The Rise of Independent Podcasters | Adam Curry (Creator of Podcasting)

In this episode, the creator of podcasting, Adam Curry, shares the origin story of podcasting along with his predictions for where the industry is heading in the future. Tune in to uncover what has caused podcasting to become so popular in recent years and to gain insights on what you can expect to see happen within the podcasting industry, along with predictions for what will happen to TV, radio, and other forms of media. Get ready to become part of the revolutionary rise of independent podcasters (on either side of the mic) who will change the world!

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Key Moments:

00:02:44 - The Future of Podcasting 
00:04:14 - The Origin of Podcasting: RSS and Syndication 
00:05:05 - The Evolution of RSS and Podcasting 
00:13:12 - The Unsocial Nature of Social Media 
00:14:29 - Suppression of Freedom of Speech 
00:17:04 - Protecting Freedom of Speech in Podcasting 
00:20:22 - Benefits of Decentralization in Podcasting 
00:23:52 - Violation of First Amendment Rights 


Timestamped Summary:

00:02:44 - The Future of Podcasting 
The guest introduces his new podcast, Boostogram Ball, which allows independent artists to get paid for their music used in podcasts. He highlights the significance of this development in opening up new opportunities and expanding the podcasting industry.

00:04:14 - The Origin of Podcasting: RSS and Syndication 
The guest explains that podcasting originated as a mechanism utilizing RSS feeds for distributing content. He emphasizes that podcasting is more than just audio files or a specific format, but rather a method of syndicating various types of content, similar to how radio encompasses different genres.

00:05:05 - The Evolution of RSS and Podcasting 
The guest delves into the history of RSS, highlighting its development by Dave Weiner almost a quarter century ago. He discusses

00:13:12 - The Unsocial Nature of Social Media 
Adam Curry discusses how social media has become unsocial and not beneficial for human communication, highlighting the need for freedom to effectively communicate without intervention from algorithms or other entities.

00:14:29 - Suppression of Freedom of Speech 
Adam Curry expresses concern over the suppression of freedom of speech, as algorithms and private companies control what content is seen or removed. He emphasizes the importance of going back to the simple and beautiful format of podcasting to regain freedom of expression.

00:17:04 - Protecting Freedom of Speech in Podcasting 
Adam Curry explains how the Podcast Index and its community of developers and podcasters are working to protect freedom of speech and distribution in podcasting. With features like transcripts, geolocation, and special categories, podcasting is becoming a robust and enjoyable system.

00:20:22 - Benefits of Decentralization in Podcasting 
Adam Curry discusses the advantages of decentralization in podcasting, where no central point of control exists. This allows independent voices to thrive and ensures that podcasts will not be removed or controlled by big tech companies. Freedom of speech is preserved.

00:23:52 - Violation of First Amendment Rights 
Adam Curry highlights the violation of First Amendment rights in the United States, where government agencies pressured social media companies to remove content. He explains how RSS-based distribution provides a defense against such violations and ensures freedom of expression.

MORE FROM THIS EPISODE: HTTPS://PODPROS.COM/251

Transcript

Alex Sanfilippo: 0:01

You're listening to Podcasting Made Simple. I'm your host, alex Sanfilippo. For this episode's guide and resources, please visit podprosecom. And now let's get to the episode. Adam Curry, welcome to Podcasting Made Simple. It's an honor to have you here today as our podfather himself. The co-creator of podcasting with David Weiner man, I'm actually wearing a shirt today or the sweatshirt. Wearing the shirt that says the Podfather on it. I love that man. Thank you so, so much for being here today. Oh, it's my pleasure.

Adam Curry: 0:31

By the way, my sister-in-law gave this to me for my birthday. I would never have something like this made for myself. The Podfather moniker was just bestowed upon me. It's a title I bear with honor, but I don't have my business card. But for today, I was a little late getting to your recording studio and there was so much going on and I'm like, oh man, I haven't even done my hair, I haven't shaved. Well, at least I got this to distract away from the face. So we're good to go.

Alex Sanfilippo: 1:00

It's also good to know that you didn't buy the shirt and make it yourself. Someone else did it for you. That's comforting, right? Yes, Someone who loves it. Good stuff, Adam. Just real quick here I'm gonna mention for anyone who doesn't know again Adam is the co-creator of podcasting, right? The thing that we all know and love. The current host, I think, of four shows, if I got it right. No agenda, podcasting 2.0, Curry and the Keeper Mo Fax with Adam Curry. All that can be found at currycom. That's just his RSS. Did I miss anything there? Just really brief.

Adam Curry: 1:27

You missed the new one, which is Boostagram Ball, which we may get into later. As we started value for value music, we figured out a way for independent artists to actually get paid for the music when used in podcasts and it's very exciting because that opens up a whole new category of podcasting which really wasn't available before because you couldn't just play any music on a podcast. So we can get into that later if you want. But yeah, that's only done 10 episodes so far, so it's just getting underway.

Alex Sanfilippo: 1:54

Sad that I didn't mention it, because I am on episode eight of that show and really loving some of the music on it, but I don't know why I didn't write that down. But oh well, that's five. But who's counting?

Adam Curry: 2:02

right, I need more podcasts in my life. My wife's talking about how I'm going to do one with a pastor's wife. We're going to call it two girls, one God, and you're producing. I'm like, okay, all right, I got another day left over, I'm sure.

Alex Sanfilippo: 2:15

Right, I'm sure my favorite thing that you say at the beginning of some episodes is bringing you anarchy on the airwaves. And I'm like man, anarchy is in the airwaves. Yeah, that's so good, hey. So I want to jump straight into this with you. We want to talk a little bit about the history of podcasting, where we are today and then, most importantly I'd say really, the future of where you see this thing going from your perspective. And I want to start off by mentioning something.

Alex Sanfilippo: 2:37

I heard you speak at a conference recently and gave a keynote Spark Ignite Media Conference, which was amazing. Something you said was that you woke up at 2.30 in the morning on Saturday, september 23rd, and it's what you described as God speaking to you, and you initially heard two words protect them. And I think that that's the best place for us to start today is what does that mean? And I know first we need to get into the history of why that would be something right. So before we even get into those words, we'll circle back to them. I think that they're very important, but can you tell us about the history and let's actually get into the genesis of it. So, rss itself can we just kind of go from there and don't want to spend too terribly much time on this, but I think it'd be a real shame not to hear the beginning of podcasting from the creator of it, so I'd love to go ahead and turn it over to you and let you share that with us.

Adam Curry: 3:20

So today we think of podcasting as the product. It's either an audio file that you get on an app or it's even seen now as a couple of people with headphones on sitting around a table not dissimilar if you're watching the video version of this, what we're doing here. But really podcasting was the mechanism. So where you think of radio, radio doesn't just mean talk radio, it doesn't mean music radio, it can be sermons, it can be weather reports, it can be news and so radio, we think of radio, as you know, as a transmission mechanism. But people will say, oh, you got a radio show. So podcasting was really the mechanism and it was born out of this format. Really, it's not even a protocol called RSS and it's an RSS feed which most people if you're a podcast, you've probably heard of it. It's no more than just the text file, really, which has some instructions that a computer can read easily. But it's cool because you can kind of read it yourself as a human being if you focus on it and you say, oh, okay, I kind of see what this is saying. This is an episode. This is the title of the episode. Here's information about the show itself, and the whole concept behind RSS is that you can syndicate, ie you can distribute whatever it is you have in this file far and wide, because all people have to do is just periodically read this file and if you've updated it, they'll get the most recent update, because that typically appears at the top.

Adam Curry: 4:42

This was developed almost a quarter century ago by Dave Weiner and that really came. You know the genesis from that and nothing is really new in computing technology. It all comes from somewhere. Even if you look at a podcast app, it's still basically email. You know it's like here's the people I'm receiving from, here's a lot of unread messages which are unheard podcasts. It was all kind of like email, but it was really intended for distributing text, because 25 years ago we didn't have broadband, we didn't have phones. You know any of the smartphones? It's what created blogs, web blogs, and for a while they were extremely popular, and the beauty of web blogs is that you control your RSS feed, so anyone who was reposting it or at the time we had programs like Google Reader. Many of your viewers or listeners may not remember that, but you had news readers and they're still around today. Different programs, but still the underpinnings of the internet, of the web by itself. There is a lot of RSS. You know, if you use a WordPress system, you're probably creating an RSS feed, whether you know it or not. That is often used by other systems to ingest your content, repurpose it. It really is kind of a solidified part of the internet.

Adam Curry: 5:52

And when I met Dave Weiner in 2000, so it goes back further than most people think podcasting goes I suggested well, you know, since it's kind of like email, anyway, you can subscribe to this thing and you get an update when it's available why don't you just add an attachment so we can put something on it like a PDF or, you know, or maybe an? Mp3s were just kind of starting around that time that people were popularized because of Napster and other protocols that were popping up, and he thought that was a good idea after some convincing, and he added that in. And it really, you know, we only use that ourselves between our blogs, if you will, because you had a piece of software you could subscribe to different blogs and you basically have your little inbox. People have seen versions of this, I'm sure. And Tumblr, that's basically what Tumblr was. If people remember Tumblr, that was a complete RSS-based blog and subscription system.

Adam Curry: 6:41

But then for me, the big aha moment came when I saw my first iPod in 2003,. And being a radio guy from way, I mean all my life I've been into radio, built transmitters, you know, I've been pirate radio broadcast or I've always loved doing just the magic of radio. When I saw the iPod, I went oh, that's a transistor radio. I remember this from you know, when I was seven years old. Except now it's called an iPod and people are only putting music on it. But I quickly saw thanks to God because, believe me, I'm not the technical guy, so how this got into my head is clear to me.

Adam Curry: 7:13

Now I saw that we could take these radio shows, which are no different from, you know, a five minute song or a 50 minute radio show. It's still an MP3 file. We just had to get it automatically onto the iPod to make it function kind of like a radio, and the beauty is you could take it with you. You ain't want it lugging around your laptop. Again, we didn't have smartphones or anything at the time. And there was also an added advantage of bandwidth, because back in the day if you wanted to listen to something online you clicked on the link. It could take five or 10 minutes before the file downloaded and before it finally played. So this could happen overnight and this little program just went on your computer and then when it saw a new item, a new episode or a new post, basically in this RSS feed, it would automatically say oh, here's an MP3, I'm gonna download it, I'm gonna put it onto the iPod. So that was the whole genesis of podcasting.

Adam Curry: 8:05

What's so beautiful about that is that and just like blogs, is you really control that yourself. You can host, you put this little file anywhere. If you have a Google Drive, a Dropbox, you could get a $5 a month server. I mean, there's all kinds of places to just serve a file. People have FTP servers that have a web component to it, and back then that was really quite common. Now, of course, silicon Valley saw the beauty of what was happening and they wanted to capture that and they made it so that you could create. In fact, twitter originally was a podcasting company called Odeo and they were using this RSS technology, except instead of you putting it on your own server, you put it on theirs and instead of having your own program to read these files, you did it on their system and, in fact, rss when you do it all in one bundle and you're doing it all in one place.

Adam Curry: 9:00

It was never intended for that. It actually broke Twitter a lot. We had the fail-wail, if you remember. It was like, oh, twitter's down again. Rss was really intended to be something that everybody can do on their own. You don't need anyone's permission to do it. You don't even have to pay someone. You could even set it up on a little simple server at home. There's so many different ways to do it, but people are lazy and they forget, and I was like well, you know what? I'm not too worried about it, I'll have these guys, it doesn't cost anything, it's all free. So let these Twitter guys or the Facebook guys, let them post all of my posts, and with predictable results.

Adam Curry: 9:36

They decided to bring in algorithmic decisions, so you weren't seeing the things that you subscribed to in the order that they came in. Now they start to mix and match and bring you stuff that you might not have seen before. Serendipity can be nice, but it's really to keep you engaged in their platform and to serve you ads. And then we had YouTube come along and YouTube did the unthinkable. I mean, they made it free for you to upload and host your video. I mean, that was incredibly expensive and complicated when they first came out, and I'm going to say 2008 or seven or something like that. And so, you know, they just created this whole ecosystem, which I think is really great because you can get almost anything you want on YouTube, but they control it all, and so what we saw in the past couple of years, increasingly, is well, it's all great until you say something that doesn't fit some particular narrative. You know, just think of what COVID was, doesn't matter what side of the debate you're on.

Adam Curry: 10:34

And now we see that, of course, these tools are being used against people on all sides of the equation right, left, political. You know, it doesn't matter. You just don't have that control anymore, and all we did is we gave it up. We gave that control up and we gave it up for these truly weird things which is, you know, for our egos. You know, we were given likes and we were given, you know, all kinds of statistics which make you feel good and like, oh man. And even we don't even know if likes are real. You know, I'm sure, I'm sure this real people clicking on the like button, but maybe not, maybe it's, you know, I know that if you're on Instagram and you know the app sees that you're about to leave because you're scrolling less, it'll it may hold back likes and go here's five likes stay, stay, stay, stay.

Adam Curry: 11:18

So we really have been captured. Our souls are, everything has been captured, and we're fighting against this algorithmic system when all we really want to do, I think, in general, is just to communicate something, have direct contact with people. One to many, that's what broadcasting is. You know. It's become social media which, of course, is anything but social. It's very unsocial, it's not great at all. It doesn't seem to be a good product for human beings. So back to the idea of protect them.

Adam Curry: 11:47

When you have something to communicate and you want to communicate effectively, you need some freedom and freedom. In my experience I'll be 16 next year it always requires an extra step and it's annoying because you got to do one extra thing to get to it, both on the broadcaster side and now, more increasingly, on the receiving side, and that's the situation where we're at now. But I think we are at this. I hate to use tipping point. We're probably not there yet, but people are starting to see this is not very beneficial If I just want to communicate something to people who are interested in what I have to say.

Adam Curry: 12:23

It should just be able to be. I put it out, they can see it. What they do with it, or if they decide to look at it or not, is up to them. But if some machine is determining what scene, or if it's being pushed down or eliminated or taken away, yeah, we don't have that freedom anymore, which you could say is literally suppression of freedom of speech. And you know, a private company can do what they want. But that's it. That's where we're at. It's like we need to go back to the genesis of what this beautiful, simple, simple format does and Retrain everybody on how to use it so that we can effectively communicate as humans without intervention from other entities.

Alex Sanfilippo: 13:02

Man, you said a lot of just brilliant stuff.

Adam Curry: 13:04

I know I talk a lot. May you got to cut me off if I'm rambling?

Alex Sanfilippo: 13:08

I'm not gonna cut you off, it's all gold man, I can happen. There it is, my day is complete.

Adam Curry: 13:14

Thank you everybody, I appreciate you got, a ring you got the bell.

Alex Sanfilippo: 13:17

I'm good to go, I can leave. Now I want to talk, go into algorithms a little bit more, because algorithms obviously I mean that the way that we know algorithms they weren't a thing when podcasting first came out, but that really is like algorithms, feeds, those things are driving like Everything these days and you actually I've heard you define algorithms and I think that that would be very beneficial for podcast guests and hosts to hear and Really, how that, in many ways, is the enemy of what we're facing these days.

Adam Curry: 13:42

So these algorithms are very, very powerful and they're mainly intended to keep you engaged wherever you are, to Surprise you, to give you a dopamine hit. Oh, there's something that that I really wanted to see. They try to learn about you and Ultimately meant to sell you advertising. Because that is the whole reason for algorithms in the first place is to keep people engaged, to find out what they want. And, you know, to solve that problem for advertisers, which has been the promise for for decades, is we'll give people the right ad at the right time, right when they want it.

Adam Curry: 14:13

Well, of course, one of those three in the equation never is completely on on point. The beautiful thing is today we talk about algorithms, we call them algos, and in some of the research I was doing, I've looked up the word algos, al gos, which is actually a Greek word. Literally, the definition of algos in Greek is pain and suffering, and it fits so well because this is the enemy. The enemy is in the algorithms, it's just. It's the friend of the companies that deploy them, but it's the enemy of human interaction. You're being controlled, literally being controlled in what you see, and they're so good they can even start pushing you toward what action you're going to take? Am I gonna repost this? Am I? Am I going to like this? Am I gonna be? You know, I'm gonna see so many of these. I'm gonna be compelled to answer this or provide a comment.

Alex Sanfilippo: 14:58

So it's, it's very it's evil if, to me, it's the personification of evil for sake of time, I want to move into more of the future of podcasting. Now this takes us back to those original words I shared protect them and we kind of shared just to kind of the history of it and then we got into kind of like where it's at currently and in many ways it's protecting freedom of speech, right, like what we have today. Is us really fighting for that and going against the exclusives or only uploading to this spot even though they promise everything? Right, the idea is keeping it built on RSS and I know that that's like really the foundation of protecting podcasting in general. But where do you see Podcasting going in the future? I really want to kind of get your insights as to what you've seen. I know you've done a lot of work in this space. I mean, you were like front lines on this, which is funny. You built podcasting. People didn't maybe know who you were for a while, and now you're back at the very front line again.

Adam Curry: 15:45

So I'd love to hear what you think we're heading so we set up the database called podcast index, podcast index org. And not only did the software developers show up, but I mean hosting companies as podcasters. There's a huge surge of people going like, oh, we've been waiting to, we want all these extra features to be in here, because Apple would never do anything. We want to have chapters and transcripts and geolocation and special categories for people a guess, or they host, and like 25, 26 different features and whoa, okay. So all of a sudden we had a community, which was great, and this community was literally supporting the index. So we have a podcast that goes with it, called podcasting 2.0. And we do it every Friday. It's like we know. We call it the board meeting, we talk about what everyone's doing, we talk about the development and sometimes it's socio philosophical, sometimes it's very technical. We have these developers on all the time, but not just developers, also podcasters hosting company owners, just to keep this open nature of the system building. And I think we effectively saved, you know, the free speech aspect and the freedom of distribution aspect of podcasting as we now have, it's like it's like some, it's like almost 70 apps and services that are using the index, people who are migrating away. We have over a million episodes with transcripts, just as one, just to show you one aspect of how well that's working. And it only really works if, of course, if everybody starts to use it. But even beyond that, you know, you can say to your own audience like hey, I got some cool new features that are in here, but it's not gonna work on Apple's app or on Spotify. Here's, you know, podcastappscom. Here's a whole bunch of other apps you can try. Some of them have been around for 10 years and have upgraded into what we're doing. Some of them are brand new and the advantage is, no matter what Google or Apple or Spotify or you know name one, you know, tune in.

Adam Curry: 17:40

Whatever they do, if they remove that podcast, it's not gonna go away from your podcast app and there's super benefits to add to this. We have a system called PodPing, which is a global decentralized notification system. So, unlike so, when I publish no Agenda, within 90 seconds, people who use apps from podcastappscom boop. It's there. They get an alert, it's in, it's ready to go. It can take an hour before it's. On Apple, it can take even longer before. Well, I don't even publish a Spotify because, you know, for reasons mentioned previously.

Adam Curry: 18:14

So there's all these benefits, all these things that we've solved, all the things that were annoying. And, as I said, you know, this group is so beautiful and open that, op3.dev, you know, people are tagging their files with a tracker and so there you can actually see what the performance is of your podcast. Everyone can see it, you know. So we might even one day see some community benefit from that. But it has become what it's gone back to, what podcasting was before 2000,. I'd say nine, that before, you know, the social networks came in and it was still growing. But now we have all these great tools, we have so much to work with and it's really becoming a very robust, very effective, very enjoyable system and the community is much tighter than it was with the development community.

Alex Sanfilippo: 19:04

I want to mention here, like what you're really the foundation you're building for the future of podcasting is decentralization. It's protecting real, independent voices and anytime I record anything or I'm talking anywhere, I always people are like why do you believe in podcasting so much? I'm like it's because, as independent voices, this is in many ways our final stance or defense against other things, and people more and more are turning to podcast. I think because they notice like okay, I feel like I'm being sold something, no matter where I get my information. I feel like I'm being sold. But podcasting really is raw. It's just real information as a guest or a host and that's what I love about it, I guess, and come on and not be like am I allowed to say this? No, most hosts like go ahead anything, go ahead and share it, right. Like we're ready and some shows go deeper than others.

Adam Curry: 19:46

If you see what's coming out. There's all these academic studies and think tanks and they're all. They're doing huge research and podcasting is a problem because people can say whatever they want. There's no moderation. You know, this is not. This is a bad idea, this is. You know, we can't really have this. These are, these are university professors doing studies on this stuff, I mean, and it's published all the time in big publications about how podcasting is a problem. Well, that's because they have control of everything, everything except podcasting or any RSS based distribution. So that kind of tells you something there's no way, there's no, there's no central point, there's no backdoors.

Adam Curry: 20:28

We all saw the Twitter files like yeah, of this and it's not discussed, but there's, you know, the violation of the First Amendment which has gone to the Supreme Court from the Fifth Circuit. What the Biden administration or the Trump administration to the White House in general, the FBI, the CDC, the Department of Homeland Security, department of Human Health and Services, we're all threatening these companies to take content down because, quote, you're killing people. We have ways to, you know, we have ways to get at you, social media company. So what are you going to do if you have, if you only have section 230 to defend you and they. You know they had to comply, but this was a gross, gross violation of our First Amendment rights here in the United States and it'll probably be six, seven years before that finally comes out and there's a real ruling from the Supreme Court.

Adam Curry: 21:16

But it is horrendous what they did and if you search deep enough you can. You can see the documents because of course no one's going to report on it except podcasters. So it really is. It's proven to be the RSS based distribution works because, even though you may not host it yourself at your home, there's thousands of hosting companies ranging from maybe 5000 feeds to 500,000 feeds in all. You know all varying degrees of price points, including some free, up to certain certain amounts of usage. So that is by nature a distributed system.

Alex Sanfilippo: 21:55

That's, that's a little taste into no agenda for everybody. In case you're wondering, go look at the show. No agenda.

Adam Curry: 21:59

You like the surface.

Alex Sanfilippo: 22:01

Oh yeah, really, if you like that at all, go check out. No agenda, adam, I thank you so much for the time and this has been absolutely a blast. Before I let you go, I just have to hear Do you have any final thoughts for podcast guests and host? Just some encouragement to leave us with today.

Adam Curry: 22:12

Well for guests, but sometimes the guest is a host, right. So, as we were talking about earlier, the idea that you really talking about each other, even if you're a guest. If you're a guest on a show, talk about some other podcast you listen to. This is the best thing we can do for our community, and when I say community it's not like you know. The community is just people who are using RSS and who who understand that this is the way forward. Some of that will be built into the 2.0 apps and protocols that that we're developing right now.

Adam Curry: 22:43

But dive into RSS. Look at a little bit of the history. If you feel like it, understand where your podcast is hosted. Don't worry if you don't understand it or if you maybe don't even have an RSS feed. I'm sure that the Pod Pros have many resources that can help you find out more about that. But take the time for true freedom. Again, it always requires that extra step, but once you're there, you will never go back and you will probably never be kicked to the side. It's the pure protection that you deserve to give yourself.