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When another network ran an experiment that sidestepped Podcasting 2.0 conventions, Dave wanted everyone to calm down rather than fight or boycott. We can work around other people's choices with code and bridge their content back into the broader ecosystem.
we'll work around, we'll work around other people's proclivities of what they want to do and will bring that content out of their stuff back into back into the broader thing that we're participating in or that we believe in.
Not in the audio. A related turn at 01:14:39 says 'I know we can fix it with code', and at 01:21:33 he says 'don't boycott people'. Jupiter Broadcasting is named as the network from context.
Ad-supported podcasters' real customer is the advertiser, which is why advertisers are called buyers. Decide whom you serve first.
ad supported podcasters have a customer. And that customer is the advertiser. That's right. That's who they sell to. That's why advertisers are called buyers.
Dave points to The Atlantic's turnaround. It went from being a slave to CPMs and Google search to a mindset that its work is valuable and worth paying for, and it became profitable again. He sees the same lesson for podcasters.
then and then and then being a slave to the CPM and to Google to Google's ad search for me, basically, from that to a different mindset of we think that our stuff is
Not in the audio. Based on a Wall Street Journal article about The Atlantic, as Dave describes it. The quote ends mid-sentence ('our stuff is'); Adam completes it with 'valuable'.
Human financial behavior is the same whether content is ad-supported, subscription or value-for-value. A person who won't pay you would never have listened behind a paywall either, so extra free listeners aren't lost customers. The content is already made. Advertising just puts a layer of fog over that, like paying a doctor through an insurer.
a person who's not going to pay you anything, is just never going to listen to your show period. Like you don't get anything from extra from that you're not, you're not creating a customer where there was not one before, you've already produced the content.
Dave's apologetics ministry offered its events for free and hoped for donations, but everyone was too nervous to ask from the pulpit, so nobody gave and the costs came out of their own pockets. As soon as they got the nerve to ask, people started giving. The same applies to value-for-value podcasting.
All of us were too scared, or too nervous to ask from the pulpit or wherever we were for a donation. And then And guess what? Nobody, nobody ever gave us any money. Yes, it all came out of our own pocket. It's amazing. As soon as we got some balls, and started asking that they people people started giving,
Spam feeds keep changing shape (Korean spam, Vietnamese gambling, escorts, movie streaming), all built on free-trial backlink schemes. Dave says the best defense is to document each abuse pattern once it's identified so all hosting companies can filter at once, but not publicly, where spammers would learn to evade it.
once a pattern is identified of abuse, is to document that pattern somewhere. So that all the hosting companies can see it and they can all take action at once right and put in a filter
Not in the audio. The 'not public' caveat comes from a separate turn at 01:17:57 ('if it's public, it's more likely to... see it and know how to evade it').
Developers who were against ActivityPub became believers after actually writing ActivityPub software. It takes doing it to see it isn't as intimidating as it looks from the outside. ActivityPub has an image problem with developers.
I think it just takes it takes doing it. It takes writing some software, some activity pub based software first to see that it's really not as intimidating and bad as is, as it appears on the outside
Dave cites Steve Jobs's famous line from Apple's 1997 Microsoft deal: Apple had to get rid of the idea that for it to win, Microsoft had to lose. He uses it to push back on zero-sum antitrust narratives.
that's the famous quote, where jobs that we have to get rid of this idea that in order for us to win, Microsoft has to lose.
Despite calling generative AI soulless and often wrong, Dave grants that for mundane tasks it makes things easier and gives you a starting point to work from, and those are good things.
it just makes things makes things easier. It makes me you know, it gives you a starting point. Yeah. Yeah. To go with and so that's good. Those are all good things.
Dave has learned a lot about Gen Z habits from a 25-year-old who works for him, for example that many of them use subtitles.
this young guy that works for me, I think he's 25. And I've learned so much from this guy, like about Gen Z, in in their behaviors about things. One thing I've one thing I've learned is it's tons of Gen Z. Uses subtitles.
Microsoft didn't take the internet or Linux seriously, and within ten years it was fighting for its life. Now most of its Azure cloud revenue comes from Linux. Things the incumbents laugh at can end up defining the market.
take it seriously. No, they did not. And within 10 years, they were fighting for their life. And they thought they also thought Linux was a joke. Now, most of their Azure cloud revenue comes from Linux,
The biggest organizations are the ones that shoot themselves in the foot. Groups in government are no smarter than groups in companies.
companies are just groups of people. governments are just groups of people. Oftentimes they're the same people. In government people groups aren't any smarter than company people groups.
Big companies chase whatever's hot, like Clubhouse-style audio rooms for about six months, and they're now doing the same with large language models. The bigger the company, the worse the effect.
Yeah, companies are dumb. That's the other part of this you know companies are dumb they chase things remember? Remember clubhouse
Talking about Apple, the EU's DMA and monopoly, Dave argues that the history of monopoly and antitrust law is mostly short-sighted. Markets and competition (and Bitcoin-style alternatives) tend to change things faster than regulators predict, starting with the Standard Oil breakup.
of monopoly law, and antitrust is a history of short sightedness. And you can just see it the the whole history of antitrust is littered with it
For a business, regulation is just another competitive pressure. A large company's biggest competition is itself.
So government is just another competitor. In a sense, the biggest the biggest competition large companies have is themselves. Their internal problems are their biggest issues
If you've never written an RSS aggregator-based app, it seems simple, but it isn't. It's no surprise developers hit a point where they have to rethink their architecture.
if you've never written an RSS based, you know, aggregators based app there is, it seems so simple, but it's not.
Dave worries that some young IT people are lost without Google because they have no basic troubleshooting skills. For an IT person, Google should be the fallback once nothing you're doing makes sense and it might be a bug others have hit.
they have no basic troubleshooting skills. And you know, like Google, Google is, for an for an IT person. Google is a fallback, where you're like, Okay, look, none of the things I'm doing makes any sense. This must be a bug.
Physical mail takes 35 seconds to triage, while email made messaging so cheap it's worse. When technology promises to make life easier or more efficient, be wary.
So when technology comes up with these great things that are going to make your life quote easy or better or more efficient, be very scared.
As LLM aggregators start rewording and republishing creators' content for nothing in return, Dave points out the dirty secret: none of these models can be trained without content, and that content comes from creators.
that's the dirty secret of all of this is that it none of these LLM is get trained without content. And where does the content come from?
In spec work, it's better for people to get really annoyed, gripe at each other, figure it out and move forward than to avoid conflict and stall.
it's better to have people get super pissed off. Yeah. And then gripe at each other and figure it out, and then figure it out, figure it out. Yeah, figure it out and move forward.
Agreeing with Castopod's Benjamin: open source projects aren't bad at developing things, but they're not good at selling them. That's true of most open source.
We're we're not bad at developing things. But we're not good at selling things. Yep, pretty much that pretty much no, that that's most open source
About consultants claiming all creators should follow a Spotify-style formula: did anybody stop to ask whether listeners are willing to take part? If everyone did it, the formula would break down.
Anybody stopped to ask the listeners what? Like if they're willing to participate in this formula? Because I'm not sure that it's as easy as all that. Because if we all did that, this formula breaks down
When a person hears 'a podcast item with an HLS alternate enclosure', they picture what it means. A language model only knows the text it has seen and the order of the words, which is why it hallucinates attributes that sound right.
you immediately see a thing in your head, because you know what those words mean? This thing only knows the language models only know, the text that it seen before and the arrangement of in the order of the words
With Patreon and similar models you have to tell your audience the option exists, or they won't know. Podcasting 2.0 apps automatically show a boost button whenever a podcast is value-enabled, so discovery of support is built in.
tell your audience that is there. Because they need because otherwise they would not know. But the podcasting 2.0 apps surface the boost button on the page where the when it sees an ad a podcast that is value enabled.
Value for value and Podcasting 2.0 aren't just a free version of the same old thing. They're genuinely new, and you have to give them the philosophical respect of being new instead of judging them by old models.
And it's not just a day a free version of the same old thing it really is completely new. Yeah. And you have to think you have to give it the sort of like the sort of philosophical respect of being a new thing.
Podcasting is like the open web: no central authority can force a feature. All that matters is what the apps are willing to implement, so you have to get your head around that and win the apps over.
This is the thing you got to get your head around in podcasting, podcasting is a different animal. Podcasting is like the open web. What all that matters is what the apps are willing to do.
Dave objects to people trashing podcast apps. Throughout podcasting's history, app developers have always gotten the short end of the stick and been treated poorly, even though everything depends on them.
when you start shitting on apps, like that's, that's what things that's where we've always been within podcasting. App developers always get the short end of the stick, and they always get treated, they get treated poorly,
Engage with repos and messages on your own schedule. If you see something a month late, nobody died, and people learn your communication cadence.
Notification fatigue will kill you. Yeah. It will literally stress you out. If somebody posts something on a repository and it takes you like a month before you even see it. Guess what? As far as what it is, it's fine. Nobody died.
Dave says he never feels burned out because he adopted an 'it's fine' mindset, like the comic dog with coffee in the burning room.
I never feel burned out. And I think part of the reason is because I've learned to adapt to basically like an it's, it's just it's fine mentality. It's fine, it's fine.
Running an open source project is mostly about managing relationships, not technology. Dave borrows Charlotte Mason's line that education is the science of relationships.
managing an open source project is primarily not about the the technology, tap it, it's about relationships. It's about managing relationships.
Dave opposes letting creators dictate app splits or behaviour in value-for-value. The listener decides how much to send, the creator decides how it's allocated, and the app stays a neutral layer in between rather than being pushed around by creators.
the apps act as a sort of unbiased layer in the transactions. So you have the the listener who decides how much value they're going to send. And then you have the Creator who decides how much value they decide how that gets allocated
Joe Rogan's Spotify renewal went from $200M exclusive to a reported $250M non-exclusive. To Dave, that shows a show is worth more when it's available everywhere over open RSS than when it's locked to one platform.
The new one is 250 million plus non exclusivity. Right. That tells me a lot, right? Yeah, yes. Yeah. He's worth more as a non exclusive than he is as an exclusive.
Dave judges whether a big podcast deal is justified by whether people in his own sphere know the show. If it comes up casually in conversation with friends, it's big enough to justify the money.
if you can just casually be talking in a group with with friends. And this somebody mentions a particular show. That means it's big enough to be justifying the money that people share on the show.
On reusing the iTunes category tag for new mediums: if you don't fully understand how a tag is used in the wild, you can't start doing Wild West stuff with it, because you don't know what will break.
if, if we don't fully understand this tag and how it's being used, well, then you can't just go in and start doing Wild West stuff with it.
Chrome is around 85% of the web without shipping as any OS default. People will try new things, so recommending better apps isn't too hard to explain.
It's like 85% of the entire internet is Google Chrome, as Google Chrome is not delivered by default on any operating system. Somebody has learned somewhere that they're supposed to go download an app.
A headline number like GDP growth doesn't help the guy who got laid off. Likewise, industry-wide podcast stats are irrelevant to most podcasters when one giant show can be a big slice of all downloads.
your two and a half percent GDP did not, you know, doesn't help the guy who lost his gig. Who got laid off? Yeah, it's irrelevant. It's an irrelevant number, the stat those kinds of stats don't mean anything.
When Apple Podcasts finally adopted the podcast:transcript tag, Dave opened the show by reading Luke 11:5-8, the parable of the friend at midnight who gets bread not out of friendship but because of shameless persistence. Years of knocking eventually worked.
If you keep knocking long enough. He will get up and give you whatever you need because of your shameless persistence.