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After a streaming service hit him with bargain-basement ad breaks every eight to ten minutes, Dave chose to buy the season instead. He sees anti-advertising as a social movement, like people quitting smoking or cutting back on alcohol, with no single ground zero. He predicts people will just turn off the content.
You can't find like the organic ground zero of these things. It's just a movement. And I don't think the tolerance for advertising is going to stay. I think, I think they're going to, people will just turn off the content.
Word and Excel are fine as web apps because they were native first; people accept them as the web version of a real thing. Dave says a web-only app with no native counterpart struggles because it's just not there.
the thing that makes them also be okay as web apps is the fact that they were native to begin with. It's because they have a native counterpart.
Whenever snow threatens Alabama, the TikTok and Twitter weather crowd goes nuts chasing clicks. Meanwhile meteorologist James Spann calmly walks through the real models and what isn't known. Dave says that's why everybody trusts him, and it shows the power of a trusted radio-style voice carried into digital.
he's become this trusted voice here in Alabama. I mean, everybody listens to this guy and nobody pays attention to any of the TikTok weather nonsense.
Local newspapers died before anyone understood what was happening. Radio, if it's dying at all, is in a glacial decline we can watch and adapt to. Dave urges podcast tech and podcasters to study what radio got right: it and broadcast TV may be the last industries not fully captured by Silicon Valley.
But the radio thing has not, people say radio is dying. But if that's true, then it's been this sort of slow, like, very glacial decline for many, many years. And so we've got all this, like we can watch it happening and like adjust to what is happening.
Dave says the radio concept of tuning in requires platforms to make choices: host and emphasize particular shows because they create the experience you want your customers to have, even if other content is available too.
We're going to choose to, we may have other stuff, but we're going to emphasize these because they are like, they create the experience we want our customers to have.
Say radio or television and people picture something distinct. Say podcasting and it's a fog of content you have to go search out. 'Wherever you get your podcasts' is powerful because it means decentralized, but it also means podcasting isn't one particular thing the way radio is. Dave says if everything is on demand, it all blurs together.
When you say podcasting, you don't, it just seems sort of like a fog of all this content that you have to go search out somewhere.
MotorTrend's streaming service went from $4.99 to $9.99, gutted its shows and added ads. Dave says that if it had never told him a price and just asked him to give what he wanted each month, he would have paid $15–20.
If they had never told me the price and said, give me what you want, just like as a monthly subscription, I would have given them, I don't know, 15, 20 bucks
If you start charging for things and hosting pieces in other places, those pieces have to stay online. Dave says a host that's down half the time doesn't work, so decentralizing isn't just complicated; it demands real commitment.
So decentralizing is a, it's not only complicated, but it also requires you to be like legit and committed.
Unlike television, audio has listeners assigning meaning as it happens. Dave says the boardroom and the hosts are all participating in the show together, even though the listeners aren't talking, and a video podcast wouldn't have the same dynamic.
assigning meaning as in real time. We are participating in the process.
Television makes you a kind of alpha-wave zombie: you experience images and sounds, then afterward tell yourself a story about what you saw. That's why people say 'I need a minute to process this.' Dave says storytelling is how we infuse meaning into a thing so we can understand it.
I have to think about what I saw and tell myself a story about that thing. That's how we understand things. And the storytelling is the infusion of meaning into a thing so that we can understand what that thing is.
Drawing on Iain McGilchrist, Dave says making meaning is the core of being human. We give everything meaning, we can't help it, and as far as we know we're the only things in the universe that do.
he makes the point that we humans are meaning makers. We, we are the only things in the universe that do that. We give, we, we give everything meaning, we can't stop it.
Modern app developers are used to REST/HTTP calls. WebSockets are still sockets, which means race conditions, mutexes and semaphores across an unmanaged open connection. Dave says that's why a protocol like Nostr is a hard sell: not a matter of intelligence, but most mobile developers won't put in the time.
There's a lot that happens when you have a, what is essentially an unmanaged open connection between two endpoints, that you are pushing and pulling packets back and forth.
During his break Dave noticed how many shows run on a schedule even when there isn't much to talk about. Interview shows especially end up with uninteresting guests and topics because an episode is due, and listeners burn out and start skipping. Shows built around news are more resilient.
A lot of times these guests are just not interesting. The topic's not interesting, but it's like, hey, it's a it's a Tuesday. So we got to release a show.
Whenever a company says 'let's get our version of this,' it never works. Dave says you pull talent out of the milieu where they thrive, like taking Stephen A. Smith out of a sports framing that let him venture into politics and making him purely political, and it fails immediately.
Like you've taken Stephen A. Smith out of ESPN, out of predominantly a sports mindset where he can sort of safely venture off into political commentary, but using sports as this launchpad. And now you take you take him out of there and you stick him purely in a political realm. Yeah, it fails immediately.
The hard part is getting radio stations to understand that their transition to digital really is a transition to podcasting. Dave says that with the Podcasting 2.0 live item tag, podcasting is radio for all intents and purposes, or can be.
that's been part of the difficult thing to get just radio stations to understand is the, the transition to digital is really a transition to podcasting.
Building an HTML/JavaScript audio-video player that gets pasted into other people's websites is one of the hardest UI jobs there is. Dave says you're in a constant battle against every leaky piece of the host's CSS, and a couple of times his team had to re-engineer the player's whole style system within 48 hours. The open web's wild west is why people dislike web UI.
you have to guardrail against every leaky piece of CSS in every, like it's, it's a constant, um, it's a constant battle to keep that website's styles and, and defaults from coming through to your, to your section of the page that you've, that you're essentially living on rented land
Every Godcaster player rollout to a new customer is a learning experience. Dave says putting software you built in someone else's hands shows you how much you don't know, because they ask questions you never thought of, especially about the interface.
I learned, you never realize how much you don't know until you put software that you built in someone else's hands and watch what they do with
If a podcast still has 12 listeners after five years, you don't have to stop; you may be doing it because you enjoy it. Dave says it does mean the content probably won't interest many people, so if your goal is making a living, something needs to change.
If you've had a podcast for five years and you still only have 12 listeners, it doesn't mean that you need to stop because you may enjoy, you may be doing it just because you enjoy it. But it does mean that it's probably not content that a lot of people are ever going to be interested in.
A following doesn't guarantee success. Marco has a cult following, but Dave says people haven't kept using Overcast for 10 years just because Marco is Marco. An app is content too, and it has to keep earning its audience.
And you don't, you don't get an automatic gimme. I don't think that's true.
Dave has listened to No Agenda twice a week for about 15 years. If it went behind a Rumble paywall, he'd sign up tomorrow even though he's never looked at Rumble. Platforms matter far less than people think; everyone assumed Google would eat RSS, and it got bored and gave up.
And the people follow the content. You, you know, you've made this point many times. People follow content. They don't necessarily, they don't follow, um, platforms
Dave respects how willing Podcasting 2.0 app developers are to play ball with each other. No app survives alone; they aren't independent silos. When podroll and publisher feeds flow across platforms, it's a united front showing RSS podcasting can be decentralized and still have a sort of global algorithm at its core.
this is another thing we have to understand about, about podcasting is that we are all in this together from an app standpoint.
Dave says the Podcasting 2.0 community has lasted much longer than most because people focus on getting stuff done and share one goal: making the podcast app experience better.
I think this community has lived, has lived much longer than most do. And, uh, that's, yeah, that's just a testament to, I think the, the focus is people just, they're just focused on, on just getting stuff done.
Debating a payment-spec shortcut, Dave says compromising now just hamstrings everyone, and two years from now you'll have to go through the whole process again for the next payment model. Better to do it right the first time.
Yeah, I mean, you know, because it's like, okay, now we've hamstrung ourself and two years from now, we're going to have to go through this whole thing again for this new payment model.
Not in the audio. The closing 'do it right the first time' is a lone Dave cue after an Unknown cue, so it's paraphrased in the summary rather than quoted.
On moving Podcasting 2.0 payments off Keysend, Dave argues this is the perfect time to rip the band-aid. The apps that would be hit hardest financially (Fountain, True Fans, Alby) also control their own infrastructure, so they're the most equipped to adapt. It's the right moment for uncomfortable, messy change that leaves everyone better off.
people who are in a position to be the affected the most financially by a bandaid, a bandaid rip are the people who also happen to be the most equipped to handle these changes.
Dave says the real test of Podcasting 2.0 has always been standalone apps with no cloud backend, like Castamatic and AntennaPod. If they can implement a feature, it has succeeded. If it doesn't work in that scenario, the feature may still be valuable, but he'll never feel comfortable with where it landed.
To me, the real test of podcasting 2 .0 in all of its detail has always been, and always will be Castamatic because Castamatic is a serverless standalone app.
Moving off a single wallet provider will make payments messier, and Dave admits it. But he says messiness is an advantage when it comes to open source.
It's going to be messier for sure. For sure. It's going to be messier. Um, but messy is, is kind of, uh, an advantage when it comes to open source.
Podcasting 2.0 doesn't create products; it writes specs and protocols. (Dave doesn't even like calling them 'standards.') If something it writes ends up dependent on the good graces of a single company, person or entity, that isn't sustainable long term, which is what happened with Alby on the listener side.
We write specs, we write protocols, we write the things that publish the things that help people do the things we, we value, uh, features and, and new functionality.
Summing up the Godcaster idea: yourself, your friend group, your church or your neighborhood can each become a radio station just by adding shows to a lineup.
Um, yourself, your, your, your, your sort of group that you hang out with your church, your neighborhood, like you can turn anything into a radio station by just adding, you know, adding these shows to your lineup and, and,
Everyone says podcasting played a big role in the 2024 election. Dave says that isn't enough: you have to explain why it played a big role, even if the explanation takes a while.
We I think everybody says, you know, yeah, podcasting played a big role in this election. But you have to say, why did it play a big role? You can't just say that it did.
On Rogan's conversations with guests across the spectrum: you hear points of commonality and disagreement, and Dave says that gives the listener mental space to decide for themselves, unlike media that tells you what to think.
It's a, it's, it's fantastic. You can, you feel like you have space, mental space to make up your own mind about what you think.
If you don't trust where information comes from, you never get as far as asking whether it's true. Dave says trust takes years to build and minutes to lose, and that's why people are leaving mass media for podcasts: you may disagree with a host, but you feel you can judge whether they're honest, and that gives you the framework to evaluate what they say.
But like truth, truth always exists. Truth always exists downstream from trust. If you don't trust where the information is coming from, you're never even going to get to the point of thinking about whether it's true
Legacy media packages up a message and sends it to the audience, telling them what to think. Dave says it isn't a dialogue, so you'll never understand why people behave as they do, voting or anything else. Podcasting is different: you're giving your opinion, not passing messages, which is how politicians and car salesmen talk.
it's messaging. It's not, um, so they, they sort of package up a message and then send it to the audience. It's not a dialogue.
Discussing On the Media's post-election episode, Dave says he'd have far more respect for the hosts if they just said 'here's our opinion, here's where we stand.' Knowing someone's position gives listeners a mental framework for what they're hearing, which builds trust.
If, if broken Micah would come out and just say, here's, here's our opinion. Here's where we stand that I would have so much more respect for them. And I would trust them more
Not in the audio. 'broken Micah' is the transcript's rendering of 'Brooke and Micah' (On the Media hosts Brooke Gladstone and Micah Loewinger); the full names come from general knowledge.
The problem isn't that people can't hear you; they just don't believe you. Dave pushes back on the idea that banning all the 'wrong thinkers' will let people hear you more clearly and make better decisions. That's not how it works.
if we just ban all these wrong thinkers, then people will hear them more clearly and make better decisions. But that's not the way this works.
A 30-minute, non-produced Zoom chat from On the Media taught Dave more about its hosts than the hundreds of episodes he'd heard. It may be his favorite episode they've ever done.
And I will have to say I learned more about Brooke and Micah in this 30 minute zoom chat. Then I, then I have all the hundreds of episodes that I've listened to them.
Debating whether new metadata (like the follow tag) belongs in the RSS feed or an external JSON file, Dave notes that a separate file saves bandwidth at first. Once people realize the data is there and start downloading it, the savings largely disappear. He also points out that hosts hold the 'feed bloat' rule inconsistently, e.g. adding Podlove chapters inline once Spotify supported them.
if you leave it in a separate file, you are going to save bandwidth, yeah. But over time, as people start realizing this data is there and start downloading it, then stuff will happen with it. You're just not gonna say. I don't think you're gonna see much savings.
Don't treat boost TLV metadata (sender name, app, message) as verified. Like an email From address, anyone can put anything in it, and nothing confirms it.
you can always fake a TLV record. There's no, there's no confirmation to that. Did it say that you can fake all? I mean, you can fake the TLVs. It's like, it's like an email. You can, like, you can put anything in the from address.
Leo Laporte once asked who uses podcast directories anymore. The answer turns out to be everybody: apps rely on directories, so a brand-new feed that isn't in Apple's or Spotify's catalog effectively doesn't exist in those apps.
It is if you aren't in the directories, you just don't exist, right?
V4V is an ideology about being supported by listeners, but it's also a practical defense: you can't sell digital content through apps without giving Apple 30%, and you can't do it at all through an open, non-proprietary RSS feed.
it's an ideology about the way that you know. Get supported by your by your listeners, but it's also the way podcasting works, because of self defense from these dominant platforms. You you can't sell content, digital content through through apps. That's right with without giving Apple 30% of of the of the the the revenue,
Because gatekeepers like Apple and Spotify can come between podcaster and listener, the Index makes its database downloadable weekly and ingests feeds instantly. The goal is decentralization with zero barriers: if a feed is out there, the Index finds it and lists it without anyone signing anything, and you can ask to be removed. To Dave, that's what a directory is.
the idea is, you want it to everything to be decentralized. You want there to be zero barriers to being found, zero, you know, because it's like, if you if a, if an RSS feed is, excuse me, if a podcast feed is out, is out there, and it wants to be in the index, it's, boom, done.