It's a result of people being stick and tired of these kind of media train talking heads,
like giving non-answers to questions on, you know, whether it's the news or the mainstream
interviews, like people can just see right through that and they're just frankly sick
of it and that's why real conversations in a long form setting where you actually get
to understand the truth behind an individual because you listen to them talk for an hour,
two hours, three hours, like that's why podcasting is so powerful and it's no wonder that we're in
this situation now where Joe Rogan has this much power of influence and influence and I think
it's a great thing. I think it's an amazing trend that we've seen and that's part of the reason why
within podcasting 2.0 we want to preserve open podcasting because it means that this precious
thing that we have in terms of these long form conversations that brush aside all of the drama
of social media and actually get into the nuance of the conversation like that's precious to us
and we want to make sure that that's not controlled by one particular centralized platform like YouTube
controls long form video. Greetings and salutations my fellow plubs my name is Walker and this is
the Bitcoin podcast. The Bitcoin time chain is 868493 and the value of one Bitcoin is still one
Bitcoin. Two days episode is Bitcoin talk where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin and whatever else
comes up today that guest is Oscar Mary. Oscar is the founder of fountain podcasts a podcasting
2.0 app that rewards both listeners and podcasters for the value they bring to the platform. We
dig into exactly what podcasting 2.0 is and why it is so important the value for value model
fountain's recent no stir integration the power of podcasts and decentralized media
why Spotify sucks Bitcoin adoption and a whole lot more before we dive in do me a favor and
subscribe to the Bitcoin podcast wherever you're watching or listening hopefully that's on fountain
check out Bitcoin podcast net for episodes and additional resources head to the show notes to
grab links for my sponsor bitbox or go directly to bitbox.swiss slash Walker and use promo code
Walker for 5% off send an email to hello at Bitcoin podcast net if you have feedback or
interest in sponsoring the Bitcoin podcast and if you find this show valuable consider giving
value back by giving it a zap on no stir or a boost on fountain. I really appreciate it without
further ado let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Oscar Mary. ZappStream makes it pretty nice. I
don't like doing it for YouTube so I've never live streamed on YouTube or X but I figure if I'm
going to do it I may as well do it on no stir. Yeah I think that makes a lot of sense and yeah you
don't need to necessarily live stream all the episodes and yeah for me personally like a lot
of the podcast I listen to do live stream the show and I rarely actually listen to the live
stream or watch the live stream but I do find it valuable having the audience there participating
and adding to the conversation pointing out things that are related so I definitely think it adds
something. Yeah it's you know I was actually listening to the show that you did on Bitcoin
review with NVK and you guys had Kieran Hodelbad and Odell on there as well. That was a great show
by the way I love that NVK is doing that and you know if he wasn't such a successful entrepreneur
he could really just I think make a go of just the podcasting because he's excellent at it but
you know I was listening to what you know Odell was saying just about the live streams that they
do because they've obviously been doing live streams for a long time and it is there's something
different about having folks in the chat that can interact live like it adds a different element to
it. Yeah exactly and yeah no that's that series from NVK I think has been incredibly useful as a
starting off point for people to learn about Nostra as well I definitely found it really valuable
listening to all of those episodes and yeah when you have those deep dives kind of on one
particular area of Nostra it really I think yeah shows you how much is happening and there's so
many areas that I'm excited to see the developments over the next couple of months. Yeah it's amazing
too I'm not sure what do you remember when did you first get on Nostra and by the way I I do say
Nostra not Nostra so don't hold it against me I'm gonna continue to pronounce it that way for well
forever but when when did you make it on to Nostra Nostra? Yeah so interestingly I was looking at
Nostra as a developer long before I was an actual user of you know a Nostra client because to give
you kind of a little bit of background and context into you know fountain's Nostra integration
within the podcasting 2.0 community you know there's been this goal since the beginning to find a
way to have cross-app podcast comments where you know a listener on one app can leave a comment
on an episode another listener in a different app can see that comment and go in and reply to the
comment and that way anyone on any of the multiple podcast apps can kind of add value to the conversation
and it's not siloed in a walled garden and we've been discussing this within the podcasting 2.0
community for you know basically since the beginning almost three years ago and we were we
looked at a bunch of different technologies and ideas and you know we even came up with some ideas
ourselves in terms of you know podcasting specific like open comment protocols that we might be able
to use to solve this problem and so when I can't remember where I first came across Nostra but you
know when I saw it I was looking through the spec as a developer to figure out okay could we use
this for cross-app podcast comments and when I first looked at it initially I was like okay yeah
this could work but it was still such a small project and also at that time I didn't really see how
we could connect podcasting into the Nostra spec because it just seemed a little bit too challenging
so yeah I spent some time looking through the spec and looking into it as a developer way before
I started actually using a Nostra client you know as a user to follow other people and find
content and then I guess like as I saw Nostra develop further and also saw the flexibility
of which people were submitting new things to the Nostra protocol it made it clear that oh actually
you know you can go in there and propose something the nips are very flexible clients don't need to
adopt all of them and that was really great and that kind of gave that made built my conviction
that actually Nostra could be the solution that we'd been looking for and so yeah jumping forward
a bit to it was definitely over a year ago it was maybe just over a year ago that I kind of
seriously sat down and was like okay we want to use Nostra for cross-app podcast comments how are we
gonna do this in a way that integrates with RSS and bridges with RSS as opposed to having to go
and ask podcasters sorry you need to go and sign up to Nostra because for me if the cross-app
podcast comment system doesn't work for a Joe Rogan without him having to do anything then it
kind of is dead on arrival because it's just gonna be so slow so yeah about a year ago I kind of
started a discussion on the Nostra Nips repo just posing the question you know how can we reference
podcasts in Nostra events as opposed to you know host podcasts on Nostra and maybe that will happen
one day in the future but for me the kind of intermediary step was always can we reliably
reference podcasts in Nostra events and luckily one of the things that the podcasting 2.0 community
had put forward again at the beginning maybe three years ago was this concept of a podcast
good which is essentially a unique ID for your show that won't change even if you change your RSS
the URL or change your hosting company so that good should as long as the hosting companies
abide by it and many of them do follow you from hosting platform to hosting platform and so once
you have a podcast that good sticks with you and that concept was what I kind of saw would be the
glue between Nostra and RSS because we can use those show level GUIDs and the item level GUIDs to
kind of reliably reference podcasts and their episodes into the future without anything having to
change and so yeah that was a year ago and then it took a long time of you know back and forth
conversation with people in the Nostra community to figure out okay what is the right way to do this
you know some people didn't like the approach because they wanted it all to be on Nostra they
wanted the podcast to be hosted on Nostra and the episodes to be Nostra events and again maybe
that will happen one day but you're not going to snap your fingers and have every podcast to you
know switch to hosting on Nostra today whereas you can snap your fingers and have a way to
reference every podcast on Nostra today so that took yeah that took a long time to kind of finally
work that out and I think part of the way we were able to do that is show that there's other use
cases not just podcasting where you have this like global ID that you need to reference you know
another example is like books with ISBNs another example is like movies that also have this like
globally unique ID so we finally managed to get that merged into the Nostra repo and obviously
until we had that as I'm sure you've seen being a longtime fountain user the Nostra integration was
a massive change for us it was you know we rebuilt everything we changed so much and we did
frustrate some of our users as well because they were like where's the old fountain I don't want
to Nostra profile I just want to use the app as I have been so yeah I don't I think I'm going on
quite a long tangent or you know maybe just sharing random thoughts but yeah hopefully that's like
interesting in terms of how this all came about no it definitely is and I always say this is a safe
space for tangents for rants and any digression so no you're you're in a good place for it I do
want to I do want to back up a little bit because there's there's a lot of stuff I want to get into
with you today and again I've been using fountain since long before I was podcasting I was just
honestly I'd used Apple podcasts forever because like it was easy right it's just it's there when
you when you get a new iPhone it works fairly well I noticed it does take forever for new
episodes to actually get pulled into Apple podcasts I don't know why that is whereas on
fountain it's like instant leaks I always check like I'm always grabbing links from different
podcasting platforms and it's like for some reason Apple just takes the longest fountain's
always the fastest Spotify is somewhere in the middle we can get into why Spotify is a piece
of shit later but I always appreciate how quick it is on fountain but I want to I want to back up
just a little bit because I'd love to just know a little bit of your kind of story about how you
actually got to the place where you are building a podcasting 2.0 Bitcoin and now noster integrated
application and I'll just phrase it in this way who are you and how did you get here today to be
doing this what was your journey yeah great question so it actually all happened quite
randomly and not 100% intentional which I feel very lucky for how things happen to give you
like high-level background you know I've been a software engineer for most of my career so I've
always kind of worked in in tech and around tech and in I guess it was at the start of like 2021
I was kind of like in between things and you know thinking about what I wanted wanted to do next
and had always wanted to expand into mobile development so like learn mobile app development
and give that a try because I hadn't really tried it before and I've always been fascinated by the
audio medium I think it's a really powerful medium because you have all of the you know tone
emphasis and personality of the human behind the words as opposed to just reading the words in
text form and some some projects that I've done in the past had really made an impact on me around
that as well I also had a big belief that audio was lacking in discovery compared to other
mediums on the internet like if you look at whether it's short form text or short form video or long
form video you know all of the platforms that we consume those mediums on have social discovery
built in whereas podcasts never did partly because of the way podcasting has been historically
fragmented across different apps and hosting providers and partly because audio is much less
browsable as these other mediums like it's hard to sample a podcast episode so I kind of like had
all of this in my mind but really the origin of fountain as an app was just me saying I'd like to
have a go at building a mobile app I'm interested in audio why don't I build a podcast app that
allows you to create clips and have people follow you and see those clips so that was like the first
version of it but there was no intention to you know necessarily do it full-time or you know try
and run it as a business and then so I had this app that I built and it was you know a terrible
app it didn't work very well but it was a podcast app it did do that fundamental thing even though
it was very janky and then just as I was like playing around with that in test flight you know
no one else was using it that's when I came across Adam Curry and Dave Jones and their podcasting
2.0 project I don't remember how I came across them but I then heard that they had introduced this
new specification into the RSS feed which was the lightning value block that allows podcasters
to receive Bitcoin lightning payments and I've been a massive believer in Bitcoin for years before
that you know was a Bitcoiner never thought I'd work with the Bitcoin technology I thought that
was like over my pay graders a developer and I'd never really be involved with it but I was a
Bitcoin I was a massive believer in it I thought it was the future of money and so it was kind of
this weird thing where my interest in audio my interest in podcasting and then all of a sudden
just as this app is kind of like half there I listened to Adam and Dave and they start talking
about lightning payments in podcasting and I was like wow this is amazing like this is gonna be
the future and so that was the kind of that was the tipping point to be like okay well maybe we
should actually like try and launch this as an app and add Bitcoin payments and try and you know
turn it into something bigger than just a random you know little thing and so yeah decided to
do that added lightning payments to the app polished it a little bit and then we launched it and it
was still a pretty terrible app but you know I think within the podcasting 2.0 community and
within the Bitcoin community people did see that it was something new and cool the fact that you
could stream money for every minute that you listen to content so yeah that's the kind of like the
backstory to it is quite random in terms of the timing but yeah I'm really happy that it's this
like natural combination of two of my interests in terms of podcasting and Bitcoin. I mean randomness
and serendipity are very close together I think right like serendipity requires randomness and it
sounds like you know there's that very like cliched quote you know luck is what happens when
preparation meets opportunity but I think that's it is very you know there's a reason that it's
oft quoted because it's very true it's like had you not been in a place where okay you have the
technical chops to build out the application you also have the interest in Bitcoin where okay I
believe in this you know I've studied this I like I am all for this and then having that kind of
technical chops audio interest and Bitcoin knowledge meet up with right place right time
hearing about podcasting 2.0 early on and obviously it's still very early on but like very early on
that's just kind of like it's kind of beautiful and could you talk a little for people that maybe
hear this term podcasting 2.0 and are like what what does that actually mean can you just explain
a little bit about a kind of that backstory of like okay here's podcasting 1.0 you know you
mentioned Adam Curry already the the pod father and then what does that mean that transition to
podcasting 2.0 what is the jump there yeah that's a really good question and happy to kind of
explain what that means so obviously podcasting has been around for a very long time now you
know two decades and Adam Curry was actually one of the inventors of podcasting so it was you know
he played a massive part in taking the RSS feed format and you know saying why don't we put an MP3
in this so that people can you know listen to audio so he played a massive part in inventing
podcasting you know you know 20 years ago or whenever it was and for the past you know 15
years what the podcast what I podcast is hasn't really changed that much it's you know a way of
distributing MP3 files in an RSS feed with a bunch of metadata around those MP3 files so you can
understand what the episode's about also during the past 15 years you know Apple were very much the
kind of stewards of podcasting you know they maintained a directory of all of the podcasts and
that directory was used by many of the podcast apps not just the the Apple podcast app and yeah I
guess podcasting you know didn't change much it maybe fell behind some of the other you know
media interfaces that we use today whether it's like YouTube for video or social media for other
sort of kinds and that's why you use some you've seen over the past 10 years a lot of
podcasters will put their podcast on YouTube just so that they get access to the YouTube
comments you know and people listen to a podcast on their podcast app and then they'll go and
check the YouTube comments afterwards just you know to see what people are saying so that's kind
of a bit of a background to podcasting and then Adam and Dave Jones I think about three or four
years ago two things started happening number one Apple's podcast directory API started being a bit
flaky and wasn't really working for some of the other app developers and also Spotify was making a
big move into podcasting and trying to essentially be the YouTube of podcasting and I guess Adam and
Dave saw those trends as a bit of a threat to open podcasting as it had always been and so they
decided to set up the podcasting 2.0 movement with kind of two main goals the first goal is to
preserve and protect open podcasting so ensure that you know the directory of podcast is open
any app developer can access it and the standards around what is a podcast is also open and it's
not controlled by any one company because also at the time the definition of what a podcast is was
defined actually by Apple from their Apple iTunes namespace so that was the first goal of
podcasting 2.0 protect and preserve the openness of podcasting because that's one thing that's great
about the medium right you can choose what hosting company you want to use you can choose what app
you want to use they're all different you don't have to use Apple podcast and then the second
goal of podcasting 2.0 was to advance podcasting and try and bring it into the future and extend
what's possible with open RSS so as well as Adam and Dave and as well as then maintaining this open
index of all the podcasts and that's podcastindex.org where you can go and find all the podcasts they
also started to develop the namespace which is essentially the specification for what a podcast
is so introducing new tags into the RSS feed introducing new features coming up with new
ideas that can help push open podcasting forward and bring it up to the level of you know some of
the more centralized platforms like YouTube and so they've been consistently and this is a community
effort as well it's not just Adam and Dave you know there's many open discussions on the podcast
index GitHub about you know what we should do but one of those new features was what's called the
value tag and this is what allows podcasters to put their lightning node information into their
RSS feed and that was the kind of key innovation that enabled decentralized payments within the
podcast industry via lightning so yeah that's kind of a background and I guess the goals of
podcasting 2.0 the movement. I think it's really helpful to kind of have that that background
and it's it's really incredible to see the you know I guess the importance of podcasts in terms
of like the actual dialogue in larger society like you'd be hard-pressed to find a person nowadays
who's like nope I don't listen to podcasts I've never listened to a podcast like I'm sure you
can find them but you're gonna really have to search for that like they that is what people
do like you've got a long drive you you know put on a podcast you're cleaning the house you put on
a podcast going for a long walk put on a podcast like it is what people do and it it's also just
beyond just you know it's it's it is in no way uniform like I mean like true crime podcast for
example I think some of the most like most listen to podcast because people like really love true
crime I may once there's maybe I need to do like Bitcoin true crime I don't know to really get
out there get out there in the algo somehow work that in there but no it you know and it's it's
fascinating that you look at even what's happening in the US like you know Donald Trump just went
on Joe Rogan's podcast right yeah and now you have Joe Rogan saying well yeah I and talks with
with Kamala's team I'd love to have her on but I want to do it in my studio and I want to have
my usual full three-hour podcast and if not I'm not gonna do it and like that may sound crazy to
people like what do you mean this podcaster is dictating terms to the vice president of the
United States of America but it's like he has the biggest platform in the world he can dictate
terms and that's kind of an insane place to be at where it's like this this you know fear factor
host MMA fighter who has a podcast can dictate terms of that podcast to you know the vice president
United States like that's just kind of like an incredible cultural moment I hope she does go on
there I think it would be quite fascinating but I want to kind of understand too in terms of this
podcast in 2.0 space how many apps are there out there how many you know podcasting 2.0 enabled
services are there we're obviously fountain you mentioned podcast index but where else can people
use this right now like how widespread is this functionality of the you know that value tag
it's pretty amazing that you can zap me Bitcoin if you find this show valuable directly on fountain
or on any no-ster client and thank you to everyone who has done so you can also support the show
and get a great piece of open-source Bitcoin hardware by going to bitbox.swiss slash Walker and
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5% off a great piece of Bitcoin hardware but you also help support this show so thank you
yeah great question and definitely just to touch on like what you said about the power and influence
of podcast so I couldn't agree more and I think you know it's a result of people being stick and
tired of these kind of media train talking heads like giving non-answers to questions on you know
whether it's you know the news or you know like more mainstream interviews like people can just
see right through that and they're just frankly sick of it and that's why real conversations in a
long-form setting where you know you actually get to understand the truth behind an individual
because you listen to them talk for you know an hour two hours three hours like that's why
podcasting is so powerful and it's no wonder that we're in this situation now where Joe Rogan has
this much power of influence and influence and I think it's a great thing I think it's an amazing
trend that we've seen and that's part of the reason why within podcasting 2.0 we want to preserve
open podcasting because it means that this precious thing that we have and in terms of these long
form conversations that you know brush aside all of the drama of social media and actually get into
the nuance of the conversation like that's precious to us and we want to make sure that that's not
controlled by one particular centralized platform like YouTube controls long-form video and so
yeah it's fascinating to me and also the other thing in your touch on it as well it's like
podcasts also don't have this they're not competing with this like overly crowded attention driven
social media screen based app experience like they're just a totally different thing so you can
jump in the car you can stick on a podcast you don't have to look at your screen you don't have to
look at a social media feed you're just listening you can do the same yeah while you're out on a
walk so yeah I think the podcast medium is really something special it's it's precious and we need
to make sure that it stays open but yeah to answer your question specifically podcasting
2.0 is way bigger than just fountain and you know fountain is just one small part of this bigger
movement and there's many many different apps and services that contribute to podcasting 2.0 so
there's a bunch of other podcasting 2.0 apps like fountain that support value for value that
support lightning apps like podcast and podcast guru and the beauty of what podcasting 2.0 is
doing is that it's not constrained to one app and if you know fountain's not around in the
future I'm hoping we will be but you can always switch to another app and and you can bring
your shows with you and you can still support your favorite podcast with with Bitcoin so yeah
it's open there's many different apps and services and then in terms of like the adoption and it's
important to to note that the hosting companies are also adopting the new podcasting 2.0 features
you know it takes time and but slowly the hosting companies are starting to adopt the new features
and so you know I spoke about the podcast GUID tag and how important that is for what we're doing
with NOSTA like most of the hosting companies now support the GUID tag the new transcripts tag
that allows any episode to have a transcript provided by the podcast that most of the hosting
companies support that now even the Apple podcast app now supports that tag that was introduced
via podcasting 2.0 so you know it's not it is gaining adoption and because it's an open
specification hosting companies can choose you know which new tags to adopt and when they do it
and it is having adoption within the broader podcasting industry when it comes to the value
tag and Bitcoin and Lightning obviously there's that mainstream you know kind of hesitation around
Bitcoin which I'm sure you've come across before and so that has been slower on on the hosting
company side but we feel like you know that's our opportunity to to show the rest of the podcast
industry why Lightning is such a good fit for open podcasting and and what you can do with it and
that's like our number one focus with fountain but yeah I you know my view for the future is that
the way that we keep podcasting open and stay you know protect the precious medium that we have
is to help podcasters get paid with this open payment protocol called Lightning and also now
with Nostra to help listeners and you know podcasters and whoever's interested in podcasts to kind
of share episodes discover new episodes have conversations around episodes without that being
locked to anyone at for platform or service so yeah I think the addition of Lightning for open
payments and Nostra for open social when you add that into what was an already amazing system which
was open content by RSS I think RSS Lightning and Nostra together are just an amazing fit and we
can actually you know keep podcasting open but elevate podcasting to where you have the same kind
of you know useful features as as like you see on YouTube it's interesting to me because ultimately
all of this stuff comes down to a better user experience right it's a better user experience
for the listener it's a better user experience for the podcaster themselves like all of these
podcasting 2.0 initiatives are striving to make that experience whether you be listener or you be
host better for you and so it's kind of it's kind of this amazing thing where if you want to
remain competitive as a podcasting app podcasting service platform whatever it's in your best interest
to adopt these things because you are going to have happier users because of them it's not like
you don't need to force this down people's throats it's like it's fairly self-evident why these things
are good and why people would want them like transcripts yeah that's it's pretty obvious by
that that's you know useful um perhaps things like the value tag and and bitcoin over lightning
are maybe not as self-evident they're self-evident to bitcoiners but maybe not as self-evident to
as you touched on kind of that larger population yet I think we're we're getting there as the
overtune window shifts as bitcoin becomes a part of just mainstream mainstream discourse
we're seeing that shift to where it becomes kind of impossible to ignore and the fact that you can
do things with bitcoin over lightning that you just can't do effectively with you know fiat rails
like you're you're streaming these sats in a way that is frictionless does not involve middlemen like
it's it's quite beautiful and i'm curious you know I want to get into the the no-ster integration
specifically um a little bit and just kind of go down that because when I heard you guys were
doing that and I was thankful I got a chance to play around in the on the beta a little bit
which was just awesome because as soon as you guys said you were doing it I was like oh this
it was kind of like uh like oh duh of course that makes sense but I didn't really see it coming
that you guys were going to implement something like that um and you did it in a relatively kind
of short time and I think for you guys it was incredibly forward thinking and also solved
a problem for you in terms of not wanting to make yourself a walled garden so can you kind of talk
about a little bit what you know fountain already had some of these social components built in
so people may say okay well then what's and maybe you had some users say well why did you add
no status what's what's the point of doing that can you talk a little bit about
why that was important to make that shift and kind of what additional things it enables for users
beyond what you guys already had before which was was really great but you've taken it to another level
now yeah uh there's so much to talk about here um but yeah I'll get into all of it um yeah I guess
the first thing to cover is as I said before the concept or notion of cross at podcast comments
is something that everybody within the podcasting 2.0 like developer community and you know those that
you know participate in there's a podcasting 2.0 podcast that Adam and Dave do every Friday and
you know there's like a a diehard group of listeners and developers that you know listen
and participate every week and we've been talking about cross out comments for years since the beginning
and that the reason that is so important is exactly as you say because if the content is open
and we managed to keep open rss as the bedrock of podcasting the payments are open because we use
the lightning network and it can work between any app and hosting company without having to do an
integration it just works without permission but then you have social features that only work within
one app then you're kind of like falling at the last hurdle and you're not actually achieving what you
set out to do which is keep podcasting open because I do believe and I think everyone else sees this
as well that social dynamics within media are important you know it's nice to be able to
see someone you follow and respect recommend an episode and that's why you know that that's a
useful thing and we want to bring social features to podcasting but again if those social features
only work in one app then it defeats the point of keeping things open so we've always had this idea
in our head of cross app podcast comments and yeah over the years we've tried a bunch of different
things we've looked at many different protocols we've even come up with some really bad protocols
ourselves and yeah for me the the more I learned about Nostra it became clear that Nostra was the
way to go because it's incredibly simple it is decentralized it's flexible such that we can
introduce new things that are needed for podcasting specifically and also there's the natural affinity
to bitcoin and lightning because you know it is a challenge to onboard people that have never
purchased bitcoin before if you ask them to you know buy bitcoin so they can use it in their
podcast app it's confusing as hell and it is you know a difficult experience and Nostra clients
have the same issue whereby they're trying to onboard people to use bitcoin in a in a kind of
social way and I think that the Nostra clients and podcasting 2.0 apps that support lightning can
learn a lot from each other in terms of how to do that in the best way how to communicate it and also
which tools to use for things like on ramps so yeah over time it became clear to me that Nostra
was the right solution for this cross-out comments for podcasting and yeah then then for like since
like over a year ago I was kind of like heads down planning to just rebuild fountain using Nostra
and that was you know a big challenge for two reasons one we had to propose this change to
or this addition to the Nostra spec to be able to reference the podcast episodes and shows in a way
where any app can query them from any relay using the existing Nostra tagging system and that's
really important as well because obviously we don't want to just build we don't want to use Nostra
in a way that is only being used by fountain because again it defeats the point so we spent a lot of
time figuring that out and making sure that this specification was correct and then the second part
was just rebuilding the app because again that you know we had social profiles we had follower
relationships in fountain we had comments in fountain and we had activity feeds in fountain and
we had we had all of this you know data and to rebuild all of that you know it's hard enough
rebuilding your entire social system in an app but if you have to do it when you actually can't
create the new data until a user has their key in the app then it's even harder because you
can't just like run a migration script to change the data you need to wait for the moment that
that user chooses to join Nostra so it was a really difficult thing to do and and you know we tried
our best to do it in the right way but it was really hard and so there were some aspects to it
that frustrated the users that weren't as convinced as us that Nostra was the right thing to do for
open podcasting but yeah over the past like year we managed to get it done get it into beta like
three or four months ago and launch it a couple of months ago but yeah for me there's like there's
there's two sides to it one is what I talked about which is preserving open podcasting because
we think it's such a brilliant medium but the other side is for fountain I think it is amazing too
because it adds so many cool layers to fountain like one of the things we've heard time and time
again from podcasters is that they really love receiving boosts not just because of the money
and the encouragement that it you know that is the money obviously getting paid is always good
it's the encouragement which feels really good yet to know you're not just speaking into a void
as a podcaster and people really value what you're doing but also because of the way we
highlighted the boost in the home feed in fountain it would also generate discovery for those podcasters
and other people would discover the show but obviously only people that are already using
fountain would discover the show that way and now we have Nostra it just kind of accelerates that
dynamic because every boost that you send goes out into the wider Nostra network and anyone can
see it anyone can repost it it can be surfaced in any client so yeah it's massively beneficial to
fountain for that reason and also it makes it easier for new users to join fountain because
you know joining a new app and rebuilding your social graph is kind of a pain you don't really
want to do it you like you don't want to go and invite everybody out there so yeah for those two
reasons not only does it help us in our goal to keep podcasting open but I think it's also great
for fountain and for fountain users and their experience of the app and I think you know there's
still it's very much like a v1 of the Nostra stuff we want to do in fountain and I want to make
things so much better especially with like the home feed and the way you discover episodes
but I think already we've seen that there's like there's some really like cool things
that are happening in terms of discovering episodes that were shared outside of fountain
in fountain I mean that was the amazing thing for me was the first time trying out the the beta was
okay I just boosted a show and now that show is also published as an event or I should say my boost
my comment whatever I said you know oh this is a great episode that's also put out there on my
published from my n pub that's awesome and it's and it's just it's seamless right and I'm also
sending value as a part of that and then the other thing is the fact that you guys are you are
basically fountain becomes you know a noster client that is audio centric and enables people to
okay I want to like I can use fountain for podcast discovery from my network because I can go into
my feed in fountain and it's going to pull out basically and correct me if I'm wrong here but
it pulls out all of the any content that doesn't have an audio related you know podcast related
episode in it and just leaves you with anything related to a podcast or now you guys have music
in there as well but that's pretty cool because it's like your right discovery podcast discovery is
really difficult like okay you open up Apple podcasts and they give you you know that here's
the ones you should listen to if you like politics and it's like up for up first and whatever other
you know npr shows there are and that kind of thing and like that's fine but that really all that
all that does is make the the already big shows even bigger and kind of hinders any sort of small
upstart from having a chance at being just randomly discovered like it's just it's just not going to
happen but when you put the social graph layer in there that's then allowing all of your network to
be in service of you finding great new content that you may not have seen before like that's
that's putting that you know kind of like a hive mind discovery tool into effect and and do you guys
I don't remember do you pull in also like if somebody posts an Apple podcast link
on Noster do you pull that in as well like you pull in any podcasting content basically right
yeah so yeah that's exactly it and we haven't got this working 100% yet so it doesn't always work
but we're improving it but yeah what we do is we look for episode links and show links from any
podcasting platform or app and then we kind of determine that okay this post from one of the
people you follow on Noster is related to podcast and we'll include that in the home feed and then
if we can determine what the episode is because again podcasting is open which is so amazing
then what we can do is even though that person that you follow on Noster shared an Apple podcast
link or a Spotify link we can actually insert the fountain content card in the app so that you can
just you know add to your queue or like star or download to play and we'll keep the Apple podcast
link in there because that's what the person intended to share but yeah you know the thing
that I love about this and actually it happened to me like a week after we launched it and I was
so happy that it did because again it's very much a v1 with the Noster features and there's
you know there's so much more that we need to do to improve it but Will from Damus
because the other thing is it's about frequency of posting like if you look on a micro blogging
app like Twitter or any of the Noster clients generally you're only going to see content
from like the last 24 48 hours because that's the way these apps work is there's like a
recency bias but obviously people share podcasts a lot less frequently and so and also you don't
necessarily you're not necessarily looking for a new something new to listen to every day
you maybe once a week or maybe even a couple of times a month you'll look for something new to
listen to that's not already in your queue and and so what you really want is you want to filter
only the podcast related shares from your main social media feed so that you can go back in time
more because you know if you shared an episode last month I might want to see that in my home
feed because maybe it's interesting to me and you know obviously we could never do that with
Twitter because well number one it would probably cost us a crazy amount and number two they could
always turn off their API like we've seen in the past but with Noster the data's open and so we can
do that and yeah it happened to me with Will shared an Apple podcast link hopefully we get him on
fountain one day but but he shared an Apple podcast link and it was some physics podcast that I've
never heard about before and the episode looked really interesting to me and we were able to
reverse engineer what episode it was display the fountain content card in the app and I just added
it to my queue in you know one tap and and he'd shared it like a week before as well so I totally
missed it on Noster because of that recency bias but I was able to see it in fountain so yeah that's
another example of how Noster doesn't just help us with our kind of missions keep podcasting open
but it also just you know allows us to create these really cool discovery experiences and again we
really need to like make the app so much better and allow people to have these experiences more
regularly and there's a lot to do but yeah I think stuff like that is just so cool.
Are you at a stage right now with fountain where you feel okay you've got the Noster integration was
obviously a big that was a lot of work but you've got that integrated now do you feel that you're
at kind of a polishing stage right now or are you still looking to roll out new features kind of
where are you at from just like a development standpoint? Yeah so we're definitely in a polishing
mode we're not going to be launching anything new very soon although we do have an interesting
thing coming in the next two weeks but it's not really a new thing but yeah like to give you a
view into what we've been working on since the Noster integration we actually completely rebuilt the
content library architecture to make things more performant in an offline mode and use less data
and things like that so like we want to you know I'd love to spend every day working on these cool
Noster discovery features but you know I'm very aware that fountain is also a podcast
app first and we need to make the podcast listening experience as good as it can be so
we've worked on rebuilding the library architecture that's now live and we're also currently working on
improving the audio interfaces so things like carplay work better things like scrubbing speed
you know all of these like small things that you probably would never think about but we want to
just make sure as smooth and reliable as possible so we've been working on all of that and then
yeah the the next few months probably into next year I don't think we'll be necessarily launching
anything new but we just want to polish the Noster experience and make sure that it yeah provides
more of those like unique discovery moments where you can you know find something cool because
that's the thing like people are into really niche and interesting topics and it's fascinating
like if you if you ask somebody like what niche podcast are you into right now they'll they will
tell you something different every time you have never heard of the show you'll have never even
maybe heard of the topic and you go and check out those episodes and you're probably not going to be
interested enough to subscribe to the show or follow the show and get every episode but there's
probably something fascinating in there that you'd really enjoy adding that single episode and you
know just exploring another part of the world as you're as we talked about driving or doing the
chores or whatever so yeah we just want to make it easier for people to do that and also
just continue to improve the app like I said things like carplay things like you know just
the basics that we're we're getting we're getting close but there's still more that we need to do
on that I mean I've got to say the fountain carplay works very well for me I'm sure there's
like little things that you notice that I would not notice but like from a user perspective
I mean I I use fountain all the time and and my truck and it works it works great so
excited to see what even more polishing would do to that but niche podcast is there a what so
what niche podcast are you into or a niche podcast topic so my like niche topic is history I'm a
massive fan of like you know and I listen to a lot of you know history audio books as well but
my number one recommendation is there's a podcast called full of civilizations podcast
which is amazing they release very infrequent episodes like maybe only every six months but
they do like three four hours on like the collapse of an ancient civilization so whether that's
you know the Romans or the Byzantine Empire or the Han dynasty in China and it's amazing I actually
hate to admit this but it's it is a podcast but it's actually better to go and watch it on
YouTube because they do have some some good visuals in the video versions but again another
thing that podcasting 2.0 is pushing is the adoption of the video alternate enclosure
tags so that you know you don't need to go to YouTube to get the video version you can get it
in your podcast app so hopefully one day we'll have the video video version of that in fountain
as well but yeah full of civilizations podcast I would highly recommend even if you're not that
into history they're quite like obviously they're three four hours but you know they're just done
really well as well as the historical information you really the narratives really good so you
feel really drawn into the the people of that time as well so yeah we definitely recommend that
I'm gonna have to check that one out because Carl and I take a decent number of longer drives and
so like we always end up searching for like okay we we want a new podcast to listen to this we don't
just want like a you know necessarily always like a talking heads type one like we go for like
history deep dives as well and sometimes find ourselves way back in like so many different
find ourselves way back in like super old episodes because that's the thing like people have been
putting out really incredible podcasts for a long time now like there's a lot of stuff like if
you're only looking at new stuff that's come out you're gonna miss some really great stuff that's
been around there forever and been downloaded countless times off that rss feed but I know
I'm gonna have to you said fall of civilizations yeah yeah okay I'm gonna have to check that out
and you know I'm I didn't know actually about the video part that that was part of the podcast in
2.0 initiative so is that basically like this is kind of a good uh transition a little bit into
I did want to talk about some of the problems with uh places like Spotify for example um now
Spotify obviously like very famously brought Joe Rogan you know signed I don't remember how big that
deal was like a hundred million it was some absurd number uh for him to be exclusively on Spotify
and obviously his show is audio and video and Spotify supports video as well I'm assuming they're
not doing that on any sort of open podcasting 2.0 standard that's all walled garden something that
blew my mind from your uh your uh when you were on bitcoin review I think it was maybe uh Odell
was mentioning this that in Spotify you actually if you're like so I use rss.com for my hosting
because because when I was creating a podcast I was like well let's just go to rss.com that seems
like an easy way to do it and I'm stuck with and I like it but you mentioned it yeah if you're
looking at any of your podcasting metrics they're probably not really giving you accurate numbers
from Spotify because Spotify keeps a lot of that like in-house and so I went in there and I tested
that today actually and I found that I had you know like 70 or 60 or 70 000 downloads that Spotify's
dashboard was showing me like just in there and I'm like oh well that doesn't jive with the numbers
that I'm seeing allegedly from Spotify in rss so is all that Spotify's building like completely
closed off they are just literally a walled garden of a platform yeah that is the direction they're
going in unfortunately and you know it it's an interesting it's interesting how it happened so
Spotify moved into podcasting in a big way a few years ago and they did so through acquisitions
both in terms of content with you know exclusive deals with people like Joe Rogan but also through
acquiring other companies and one of the companies they acquired was Anker which was a free podcast
hosting company and it's really fascinating because the CEO of Anker after a few years after joining
Spotify wrote this blog post explaining how rss was like an old protocol that you know couldn't
move the podcasting space forward and that's why Spotify have had to kind of like sidestep
rss and build all of this custom stuff that only works in Spotify and I think you know and he wrote
that just as podcasting 2.0 was starting to emerge so you know I'd love to have a conversation with
him one day and say you know look at what we've been doing in open rss which is recreating all of
the features that you have built in in your own world garden within Spotify and do you think
still think rss is a broken protocol because it seems to be working for us and obviously the things
that it can't do we can use other protocols like NOSTA and Lightning to bridge into it and fill
those gaps but yeah I think they I think they internally through this acquisition of Anker
looked at rss didn't think that they could change rss because it's difficult for one company to change
a protocol that's why the podcasting 2.0 movement is so important because it's not controlled by one
company and I think that they just decided okay we're just we want to be the YouTube of podcasting
and there's no point doing it on open rss we're just going to build our own kind of layer and so
that's why you know video on Spotify only works on Spotify even you know the transcripts that you
get on Spotify because they do support transcripts for some podcasts they don't follow the the open
standard they just have their own transcripts there and so yeah they're they're kind of like
going their own route and yeah I guess it's it's our job in the open world to try and make sure
that there's an open version of all of the features that they have and obviously video is
something that we do want to get to eventually so yeah hopefully one day soon we'll have that
it's such an interesting kind of like polar opposite from what you guys are doing at Fountain
because okay they are building a walled garden and they're building the walls really high right
they are trying to make sure that they do not want they want to keep everybody within
that Spotify ecosystem they want you paying for your Spotify membership they they want you to not
leave that app and go somewhere else so they've got the video in there too so you don't have to go to
YouTube right exclusive partnership so that you can only find you know certain types of certain
people's content on there and then there's Fountain which is saying oh we're gonna in fact pull in
to our social feed that we now have enabled through another open protocol noster we're going to pull
in we'll pull in that Spotify link and we'll pull in that you know that Apple podcast link or
wherever it might be and we'll but you can still watch it in Fountain but we're not going to try
to hide that and building out what I think is so brilliant about you guys taking this kind of jump
and building on noster is that Fountain like not only do your users benefit that's that's very
obvious not only do podcasters benefit because discoverability of their show is easier but you
as Fountain benefit because you benefit from noster's network effect so as that noster network
grows that you guys are now basically a you know a podcasting micro client built on top of noster
and so anyone that is joining that noster network as that network grows you're not saying well we
need to get more Fountain users like you will get more Fountain users by noster simply growing as a
network and I think that's ultimately like for a smaller company such a smarter move maybe maybe
this is the like the classic battle of just centralization versus decentralization right it's
like centralization kind of seems to be winning at the start but you wall yourself off so much
you end up creating an experience that's not great for the user at least that's I've never been a
huge fan of Spotify maybe I'm a little biased I just I don't know I've never particularly liked it
still use Apple music for for my music because I like to make my own playlists and don't like
having them all you know I think I've got better taste in music than most of the people making
playlists on Spotify this is again just tuning my own horn but my point being it's such an
interesting dichotomy like it is literally could not be more polar opposite you've got one trend
towards ultimate centralization control your platform keep everyone there and force people to
stay there versus hey we're gonna open this up we're gonna pull in all of the social interactions
that are possible with this new blossoming open protocol and we're gonna use that both to our
benefit but to the benefit of the users and of the creators on there and I think it's like it
maybe a slower way to start but I have to imagine that in the end that decentralized approach ends
up winning out at least I sure hope it does you know yeah I think it will I think because ultimately
people are different you know people want different things in terms of how they discover new content
on the internet and how they consume content on the internet and for one company one product one
app to kind of have the almost arrogance to say we know how every human in the world should discover
content you know learn new things about the world you know laugh about like some you know funny stuff
that the podcast they like is talking about or like connect with people like one company cannot
do this everybody's different everybody has good ideas and people should be free to experiment
and try different things like music is another great example like the music ui's in Spotify and
Apple podcast they're not that different they're pretty much the same and the reason that nobody
no one has really innovated in the music space is because the content library is locked down so you
can't easily go and build another music client for the Apple music library or the Spotify library
is really hard to do and I'm hoping you know I'm a massive fan of what Wave Lake are doing and
you know with music that's another example of how OpenRSS and Nostra are working together so you
know every artist that uploads their music to Wave Lake is available to play in fountain and you
know we're doing things slightly differently in terms of the UI and there could be a third music
client that pulls in the same library so yeah I really believe we're not gonna I think the days of
you know these massive companies dominating a specific medium like YouTube dominates
long-form video I think those days are over and I think that the apps and services that we use
the consume media on the internet are going to be smaller they're going to have a lower kind of
overall market share and that's going to give people more choice and it's going to be way easier
to switch between them because your library is going to follow you around on Nostra and your
followers are going to follow you around on Nostra and I think that will be a much better world it's
it's almost like harder as someone building a product to in that world because people can really
easily leave and go to a different app but ultimately that is better for the user and
you know it keeps everyone on their toes and also it does lift everybody up as well so I'm
looking forward to that world and I also think with the introduction of lightning we can also like
just make these experiences much more valuable so yeah I'm hoping we do get there and you know
maybe one day you know Apple podcasts integrates Nostra and lightning as well you know and that
would be great because then you know if Tim Cook from Apple recommends a podcast and I follow him
on Nostra then I'll be able to see that in front of him. I mean ultimately that would be better for
users of Apple podcasts right like it having I don't think it can be overstated how like how much
better it makes the experience to be able to have a conversation with people and not people that are
just in one particular app but anyone on Nostra about a specific piece of content because like
that you listen to a you know like there's a reason that like even on just random blogs back in the
day comment sections would blow up and you know be these like long drawn out things it's because
when people read something or especially I think when they listen to something they want to talk
about it and if you're listening to it alone you're just you know in your car driving well
you don't nobody else listen to that with you there's nobody for you to talk about it with like
you want to go to the internet right that's the beauty of the internet it connects people
from all over the place who are into the fall of civilization podcast you know yeah but you want
to be able to have that conversation but if you're doing it in a walled garden that conversation is
by definition going to be just truncated or not possible at all because there you know the comment
section doesn't really doesn't really enable that and or I think like on Spotify because again I
literally just for the first time logged into Spotify for podcasters today uh you have to like
approve comments to see if they can be added to your you know to your to your show so like you
know if somebody says like you know fuck tiktok and podcast I hate that guy real you know just a
giant douche wad like I could be like oh no don't want people to see that on my on my Spotify page
but like on noster you can say tiktok and podcast sucks and that walkers a giant douche bag and
that's okay no one can stop you and I think that's the way that it should be I encourage people to
say fuck tiktok and podcast I hope that I'm not too big of a douche bag but like you know
there's a little bit of douche bag in all of us perhaps but I'm curious because I think something
that we mentioned that the whole Spotify Joe Rogan deal right that was a very concerted effort by
them to pay a ton of money to bring over the biggest name in podcasting because why because
there are people who love Joe Rogan's show so much that they will go and watch it on they will
sign up for Spotify they will get a membership they will go there just for that show so like they
did the calculation that that seems like a good investment for them right I probably it was because
he's got a massive show I did not pay for Spotify premium just for Joe Rogan I just figured you
know it won't be too long before he's back out in the the real world you know I'll see clips of
this elsewhere but I'm curious on for for fountain or just for noster more broadly
obviously there's not like this massive pool of somebody in the zapp stream live stream said it was
actually thank you Sarah 250 million that they paid for Joe Rogan there's not this massive pool of
you know a quarter of a billion dollars sitting out there that can be deployed to bring over some
big name to noster to help onboard more people like noster and fountain must compete on that
experience right but I'm curious you know to me I see the cool things that you're building with
fountain and as a as a podcaster I love it because I have I just checked today I've earned like
1.74 million sats from people boosting on fountain like that's amazing it's incredible there's 504
people that have supported this show on fountain so if you're listening thank you for that I really
appreciate that that is awesome it's insane to me that more creators more podcasters don't try and
take advantage of these podcasting 2.0 initiatives do you think that the the reticence to that the
what's holding people back is is it just not knowing that this stuff exists is it that they if
they're a really big name they've signed you know some exclusive deal is it that they think bitcoin
is a total scam like it's like to me it just becomes like why wouldn't you want to take advantage
of this awesome opportunity not just to to like make money but you have a way to connect with
your fans in a totally organic way where they are giving you value because they think what you made
is valuable like that value for value model is really beautiful like why don't more podcasters
take advantage of this yeah this is a great question and I think like we have to be honest with
ourselves as you know the bitcoin community and and this is in my view the barrier to adoption
that there there are a lot of people out there in the world that don't know anything about bitcoin
have never purchased bitcoin and the only time they've ever really heard about bitcoin is when
you know the price either massively goes up or massively goes down so in their heads bitcoin
is just this really volatile you know cryptocurrency and that's all they know about it and they've
also read their headlines about fdx and you know they think that there's massive risk around it
and when you said like here's how it works and we've spoken to podcasters and we've kind of
heard this again and again the idea of value for value where people listen to your content for free
and then support you after the fact if they feel like it was valuable and they want to support you
podcasters love that and you can see this this happens with patreon you know a lot of podcasters
get support on patreon although there's many reasons why that is a bad experience but so they love
value for value they understand it they also love the kind of experiences they also love open
podcasting and they love the kind of experiences that we're building in fountain where the payments
are social and the payments drive discovery to new listeners and you know you can have conversation
around the episode and that conversation can also happen on nosa they love that as well
but the reality is that the first thing a you know non-bitcoin podcaster will do when they hear
about this is they will go through the user journey that they're expecting their audience to go through
and currently within fountain what that involves is getting some bitcoin into your fountain wallet
and the the easiest way to do that right now if you've never purchased bitcoin before is through
our moon pay integration where you can purchase stats and have them you know go straight into your
fountain wallet via a bank card but the reality is it's a terrible experience you know it's just a
really bad onboarding experience to bitcoin you have to you know do kyc you have to wait 30 minutes
for the block confirmation because the purchase system through moon pay is only on chain and then
we swap it to lightning after the fact and also it's just you have to leave the fountain app to
do it and if you compare that painful painful onboarding experience to something like apple pay
you know these podcasters are thinking my audience are never going to do this this is too difficult
and so i think that is the number one barrier and we have to be really honest with ourselves you
know i'm a massive believer that through these you know social micropayment experiences whether
it's in podcasting 2.0 fountain or the other nosda clients i think this is going to onboard millions
of people to bitcoin and they're going to be using bitcoin for the first time not because of
number go up or the you know monetary value that we all believe in but just because it's fun and for
those people we need a new onboarding flow to get your first stats in your wallet to start playing
around and until we crack that we're always going to be fighting this uphill battle now i think this
is starting to happen i think what primal have done with their purchasing sats via in that purchase
is brilliant and i think you know it's something we're looking at obviously there's like regulatory
stuff that we have to think about but i think that going down that path is the right thing to do because
also people don't mind spending a 30 premium on their first sats because they have no idea what
the sats are worth because they don't they don't know what bitcoin is so for them it's just oh yeah
5 000 sats yeah i'll buy some of those and send them and so honestly to answer your question that is
the barrier to more people adopting bitcoin in a in a social way whether it's in fountain or these
other apps and we need you know i hope that all of the you know i i hope that all of the whether
it's exchanges all of the on-ramps to bitcoin i hope they're all kind of aware of what's happening
in in nosta and in podcasting to one and these other social lightning experiences because
i think it's a huge opportunity to onboard millions of people to bitcoin in a completely new way
i i appreciate the honesty there because i i think i agree like the friction in onboarding is always
going to be the biggest deterrent right but i am i'm curious i would challenge a little bit too
another question i always have is when i see bitcoiners and of course everybody's free to do whatever
the fuck they want right i'm not going to tell anyone what to do but when i see bitcoiners that
are like still using spotify still using apple podcasts still you know whatever it may be
when something like fountain exists it kind of blows my mind because i'm like like guys
there there is an app here that you can use that literally aligns with your entire ethos of bitcoin
it is built by bitcoiners you can zap and you can both send value for something you find valuable
but you can also earn bitcoin for listening to the podcast you're already going to listen to on
apple podcasts or spotify where you're not getting paid and they're taking a ton of your data and
you know whatever else it blows my mind that like more bitcoiners don't jump at these opportunities
it blows my mind that more bitcoiners aren't you know just balls deep into no-ster because again
it's like you have bitcoin as this native currency of this brand new protocol this brand new network
and i i don't even know if i have a question there it's more just like expressing expressing
surprise that more bitcoiners don't don't jump at this i mean do you think that's just because
like for bitcoiners because again these are people who understand bitcoiners because they
people who understand bitcoin they have bitcoin there's so none of that onboarding friction with
bitcoin exists but there's still some friction is it just i've been using spotify apple podcast for
so long that i just i don't feel like i don't feel like doing something new like is is that all it
comes down to i think that's part of it yeah and i think you know fountains been around for a couple
of years now and you know the maybe maybe someone tried fountain a couple of years ago and thought
it's not really you know it's not really as good ux design you know functionality wise compared to
apple podcast or spotify it's a lot better now i i feel like when we had our 1.0 release at the
beginning of this year i finally kind of like now feel comfortable you know you know putting it out
there that yes fountain is as good as spotify or apple podcast from a ux and design perspective so
maybe they tried it you know when we first launched and thought no i'm not going to use this but it
is difficult you know it's difficult you you listen to podcast every single day every single week on
apple spotify and it is difficult to make that switch and i think for any bitcoiners i i try and
communicate this as you know part of the adoption story you know there's people out there and actually
there's a massive number of people out there that are just they they haven't understood bitcoin and
they're probably not going to for a long time and this is another way in for those people
it's about making it fun it's about new product experiences that weren't possible before and i
i know we see this all the time you know we have a lot of users that don't know that sats are bitcoin
they think sats are just podcasting money and they love it they they love the sats they love
earning the sats they love sending the sats you know and i think there's just a huge opportunity
to onboard more people to to sats in a fun way and it can happen on nosa it can happen in podcasting
2.0 and yeah so i think it's part of the adoption story um we just need to continue to push the
product forward make the onboarding easier and help people understand that that is part of the
adoption story it's not just you know number go up that's part of the adoption story it's the new
product experiences so yeah hopefully uh anyone that's listening to this can you know help us
spread this message as well because you know if big if bitcoin is the global currency and we get
this to a point where it's used for payments then social payments within apps are going to be a huge
part of it and you know nosa podcasting 2.0 fountain these are the early uh signs of that and whatever
you can do as a bitcoiner to help you know kick the tires you know make suggestions like we're
like you can always contact me directly and and whatever ideas you have but yeah this is part
of the adoption story you know it's just as important as the etfs it may not sound as important
but you know i don't know how many people the etfs are going to onboard to bitcoin but if you have
a really fun new social app that you know can can explode to tens of millions of users then
you know it's just as potentially uh important for bitcoins adoption
i couldn't agree more into any bit coiners who are listening to this show who are not using fountain
i would really i would challenge you try it out because even like okay bitcoin adoption aside
it is a better experience in my opinion it is a better user experience for me as a user i'm not
talking as a podcaster i'm talking as a user i prefer the user experience and i remember i was
still using uh apple podcasts and fountain kind of side like side by side for a little while
you know a while ago when i first started using fountain just because i had like the you know
the fees i was subscribed to an apple podcast i was just adding like you know one here and there
on fountain that i you know uh wanted to check out and eventually i just i realized because i
was using them side by side oh fountain is literally just a better user experience for me and this
was before like long before the noster integration obviously which has taken that to the next level
and so i would really encourage people to to check out fountain to try it because i think that if
you compare it side by side bitcoin aside like we don't even have to bring the value component of
how awesome that is to be able to send value frictionlessly and receive value for listening
to shows take that out of the equation and it's still a better user experience so i would i would
put this out there as a challenge to bitcoiners to really try fountain and again it's like and if
you if you're a bitcoiner like why do you not want to be using a bitcoin native podcasting app like
it just blows my mind so i hope anyone listening to this who's not listening to it on fountain
makes that switch over and if you're still stuck inside the walled garden of spotify
try walking out into the the freedom of the open air for a little while and see it'll feel better
i promise but i i wanted to know too from you and just being being conscious of your time here
i'm kind of curious because i know you've talked to uh like you've talked to a lot of
podcasters throughout this process do you have like a an elevator pitch that you kind of give to
podcasters like you know okay let's say you bump into joe rogan uh in in the hallway somewhere
uh you know maybe it's maybe it's at the gym uh you you know he's just gotten done tearing it up in
there and and you've got a very limited amount of time to be like hey here's why this is interesting
to you what do you say to somebody like that?
Yeah i would say that well well firstly i think that um you know going back to the start of this
conversation um the beauty of the podcast medium is that there's a lot of nuance and it's a long
form discussion where you really get to to know and to know what you're doing and what you're
watching where you really get to to know somebody and and what their views are so you know part of
me realizes that this is going to be a slow journey just like bitcoin adoption and you know you
really need to understand the history of open podcasting you know the nuances of how closed
media is actually a real drag on your time and attention and and your potential in terms of
discovering you know and learning new things up on the world and then also you know the nuance of
value for value and why that's a good philosophy to live your life by especially when there's you
know content that you're consuming that is actually having a profound like effect on you in terms of
what you think so there's a lot of nuance there and i think like it's sometimes difficult for me to
to pick the one thing um but i would say for podcasters in particular i would say that every
podcaster wants to grow their audience um or at least every podcaster that i've kind of met and i
think that you know currently there is no discovery that's native to podcast apps so there's no way for
a podcast listener to discover your show or one of your episodes in the app that they use to listen
to podcast it just doesn't exist people might discover your podcast on other social media
platforms like twitter or tiktok or instagram someone might share an episode link in the tweet
or someone might click the podcast and put it on tiktok but the discovery of podcast on those
platforms is competing with you know the us election cycle or you know the latest you know war
that's happening in the world or whatever else it is that this attention algorithm is like shoving
into your face on that particular day and so having a discovery mechanism within the actual
podcast app i think podcasters can see that that's a better way of doing things and is a great
opportunity to you know reach some some new audience so that's probably what i would say is that
you know we want to have podcast discovery uh in the place where people listen to podcast which
is the podcast app and and here's the reasons why this hasn't been possible because of the way
podcasting is developed because of the fact that it's open and fragmented because of the fact that
in order to do it properly across all the apps you need an open social pro's goal like nosta and
then you can get into some of the new technological developments but yeah it's hard it's hard and it's
dependent on the person and i think like yeah someone like joe rogan you know you know maybe
not this year maybe maybe a bit further out into the future we'll finally get him but i think that
if you could you know sit down with him and and have a conversation with him in long form i think
in long form i think he'd totally understand it and totally get it now he probably wouldn't you know
walk away from his hundred million dollars from Spotify uh just because of this but you never
know so maybe one day we'll get there but until then you know joe rogan is not the only uh person
out there and you know he's just one podcast there and he pioneered the the format in many ways but
it's plenty of other people out there and the great thing about podcasting is that you know
everyone has an interesting perspective and it doesn't need to be the biggest podcaster in the
world you know people can listen to smaller podcasts and it's still just as valuable as a medium so
just hopefully we can just bit by bit you know one by one make the app better make the experience
better get the message out there about open podcasting and and just yeah like bit by bit continue
continue to push it forward and i think especially for smaller podcasters like because you're exactly
right you know joe rogan's definitely not the only podcaster out there i don't know how many
podcasts there are now maybe you know uh off the top of your head but i mean like an unfathomable
number at this point i know a lot of them don't make it past like there's like a 25 episode or
something kind of like cut off where like 90 of podcasts stop after that but if you're a smaller
podcaster and you're trying to get up and you know start and you don't have a huge social presence
on other networks that's really really hard to do like i mean basically impossible like you're
you know unless you get really lucky like you're not going to find a good way to do that i was
fortunate because i already had a bit of a platform both on uh on x formerly known as twitter
and on noster and so it's like okay starting a podcast i have a decent channel to push that out to
already but if you don't have that that's really really hard and so like i i think that for smaller
creators especially fountain is just a wonderful tool for that because again without the discovery
you just you don't stand a chance like you're you're just not going to get served up on the apple
podcast home feed like it's just not going to happen and so like i would you know whether big
or small uh there's a lot to be said for trying out these podcasting 2.0 applications uh i you
know personally again i dig fountain i'm really happy that you guys are building it and i was really
happy to see you integrated noster and i you know i'm curious do you think like maybe a different
question do different podcasting uh application companies talk to each other like do you guys
have like a is there like a uh pod conf uh like do you guys like ever get together and like talk
about like hey here's what we're building because it is like this open standard kind of thing is
there anything like that like do you talk to any other founders who are like oh we're looking at
integrating noster we're looking at integrating bitcoin we're just not quite there yet like
what's your sense for where the rest of the industry is at for ones that have not yet
implemented these podcasting 2.0 initiatives yeah we definitely do i think like the first
the thing i'm trying to do now is i guess like you know there's always this there's this phrase
right the the talk sometimes sometimes you need to like show rather than tell and for me with
noster like that was very much the case i wanted to show the rest of podcasting 2.0 and the podcasting
industry that noster can work for us for a cross out commenting system noster can bring
better discovery to uh podcasting because of the fact that it's open and as a user you don't have
to make a choice between leaving a comment on an episode or sharing the episode link on social media
or sending a payment you can do all three at the same time um so i wanted to kind of get
fountains noster integration out to show that um but yeah i'm speaking to you know the other
podcasting 2.0 app developers and you know i want them to integrate the same noster specification
that we have used so that you know someone can leave someone can send a boost on podverse
and you can see that on the episode page in fountain and you can reply to it and we can get
that interaction going i think that's the first step and then from there you know moving through
some of the more established uh players but yeah that's definitely the goal like the whole reason
we made this changes so that other apps can can do it as well and as we've talked about that makes
the experience in fountain even better and you know each app has its own you know different
ways of doing things so yeah definitely aiming to to to have that happen and do you think the
the value for value model overall egg we're obviously still very early in this um a lot of
podcasts are monetized by sponsorships um my my own included i've got a great sponsor bitbox who's
been with me since like it was very small and i'm very grateful for that but this value for value
model i mean do you think that this is something that can really uh that it really scales and that
that's also just a function of the larger network effect of of bitcoin of noster like that that model
becomes more like that could be you know you don't need to take any sponsorships at all because you
could actually sustain like have an income from this do you think that that's something that we
can actually see like in the next number of years as this network effect grows yeah 100 i think that
that well there's a couple of things here yes is is the answer to your question i think that
you know patreon is the proof point you know there's many podcasters out there that um make a
living solely off their patreon subscribers now our view is that doing that in the app where it
also generates conversation around the content and discovery for the podcast and other that uses
of the app is way better than doing it off on patreon um so we think that's better um but yeah i
think patreon proves that i also think if you look at some of the live streaming platforms like twitch
and kit you know they prove that this model works um i think there's always always going to be a mix
of monetization for content creators and some of that is going to include what i would say is like
ethical sponsorship where the the values of the company or the brand really align with the values
of the you know content creator like in the case of of you having bitbox as a sponsor so
uh but i do think as we you know solve the onboarding challenge as i talked about make the product
better you know make it easier to support like increase the kind of like feedback loop with
the support payments that for content creators that want to they can make a living purely
through value for value but yeah i think sponsorship will always be there and play a part um yeah i
think that's a really good point about kind of uh value for value may not completely replace
sponsorship but hopefully it gives people a little more optionality to be pickier about
yeah the sponsors they do bring on like i'm like this is not my uh my full-time job i really love
this very much as a as a hobby and it's one that i spend a lot of time on obviously but i do have a
i do have a fiat mining job and so i you know i would still do this podcast if i only was receiving
the zaps that i get on noster or the uh you know the boost that i get on fountain simply because i
like doing it i like the opportunity to talk to people like you um i it's i feel very fortunate
to be able to do that but for people who are making this their entire career like you can see why they
would maybe occasionally take some sponsors that perhaps do not have the best interests of their
listeners at heart and i think we've seen some of that you know it can happen with bitcoin podcasts
too they're not immune to it uh and especially i'm sure as we get into this next kind of bull cycle
there's going to be a lot more money getting thrown around it's very tempting i had a you know
plenty of folks reach out that i would never in a million years agree to letting sponsor this show
because i wouldn't want to taint the message of this show uh or screw over my my listeners like i'm
you know i i don't i just don't want to do that i'm in a position to say you know uh you know
kindly fuck off to those people uh but maybe some people aren't um and you know they go down a
different path and that's a shame but hopefully with this value for value model becoming more
prevalent they have a little bit more of a cushion to be able to say you know what i'm going to be a
bit choosier about this i like that's nope that's not worth it i don't want to do that to my listeners
i i i really hope that that's the case yeah 100 and i think you know one of the key things to get
across is to communicate that you know we talk a lot about the value for value ask and this is what
adam curry talks about all of the time is you know if you don't ask for support from your audience then
people are probably not going to support you and part of the ask when you ask people to support
you optionally if they found the content valuable is to is to explain stuff like that you know i do
have a sponsor um but your support if you find an episode valuable you don't have to support every
episode helps me you know main make sure that i will never you know compromise you know this trusted
relationship that we have as you know podcaster and and listener and i think you know sometimes it
can feel a little bit like weird to you know talk about that on the show and talk about that with
your audience but that's part of it too you know the honesty around that and i think that definitely
helps a lot so yeah it's important to have that out in the open and just like communicate that value
for value is completely optional you don't have to support but like it means so much in so many ways
if you do and it's really easy if you're using an app like fountain so yeah it's it's it's complicated
it's nuanced and also we're all kind of i feel i feel like we're all just learning this over the
past couple of years we're still learning how it all works you know luckily we have legends in the
space like adam curry to kind of you know learn from but we're all still figuring it out yeah the
ask is the the the hardest was like the hardest part for me to come around to because it feels like
it feels weird to do it i just did it in the zap.stream i think it was like uh i think gg like
phrase this really well and that's the one i've used since then it's just if you find this valuable
consider giving value back and i think that's a nice way to phrase the ask because again it's
like no you don't have to but like maybe you didn't find it valuable that's okay but if you did just
just consider it and like it it's a weird thing to get yourself around to like you know it almost
it feels like like begging somehow but then it's like you have to remember it's like no you're
you're putting in a lot of hours to this to try and bring value to people and i think the other
thing is that what i've found is that people genuinely do want to give value back like they
want to give value when they find something valuable like i i know i do and like it's cool
that bitcoin enables us to do that in a really frictionless way and we happen to be exchanging
the most incredible money that humanity has ever discovered so like that that's pretty nice too
like that's uh that's definitely a bonus yeah 100% and also like as a listener you know if you don't
hear that first value for value ask you probably are never gonna send a boost or support a podcast
but when you do you realize that it feels really good it feels like it adds to the experience
because it's another way for you to yes show appreciation but also influence the direction
of the show that you love you know because you can you know if one episode out of the last
25 episodes that you produce gets like 10x the amount of boosts and sats and messages
it's such a good signal to you that that's the kind of thing people want to hear and so for me
as a listener that's why i like sending boost because i feel like i can i feel like it deepens
the connection between me and the people that i'm listening to and it and it makes the production
of the podcast something that's more of a shared act rather than just you know podcast they're over
here you know doing whatever they want it it makes it more of a shared thing and interestingly
um you know with adam and his shows you know he doesn't you know talk about his audience as
audience or listeners or anything like that he talks about them as producers so everybody listening
is is a producer of the show and contributes back to it and so that's another part of this that you
know in the app we want to try and make more obvious but that's another part of the philosophy
which is you know yes you're sending money yes you're sending appreciation but you're also helping
shape what is this podcast and how what direction can it take and you know so there's there's a whole
bunch of different layers to it um but yeah if you don't send that first boost then you'll never
know and you won't take that first step it's a great point just about shaping direction because
value is the best signal right alike doesn't really mean anything that that's free but if somebody is
sending you value that is a very high signal action letting you know wow they they really
did find it valuable because they are giving me value in return they're giving me a little chunk of
a finite 21 million bitcoin like that's it must mean that it meant something to them you know that's
that's pretty cool yeah and and ultimately like that that is what I think is so profound in the
long run because at the moment any media platform or social media platform and all of the media
platforms are social now you know twitter youtube instagram tiktok all of these platforms are driven
by an attention signal that goes into the algorithm that ranks the content and serves it to everybody
else based on that attention signal and that has so many negative downstream effects on the whole
of society I think everybody can see this if they browse their twitter feed um and by replacing
the attention signal with a value signal I do believe that we can create a better internet
and ultimately a better society because all of our world views are built upon social media these days
and so yeah it's also about changing the way we serve this content so that the attention signal
that is also that's often associated with something like outrage or you know disagreement or conflict
is replaced by a value signal and instead of you know browsing twitter and and seeing all of this
you know terrible stuff and people you know shouting at each other instead of that maybe you'll go and
see an episode of fall of civilizations and you'll you know expand your mind on the history of the
world or something like that and you know I reached out to the the guy from fall of civilizations
podcast and I was like hey you know we're doing this like would you want to you know set up your
show to receive value and he was like no not sure about this bitcoin thing not today so I hope one
day he will you know enable value for value because I'd love to show him my appreciation for all the
value I've got and you know help people discover that content because it's it's super niche but
it's incredibly valuable and I think that's also the kind of bigger like vision for this whole thing
is let's get away from these attention algorithms that are kind of a drain on everybody's like
soul at the end of the day let's replace that with a value signal and I think we'll have a better
internet so yeah hopefully we can get there but we're just very much at the beginning and
there's lots to solve but it's cool what's happening and I'm happy to you know try and play a small
part in it. Oscar I think that's a it's a beautiful note to end on and thank you for I think you're
playing more than a small part and I love what you guys are doing there and so again I would like
to encourage everyone who if you made it this far if you're still listening I know we've still got
people on the zap.stream on Noster so thanks for being here but check out Fountain you can go to
fountain.fm on the web or just search Fountain in the app store anywhere else you want to send
people I'll link your your Noster of course your centralized X as well but definitely the Noster
but anywhere else you want to push people toward. No I think that's probably it I would just say
yeah for anyone who's who's listening and does check out fountain you know you know my like
ask would be please just reach out to us and let us know what we can do better you know if you're
coming from Apple Podcast if you're coming from Spotify if you're coming from Overcast just let
us know like what we can do better in terms of the app and we'll happily you know work on that for
you so you can reach out on Noster or Twitter or you can also just send me an email oscarfountain.fm
and you know we can try and like if you agree with what we've talked about on this episode like we
can all like work on this together and try and build this future so please do reach out and yeah
thanks so much for having me on Walker I'm a big fan of the show so I'm a regular listener and yeah
it was great to chat today. That means a lot coming from you because I know you do podcasts
all day long for work so it's nice to hear that you're a listener I'll say a producer of this
show as well but thanks so much for sharing your time with me this was a treat.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of The Bitcoin Podcast. If you are a Bitcoin only
company interested in sponsoring The Bitcoin Podcast head to bitcoinpodcast.net slash sponsor
or send an email to hello at bitcoinpodcast.net. If you are enjoying The Bitcoin Podcast and find
it valuable give it a boost on fountain a five star review wherever you're listening or better
yet share this show with your network so more people can learn about Bitcoin or don't Bitcoin
doesn't care but I sure do appreciate it you can grab links in the show notes to watch or list this
show wherever you get your podcasts or go to bitcoinpodcast.net slash podcast and you'll also
find the links to follow me and the show on noster and on x. Bitcoin is scarce there will only ever
be 21 million but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant so thank you for spending your scarce time to
listen to the Bitcoin podcast until next time stay free.