
account management in the agency world.
So I was always like the first one in the office, last one out.
I was taking a lot of the stress and the pressure
of being in the sort of client agency relationship.
Do you have to do a lot of the drinking and partying?
Yeah, and I'm also like, it was my job to go out
and win new business to grow the account um so a lot of commercial pressure as well as like the
pressure of making sure that the work is good um and i'm quite a conscientious person so i just let
that get to me um so i got to the point when i was like you know what i want to try something
different i want to just have a bit more of a segmented life when i can come into the office
at nine leave at five i don't have to i'm not really responsible for growing the business and
i don't need to because nike is a multi-billion dollar company like no one's really going to
notice if i don't do a good job um you that's the that's the route down a lot of the fiat path
isn't it it's like now there's that's a bit of a meme these days go in and do the least amount of
work you can in your job and like yeah i wouldn't say yeah for me it wasn't doing the least amount
of work it was just like trying to take on the a slightly smaller amount of responsibility and
personal responsibility about the outcomes of my work um so i was at nike for i think just over
three years and half of that time was in lockdown and like i said most of that time in lockdown i
was thinking about what am i going to do after this because i've always wanted to have my own
business i've always wanted to have that freedom just to be able to be like right what are we going
to do today what are we going to build um i've got an idea let's go um which you can't do at nike
you can't do in agencies so um yeah so the back to your first question when when fountain started
yeah i don't it wasn't even a podcast app to begin with it was a social audio sharing app
and the idea being that you can upload clips or you can create clips of stuff and share them easily
with other people we quickly realized that it wasn't going to take off because you have to
convince people who are creating content to come onto your platform and trust you even though you
have nobody there so we we moved away from that and we just decided actually we both are really
into podcasts why did you have the found why was that called fountain then i thought because i
thought that was quite a good name for a it's like fountain of content yeah it's kind of a i think
it's kind of a dual meaning really the first one is like fountain of wisdom or fountain of knowledge
You know, we wanted to use the ability to create clips and, you know, take this, you know, what is very long form content and put it into short form.
So it's more discoverable, more searchable, more shareable as a way of just kind of creating like a library for the stuff you can learn.
And then the other meaning was if you think about how a fountain works, it's kind of like a circular system.
Like the water comes out the top, it goes back through the bottom.
and that's very much how the money flows on fountain because as a listener yeah or let's say
one of the things we do on fountain is you can actually earn money by listening to podcasts for
us it's kind of like a bit of a loyalty system in a way whereby if you if you keep listening on
fountain you get some reward from it and we kind of reward your attention in the way that other
platforms maybe do not um so the money you earn you can either keep it you can withdraw it to a
wallet or you can send it back to a podcaster and the money flows and the money that the podcaster
gets they are also using the app as a listener and they can support a podcast so really money is
flowing all over the place and it kind of works in a circular system in the same way fountain does
how did the so when you realized the company wasn't going to work how did you did you then
at that point did you discover bitcoin and then realize you could integrate it into it or were
already into that kind of stuff uh oscar was oscar's been into to bitcoin since relatively
early on i remember him saying to me in like 2016 like you should get some bitcoin he's an old mate
of yours is he yeah not from nike or anything we went to school together oh cool yeah um so he he
was always into bitcoin and then yeah when we because he'd also he'd uh he had a previous
company before this which he'd he'd sold um and was looking for a new challenge so we were meeting
up and working on this kind of social sharing audio app and this was only after a few months
we realized that actually we're probably best to focus off on focus on podcasts because there's an
existing library of content that we can pull in through rss suddenly we have four million podcasts
on the app and that clipping tool that we built we can apply to podcasts and you can easily clip
a podcast so that's kind of where it started i think it wasn't until yeah there's probably a
couple of more months before we actually launched the app publicly and in that time that's when we
saw what was happening with adam curry and podcasting 2.0 and the whole specification for
open open podcasting being better defined and having all these new features like the lightning
payments being integrated so we we launched with that um and and so yeah i really quickly had to go
on a crash course of bitcoin to figure out what it all was was that 2020 this is i think it was 2021
on yeah a lot of people got into it during the pandemic yeah yeah yeah yeah that must have been
fun times did it how did it affect you psychologically i know a lot of people that
went a little bit crazy when they well you know when when when you have to go straight deep in
one touch point and then down the rabbit hole i think what was really interesting for me is that i
the my first experiences with bitcoin were thinking more practically about how it can be
used as a medium of exchange in an app so i wasn't i wasn't like i wasn't sold in by a friend on
the monetary philosophy behind it you know the store of value stuff like i kind of got to that
later oscar gave me a copy of the bitcoin standard i read that later but first we were having
conversations about how do these payment works how how come how can we split the payments how can we
get the right metadata in the payments so that we can see who sent it what content they sent it to
all the technical stuff that's pretty good and it i mean you you hit you you mentioned the word
attention earlier and what i i think a lot of people are just starting to realize is that
the whole internet that they now use on a daily basis is based around your attention it's totally
it's like and in not in a good way not in it at all in a good way in fact it's it's this kind of
self-perpetuating terrible idea that the internet vies for your attention when it gets it it works
out how to do it more and it gets it more and more and more and that's how the whole economy
is set up grab your attention monetize it with a an advertiser or whoever sell you something and
then you know this is how it works and as a result now apps are all evolving in the same direction
which is keep you sat there looking at it which is terrible i like and i mean i think it's sad
that you said earlier that i might be the first person that actually come to visit you in real
life and there's a reason why i do that because i and there's a reason why it's i do the podcast
in real life as well i think things like this are all really important and sitting on a screen is
is not it's useful sometimes but it's not good for you and i've got kids now so i know it's not
good for them you can see when they're doing that and when they're not yet we've fallen into this
world where the world is basically monetizing the internet on on the basis of attention which
obviously is the opposite to what's found in does found in kind of like a trade it's like you listen
to my podcast then you you send me a little bit of bitcoin yeah right yeah i think that
this idea that uh platforms are monetizing people attention people's attention is better understood
than it was in the past um when did the social dilemma come out that documentary a few years ago
like so a lot of people saw that a lot of people instantly recognized that you know the behavior of
apps like facebook and instagram and stuff i still don't think that people see how other things work
in that way though like people don't i think look at youtube and see okay well why am i i mean have
you been on youtube recently are you i don't know if you're a premium youtube subscriber i'm not but
there's so many ads now like if i'm watching a 20 minute video there's probably six different
inserted ad breaks and they're very subtle as well i what i noticed about um twitter the other day was
when i was on the feed and i i clicked on an ad by mistake you know sometimes you your finger
Yeah. Press is too hard. When I started scrolling from that ad, I only got ads like sick. It took me six before I thought, they're only serving me up ads here.
I want to, you know, and I didn't even really know the first one was necessarily an ad because it was someone just talking about something.
And then later on, it's like, hi, guys, get ready with me while I when I'm like, and I was like, oh, God, and you get sucked in.
And then the next thing you know, you say, first thing I do is I go to Starbucks and I get my you like, oh, shit.
I've fallen into the trap here.
I've been,
I've been sold a Starbucks,
you know,
or something like that,
you know,
but,
but yeah,
the,
so,
I mean,
was that something you thought about in the,
in the early days?
Yeah.
Big time.
Because we,
we had to,
we had to start this business and think about what specific problem we were
solving.
Like,
why would a podcaster come to us?
And the best answer we could come up with was,
you know,
podcasters,
don't have any freedom when it comes to how they monetize their podcast if you're of a certain
size and you've got a certain audience you can put ads in there either you know sponsored host
red ads where you manage the relationship with your sponsor or the kind of the dirtier type of
ads that the dynamic ads that you get on kind of youtube where you have no control over what ads
are going in and they're really fucking annoying um and we didn't like that we thought there's got
to be a better way for podcasters to you know take back control of how they're making money again
so that's why we put the sort of the the direct payments in uh as a as a means to solve that but
i think the other thing we've been trying to battle with is like right that solves a real
problem for the podcaster but does it solve a problem for the listener like i don't think
listeners out there are thinking god i really wish there was just an easy way i could send
tim some money you know people people don't want to pay for something that's already free
correct and that's when we kind of get into this whole value for value idea because it can sound
very deep and philosophical at first like this idea of like if you find value in something you
can send some value back but like most people most people probably just won't do that um they
just want to listen to something that's free so that's why we've been thinking more about what
what was what are the incentives for the listener and one of the things that we've launched i will
launch with this new product podcast hosting platform which you're now using is the ability
for podcasters to host their podcast and fountain and actually do an ad free version as well so
people can pay for a version without ads um which i think gets us closer to you know product market
fit of actually what does a listener want like what would what would make a listener send money
to the podcast. That being said, though, there are still a large number of listeners out there who
just, you know, voluntarily will send a payment because they have such a deep connection with the
content and with the podcast host, particularly as well that the smaller podcasts, like the ones who
are independent, they don't employ editors or producers or, you know, script writers or
researchers. They're a one man band. It's probably their side thing. Like it's not their main job.
They're trying to find a way to sustain themselves.
And the listener knows this and the listener wants the content to keep coming.
So the listener has to put some money in the hat, so to speak, to use busker language for the content to keep coming.
And so that has worked to an extent.
And we see that podcasters who really commit to Fountain and decide I'm going to talk about value for value or maybe not in those words,
but I'm going to ask my listeners to support me in every episode and be really consistent about it
and try and find a way to make it fun like you did by reading out the boosts and the comments
at the end of the episode. Those who do that succeed. But I think the other challenge we have
too is that until now, the only means of payment has been with Lightning. And I don't know how
many people are using Lightning wallets these days. I mean, it's a niche within a niche, right?
Bitcoin is niche within the world.
Lightning is niche within Bitcoin.
And then people who want to send a payment with Lightning,
that's a niche within Lightning.
Sorry, a podcast payment.
So we're a few layers down, or we were a few layers down,
and we've been looking at ways to broaden it
and make it more accessible,
which is why you can now send payments not with Lightning,
with card payments as well.
Which I've had a few, actually.
I had two, randomly.
But I don't want them.
no i'm not being funny i don't have to receive them well no but what i mean is i don't i'd want
the bitcoin yeah i would rather the bitcoin and mainly because it's cheaper like um the platform
what's it called a stripe you know there's a percent you know like on a small payment their
percentage charge is quite high and um and and you know it's very interesting to look at because i've
i get i've got both now i get streaming sats and i've got like i say a couple of people have bought
things outright with real money with fiat money yeah and i'm probably not going to do anything
it's probably just going to sit on that app forever and nothing's going to happen to it it
doesn't seem like real money to me it was a real eye-opener to me that i'm thinking
i really do i am really am a hard money advocate yeah it's really happened um what what i was going
to say was um this is my experience of who which listeners do send you money or subscribe or what
it is those people in my case it is those people who who care about what you're doing who kind of
feel a personal connection i'm not sure in my case that could scale necessarily i mean it's probably
a very small percentage of people and i'm you know i i agree that really when i go through my
podcasting app i'm not thinking about boosting people except if i hear say you and me are talking
and you say something really innovative or cool or something all right but but i do i get that urge
when i'm listening oh nice one mate well done you know and you want to send something i just wonder
whether that's a good business model like what how i've always thought that the internet of the future
um should be and obviously that's me thinking it should be a massive network of micro payments
for everything literally seamlessly happening in the background so when you're when you're surfing
the internet without even realizing it if you end up if you're on youtube and you see a bit of
my content i get a quarter of a penny sit in the background seamlessly and it's it's part of yours
you know a bit it's basically the fountain experience scaled up to the whole internet but
I don't know whether it could ever happen because I don't know.
I think the reason it's so difficult is because the incentives are just not aligned.
If you look at YouTube, obviously, like you said, the more time people spend watching stuff on YouTube, the more money that's going to be generated by advertisers for the platform and also for the content creator.
if you think about how that works for the listener like like we said most people don't actually want
to pay for content what's interesting though is that i saw a stat the other day that actually
i think 15 to 20 percent of people in the u.s had actually paid for podcast content in some form
so we say that most people won't but actually that was surprising how because that's how are
how are 15 of people paying for cotton so it could be that someone who has um subscribed to
someone on patreon or they've they've used like um you know like some of the big podcast networks
have these in-app subscriptions for apple podcasts or on spotify people have subscribed there or
people have sent a donation or there's various different ways they could have done that but it
surprised me actually that 15 20 percent it's it's higher than i thought it was going to be
yeah and the reason that listeners
because listeners won't pay
someone has to pay
and that person has to be
or that group has to be the advertiser
because no one else is going to do it
otherwise there's not going to be any money in it
do you think there's a future
in completely ad free
content creation then
I mean at the moment
even I thinking about when I look at Fountain the top the people who are earning the most money through the value for value network like Max you know and ungovernable misfits people like that
Whenever I listen to that, I think, you know, people are donating 100,000 sats, 150,000.
I'm like, every week they get a lot of sats.
And like you say, he's built up a really good relationship where people understand that, you know, this is his job and this is it.
But he's also got sponsorship deals as well.
I think actually that the best solution,
the most likely real world solution,
is a combination of those two things.
Like having ads, having value for value,
but then also having a subscription.
That means you're just not reliant on any one single thing.
The advertising market could dry up completely
and you'd still be okay because you've still got your supporters.
So I think you're right.
Subscription is the way.
it's it's people are much more likely to continue subscribing rather than every now and then
deciding oh i'm going to send some bitcoin i'm going to send some bitcoin or something yeah
but i mean it's interesting though because you know max's podcast on government misfits is
from what i can see it's not a huge podcast with a huge audience it's big enough to get
um some some advertisers which is which is great um but he's also like you said got certain
listeners sending 100,000 sats in one shot just because they want to. So if you think about it
like that, maybe this idea does scale. Maybe if you can just get each listener from sending 1,000
sats to sending 50,000, 100,000, that's the way it scales. It's not scaling through the number of
payments, it's scaling through the value of payments. True, but you just, yeah, I mean,
I think the way to win at podcasting probably in the,
in the first instance is to specialize for sure.
Um,
but I think in the end,
probably if you were like diary of a CEO and you decided to go value for
value and 10% of people decided to support you,
you just make a lot of money because they're pulling in millions,
millions of listens per episode.
Even if you monetize 1% of that,
that's good money.
But then that's like, I don't like that model though, because that's the YouTube model, which is you look at YouTube and you think, wow, you can make money on YouTube.
And the answer is no, you can't.
0.1% of people can make money on YouTube.
Everyone else gets F all basically.
And I would love to see a system where everyone gets the opportunity to make a bit of money.
Because I think, you know, I have worked in the media my whole life.
and I've worked at lots of different types of media.
And the most fun I'm having is being an independent creator in charge of
everything where no one tells you what to do and you just do what you do.
There's a degree of that with this podcast,
because I do work with the free cities foundation.
So,
you know,
content has to be in a certain direction,
but really I think,
you know,
freedom and ideas of freedom and free cities,
they overlap with a lot of things that we do and freedom in freedom in the media is one of these
things which is what you guys do um but but i i yeah i i it is hard and i don't have any i any
sort of dreams of being a value for value podcaster i'd love it i think it'd be brilliant i would i
would get up every morning to please my subscribers you know really because it's it's the perfect way
to do business because that's how you do business in a lot of other realms in your life if you run
a coffee shop you're not pleasing you know the coffee manufacturer you're pleasing your customer
and your customer comes into the shop it goes great coffee i'm coming here again you're like yay
free market is happening here we are you i'm producing something you're buying it this is all
good i do want that in the media i really do i just think maybe it takes a massive psychological
change it does people it does and i think you're right like it's when you have uh a relationship
which is bound by money moving one way and a product is moving the other way it feels good
you know it's how we how all other markets work pretty much yet content doesn't work in that way
the listener gets something for free the advertiser gives some money to the content creator
and I think that when yeah when when you have that relationship bound by money it brings you
closer it means there's a relationship that's actually there and it's going to last and that
listener will maybe follow you in whatever you do next and I think you know that's what we want we
want anybody you know just to be able to do their own thing host their own podcast you know it could
be about anything there's no one dictating it they can start from an audience of zero and even
if they only get to an audience of i don't know a hundred or a thousand they've got enough there
to sustain them or at least feel like they can see the path to okay the more i put into this
the more i get out of it it's interesting i never thought of that before that the media does work
in a funny way but and i'm wondering whether why that happens because i used to work in newspapers
when they were still picked up and read and people paid for newspapers you know you paid like 20p to
or 40p or a pound or whatever but there were ads as well in the newspapers so they were buying a
product but you were also subsidizing it with advertisers so yeah i wonder whether this is
ever gonna change they'll always be like when will anyone ever see listening to a podcast as
a product that they need to buy because i know a lot of people i know another guy trying to monetize
content in that same way using like using bitcoin using the lightning network having things behind
paywalls so you know like you if you know but using nostr so that if you buy something you you
kind of own it if you see me so if you buy you're it's like you're buying the right to listen to a
bit of content and you'll have that right forever so you can you know the cryptographically you can
always listen to that so you you are it does change the idea a little bit to i am actually
buying something now yeah rather you know yeah i i think that the the the technology that the media
is built on and distributed through has a massive role in dictating what the dynamics of the
marketplace are that come after it because if you think about radio you know a lot of early radio
was public funded, public radio.
And it was available in every car,
every radio station everywhere.
It was freely available.
So listeners are never going to pay for that.
It was always going to have to be something
that was supported by advertising.
And then if you look at the film industry,
films are so incredibly expensive to make.
And yes, there are people that will pay
to go to the cinema to watch them.
But is there enough for,
is there enough money to cover the cost of production?
Maybe not.
That's why they have to go out and get finances
to put money into the studios to make them happen.
and that's you know eventually when film got absolved into netflix and other things where
these big kind of rights and media packages were being sold again that's subsidizing for
the huge cost of making these programs because not enough people are paying the
9.99 a month for netflix to to make the model work so and for podcasting you know it's built
an rss it's an open protocol if you have a podcast feed anyone can listen to that feed
so it's very very hard to to kind of to paywall something to contain the information that's
already been made free everywhere else i think it goes back to the internet
that is the reason i remember when i worked in fleece tree it was completely analog and i went
through that whole process of the media going from analog to digital and it took me ages to
get my head around the idea that a way you might make money is by doing something for free and then
it it paying in in sort of hindsight or in in another way in an indirect way that was i'd never
done that before i i was a jobbing photographer so i did jobs for money i held sold rights to
pictures i i made you know it was all like here's something you've got it now here's my money for it
you know and and then the platforms became the publishers and the platforms required
your content for free and i really resisted at the start i remember telling everyone this is a
scam look can you not see what's happening you know the old version of photography of being a
photographer was you a magazine bought your content and put it in their magazine the new model is
uh instagram's the magazine yeah it's the mag where all the content's being shown but you're
just giving it to them yeah as i stop it stop it and obviously you can't and then you to cope you
start going okay right maybe they're right maybe i give it to them for free it gives me publicity
i get a job somewhere else and blah blah so it does generate me money but that's bullshit
to be perfectly honest it does work for some people but not for many whereas in the old system
when i was working there were thousands of photographers making a living you know even i were to the independent we had 20 photographers at one point it insane jobbing daily photographers you know you know and
obviously now there's no photographers there at all there's and even if there was the wages would
be half of what they were back then because yeah you know but but it is the kind of the way the
internet has been has been implemented it's it's it's a place to advertise it's the platform to
advertise on rather than the an arena the marketplace where the the trade happens between
me and the person that has my content maybe maybe that's that's the solution here maybe that's why
NOSTA is so important even though it's not very um popular at the moment because it's peer-to-peer
and maybe the problem with the internet is um the there's no peer-to-peer places to swap
content like instagram's a place where you swap content but someone monetizes it in the back end
and you you get basically taken for granted completely whereas with nostr arguably you you
have control over your content i don't know i don't i don't know enough about nostr to to
to make a prediction what do you think am i am i talking am i am i confused i do sound a little
bit confused actually i think it's fair enough to be confused i mean nostr is a such a a new and
significant innovation that we're all still figuring out what it's going to be used for
like what problems is it going to solve like and i think people are interested in different aspects
of nostr because there are so many different parts of it you know you've got the the identity aspect
of it you've got the sort of portability of that identity be able to take it anywhere um so you no
longer have an instagram account a facebook account uh you know whatever a google account
you just have one account i mean that makes a lot of sense but then i don't know i think the
the interesting aspect for me is the fact that all of the the content can move across different
platforms not necessarily that the the people can move across different platforms sure that's cool
But it's really interesting now that, I mean, if you put it into like a modern world example, somebody posts something on Instagram and someone can see it on YouTube.
Like, how cool is that?
Like, you forget about these.
You don't have this idea of a platform anymore.
It's a network.
It's an ecosystem.
You put something into the ecosystem and it can pop up on any number of different apps and people on any number of different apps can interact with it and respond to it.
like that that is really really cool that's good for content but that's not necessarily good for
content creators like how if in as much as um if i don't like the way my like for example if you go
on in if you go on youtube you're being shown a bunch of videos that you might not want do you go
to nostra or the or a nostra client that you chose videos you can control the algorithm yourself you
can see whatever you want you can see everything or you can yeah yeah that's great but what about
people who want to make a living out of content people who are running podcasts running shows
running i mean it's a big business now isn't it think about how many people it's all it's become
part of a business model as well podcasting especially the thing like i'm a perfect example
of this because i listened to podcasts for years and then i was asked to do this one and when i
started doing it i realized what an incredible tool for business it is yeah i.e you and me are
sat across the table now if i want to do business with fountain and i phone you up and say hey you
know uh can i can i talk to you say oh you know let's do a 10 minute zoom call you know if you if
you run a podcast you can come in sit down before you know it you really get to know someone and we
that happened to us with with this podcast yeah we went to visit in person all these places and it
it was massive for our network our network of connections it was beautiful it's brilliant which
is obviously in one sense this is one of the ways we're monetizing this podcast we don't get actual
money for it but our network is is growing in in in value but then the question is okay how am i
going to monetize that network and normally it's like oh let's find some people who might want to
advertise here then because now we've got the eyeballs now we've got the ears and the eyeballs
what can we sell them and you know i don't like that thing there's a part of me that thinks that
is a service as well because i have one uh advertiser who i really like and i really like
what they're doing so in a way i'm like cool i'm really happy to tell you about veritas village for
example or the off-grid communities in panama and stuff but really the ideal way to make a living
would be for listeners to you know in in a small way especially through a subscription i like that
um me to get you know x number of dollars each month like a wage for doing it so that i can then
run the business like okay this is how much is coming in this is how much i can afford to spend
on travel this is how much i can afford to spend on post-production blah blah blah you know which
is the dream i suppose isn't it yeah that's the benefit of um you know like sponsorship deals and
subscriptions is you get recurring revenue that's reliable and that's the thing with value for value
it's the complete opposite you know one episode might get you i don't know 500 000 sats and the
next one gets you 2 000 and you're like what's what's the difference um like how did one end up
doing so well but i think that's also the great thing is because you you get a really clear signal
of what work is actually valuable you don't get that with advertising you the advertiser pays
on the based on the size of the audience not on the quality of the content and funnily enough like
the the quality of content doesn't always dictate the size of the audience when it comes to podcasts
some of these podcasters just have big audiences because they are celebrities like the quality of
the actual content they're making is pretty poor.
But people just like them because they're likable characters,
they're popular characters.
So I think, yeah, it's interesting that we can get to a place
where the content creator is really getting a clear signal
on what's working and then can do more of that stuff.
And that's kind of a self-reinforcing loop
whereby you're really optimizing towards enjoyment
rather than the size of the audience and the number of eyeballs on it.
which is good in one sense but then in another sense you can end up in a bubble that way
i mean if you're if you're the kind of podcast that's um that's into something often you're
you know one particular thing or if you're pushing a certain idea like we do um you know you you you
if you if you're not careful the audience might want um cat pictures cat videos do you know what
i mean like which is i don't know i'm not that's underestimating my audience of course but but i
wouldn't necessarily say that part of being a creative is to please your audience all the time
i think you know you worked in in advertising that's a creative's worst nightmare is when the
ad guys are all i've been at shoots i used i shot ads for for a while and i'll be there
doing my job and there'd be like a row of people behind me in stages the client the the you know
and they're all saying can you do that can you and you're thinking why and this is why when i
employ creatives i just say you should go and do it here's here's what i what i want you go and do
it and i accept what you bring me that's why i've come to you as a creative you know so it listening
to your audience is good but not not not always i think i agree um but also on the other side of
this you have if you have advertisers you have to listen to them like what do they want you to do
or what don't they want you to do and talk about hopefully not i mean i i would that would that's
always that would be a proviso of me advertising with someone yeah if i suddenly realize how many
i don't like your product i'm not going to mince my words i mean i think part of the attention
economy is based on honesty and trust these days isn't it yeah and that i love that that's great
it um you you're right that there are some celebrities who have podcasts who are diabolical
and not worth listening to but people some people do i mean people watch cat videos don't they
there's doesn't you can't stop that but in our realm of the attention economy um i think it's
it's really important to be honest own up to your mistakes say it like it is and if you don't
you you you could struggle but then again i don't know i know some very well listened to podcasts
that screwed their listeners over and are doing very well in the bitcoin space as well that's
something i don't know mate i don't know i don't know what the business model is all i know is that
yeah do you think there a future in mass value for value like mass adoption
value for value i hope so um i think that like you said at the very beginning though
are we too early um i think we're we can be early on different fronts i think technologically yes
for sure we're still early you know i've already said about the number of people who are using the
bitcoin lightning network or know how to use it or even want to use it it's still so small that has
been a limiting factor so far but then the other thing is the the consumer mindset and expectation
of actually paying for something that's free already um so i think that it really depends
on the type of podcaster you are there's some very clear and obvious examples already that tell us
that value for value in itself exclusively can work as a business model for some podcasts.
Adam Curry and John C. DeVolk have been doing that for 15 years, I think 20 years with no agenda.
You know, originally that started out as we will take your checks in the post and then you can send
us money on PayPal. And now it's you can send us a boost on Fountain or any other podcasting 2.0 app.
So the technology has evolved behind a value for value, and I think it will continue to evolve.
but it really comes down to the creator like how much how much do you want that freedom because if
you really want it you have to really commit to it over a long period of time be really really
consistent and not make any stupid decisions about you know advertising or other kind of things you
might do to try and you know line your pockets um i think what no agenda have done is they've just
been very very very honest and very transparent with listeners about cool we're self-funded we
don't have ads send us some money so that we never have to do ads um and they built that relationship
over the years and they have a great relationship with their audience so it's they they take value
for value to the next level where it's not just someone sending money it's actually someone
offering their time by creating the show artwork or doing the chapters or whatever else it might
be there's a whole community of people here who are kind of producers on the show which is which
is really cool um so yeah i think there there is a future for it i think though that most creators
will find that value for value is just one aspect of their their revenues so using kind of the
donations alongside a subscription uh or alongside having ads on your podcast community is you're
absolutely right i was thinking about adam curry there and it's a very subtle and intangible thing
community isn't it when you think about it in those terms yes he's putting out he does a show
a day doesn't he adam and it's like a kind of like a new show on you know it's a great fun podcast but
really to be to get to the level where you can lean on your listeners as much as they do
is purely about maintaining this solid reason for existing and and do they i mean do they have
like ways that their community reach out to each other independently and stuff is it that is that
how it works they um what was it called they have this like um irc chat so it's like a decentralized
chat system whereby it's the chat's always live you anyone can work or you know posting it whenever
um and they also have i mean i'm not i'm not like too close to the show but they have this like
no agenda live stream whereby it's like a 24 7 live stream that shows no agenda content
but it also shows other podcasts so it's kind of like a like any other podcast within their sort
of community can get some airtime on it so there's always something to watch and it helps
kind of cross-pollinate that listener base across other shows bring fans of those different shows
together um and then i don't know how like yeah so people the the audience create the artwork for
each episode and then you can just submit them and then adam and uh john choose the artwork every
episode and they give a credit to the person um so that they have all these different ways that
they try and bring community into what they do and like to it sounds like really nice like any
any podcast you could see that and be like oh it's really cool but like you have to ask yourself like
how much do i want that like because it's it's a real commitment like you have to put in a lot of
work and you have to be really focused on that purpose that end goal without getting distracted
by other things especially um it's interesting adam curry's been on joe rogan's podcast a number
of times hasn't he yeah not just once i think if you have four or five right and still value for
value is not very well known about i mean that just shows you how unsticky kind of um value for
value and streaming with bitcoin is um because he's the number one guy he's rogan loves him he's
always calling him the pod the pod father and he really i think he got him into podcasting in fact
so he really does big him up and and adam does talk about what he's doing but people don't seem
to come over you can understand that he's probably monetizing that enough from that amount of
exposure but yeah i i do think it would be tricky for the average podcast to to think in those terms
like what why should i why should i try this i mean i suppose in the beginning you it doesn't
really matter nothing ventured nothing gained in the beginning but but you're absolutely right you
really do have to go for it um and and unfortunately i suppose at the moment the value for value world
is very skewed towards um really bitcoin really bitcoiners yeah is people who already have that
sort of freedom mindset um who want to live outside of the system and and have have a different way of
doing things and it's yeah podcasters who also have that mindset as well so naturally that's
where the movement has began and where it's kind of prospered but that's what we want to change we
want to see if this can go and be something more mainstream have you got other types of content
on there then what are the what obviously there's a ton of bitcoin call there's you get you get
freedom podcasts like ours and freedom footprint that kind of thing and then you get like bitcoin
podcasts what through and through like what what have you got that isn't related to that
i mean there's all sorts of stuff and it's also not just podcasts either we also have music on
there uh and we also have music shows which are podcasts which play music uh that you can support
the artist directly so in terms of podcasts yeah there i mean there's there's all sorts of genres
and categories of podcasts on fountain that are actually using fountain um not all of them are
successful because again we're struggling with those issues of like are we too early on the
technology front on the consumer mindset front but also i think that some of the let's say like
a sports podcast on fountain for example like they maybe have got on into fountain because they thought
it sounded interesting but they maybe just found they hit that barrier of like i'm not really sure
what to do next i'm not sure if my listeners will know what to do next which i think is why it's
mostly bitcoin podcasts that have done well um but i think what's really interesting though is
is the the whole music aspect because going back to that thing we're saying about what problem are
we solving for for podcasters well the problem we're solving for artists is it's even more clearer
and it's i think something that the listeners understand even more than the podcast listeners
do which is that artists don't get paid very well you know the terms and conditions of the music
industry are incredibly oppressive for artists um i think after if your song gets streamed a
thousand times on spotify you maybe make four or five dollars i don't think it's even that
i saw yeah maybe less it depends on this numbers from snoop dogg or something yeah said he got
something ridiculous like a billion listens and it was worth like you know a few thousand dollars
or something was ridiculous and then you know that that paper stream that's come down considerably
over the years while at the same time the cost of a spotify subscription has gone up considerably
so you know there's something going on there once again that i saw that happen happening in real time
when i worked in the media and i just thought okay the model of the copyrighted music model
is just out of date now because what happened what you saw happened was people had to go out
and play gigs on stage to make money that was it and and i didn't see that as necessarily a bad
thing i thought okay we've lived off this kind of renting this mindset of i can produce music
and then i can send it out there and go go to bed and it makes me money to the okay now i actually
have to get up and go to work i have to i need a proof of work here i need to actually be on stage
strumming my guitar and singing in order to make the money i didn't see that as necessarily
a bad thing.
Or no, I didn't like it because it,
basically I used to get a lot of money in royalties
from video and film.
It's almost non-existent now.
You know, it just doesn't really happen.
It does happen.
every month but it's minuscule you used to be able to live off royalties but but i when i think about
that system in general it's like yeah okay could i it it is a bit better to actually get paid for
what you do is a bit rent seeking to sort of like ask for people to pay just to listen to my stuff
over and over again but then again um if you prepare to pay which people in on so on on fountain
do you pay you do you subscribe to a a new uh as an audio channel then like or is it or do you pay
per song or what so it's exactly the same as it is for podcasts you know you can choose to stream
money to the artist directly you can choose to send a boost um and we'll also be launching
subscriptions for artists as well so you could put exclusive releases material on fountain that
wasn't anywhere else you can allow people to like download a high quality mp3 or web file
you can maybe even do stuff off platform so if you want to give away early access to gig tickets or
discount your merch page or access to your private group chat whatever else you want to do you can do
that through fountain but yeah it's interesting because again the same thing that applies with
podcasts also applies with music in the sense that the listener loves the artists but they're
not actually paying they're not paying anything you know gone are the days where you walk into a
record shop and you pick up a record from the the artist and you know that x percent whatever deal
they've got with the label x percent is going to go into the artist's pocket at the moment i'm just
paying spotify or paying youtube music or whatever else and somewhere in the background they figure
out the economics and a bit of money goes to the artist but you don't have that direct relationship
anymore um so that's what that's what we're trying to bring back yeah that's interesting it's an
interesting problem to solve for because what was beautiful about um the old system is there's a
collectability to the actual items themselves i've still got my complete collection of vinyl
yeah you know ironically i sold my decks i had sl 1200s pioneer really nice decks i sold them i
kept the vinyl because it had sentimental value the decks didn't you know um even cds i mean which
is a bad example because they've really just you can buy cds for like 50p each now but people used
to collect rows and rows of cds and they're maybe yeah we need to find a way to i suppose merch is
the the the modern you know um incarnation of that if you but imagine if you could merch per
episode or something i don't know maybe we're just in this world now where people
we're moving on from that model and media is more free information is more free and it always will
be and i don't know i i would love a value for value world though i really do i think i think we
need a complete change of infrastructure in order to have that i think if we could all live in a in a
in a kind of if the nostril infrastructure for example um permeated large sways of the population
or even just large communities um it could be that you could probably i'm not techie enough
but someone could implement a system where micropayments happen in the background without
you thinking about it like it happens on you that what you guys have started doing yeah if i watch a podcast i paying them 10 sats if i listened actually i this morning i listened to one i was being paid 20 sats for 10 minutes
which are back to me for listening but um but yeah i mean the theory is good right the theory
is good i think whatever it is like we have to just try and work on for the listener taking the
friction out of it yeah um you notice as well particularly when you're in london that a lot of
the buskers on the underground have card machines now and they they pre-load like five quid or
something onto their card machine so you can just walk past and tap it because people people are
tight people don't want to pay for stuff unless they really have a good reason to unless it's
made really really easy for you and i think that's why the streaming sats is so interesting
is because it just happens in the background.
You just turn it on.
I can set it on for your show
and then maybe off for another show
that I don't like as much.
I can choose how much I want to send per minute
to your show versus some other show
that I'm supporting.
And I don't have to do anything.
I don't have to lift a finger.
It just happens in the background.
There's no mental challenge on me at all.
There's no decision of like,
am I going to do this?
What am I going to say?
Like, how much am I going to send?
It just happens.
so we need to try and find ways of making it yeah more frictionless and i think having more payment
options is part of that as well okay i can see because we're in a we work we've got a limited
time here and i have to take down all this equipment i've got i think i've got one time
for one more question um it has to be a question about the future i think and in particular because
i see the movement i'm in the kind of freedom movement the free cities movement
um it's the free cities movement at least is quite a fledgling thing this idea of independent
jurisdictions and people setting up um new places you know it's it's quite new and i i can see that
in i've got an opportunity to talk about it and people come and listen to it which is great
but not masses amounts of people because it's a small industry it's but as people i've noticed on
our stats our listenership just goes up and up and up it's not flattering out it's just going up
and up and up slowly but surely and i i think that's about right i predict that because you
know there's only so many people that want to hear about these kind of things until it becomes
important to them and i think as time progresses i think we're the world appears to be on a
trajectory where people are losing their freedom more and more and and every day someone new
kind of bumps up against this barrier and goes oh shit and then they look it up and then they end up
being a listener and then right so i i see that and i think it's great that people can start
podcasts as well i think it's really important that people can start podcasts and these days
podcasts aren't even podcasts podcasts are shows podcast is a is almost like a it's becoming a bad
word almost you know um but the show is the old as in the the old tv show that used to do
they're really they're really quite important i think probably if not the most important thing
about getting in the battle of ideas so i thankful for like value for value platforms like yours but what are you what are you hoping in the future And what do you what do you think the timeline is for that
As someone that's like on it all day, you know, working on it all day, promoting it,
trying to get people to be on it, seeing what people content are putting on there,
seeing how much people are being listened to, seeing how much money they're making.
You can see, you know, what's the outlook for people that want to spread ideas through podcasting?
According to you.
Yeah.
Well, I think that as of next month, which is when we'll launch our podcast hosting platform that you've been using.
Oh, we haven't launched it yet.
Yeah, well, it's still kind of in beta.
Oh, right.
I didn't know that.
You saw one of the first few, but maybe by the time this comes out, it'll be live already.
you know finally podcasters will have all the tools they need to be able to go and make this
successful they've got the donations they've got the subscriptions they've got the premium content
they want to do like bonus episodes ad free early access whatever um and they've also got the ability
to not just receive payments in bitcoin but fiat money as well um so that we've we've been pining
for that really for the last couple of years to get to that point while also having a mobile app
which just works and the ux is what you would expect it to be and it's what the listener needs
it to be if they're going to move over from spotify so i think that very very soon by the
end of this year we'll have something that we think can you know get product market fit
the question is like yeah how uh how how broad can that market fit be because at the moment you
know i'd say maybe we have market fit with bitcoiners but that for us is probably not
going to be enough longer term for us to make a a valuable company out of it um so i don't know i
you know i think the good thing is that we're no longer really relying on adoption of bitcoin
for adoption of our product in the past we have been um and as much as we are big believers in
Bitcoin and value the freedom it gives us, the technology, the way that it works is so much
better than the fiat world. At least we're no longer reliant on that. So yeah, I don't know.
I'd say what I would love to see is within the next year or 18 months, a really large podcaster
who maybe has an audience in the millions, who is nothing to do with Bitcoin, who is able to earn
some meaningful money on fountain and by meaningful money i mean maybe something that can can compete
with the amount of money they're beginning from advertising um that i think would be would be a
great outcome for us yeah i think that would i it just occurred to me with the i i there was a that
was a great place to end but it just made me think of something and that was that um because you're
integrated with NOSTA, do new people that come on who aren't into the whole Bitcoin NOSTA networks,
do they still have to join NOSTA? You don't have to. If you want to use any of the social features,
like if you want to comment on something, or you want to, I think, create a clip or a playlist,
you have to create a NOSTA profile But you can do that within Fountain What about if you want to subscribe with dollars which like i say i got a subscriber with dollars and do they have to have a nostril
account even though they're they're just sending dollars over strike would yeah because we actually
uh and not to get too deep into the technological stuff but we actually need nostril to uh prove
your identity when you're buying something so if i've subscribed to your podcast or if i bought one
of your bonus episodes i can i can prove that i purchased it so if i'm logged in let's say like
another podcast app started the same subscription thing that we have which they can do because it's
all built on an open protocol if i subscribe to your show on fountain but then i downloaded this
other app and logged into my nostril profile there i would still be able to access your content from
that other app too because i'm using the nostril profile as the verification there right okay
maybe maybe we are a little bit too early i don't know i think i'm excited i'm excited because
like i've got i've only got a few subscribers but it's still some subscribers paying money
and that's exciting you just you just sort of like adjust your um how excited you get about
certain amounts of money meter whatever that is you know in the old if you have it's not how much
you're earning it's the fact that people are choosing to hit the subscribe button and send
you money regularly which is really cool and i i i hope i'm i mean i'm playing the long game here
i'm definitely on board because i'm in that world as well the freedom world of the bitcoin world are
bedfellows and a lot of our people are in the fountain world and it's true even when you look
at the statistics even when we were on spotify the um the number of listeners was spotify or and
fountain were often having a battle with each other with how many people were using the platform
to listen because sometimes you have episodes which are more geared towards the bitcoin aside
and then they like listening to those um but but yeah i really do hope that that the the the whole
thing scales and the whole thing evolves into something big because I like I say I'm I've been
in the media my whole life my whole working life and the dream right from the word go when did the
digital world started appearing and I spotted it the dream was always to to live in a value for
value system always in everything in everything you did it was the way that I saw you would get
paid when when we started moving into the digital world and you started realizing creators were
getting completely disenfranchised by this whole system and whilst it's only a few people at the
moment let's hope in the future it could be just the way things work hopefully yeah i hope so we'll
do everything we can to get there cool well nick thanks for coming in thanks for coming in to hear
yeah i appreciate it i like uh i feel really young and vibrant being around all these people
doing hot desking and stuff like that and yeah good luck and um and yeah thanks for talking it's
been great thanks a lot