"Welcome to the 50th episode of the 'Future of Podcasting' with your hosts, Daniel J. Lewis and Dave Jackson. Today, we look closer at how podcasting technology is becoming increasingly 'invisible' to end users (and needs to keep heading in that direction).
We'll explore how reducing technical barriers is making podcasting more accessible, comparing it to the early days of the medium and its evolution. From iTunes revolutionizing podcast access in 2005 to modern innovations like Anchor and advanced podcasting equipment, we’ll highlight the key turning points that have shaped the industry.
We also discuss future predictions and the enhancements needed in podcasting, such as seamless cryptocurrency payments and better integration with platforms like Spotify. Stay tuned as we celebrate this milestone episode and imagine a future where podcasting is effortless and intuitive for everyone."
Find Dave at schoolofpodcasting.com
Find Daniel at theaudacitytopodcast.com
Daniel
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Dave
Listen to this podcast on any of the fine value-enabled app at www.newpodcastapps.com
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00:00 - None
00:45 - Make the Technology Disappear
04:20 - Inflection Points
05:06 - Juice Software
07:17 - How Did Dave Discover Podcasts
09:12 - Apple iTunes
12:55 - Thank You Anchor?
15:34 - The View Has Disappeared
16:54 - Spotify Deserves Credit
18:19 - Starting in Podcasting 2.0 Today?
21:10 - Who Makes the Wallet?
25:54 - PayPal
27:04 - When It is E Z
28:17 - A Twist From Sam and True Fans
31:28 - Eliminate Thinking
34:16 - Boostgrams
35:30 - Saturn?
Can we make the podcasting technology invisible? This is the
future of podcasting, where we ponder what awaits the
podcasters of today. From the school of
podcasting, here's Dave Jackson. And from the audacity
to podcast, here's Daniel j Lewis. Daniel,
future of podcasting episode 50. Whoo. We're
50. I can feel the gray hairs coming
in. Oh. Dave, I hate to break it to you.
They all came in for you a long time ago. Yeah.
Actually, I was 29 when I got my first gray hair, which was also the
same year I got married. Coincidence? I don't think. I don't know. Anyway,
but we're talking about invisible technology? What what what
what's the idea here? I asked Dave if I could have
another soapbox on this because I wanted to dig into this further, and
I've posted some stuff on x Twitter about this. Way back in
2015, I did a presentation, a keynote,
on the future of podcasting, and we'll have the link to that in the
notes for this episode. I'd love for you to check it out because
while in hindsight, I kind of regret some of the ways that I presented
that, maybe not the most keynote worthy style of presenting the
information. To be honest, I am humbly proud, like in a good way,
proud, happy, I'll put it that way, happy with my predictions
because they're coming true and because they were
unique predictions where many of the predictions that people have for podcasting
basically comes down to the word more. You know, we'll have more of this, we'll
have more money, more podcasters, more celebrities, more opportunities, more this,
more that. Just put the word more in it, and that's all the predictions pretty
much out there. I had some specific predictions, not like
this company will do this thing, but some specific
things of what I think will happen in the podcasting
industry. And one of those was
the technology will disappear. And by that,
I don't mean our technology that we use
or the things that technology can do will cease,
but that the technological aspect of it
will no longer be visible to us. Just like with our
phones that we have and our computers, and there are a lot of things
that we do that are extremely complicated processes
that we do that we have no idea what's going on in the
background. We don't care. We shouldn't have to know what's
going on in the background. We just want to see our latest
email or the latest social post or we want the quick answer to our
question. We wanna know if so and so team won the game last night so
we can get a free donut from Kroger today. That's the kind of stuff that
we want to know. We don't care what kind of technology happens in the
background. I want that for podcasting. Dave, who is
it that you often talk about as your symbol for this? Well,
that would be aunt Cheryl. She's the person that when you go just copy
and paste that, she goes, what do you mean copy and paste?
So we want that person, and there's nothing wrong with aunt Cheryl, by the way.
But we want it to be easy. When I was talking with,
a member of the Apple staff at podcast movement, They
he just said this podcasting 2 point o's looks really interesting. He goes, but it
has to be easy, like, easy. And the
minute you're like, okay. First, you gotta do this and then the thing and
do the hokey pokey and turn yourself. Nope. We've already lost aunt Cheryl.
So it got easy for a minute there when we had Albie
kinda going in. Now we're looking for okay. We tried that.
We can check that off. That did work, but it's not long
term maybe the best solution. And I wouldn't even call that easy either.
Yeah. That's true. It was well yeah. Because you had to okay. Well, first you
have to set up a wallet. And then the other thing was
that nobody ever really asked, which was kinda good, but I didn't get
anybody going. How do I get my satoshis and get them into my bank?
It was always just, how do I set it up to receive them? I didn't
have anybody really, and they want to give them back. And so that was kind
of something I thought was kind of unique and in an
interesting insight that nobody was like, okay. How do I put this in my, you
know, wallet so I can go buy some groceries? And I'm like, well, I think
you can get a Mountain Dew with 4,000 sat, something like that.
But, yeah, that was still too hard. The reason I've been thinking about this a
lot lately is looking at the inflection points within
podcasts and the podcasting industry. And where I
differentiate that is podcasting is the art of making
podcasts. So a podcasting app is an app that
helps you make podcasts. So Steve Jobs was
wrong when he said he was bringing podcasting to iTunes
4.9 way back in 2005. He brought
podcasts. But that was the
first major inflection point for podcasts since their
birth was when they came to Itunes 4.9 in
2005 because well, for me, that was my
introduction to podcasts. Dave, what was it like
listening to podcast before that? Oh, before that, it was insane.
I was using I know on the Mac, it was called iPad or X. I
think it was called Juice, and it had a big picture of a lemon on
it. And I would fire that up in the morning. It would
go out and check for new episodes. And while I was showering
and doing my hair and eating my bra, I'd come down, like, a half hour,
45 minutes. Hopefully, I would have, like, 5
or 6 episodes because there really weren't that many podcasts that I was listening to.
But there was no iPhone. There was no iPad at that point
even. And so I had this little thing called an iRiver 899.
I think it held was either 256 or 528
megabytes. And it back then, it was like, oh, holy cow.
And when you plugged it in, it looked like a little hard drive. So I'd
have to know where Juice had downloaded my files,
open up that folder, copy them, open up the iRiver, paste them
there, wait for it to transfer over, and then I would go out. And I
forget how I had them wired up in my car. I know at one point
I used, like, a cassette converter, and that sounded awful.
And I think I had I think and back then, that was huge. I had
an auxiliary in. It was so I think that's how I ended up plugging
this into it. But what was sad is I would listen to Howard Stern in
the morning. I'd start listening to all my podcasts, all 5
episodes that I had copied over. And by 3 o'clock, you're like, oh,
man. I'm on a podcast. And he was like, well, gotta wait till I get
home. So it was not a fun you know? And and to say the
technology was way like, you know, that's why when
you ask people, do you listen to podcasts? A, they thought you had to have
an iPad once the iPad was invented. That's why the
iPad was such a great thing because I literally would wake up,
plug my iPad into my computer, and that was it. I would
come down later, grab my iPad, and get in the car because everything had
already transferred over. It had already downloaded. And that was the first time
when Apple brought in podcast. It's the first and only time I've ever
actually seen hockey stick growth. Because I remember going into my
stats and just it was just it just shot right through the roof. I'm like,
what is going on? We're like, oh, it's the Apple thing. I was like, oh,
yeah. That might help a little bit. Well, and even before that
so that was complicated enough. How did you even
get the podcast? How did you discover them? How did you
even start downloading them? Where did RSS fit
into this? Well, the the first one, and I think
I have the clip for this, but when I downloaded Juice, the
voice of 1 Adam Curry came out. Nice.
And I was like, hey. I know that guy from the Headbangers Ball. So that's
what really one of the first things that got me into it. And I started
listening to The Daily Source Code, and then he would mention C.
C. Chapman from Accident Hash, which was a radio show. Okay. So
then you hear another podcast or of another podcast. How would
you get that other podcast into your podcast app? Oh,
yeah. You'd go over to let's say I was gonna listen to the scene scene
by Marcus Couch. I'd go over to his website. He'd have an RSS button.
And because we were all nerds, I knew don't click on it. I had to
right click and copy and then go into the Juice
software and paste in the RSS feed. So then it would go out and
check, and you're like, oh, wow. Marcus has, you know, 5 episodes. He's been doing
this a long time. And then you would just wait for them
to download. And then, you know, like, okay. And then you'd
you'd put them on your iRiver and off you go. So those who fell
asleep through all of that wake up. Now we
have iTunes and Itunes
well, now we have Apple Podcasts actually, but Itunes was a major
inflection point in that it made all of that so much
easier that discovering a podcast or adding
a podcast was as simple as pressing
a button to subscribe, and that was it. And it added
it to your library. It would automatically check for new episodes every
I think the default might have been every hour or maybe it was once a
day back then. I forget. But it would check for it automatically frequently.
And if you had an iPad or even for a little while,
the Itunes app would synchronize with a Motorola Razr flip
phone, but you could synchronize your media. And other people
made special little scripts that could then synchronize what was in
your Itunes library with some other third party MP
3 player that you could take with you, and there were other things.
But Apple Itunes was a huge inflection point for
us because it made things easy.
It made it so easy that you didn't have to know what
an RSS feed URL was for a podcast you wanted. You didn't have to
copy and paste. You didn't have to try and do any of that. You
pressed subscribe. You searched for the podcast by name
or by subject, and you pressed subscribe. And we still have that same kind
of workflow today, although the language is mostly followed now, but it's
still the same basic thing. It's now just that simple. You
click or tap and you have it. None of this having to
worry about the RSS stuff. It's there. And
then look at other major inflection points within the podcasting
consumption and podcast creation, like the invention of the
iPhone. So the iPad was way back in 2002, I
believe, when that came out. The iPhone was
2,007, I believe. And so that was after the
invention of podcasting. The iPhone made it even more convenient
because then your device could do some of the synchronization
a little bit more for you, and especially when they started doing things like being
able to download the episodes directly onto the device instead of having
to synchronize through your computer, again, making the technology
disappear. And now people never connect their
smartphones to their computers to synchronize or transfer stuff hardly
ever, and that technology has disappeared. Think about it from the
perspective of the podcasting side. So
creating podcasts, we give Anchor a lot
of grief, but what did Anchor do
to the growth of podcasting? They brought a lot of crap into the
space? Yeah. They also made it easy. The word
crap. That sentence is still correct. They brought a lot into the
space. There was an explosion of interest in podcasting
because Anchor made it so dead simple
that, yes, it was super simple to make a lot of crap, and that's what
happened. But it was a win for the industry
because it was so dead simple. People didn't
have to worry about technology. They didn't even have to worry about
microphones or mixers or stuff like that. It was just open the app, press
record, press stop, type a little bit of text, give it a
title, press publish, and it's, you're a podcaster now with
whatever you just said. You're a podcaster now, and it's in the Apple Podcast
Store and some other places. It made it simple, and that created
a measurable explosion in the growth of new podcasts.
Yeah. A lot of them crap. Yeah. You didn't even need talent.
Exactly. But there are, I think, today,
a lot of talented now podcasters who
got their start because Anchor made it
so dead simple for people. Think about the gear that we
use now with podcasting. Dave, you and I have both
been around long enough to have experienced
having to mess with mix minus. The good old
days. That's something we haven't had to say for years. Right?
Yes. Mixed minus. That was such it was such a thing that, like, once
you got it, you got it. But getting the light bulb to turn
on was not easy at all. There are a lot of people that were like,
so I do what? I'm hearing an echo. What? And it's like, And
then trying to make it work like some gear, you would get these tiny little
mixers because people would hear, oh, I need a mixer to connect with my microphone.
And how do I get the mixer connected to my computer? Oh, now I need
a USB audio interface. And now with this tiny mixer that I only
spent $50 on, how do I do mix minus with this? And
it's, like, it's not possible where you have to do this convoluted thing with
the auxiliary output, the auxiliary sends, or maybe you do something where it's
like the left and right balance of the audio. It starts getting complicated.
Now huge credit to RODE, I think, really led the industry. I'm
not gonna say they're the first on this, but they certainly
led and continue to lead the industry with the innovation of the RODEcaster
Pro. And that one device, when the
Rodecaster Pro came out, that one device
designed for podcasters made so much of the
technology just disappear. Yes. There's a mix minus
toggle switch inside of the Rodecaster Pro, but that's
it. And I think out of the box, it's doing the mix minus
for you. Yeah. So you don't even have to think about
it at all. It just works. When I
first got the Zoom PodTrak p 4, I was going through all
the menus looking for the mix minus setting, and it was
so bad. I actually had to look at the manual.
I was trying to think, what is it? And then finally, you know, I think
I emailed support, and they're like, yeah. It's just there. It's on already. You don't
have to turn it on. And I was like, this is amazing. So,
yeah, it's that's another one where you take it for granted. It's kind of
funny now when you stumble across old pieces of
technology and you're like, oh, I remember I remember mixed minus. And I remember,
you know, you even right there, you said you the whole panning sometimes. You could
pan things different ways to get separate tracks, all sorts of weird it
was just we're all just hacking everything good because nothing was made
for podcasting yet. But that technology, the
actual thing that technology is doing hasn't disappeared, but our
view of the technology has disappeared that now it's just we plug it in, we
turn it on, it is plug and play. Or even look at stuff
like as much hate as we give to the Blue Yeti microphone.
Right. It was accessible. It was easy for people. They
go out to Best Buy or Circuit City, and they buy the microphone,
or they plug it in, and they start recording. And let's not forget its predecessor,
of course, the brilliant blue snowball.
I always think that there's this doctor who a series of
these episodes with these particular characters, the Ood,
who hold their brains in their hands in a little ball that is then
connect with this like it looks like an umbilical cord to their heads, and their
brains are in the ball. And they talk, and it, like,
glows as they talk. So I always I did this the first time I
held a Blue Yeti. I did I went live on Instagram
video, and I said, you know, we must feed. We must feed
because that was a line from when you meet the oud because that's that's what
it like, it's this giant softball sized microphone,
but it was easy. Yeah. Because you just plugged it directly in. It
was a USB microphone. You're like, wait. I don't need a mixer or anything. Nope.
Just plug the microphone in. So Yeah. And you look at other things
too, like Spotify. Okay. They're doing a lot
that we don't like in the podcasting industry,
but we have to give them credit that like Apple did
with bringing podcasts to iTunes, Spotify bringing
podcasts to Spotify has made podcast consumption
easy for countless people because it's right
there with their music so that they can listen to
their music, they can listen to their podcasts, and now they can listen to audiobooks
through Spotify too. That is brilliant for them to put it all there
and make it easy. It's kind of funny though that
now Apple has split out the different media consumption
from their app. And that might eventually happen with Spotify where we'll have a
Spotify podcast app and a Spotify music app and a Spotify audiobooks
or books app or that might happen someday. But while it's
still all in one app, they made it easy. They made
the technology disappear. They made other podcast
apps disappear. And that is what we
need to do in the future of podcasting and with podcasting 2.0
development and stuff. And I know everything starts out geeky. So I'm
not saying, hey, we need to make this dead simple on
arrival or else it's dead on arrival. I'm not saying that.
I think we need to constantly think of how can we make
this super easy. Dave, you've asked me a
question a couple of times on the kind of advice I would give.
What is that question? Yeah. I had somebody
ask me, hey. You you talk about this 2 point o thing, and they were
talking about the streaming satoshis. And they're like, how do I get started in
that? And I was kinda like, well, you go to oh, wait. You're in the
US. Yeah. And that's where I was kinda I
guess I need to find I mean, I know originally, I I was doing something
with Telegram. I don't even remember how I did it. I just remember there was
this thing, and you put it in. And setting it up on the index is
pretty much the same, but the whole wallet thing is the part that's gotten we're
we're all kind of in a holding pattern right now. I I know we could
do probably something with fountain. I know in terms of receiving
no. For sending sats, Sam over Truefans
has a setup, so it's super easy to fill your wallet and then
send to people. But if you're the podcaster looking to receive,
I'm kinda like, fountain, I think.
So what so what would be your answer to that? What I would
love to say is talk to your hosting
provider, and they can help you get set up with it. Years ago,
now at this point, it was podcast movement, I believe, 2021.
I was talking to Tom Rossi from Buzzsprout, and so maybe he'll remember
this conversation, but I shared a vision of what this could look like. And
this is the vision I would still love to see. It's developed a bit more
since then. And I touched on this previously in our episode about the
future of ad slots. This technology of streaming satoshis
and boostergrams and such, I love it. I love what
we've built. I think it's a fantastic foundation.
Now it's time for all of that technology to disappear
because I think the whole thing of getting a wallet, that shouldn't be
necessary. The whole thing of learning how to
even go to the index or connect your wallet or there's a
hosting provider. I don't wanna throw them under the bus, so I'm not gonna name
them. But they do a lot of things very innovatively. And they have a
field where you can add your value information, but they have this
drop down for when you add your wallet.
And even I, with understanding of some of these
things, I sometimes don't know what am I supposed to pick from
these things that use the Cyrillic alphabet, but I
have no idea what that means. It's like, is it
the the, you know, the x y z wallet type or is it
a satoshi or is it a a whatever, a hash or is I don't
even remember what it was, but I remember that someone
else, unless they were told, use this option,
they're not going to know, and they shouldn't have to know. Even just
simply copying your wallet address into your podcast
feed, I think you shouldn't have to do that. So the vision that I
have for this is I would love to see,
let's follow this from the very start. The
podcast apps, I think, should make wallets
where the podcast consumer simply
purchases tokens. We don't even have to call it Satoshis. We can because that's
probably what's going to power it. But we could call it credits,
tokens, Satoshis, whatever. They put
some money into this podcast app. That
app then converts that to whatever digital
currency necessary, and then the podcast
consumer can choose where that money goes.
Then the podcast app will send that to the podcaster.
Now the podcaster, of course, needs a way to receive that money. That's where the
podcast hosting providers, I think, need to get into this. And I know there
are certain concerns about custodial wallets
and cryptocurrency exchanges and some of this stuff.
I think and I I am not a lawyer on this.
Please keep that in mind. So this is not legal advice.
But my perception of things looking at the
industry is that when you are
handling and holding someone else's money, that's when things
get complicated. But if you are selling them something
or you are regularly paying them out for something, that's when things are
simpler. Like you look at all of these affiliate programs that you can
join. I have an affiliate program for Podgageman. I'd love for any podcaster
to join that affiliate program and recommend it to other podcasters. Most of the
way that these affiliate programs work is that you earn a certain amount of
money. And then probably once a month, usually near the beginning of the month
or maybe near the end of the month, you get paid what you have
earned up to that point or up to a certain cutoff point
for accounting for any kind of refunds or anything like that. They're
not managing your money for you. It's you've earned this
amount and we will pay you this amount at the end of this
particular term or waiting period or anything like that. That's the way it could
be for podcast hosting providers where they set up
maybe they need only a single wallet on their
side. So they set up their own Albi Hub or whatever technology
they need to do that is invisible to the podcaster. They
receive the payment. With the payment, there's the information of what
podcast it goes to, what episode it's for, you know, all of that stuff that
currently we talk about being in the TLV record. Maybe it will be in some
other thing like an activity stream in the future. Whatever technology that
is, doesn't really matter in this context. But they get that information.
They then can add that to a balance to
the podcaster, and the podcaster can then either
set up something that's automatic or maybe it's a manual payout,
but then just they decide, I want to get my payout,
and then it goes out to some other place where it's less
complicated. Like, you look at Coinbase, what Coinbase has done in the United
States. Coinbase is working really hard to follow all of
the laws, and they're doing a much better job than places like Binance
US and many other places who had just decided, nope. We're not going to
even serve people in the United States. Or if you're from the US, you cannot
use our cryptocurrency platform. But Coinbase, it's
even a publicly traded company. I do not own stock in Coinbase. I do
use Coinbase, but I don't I'm not invested in them currently.
They do have a lightning wallet feature, but it's the
traditional style where it does this kind of invoice
thing in the background that is still a little bit technical.
But to get that money then from the podcast hosting
provider to your Coinbase wallet, From Coinbase,
then you can take that cryptocurrency, convert it
to dollars, deposit it into your bank account. And even
that could be a little bit easier. Yeah. But I think that
is fairly easy right now. Once you're in that
space of having an exchange account, you're very familiar with the concept
of depositing and withdrawing and converting between different
currencies and tokens and such. But this whole process
should be invisible. I think it should be as simple for the
podcast consumer of, I wanna upload $10.
How many credits does that give me? Okay. It gives me this many credits. I
want to disperse these credits across these podcasts in this particular way.
Those podcast hosting providers receive that, then
they disperse it to the podcasters, then the podcasters can choose when they
want to redeem that, or maybe they just withdraw it when they want
to. That's what I'd love to see. Yeah. If you think about it,
PayPal, if you think about all the stuff that goes on there where
when you say I wanna pay $18 to Daniel
using PayPal, it goes behind the scenes, goes to my
checking account, removes $18, sends it to
Daniel, goes into his PayPal, and then Daniel can throw it into
his account. And it's not invisible because you have to click the
PayPal button. But once you log in, you're done. At that point, it's
really easy. So if you think about in the I don't remember
what I really don't remember what life was like before PayPal. Right.
I guess you had to send somebody a check. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's
been around for a long time. But and now there are other
you know, there's Stripe. But Stripe has a thing called link now that
when I go to stuff, because I've used it once, it's like, oh, do you
wanna use your link information? I'm like, sure. And it puts in
everything. I think the only thing I have to do is put the little three
digit code for my credit card to to prove that it's me. So that's pretty
seamless too. So, yeah, if things are getting easier, we just need
to and like Daniel said, we aren't gonna do this
overnight, but that's where we wanna go. Yeah. And when it gets to that
point, I think that's when the companies like Apple who are
saying, you've got to make this easy, that's
when they can start supporting that same kind of thing too. And in the
background, maybe there can be multiple protocols. I
think Bitcoin is a great way to do this because what we can do through
specifically the lightning network with Bitcoin, Maybe it's something
else that can come about in the future. But the whole point is whatever
technology is happening behind the scenes, podcasters
and especially podcast consumers should not have to
care at all what it is. It should just
be a seamless transfer of value
from the consumer to the podcaster.
And if a few places in between take a small
cut, that's okay. As long as, of course, they disclose that.
I think that's totally okay and should be that way because those
places have some expenses when processing these things. And
also they should be compensated for their work that they're doing
in making the process easy. And to throw this back to the episode where I
initially kind of shared a little bit of this idea when we were talking about
more potential for ad slots, Sam Sethi from truefans.fm
had sent us a boostergram, and we didn't read that in our last note.
And he had mentioned something about our not reading that, and that's, I think,
a a great conversation to have. But something that he wanted to point out
and something that we briefly touched on in that episode is
another layer to this that we can still
think about. And what he said in his comment is the extra twist
is the user in their settings can set a minimum streaming
value. For example, 100 sats per minute for your
time and attention to listen to an advertisement.
If the advertiser only offers 10 sats per minute in
then the advertisement is skipped by true fans. However,
if the value offered is 100 sats per minute or
more, then I hear the advertisement. But I still have the choice
to skip if I don't like the advertisement and the streaming sats
stops so the advertiser is not paying if I don't listen. So
this is talking about some cool things you can do that Sam is doing with
True Fans, not only the option for the podcaster
to pay their audience in sats if they listen to
ads, but also certain things, ways that the
podcast consumer can change how they're paying
in sats and some of the skipping and stuff that goes on. That kind of
thing, the way that I explain that is probably kind
of confusing and scratching some people's heads. The idea here that I
want to touch on and why I'm bringing this in right now is that can
also disappear, but potentially be reserved
for apps that are promoted specifically for this thing.
So imagine if, like, with this podcasting 2 point o stuff that we've got with
value and all of these other great features, you can promote those
apps. And then you could even tell your audience if you would like
to earn some satoshis listening to my podcast or if you
want the opportunity to hear my podcast ad free while you're
streaming satoshis to me or exchanging value or
whatever language that we use, streaming payments would be better,
then use this app. Use Truefans or use whatever
app because then that unlocks these new things or
that helps you to skip the ads if you are paying this amount. So
then you are incentivizing them with an experience. That
experience could be skipping ads. That experience could be
getting paid for listening to the ads if they switch
apps, but still making that technology
aspect disappear. That's what I would love
so much to see. I know that a lot of this stuff is still
technical, and it will continue to be for a little while.
Because even back in the early days of podcasts and
podcasting, it was technical. That's why it was predominantly
tech based shows and predominantly men because
techy stuff stereotypically attracts more men than it
does women. But that has changed over the years
as the need for the technology aspect has
changed. Then now it's made it more accessible for people
who don't care about the technology. That's the thing
I would love to see is that for podcasting, well, it is basically
mainstream now because the majority of the population consumes podcasts at least
on a monthly basis. To make that even higher, I think
we need to make it so simple that people don't have
to think about technology to get it. It's not like podcasts are only
for geeks. And and I think we've crossed that point years ago of that
impression of, oh, podcasts are only for geeks or even the
impression that, oh, podcasting, creating my own
podcast is only for the geeky people who know how to work the technology.
No. It's now much simpler. So now the people who
don't know about the technology, don't need to know about it, don't have the
time, don't care about it, can still create
podcasts and distribute it through the podcasting ecosystem
without the technology because the technology is
disappearing. And that's what we need to do. With all of these
innovations in Podcasting 2.0, I plead for everyone thinking
through new innovations. Focus on how it's going to help the
podcast consumer first. And keep an eye to the
future of how can we make this technology disappear.
For the podcaster, maybe it's as simple as toggle the
switch or fill in this field with something super easy.
And for the consumer, making it that easy to
toggle this, enter your credit card information, start sending money to your
favorite podcasters, whatever that is. That's my dream for the
future. To dream the impossible
dream. Yes. It's not just for old geeky guys. Now
it's for wives who wanna secretly learn how to murder their husband and get away
with it. Well, see, I wasn't going to go stereotypical. You're the one
who Well, another thing, though, that has it's it's
slowly being phased out. I know with Patreon,
if somebody wants to listen to your show
not on the Patreon app, they have to still right click on the
RSS feed and copy and paste it where things like Supercast,
you basically when it signs up, it goes, oh, hey. You're on an iPhone. Do
you wanna listen to this in Apple Podcasts or I see you have Pocket Cast
installed? It somehow has some magic voodoo going on that it
knows what apps are on your phone and says you wanna listen to this one.
You go, oh, yeah. Pocket Cast. I love that app. Click. You're done. So
that's something else that's, again, getting much easier than it used to
be. And even that can still disappear to the point where you don't even have
to present that choice. It's just, I wanna support this podcast and get
this bonus content or skip the ads or or whatever.
You do that all within the podcast app. You never leave the
podcast app. You never have to switch your feeds or anything like that.
It just works. Yep. And it's possible. It
it it really is. Well, you mentioned the one Boostagram.
Do we have any other boostograms? We had the one from Sam. We also got
one from creativity found, and we mentioned this in our last
episode, but we didn't read the message. And so to read that message,
creativity found said it came a bit late to this episode. This was about the
episode Podcasting More Than Just Podcasts. They said,
holiday listening and liked the discussion around what more
slash differently you can do with a podcast format. I have planned a step by
step course format around the future of podcasting 2.0
with explainer episodes where guests tell me what the thing
is and why it's good, then practical episodes teaching the
listener how to do the thing. Still a talk show, but we'll
use the 2.0 features to teach the 2.0 features. I
love meta stuff like this. Inspired by books I
have worked on as a text editor, and this comes from Claire
Creativity Found. Thank you so much for that boostagram, Claire.
238 sets. And that boostagram, by the way, from Sam was
204 sets. So thank you so much for those boostograms. And we
continue to receive streaming satoshis too from, like, Brian Entsminger,
Randall Black, and Johns Creek Studios, Sam, and others. So
thank you so much. And as we record this, we hope this is
temporary, but we usually look at our boostograms
through Saturn. It's saturn.fly.dev. And
right now, they're not having a good day. We got a whole lot of nothing
and spinning going on. So hopefully the guys and gals at
at Saturn are figuring out what's going on. That's always kind of
spooky when you see that. I I love their dashboard. It was very easy. That's
where we could see who our top supporters were and things like that. So, hopefully,
they've just got, I don't know, a power outage somewhere,
something super simple to fix, though. Alright, Daniel. Future
podcasting episode 50. That is gonna do it for this episode.
Thank you for letting me have a soapbox again, and remember, keep
boosting and keep podcasting.