I think what's different about podcasting is that it's been opened from day one.
And even if podcasters don't really understand how that works on a technical level, what most
podcasters tend to understand is that people can listen on any app that they choose to
listen on.
And the phrase wherever you get your podcast is commonly used.
And I think that's kind of like a baseline that will never disappear.
You know, differentiation in the listener experience and allows developers to be more flexible because you've got the RSS feed, which has all of the content.
Now with podcast index and podcasting 2.0, you have an open index to find any RSS feeds.
And that really means that for developers of podcast listening experiences, you can build whatever you want.
Hey, one quick thing before we get into it. Trust Revolution runs on value for value. No ads,
no sponsors. Fountain is how it works for me and for the show. Pay per episode or subscribe,
lightning or card. You get something from the show, you can send something back. No guilt,
no gimmicks. Go to trustrevolution.co. That's trustrevolution.co. Okay, let's get into it.
Oscar Mary, good to see you. Welcome.
Hey, Sean. Thanks so much for having me on. Really appreciate it.
Absolutely. My pleasure. I know as we were talking before we started, that based on being a customer of Fountain, a very happy customer, no plug, no remuneration, just a happy customer.
and having been on your last webinar that, pardon me, you got a lot going on,
a lot of new feature shipping, and a lot of exciting things that I do want to get into today.
And where I'd like to start, Oscar, is part at least of your origin story.
And so as I understand it, while at Accenture, or rather perhaps post, we'll get into that.
So in essence, you made $30,000 in six months from Amazon's Alexa platform.
Your Find My iPhone skill was number one in productivity.
You became an Alexa champion, sort of one of their advocates, ran the London meetup, taught courses.
So all that to say you were winning inside Big Tech System.
What changed for you?
Yeah, that's a great question.
And there's a lot that I can share from that journey working with voice technology and Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant.
I would say that the number one thing that changed for me is that the actual technology of voice assistants at that time, we're talking 2017, 2018.
It didn't really live up to the expectations that we had as a developer community and also for, you know, end users, you know, interacting with Alexa in their homes.
The technology just wasn't really up to scratch.
And that kind of limited the scope of the kinds of things that we could build.
So when I first started working with specifically the Amazon Alexa technology, the assistant, because that's how I got into it, was very early to get access to the developer kit and release one of the first Alexa skills, which was kind of like, you know, the mini apps that you could build on top of the platform.
You know, we had we were very excited about the type of interactions that you could build.
um i'm still a big believer in voice as an interface to technology primarily because you
it means you can access technology and um the audio medium without having to pull your phone
out of your pocket and without having to look at a screen and maybe be distracted by things like
notifications or ads uh so i'm still a big believer in it it's just that big the the level
of accuracy you need when building a voice-based interaction is so so high it's much higher than
you think and at the time even though the accuracy was probably 95 96 it just wasn't enough and
we found that for complex voice interactions it just kind of fell down and that's why you know
you mentioned some of the the apps that we built that's why the really really simple ones that were
almost like one-shot invocations and one-shot responses those were the ones that were incredibly
popular and and did really well but that limited the scope of uh what we can build and so decided
to kind of yeah move on from from that part of my I guess tech journey but yeah have always worked
in tech have always been uh very um excited about what technology can do and particularly the audio
medium you know I'd say that is the consistent theme between what I was working on before and
now working in the podcast industry personally I just believe that audio as a medium is incredibly
powerful but it's also non-invasive you can you know listen as you're you know doing something
else or walking out in nature or you know falling asleep even with audiobooks and I just love that
aspect to the audio medium when you compare it to every other technology medium that we interact
with all day, which is so invasive and so crowded and so dominating in terms of your attention.
That's where I feel audio has a kind of special, special place.
And I remember distinctly, and this is not to, you know, to blow smoke at you, but I remember
testing your skill. I didn't know the name Oscar Mary at the time, but I remember sitting at home,
whatever it was, 2016, 2015, at the time that you pushed the find my iPhone skill to be more
specific. And the idea of laying back on the sofa or wherever I was and saying, hey, Alexa, find my
iPhone. And having my phone, you know, start to start to beep felt like magic. You know, when you
fast forward 10 years and, you know, we now ask Kroc to, you know, create one-shot videos that are
indistinguishable from reality, things pale in comparison. But at the time, it was absolutely
magical. So I appreciate how that would capture one's imagination. Was it, you mentioned, Oscar,
the, at the time, failure to live up or the inability for it to live up to its expectation,
which is so often the case, of course, in an emerging technology.
Was there an aspect at that time, did you sort of sense where things were going in terms of major players controlling that sphere?
So if we sort of walk back to Accenture 2015, two Echo devices show up in the innovation lab, you know, was it really about readiness?
Or did you also, not to put words in your mouth, did you have sort of a line of sight to where it was all going in terms of top-down control?
Yeah, it's a great question. I would say that the primary reason from my perspective that the technology didn't live up to the promise of what it could do was the accuracy. And then there's also this aspect of browsability. You know, one of the downsides of a voice interaction is very hard to browse or scan content.
So any type of question where you want to be presented with options or quickly scan the result, you can't really do that with audio.
And that was another limitation, although there are ways you can get around that.
But in terms of top down control of, you know, individual platforms, I do think that played a part as well, because it played a part for two reasons.
Number one, you know, Amazon were the gatekeepers of progress with the technology.
So unless their engineering and product teams decided to focus on a particular aspect of improving Alexa or the Alexa development kit, then we were stuck and we couldn't move it forward independent from them.
It's a little bit like how you see, you know, iOS development today.
If you can't do something because Apple don't let you buy the iOS APIs, then you're kind of stuck as a developer.
So that also limited us.
And then you have, I guess, both Amazon with Alexa and Google with Google Assistant at the time were kind of copying the way things worked with mobile operating systems and app stores, whereby everything was quite locked down.
um there was no real interrupt between you know Alexa or Google Assistant so things would work
slightly differently and also there was no interrupt with um the rest of their ecosystems
for example you know Google Play on on Android and things like that so I do think that played a
part in terms of uh yeah again just limiting what was possible um with the uh with the APIs we were
using but i would say that the primary factor was the accuracy of the voice assistants at the time
another actual massive factor in um the kind of the space not reaching the potential we thought
it would was siri on ios because every year we would uh you know look to wwdc and and expect some
kind of you know improvement with siri you know some new apis from siri for ios and that never
happened and and you know it's 2026 it still hasn't happened and they're outsourcing to google
yeah but we got we got liquid gas you know there's a pro right right well you know actually
that's a really interesting seg i think to whether whether you know whether in voice
there was even an opportunity for significant gatekeeping because of the essentially failure
for it to live up to the hype. There were, as you know, the two players, really, Amazon and
Google with Apple being an also-ran. So, you know, is podcasting the same pattern with Apple
and Spotify controlling what people hear, sort of A, B, maybe more specifically, when a show
gets removed from Apple's index, perhaps as an Alexa skill got blocked, banned, deleted from
their marketplace, you know, it disappears from most apps. And so this is the gist of the question.
Given that control that I think arguably, and tell me if you disagree, that Apple and Spotify
have over podcasting and what people essentially hear, how many creators do you think understand
that risk as perhaps a parallel to the developers we just talked about? Yeah, that's an interesting
question. I think what's different about podcasting is that it's been opened from day one.
And even if podcasters don't really understand how that works on a technical level, what most
podcasters tend to understand is that people can listen on any app that they choose to listen on.
And the phrase wherever you get your podcast is commonly used.
And I think that that's kind of like a baseline that will never disappear with podcasting because it's how it's always worked.
And there's millions of people out there that listen on apps that are not the major ones, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
and then I also think that encourages you know differentiation in the listener experience and
and allows developers to be more flexible because you've got the RSS feed which has all of the
content and now with podcast index and podcasting 2.0 you have an open index to find any RSS feeds
And that really means that for developers of podcast listening experiences, you can build whatever you want. And we see, you know, there is a very long tail of podcast listening experiences that all do all do things slightly differently. And I think that, yeah, that baseline of openness in podcasting will be very, very difficult to break, I think.
Would you say, and I know this is one that people trot out a lot, but to my memory, it is one of the most significant in Spotify doing, what was it initially, a hundred million dollar exclusive with Joe Rogan.
And then I think subsequently 200, if I got the details.
So I'm just staggering numbers.
And I don't have, maybe you do, I don't have any data to support this.
But as I recall, there was absolutely an intention to try to wall that in.
So, A, do you know perhaps if that happened? And B, is that a threat, right? You know, if major, major, major podcasters like Arogan or whomever, if they do exclusive deals, and I presume it would be with Spotify and Spotify somehow blocks, you know, the RSS feed distribution, otherwise, like how much of a threat is that to the model itself?
yeah um it was such an interesting case study uh joe rogan going exclusive on spotify for
however long it was i think it was about two years um what was so fascinating about this is
obviously to joe rogan there was a massive benefit in terms of the financial um you know reward for
for going exclusive but actually um there was a huge uh downside for joe in terms of his reach
and his influence um in going exclusive with spotify if you think back to kind of peak joe
rogan which was just before he went exclusive on spotify he was without a doubt the biggest
podcaster in the world probably the podcaster with the most influence globally in terms of
you know interviewing guests getting a story or a topic of conversation out to the world and
during the the year or two that he was exclusive you know i would say and there's many people that
have also written about this and and shown data to back it up that joe actually lost a massive
amount of influence because of the fact you could only listen on spotify the reality is with
podcasting is that it is a fragmented ecosystem even the big two of Spotify and Apple podcasts
only have round about a 30 percent market share in terms of listeners so if you choose to go
exclusive on Spotify you're essentially saying to 70 percent of your existing and potential audience
sorry you can't listen anymore and that means you can't share the episode with a friend you can't
you know, talk about the episode on social media, you can't bring up the episode, topic of
conversation with friends or family, whatever it might may be. And I think for that reason,
Joe Rogan lost a massive amount of influence. And we've seen other podcasters like, you know,
Lex Friedman, Andrew Huberman, these types of people kind of step into the void that was
left by Joe Rogan going exclusive.
And I think that the strategy for Spotify worked
because they acquired a lot of podcast listeners onto Spotify.
Who doesn't want that next $100 million, right?
Yeah, and for Joe, obviously, he got a massive payday,
so fair play to him.
But I think that he then reversed it.
I don't know who made the decision,
but my hunch is that he said,
no, this isn't working for me.
I want to go back to, you know, open RSS.
And now Joe Rogan is, again, available on any podcast app.
But I think other content creators have seen that as like the prime example of exclusivity,
how it may still work for you and there may be a big payday, but it comes with very obvious
drawbacks in terms of a drop in influence a restriction on how viral your podcast can can go and all of these other drawbacks And I think that also you know a benefit that open podcasting has because it almost
like a restricting function on people thinking, oh, yeah, I'm just going to go exclusive.
Absolutely.
And I think that is such an important point to underscore, that the fragmented, chaotic,
some might say nature of podcasting, is a check against centralization. And even Spotify,
the biggest player in the business in music and audio, I think one could say, could not deliver
what Joe wanted more, even more than $100 million, we're speculating. But I think you raise an
excellent point in that ultimately his influence declined. And if that is the measure of success,
if reach and influence are a greater measure of success than revenue, you can't win through closed.
And so if we then, Oscar, go from $100 million to a dear friend of mine used to say in the music business, stepping into a river of nickels and picking them up, value for value.
So great, great in theory.
I think the trick, of course, as we know, is that I did a previous segment on this.
Voluntary payment models usually see 1% to 5% participation.
And so as I said then, and I will reiterate now, I am a believer. This podcast is strictly value for value. We'll see how that plays out. But it is something I believe deeply in and want to work, but wanting it to work is not the same as it working. So let me ask you, why do you believe value for value can work?
Yeah, I would say, yeah, I do believe it can work. I guess there's two categories of my answer and my reasons to why I think value for value can work. One is almost an emotional reason. And then the second is more of a, you know, evidence set of reasons in terms of where I see it working today, in other contexts.
to start with on the more kind of the areas where I see it working and where I see evidence for it
working the biggest one is Patreon so if you look at Patreon today podcasters using Patreon
to receive voluntary payments from their audience you know generate hundreds of millions of dollars
per year for those podcasters. And many of the podcasters make, you know, a serious living
through Patreon. I think if you also look at the live streaming platforms like Twitch and Kick,
you see the same thing where the revenue from listener donations is significant and, you know,
is equivalent to the advertising and sponsorship revenue that they receive. So for me, Patreon
and the live streaming platforms are examples where I can see essentially value for value
working today. It's just that both of those examples are in closed context. And so what they
lack, interestingly, very similar to the Joe Rogan example is they limit reach and discovery
for content creators because essentially they limit your you know your top fans to
interacting with your content in a in a closed ecosystem um and ultimately what we're trying to
do with fountain and open podcasting open podcast payments nostra is to try and recreate the product
experiences that exist on patreon and these live streaming platforms but do it in an open way and
tie that back into you know social discovery through through uh nostra but then on the other
side in terms of why i believe it can work uh more on an emotional level and like why we're actually
doing this why i'm spending time on this why i believe in it is because sometimes you listen to
a piece of content and it has such a profound impact on you whether that's learning something
new you know discovering something interesting about the world that you didn't know before
you know having a laugh because someone's saying something incredibly funny or whatever it is or
listening to some music that you know makes the the hairs on your arm stand up that value currently
is um there's no way to give back and i think that if the tools were there to be able to capture that
feeling and immediately present you with a way to give back to the person that made you feel like
that i think that is something that people uh want to do not only are capable of doing and would do
but they actually want to do that the reason i think the percentages and you're correct in saying
that it's like a one one to five percent of the audience that will actually support you uh in a
voluntary capacity the reason i think that is so low is because the tools are not there uh to make
it really really easy for your audience to support you in a way that it makes them feel good and and
there's some things that for example the live streaming platforms do well and and the content
creators uh within live streaming have kind of figured out some of the the language to use and
stuff but yeah ultimately i think that uh people want to give back and also in an age where we're
drowning in content and there's AI content and there's these algorithms on platforms like X and
Instagram that, you know, certain content does well and you have to play the algorithm game and
you have to, you know, create endless content. People also don't like that. And if you can,
and I'm not saying we've achieved this with Fountain by any means, there's a long way to go.
But I think there's this magic combination of number one, giving people the tools to be able
to support and say thank you for amazing content number two tying that back into discovery and
explaining to people that there's a different way there's a way that you can have content discovery
that isn't driven by an attention algorithm and it's very hard to do that to to you know
your average person in a succinct way but i do think that if you go out there and you talk to
anyone they they do understand that these attention algorithms are unhealthy and and if you can
put forward a better way of doing things um with with a similar level of product experience to
what they're using already be that youtube spotify apple podcast twitch um i think the combination of
those two things um can work and um but yeah ultimately that there's a lot still to do to
to make this work in the way we want to um you know we've got a lot to do as fountain and and
the other tools that interact in this ecosystem whether they be podcast apps hosting companies
nostre clients you know whatever it is but then also for um for content creators that it's not
it's hard it's hard work you know there has to be first off you have to create incredible content
that when people listen or watch,
they have that moment I was talking about earlier.
You know, it really moves them
or it really provides incredible value to them.
That's job number one.
Secondly, you have to actually ask them
to support you in the right way
and make that incredibly easy,
make it make sense,
fit that into the content format in the right way.
And then also, you know,
we need more people to be using
these open products and open tools that interact with each other. And people need to understand
why that's important more broadly for, I guess, society. So, you know, whether it's Fountain,
you know, doing a better job on the product side, content creators, you know, doing a better job
with the ask, and then just generally everybody communicating and selling essentially this future
vision that is a different way of doing content discovery on the internet. There's a lot still to
do and i think yeah we're even though you know we've been working on fountain for a long time
now i still very much think that it's it's yeah we're right at the beginning of this journey and
hopefully we can we can um achieve what we want to set out to do because i do think it will be
beneficial for everybody involved absolutely i i tend to maybe this is a strained analogy but i
tend to look at value for value, voluntary payment as similar to choosing to buy good,
expensive, clean food. Not everybody will do it. You know, it's one in our, in my family,
it's one of our largest monthly expenses. It's a choice we make. We believe that that's
an incredible investment. And so again, not to strain the analogy, but I think it is
One, something you need to be aware of, two, something you need to value, and three, something, you know, you need to have the means to acquire.
And so I think voluntary payment, the low friction way, and the means of rewarding for those magic moments that you described.
I'm a lifelong drummer, musician, so I, you know, I think I just got the arm hair, thinking about the arm hair tingling.
So it is magic and it's worth a great deal.
And so I know, Oscar, that, you know, as you say, even four years in, it is still very much experimentation.
And I do not wish to dig up the pay to listen sort of phase.
But what I do want to ask about that is what did you learn about the tension between rewarding users and sustainability?
And, you know, so for anyone in your chair, and I understand CAC and LTV and daily active users, and, you know, you do the math and you look at the metrics, some things work, some things don't.
And so my question is not why. My question is, what did you sort of understand then about the teeter-totter of trying to acquire listeners, bring them into this new experience and keep them around as compared to them doing what might be easier, which is slipping back into Spotify or Apple?
Yeah, this is a really interesting aspect of what we have worked on over the past four and a bit years.
Yeah, so for anyone that's not aware, we had and we still actually have in the Fountain app a system of rewards.
So you can earn Bitcoin just by listening to your regular shows on Fountain.
And you can also earn additional Bitcoin by listening to promoted episodes.
And when we launched this feature, it was probably about two and a half years ago.
We were really excited about it because, you know, who wouldn't want to earn small amounts of Bitcoin for just doing what you already do every day, which is listen to podcasts.
I loved it.
And it worked incredibly well.
People loved it.
essentially the reason that we decided to focus less on this is because of the amount of work
that it required to maintain it we're a very small team at the time we were two engineers
we're now three engineers after Dovidas from RSS Blue joined us last year so we're a very small team
and the reality is that if you have some kind of you know paid incentivized rewards mechanic
that is a full-time job to implement properly for you know probably a team of you know five
engineers and we made a decision you know a few years ago to focus less on this so that we could
focus more on just building a top class podcast listening experience because we felt that
that is a more important fundamental for fountain success than an earning mechanic
And also since last year, having moved into the hosting side of podcasting, we also felt that was more important to our kind of end goal of bringing, you know, a value based content discovery system to open podcasting, but also open media.
We felt that those two things, a first class listener experience in the app and a product that we can work with directly with podcasters to help them achieve their goals was more important than focusing on the earning mechanic.
Now, having said that, I still have a lot of conviction around the earning mechanic. And we would love to, I would love to spend more time on it and work out a system where we can essentially increase the rewards to a level where it feels exciting again.
because when we first launched it, the amount that you could earn was quite high,
whereas now it's quite low.
And primarily the reason for that is that we have to fight spam users
that are just there to earn the sats and are not actually listening to anything.
And the way that we've done that is just make the rewards very low
so that there's not a high incentive for them to do that.
If we had a lot more time and focus on this,
we could uh you know revisit this and have a system that works incredibly well and is fair for
for users and you know protects against anti uh spam things like this we just we just don't have
the capacity to focus on it right now um and yeah maybe in the future i hope we will revisit it
because i do believe that especially when it comes to advertising which we don't think is going away
as a monetization pillar for content creators.
There's just so many cool things you can do
with micropayments and a reward mechanic
where the listeners actually can participate
in the value transfer from the advertisers.
It just requires a massive amount of work
in order to do it right.
And we've just chosen to not make that
our top priority right now.
Understood, understood.
And I think, you know, the string that I wanted to pull on,
and I appreciate those insights,
is about the way the money flows.
And so, frankly, be it Bitcoin or whatever else,
so though clearly Bitcoin and micropayments
make things possible that would not be possible in fiat.
And so where I'm going,
I spent many years in music and music tech
and worked with about 100 startups.
Long story short, got deep into the weeds
of everyone who's got their hand in a musician's pocket
or a creator's pocket.
And so I would love if you could,
for those who are perhaps not that deep in the weeds, Oscar, to parallel for us where
parts of a dollar go in major media, big tech, major media, you know, the publishers, the
labels, the Amazons, the Spotify's versus how money flows in open podcasting and open
media.
So could you give us sort of a sense of if I, a creator, have a dollar, you know, at
the top of the funnel, how much lands in my pocket versus, you know, a thousand sats on the other
side? Yeah, this is a great question. And it does depend on what medium you're talking about,
you know, podcasts versus music versus online video. Licensing, royalties, all that good stuff.
Yeah, yeah. But essentially high level, there are many, many steps in the monetization funnel
whereby you as the end recipient of that money are losing out on a potentially big cut on the money.
So take something like YouTube as a very simple example.
Any revenue that you are potentially entitled to on YouTube,
first off, YouTube will take a massive cut out of that.
then you will have the the payment processor which will take another cut then if you're trying to if
you're using a third party to actually sell that advertising that third party might take a cut
and so there's already you know potentially three or four steps in that monetization funnel where
you're losing out and then when it comes to music it's even more complicated because you have
You have the actual labels you have the collection agencies and they all take a cut and then also you have a time aspect to this as well so this is even more um yeah exactly quarterly payouts and so
you know the gap between someone again going back to someone hearing your music and having their
hands stand up on the arm uh to you actually seeing a financial benefit from that as an artist
is many, many months and many, many percentage points lower than the value that that user received.
And I would just add up to 90%. You could end up with 10 cents on the dollar 90 days later.
Yeah, exactly. So, you know, it's classic things that we as humans care deeply about, time and money.
And in the current system, as an artist, as a content creator, you are losing out massively on both time and money.
And the vision for using micropayments.
And one thing that's really important to understand when I say micropayments is we're actually talking about open micropayments.
Because any big technology company can do micropayments.
YouTube can do micropayments.
Spotify can do micropayments.
The important difference to how this works with OpenRSS and Bitcoin in Fountain and other apps is that the micropayments are open, which means that as a content creator, if somebody wants to support you or pay you, they don't have to be using a certain app or system.
they can use whatever app they choose and the money when it gets transferred from that listener
to you gets transferred instantly and there are still you know fees involved you know fountain
takes a very small fee but the important thing is there are micro the payments are micro payments
so we're talking about very small amounts and this allows us to be creative in the way that
we offer support and then it's open so you know these can happen from any apps and i think
the vision for this is that you know whether it's a podcaster or a musician or you know just someone
creating content on the internet they can receive instant donations from any app that wants to
present that content in an interesting way and have that money flow directly into their wallet
within seconds. And then on top of that, what these legacy payment systems cannot do
is tie the payments back to discovery. Again, all of the major discovery mechanics on the internet
right now use attention as a signal for the things that you either see or are presented with
so whether that's a tweet on x whether that's a reel on instagram or whether that's a song in a
spotify playlist or editorial all of the metrics that drive those things being presented to you
are attention-based you know likes impressions plays anything like that and we think that if you
can attach value to discovery algorithms then you can actually have a system that works better for
creators because you can give them more leverage from their you know the people that absolutely
love their content. So the example I always like to give is, let's say both of us liked
a video on YouTube today, you know, later this evening, maybe you go and you watch a YouTube
video from a subscription that you enjoy. For me, I could choose to like that video because it was
slightly interesting and you know it it was a good you know 10 minutes spent uh in on my evening
while i'm winding down and and that like would go into youtube's algorithm and you know maybe
recommend that video to somebody else whereas you sean could watch a video this evening and it could
totally blow your mind and totally you know change your perspective on something in terms of the way
you see the world and so you give it a like and those things are essentially treated in the same
way by the youtube algorithm and so that's where we see these um negative um you know downstream
effects of attention algorithms in terms of like this slot essentially uh getting sent into our
feeds we think that if we can um attach value to these signals then the really valuable content
can kind of be surfaced to the top and people can stop chasing these uh weird algorithm chasing
these weird algorithms to to produce content that is attention grabbing but is not actually deeply
valuable and and going back to your original question that's why having open payments where
any app or service can not only make a payment but can also see the payment metadata that's what's so
important so it's like imagine if you could you know imagine if on the spotify mobile app you had
a button that that just appears at the end of each month and every um spotify listener could
just choose i want to send my 15 a month to one artist and then that data was open and available
to anybody and it was tied into your social graph and you could see like what new artists did my
friends, my family, the people I respect come across this month that they thought were deserving
of that $15. Like that would be an incredible discovery and it would be much better than
what's on offer now. So yeah, long way of answering your question.
No, no, it's great. And I think, you know, my sort of synopsis of that is the age old vote with
your wallet and that where we spend our money is one of the strongest votes and the most
significant signals that we can send. And I think what you drew out to me, or what you drew out that's
most interesting to me in that, Oscar, is that today these flows, these funnels, these mechanics,
not to, you know, get too in the weeds on the lingo, but they're tightly coupled. They are
hermetically sealed. And that seems to work for Spotify, Apple, YouTube, others today.
But what I hear you say is if they were loosely coupled and if they took advantage of these open protocols and the data that they make available, they would have even stronger signals on which to build their product to serve their audience.
And I'm also reminded that, you know, the so-called attention economy.
But I think, again, what you draw out is the attention economy is forever shattered, right?
On one side, because we've got AI slop and I can, for virtually no cost, continue to feed you what I think you want.
And on the other side, we've got such passive engagement, the so-called lean back as opposed to lean forward or lean in,
that, you know, this incredibly, you know, the dead internet theory as it goes,
we've got this flywheel that is just AI feeding someone disengaged. And the future that I see,
you know, us moving toward is one where, again, what I choose to spend my money on is one of the
strongest signals. And all you have to do is tap in to that signal to build better experiences,
build better products. And so on that note, you rebuilt Fountain Social Features on Noster.
And so anyone who listens to this show hears a fair bit about Noster, that's a big bet.
What's the vision that drove that bet?
Yeah.
So from the beginning with Fountain, we wanted to build social features into the podcast discovery
experience.
And at the beginning within the Fountain app, we had our own social system.
We had our own follower graph.
We had our own social profiles. We had our own commenting system. The issue with that initial way of doing things was that it was closed off and it was limited to just the Fountain app.
and we always wanted a way to make the social experience within the fountain app open so that
you know the dream the dream was always somebody can be listening on fountain leave a comment on
the episode and then somebody in a different podcast app can go to the episode page and see
that same comment that was always the dream from day one and within the podcasting 2.0 community
you know the the ambition to achieve that was always there and you know there were many ideas
you know talked about and and proposed on how to exactly do that um NOSTA came about at the
perfect time for us really um and when we saw uh NOSTA even before you know Jack Dorsey you know
tweeted about it and we had that influx of users we were looking at NOSTA as you know
a perfect solution for the social layer of open podcasting now it was a very difficult thing to
transition Fountain's social features from our own internal system to NOSTA for many reasons I won't
get into all of the details but essentially you have your regular you know data migration uh
issues that you'd have with any normal system but then also because NOSTA is key-based uh you
you know in order to create new data you need people to sign with their keys and then also at
the time there was no way to uh you know canonically reference a podcast show or an episode
in a NOSTA event.
So we had to come up with that spec as well,
which is now NIP 73.
So it was very challenging to do,
but where we've arrived at,
and I'm a massive believer that this can power
not just Fountain,
but the entirety of open podcasting,
is we have, number one,
we have a canonical way to reference a podcast show
or episode in a way where anybody can query NOSTA events
related to that show or episode.
This linking, in effect, uses podcast GUIDs,
which are unique identifiers that exist both at the show level
and episode level.
And these follow you even if you switch your hosting provider.
So many apps use these GUIDs to reference episodes and shows,
and we've tied that into NOSTA now.
um so yeah my belief is that um if we can get the open podcast industry to take NOSTA seriously
then NOSTA can be the social layer of open podcasting and what we can do is recreate
the social discovery features that exist on closed platforms like YouTube and Instagram and X
but do it in an open way whereby if your favorite podcast app is overcast and or your favorite
podcast app is antenna pod or whatever you choose to listen to you can still participate
in all of the social discovery to whatever level you want you know some people are not going to
want any social discovery that's fine some people might want a tiny little bit of social discovery
and and that's a great option for them too and then other people might want a full-blown
you know social experience in their podcast app and and that's great that's consumer choice that's
what we want what's important is that with NOSTA your profile your follower relationships your
follower graph the episodes that you've liked or commented on or the episodes that you've supported
financially the shows that you supported financially the clips that you've created of
these episodes the lists that you've built up all of these things are open they're accessible
in any app that wants to participate.
And that's our kind of vision
and what we think NOSTA can deliver.
Where we're at now is, you know,
we've migrated Fountain fully over to NOSTA.
We think the social experience in the Fountain app
is a great kind of first version.
Our main goal now is to try and get
the rest of the podcast industry
to take this seriously and look at it.
And, you know, I think I mentioned before the call
that, you know, we are seeing the podcast industry start to, you know, adopt these newer open
features. We saw iHeartRadio, the app just announced support for alternate enclosure. So
I believe we can get there, but like anything, it's something that takes time.
Yeah. And I think, you know, for, I don't know, perhaps anyone under 30, what is an iHeartRadio?
But for those maybe older, and correct me if I recall, Oscar, you know, they're a national – in the U.S. and I think global, but in the United States, they pretty much run the show.
And they have parlayed that into, you know, I'm thinking about the old Silicon Valley episode, Internet on the Radio, Radio on the Internet.
But they sort of dominate that.
I know that when I ask, you know, one of my Apple devices to play a station, my lightning one, shout out to Lightning 100 in Nashville, it comes over iHeartRadio.
So point being, it's a big deal for those guys to even entertain the idea and to flirt with the technology is a big deal.
So you touched on, you know, cross app comments and social unified identity, which for listeners I would call out does not mean your name and phone number and email address.
You know, you can spin up a Nostr key pair, use that.
You know, I think about the parallels in, say, Substack.
You know, not everybody wants to broadcast their subscriptions in Substack.
They, you know, there may be things there that they don't want others to know that they're consuming.
Similarly on Nostr, so no worries there.
But, you know, cross-app comments, unified identity, censorship resistance, which I think is incredibly important.
Those are the promises. What's working today and what do you think the next big step is?
Yeah, I think in terms of what's working today, I think the thing that podcasters love when we show them how Fountain works and how the Nostra integration works is the fact that somebody leaving a comment on the episode content page in the podcast app appears in the main social media feed in an app like Primal or Damas or Amethyst.
that conceptual difference to the way things work today is massive and even if you're a podcaster
and you have no idea what bitcoin is you have no idea what nostre is you don't really care about
you know censorship resistance or you know technology or any or open podcasting any of this
the fact that you can have a comment show up both as a comment and a post in a social media feed
that is absolutely huge and people love that um it the example i always give is you know sometimes
you see in the youtube comments on videos you'll see a comment and you'll and it will be someone
again saying like wow this video is incredible you know uh i loved it so much that comment doesn't go
anywhere it just sits as a youtube comment and for people to see that and be influenced by that
they have to go to the YouTube video. Imagine if that YouTube comment could go into the Twitter
feed, or the Instagram feed, or the LinkedIn feed, or, you know, the Facebook feed, that
conceptual difference that NOSTA can deliver is I think the thing that you know lights up the eyes of podcasters when I talk to them about it And I would say that is the primary thing that is working although it working at a very basic level because of some of
the challenges to onboarding to NOSTA. You know, NOSTA is not easy to use today. It is very difficult.
There's a lot of things to understand. The onboarding is quite difficult. There's these
things called keys which most people have never heard of um we actually are working on a bunch of
improvements to this within the fountain experience but i think in terms of answering your question
that the ability for content to be in multiple places at once and provide content creators with
discovery in multiple places at once that's the thing that really is magical about noster what we
need to do now is just make it incredibly easy to sign up as a listener and get started yeah and i
I think what I would underscore from what you just laid out, Oscar, for creators in particular is that, as you noted, your listeners have to go to where those those walled off comments are.
And Noster reverses the flow, the engagement, the comments, the money flows toward you.
And if you, in fact, are, you know, presumably the end point as the creator, what a fantastic inversion to be able to have all of that flow towards you as opposed to your users, your listeners have to flow toward those particular walled off apps.
And, you know, I think X is now, and you may have the stats, it is a significant creator platform now because they're, as I understand, paying pretty richly, at least the top 1% are doing very well.
And so on X or Spotify, if they decide to censor a creator tomorrow, what's different on Fountain with Noster and Bitcoin?
Yeah, what's different in terms of censorship is that if one app or client decides to censor you, you can always go and choose a different app or client.
And you can ask your audience to go and, you know, listen or watch your content on a different client.
um so you know if somebody follows you on NOSTA they can uh see your posts on you know one of
hundreds of different NOSTA clients at this point and that's the way things work in open podcasting
as well you know Apple or Spotify maybe may decide to uh take down your show and have it not
discoverable in in the Spotify search or you know not allow you to think new episodes in the app but
You can always go and find another podcast app that isn't participating in that censorship
or just go and find the RSS feed directly.
So that's what's different about these open protocols.
What's cool about NOSTA is it has that social layer tied into it.
So it's not just about, you know, where do I get the content,
but it's also about how do I have recommendations,
in, again, in the world of, you know,
basically unlimited optionality
for what you listen to or watch.
And so, you know, in short,
it is, we cannot guarantee
that there can be no censorship,
but it is highly censorship resistant, right?
You've got tremendous choice.
On the flip side of that,
to sort of switch lanes for a second, Oscar,
Oscar, to talk about your experience
as an entrepreneur, as a builder,
You know, you're building on Bitcoin, Lightning, Noster, open podcasting, a number of open protocols.
You know, for those out there who are builders and entrepreneurs, how do you manage the risk of making those bets?
You know, where the sands shift, Noster, who knows, right?
Maybe it pans out, maybe it doesn't.
Maybe there's critical adoption, mass adoption, maybe there's not.
Like, what does that look like for you as an entrepreneur?
Yeah, it's very difficult. I'm not going to lie. It's incredibly hard to attempt to build a sustainable business on top of not just one, but two brand new, you know, protocols or technologies that don't have a lot of adoption.
You know, Bitcoin has a lot of adoption, but Bitcoin used as everyday micropayments on the internet does not have a lot of adoption.
And NOSTA does not have a lot of adoption.
So the fact that Fountain is built on top of those two premises is incredibly risky.
And, you know, by no means will it be successful.
And it's a very difficult thing to do.
so yeah that's probably the simple answer i would say that what i've kind of come to
realize over the years and and this was maybe something that we were a bit naive on to start
with is that we can actually um make these huge bets on these new um technologies bitcoin as a
as a mechanism for micro payments and nostra as an open social protocol whilst also just
delivering a great product for customers where they're at right now and kind of solving their
more immediate problems so that was a big part of our shift to offer podcasts and to a lesser extent
music hosting last year you know there's many podcasters out there that that need and want a
podcast hosting platform that delivers you know amazing benefits to them separate to this grand
future vision of open payments and social and new discovery algorithms based on value.
And that's what we try to do with Fountain for Podcasters.
And so I would say that is our attempt to, you know, manage the risk and build a sustainable
business that is not 100% reliant on NOSTA or Bitcoin as a mechanism for micro payments
and the adoption of that.
But ultimately, ultimately, the first answer I gave is the reality like Fountain is only going to be successful if number one, Bitcoin is easy to use. It's not easy to use. We're based in the UK. It is not easy to get Bitcoin, get your first Bitcoin on the Lightning Network in the UK. It's very difficult. There's a lot of friction.
and Nostra is not easy to use either um you know the experience of signing up to Fountain and then
transferring your keys into another mobile app like uh Primal or Damus or Amethyst that is confusing
to to your average person as well yeah it's very difficult but it comes back to what we talked
about earlier yes i i want fountain to be successful um as a business and you know
uh and grow and and generate a lot of revenue and all of that but also we believe that there's a
better world here and you know i'm i'm also coming at this from the perspective of let's try this
let's attempt to make this work and if it does work just the the outcome would be huge not just
in terms of fountain as a business but just in terms of you know content discovery and and that's
something that i think is really really important so yeah if it was purely rational about can you
build you know a business and how quickly can you build a big business this would not be the optimum
way to do it this is much more than that it's about a vision for a future of content discovery
on the internet and and it's a bit crazy to be doing it but there's a chance I think there's a
good chance especially um with the fact that we're starting with podcasting which is already open
and people as I said in response to one of your previous questions podcasters already understand
that you know listen wherever you get your podcast so i think that if you if you compare
um the explanation of nostr to a podcaster compared to a different type of content creator
it's easier for them to understand because you can uh reference it with the phrase wherever you
get your podcast it's like it's like the same way podcasting works but for social media you know it's
open people can use any app podcasters will say oh yeah i i get how that works yeah it makes sense
um so yeah long-winded answer to your question no no and i i appreciate it and i think you know
this is this is not the built to flip it 10x path right um but the thing i would underscore
that perhaps we haven't touched on for a creator and admittedly there will be only so many creators
who wish to do this, care to do this.
You guys, because I'm a customer,
because I host this show with you,
have great dashboards.
The thing that I think is interesting
in open anything,
but let's look at open podcasting
and open media and Noster
as this layer is data.
For the nerds among us,
I aimed Claude Code at my Albie Hub,
shout out to Albie,
self-hosted Albie Hub,
wherein all of my podcasting to payments
via Fountain and others flow and integrated that with the zap function I have on my website for my
writing. You know, again, humble numbers. But as you say, believing in the future, 30 minutes later,
I've got a unified dashboard, you know, A, because AI, right? I mean, I'm a comp sci guy from long
ago, but I don't really, you know, build like that. So I've got the ability to use these tools.
But the point I really want to make is the data, right? So, you know, in an age where AI begins to take over more and more of the sort of, you know, mechanics of building software, having access to data is the limiting factor.
And open podcasting, open media, Noster, Bitcoin, these offer us the ability to get access to, to hold, to manage, self-host, whatever term you may choose, that data.
And I think, you know, TLDR, that data unlocks a tremendous amount of insight, as it always has.
And this is the only way you get it.
So I think there's a point there that is also worth underscoring.
So as we begin to wrap up, Oscar, I don't want to take too much of your time here.
For a creator who is thinking about the risks of platform dependence, what's their first move?
Yeah, I would say the first step, if you are interested in everything that we've talked about, is to just join NOSTA.
You know, download a NOSTA client like Primal.
I would say that's a great place to start.
They have a built-in lightning wallet.
And just start experimenting.
Dip your toes in the water without any, you know, pressure or expectation to have something big come from it.
You know, follow a few people on NOSTA.
Follow me. Follow Sean.
And then, you know, try taking your NOSTA keys, which are your identity, and moving them from one NOSTA app to another.
you know the keys and profile that you've created in primal move them into fountain and you'll see
that um the content that you see in fountain which is a podcast app um suddenly changes and
you know falls in content based on the people that you've followed on primal and and and that's
all you've got to do you've just got to try doing that and then just use your imagination for what
this can become in the future and then i would say just just uh yeah go from there and and start
interacting on nostr try and build up a little bit of a a group of people that you follow that
you find their content interesting send some zaps you know receive some zaps and that's all you got
to do really it's pretty simple and you know if you um like what we we've kind of talked about
today then you can play a big part in in helping move the internet in that direction because it's
very early and you know there's so much that needs to happen in terms of not just on the building
side but just on the educational side and also just feedback for you know app developers and
people trying to build this space and move it forward you know one of the um most amazing things
about building Fountain over the past few years
is just the feedback that we've received from users.
We couldn't have done it without that feedback.
And we just really appreciate all the feedback.
So yeah, it's very simple.
Dip your toe in the water, create a Nofter profile,
experience moving your social media profile
from one app to another
and bring all your followers for the first time.
And just, yeah, just try and help out.
Yeah, and I think the only thing
I would add to that, Bravo, is to clarify or emphasize that you're not moving, you're not
migrating. It just moves with you, right? So that key pair that by signing in, let's just say to a
few apps, as you say now, Oscar, you know, it's indistinguishable from magic. Your follow graph,
your follows and follows and your content, everything goes with your profile.
And so as a final question, Oscar, for someone who's never used Fountain, what's the pitch? Why switch?
Yeah, I mean, Fountain is like any other podcast app.
So we have put a lot of effort into making the podcast listening experience the way your podcast library is set up, you know, a top class experience.
So if you listen to podcasts, you can listen to your podcast in Fountain.
you can import from Spotify or Apple Podcasts or any other podcast app very, very easily and quickly.
And so, but then as well as, you know, a first class podcast listening experience,
we have the ability to number one, support your favorite content creators.
We've talked about why that's important, but then also see what other people you follow are listening to and finding enjoyable.
enjoyable and you know personally I find that's a really interesting way to discover new content
that maybe is not in your you know regular rotation if that makes sense you know there's
plenty of shows out there where you're never going to actually subscribe to the feed you're
never actually going to follow the feed but that doesn't mean there's you know single episodes that
would actually change your perspective and I think that's a great way to kind of expand
your mind and get out of maybe what your you know filter bubble is in terms of the few shows that
you listen to so yeah uh give fountain a try you can import your your shows in you know less than
30 seconds and yeah let us know what you think if there's anything you don't like in terms of the
user experience you can just reach out to us and we're you know actively working on improving things
so yeah give us a try yeah yeah and i mean sincerely i've been there since day one not
rah rah me i'm an early adopter but um it is understandably night and day uh because things
evolve but again i want to say that it is now absolutely first class i mean i i remember when
i switched from castro or whatever i was using back when i stole an iphone it felt like a sacrifice
but I wanted to understand it.
And now it is, there's no sacrifice.
I mean, it is just absolutely excellent.
So I would encourage everyone to do that.
And I'm delighted to have had this conversation, Oscar.
I appreciate the work you guys are doing,
you, Nick, and the team.
And I will look forward to seeing those new features
that you teased coming out very soon
and following your progress.
Yeah, well, thanks so much for having me on, Sean.
Really appreciate it.
And yeah, hopefully you can come back on again once we've dropped some of this new stuff
that's coming.
Absolutely.
Let's do it.
Thanks again, Oscar.
Bye bye.