Sir Gene Speaks

0038 Sir Gene Speaks Special - Interview David Norman

April 25, 2021 Gene Naftulyev Season 1 Episode 38
Sir Gene Speaks
0038 Sir Gene Speaks Special - Interview David Norman
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Gene:

we've got David Norman with us right now. David is the creator of hyper catcher. And before we get into hyper catcher and what all it does, David, I want to find out a little bit more about your background and what led you down this path. To create hyper catcher. And also what led you to make it more podcasting? 2.0 compatible.

David:

Hey, Sergeant. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I appreciate you having me on so I could talk a little bit more about this. Let's see. I've been a podcast listener for a long time now. I think I really started out with the Joe Rogan experience podcast and just got really into that during college. And I was a user of the overcast podcast app for a while as well. And I just noticed, as always using it, there's a few times when, things would come up during the podcast, when Joe would say something like, Hey Jamie, could you bring that up? And I just kinda. I kept thinking about the fact that I wasn't able to see those things that they were talking about. And so that's been a problem with podcasting. That's been in the back of my mind for a long time, obviously that can be solved by video. And you can just watch along to a lot of these podcasts are in video form. But I started thinking around the fact that, sometimes, maybe video, isn't the best thing. What if I actually want to go look at that, that YouTube video myself, that they're watching or listened to that song, get some sort of direct link to

Gene:

Or the document they're looking at.

David:

The document. Exactly. And and that sort of case, video isn't as good as actually having some sort of link directly. To it. And so that, that's where I, when I started thinking about hyper catcher and developing hyper catcher as a podcast app, I was, I've been a podcast or a, an app developer for, since leaving college. So eight, nine years now. And just been playing around with a bunch of different ideas and things. They're all, all in the app store and littering the app store with my dad old projects. But yeah, this one kind of caught on and I'd been developing it for about seven or eight months. Before I started hearing Adam talking about, this new podcast project that he was going to start working on soon. And that got me really excited and hearing him talk about it on knowledge into a couple of times. And I started reaching out there and used, I was, one of the people to adopt the podcast index early on and start using it for hyper catcher, just because it was such a great solution to another problem I was having around just, getting podcasts to display to users. And then, as I learned more about the project, I realized that there was a way to maybe integrate some of the things that I've been thinking about with links. And we ended up integrating this chapter's feature with podcasting 2.0. And I think by far it's one of the best implementations I've seen of chapters and without, the podcasting 2.0 adoption and kind of. Really helping to flesh out the protocol and how it works. Yeah. Hyper catcher would not be nearly as good today. So

Gene:

So chapters I've noticed in your app on like most apps. You're actually pre-loading the links or you're loading the links when somebody swipes to that link automatically rather than just waiting until, or unless somebody clicks on the link.

David:

Yeah. So that's because I wanted to, have it be just a snappy, interactive experience. So when you, yeah. When you, when a podcast is talking about something, you can, if they're talking about a website or a video, it's kinda, you can just pull out your phone and it's right there in front of you. Rather than needing to take an extra step to jump through. I thought that was an important part of the experience to have and something that I was hoping to do early on.

Gene:

so that was your thought right off the get-go before even the podcasting index 2.0 stuff.

David:

Yeah. So there's a few apps there. So podcasts chapters is something that's existed for a while and different forms. And so actually one of the earliest uses something that really made the two ideas snapped together in my head was seeing Ben Thompson Stratec Curry podcast and how he would, when he was talking about something, he would change the kind of album artwork In the pod in the podcast. And you could see that happen in overcast where overcast would up, would read the podcast chapters and then update the album artwork based on the podcast chapter. Yeah. And so there's some issues there that worked fine for hyper catcher. But one thing that I noticed was that it was really. Hard to get podcasters to do it to actually, because it was actually embedded in the MP3 file. And so that meant that the podcast, or before they publish the podcast would have to actually go in, edit the MP3 file, add in, whether they want to add links or images or chapter titles, and then publish that And so in talking with the podcasting 2.0 community talking with Dave Jones and Adam about what they, what the best kind of experience would be for podcasters as well as listeners. That's where it kind of some of the ideas around what if we were putting this in a different file somewhere so that you could write to that file. And the chapters could change dynamically over time. So I think that's changed podcast chapters in the something new that hasn't been seen before.

Gene:

Yeah, I think certainly a lot more. Pod-casters they're starting to add chapters. I only started adding him I guess, a month ago. And I was also just using over a, what the hell is that app called over? I don't use any more. So a name us already, I'm starting to forget the same one. Yeah, we're using before. I keep thinking Overwatch. It's not Overwatch. But anyway, they support a chapter's overcast and their support of the chapters is using the old format, which is included in the MP3 rather than as a separate chapter. And I totally understand where Adam is coming from from in this, because. He wants to be able to have a different person, create chapters while listening to the podcast and then have those chapters become globally available. So I think that certainly makes some sense as a consumer of podcasts. I hate that because it means that if I download the podcast right after it's released, there are no chapters. At least for for no agenda. I have a very different experience than somebody who listens a week later, where it's full of images and it's full of chapter information, everything. Whereas for me, it's it's totally not a podcasting 2.0 podcast yet. The way I do my podcast is I actually put all the chapters, all the graphics, all the links in before hitting the publish button. So I want to make sure that the moment that button is pressed, that the podcast is fully finished and flushed out. And that the first person downloading it has the exact same experience as somebody downloading it a week later. But I understand that not everybody's going to be willing to do that.

David:

Yeah. And that, I think that just goes into some of the tooling that's been created so far. I think that's one thing I'd really like to address next is just making the, the process for creating chapters is a lot easier to do. So that, ultimately I know I'd always imagine that, the. The podcasts are, would do this synchronously. So at the same time they're recording the podcast also creating chapters. But that's super difficult and there's not a lot of tooling built around that specifically, yet there's a couple of podcast recording studios and IDs sorts of things that kind of have some of these chapter features built in. But none of those are podcasting 2.0 compliant yet really? So I think that's one opportunity that I'd like to know. You with Piper catcher studio, which is the backend side to hyper catcher, where we currently manage podcast chapters. And that's what Adam and Dred Scott are using to put up podcast chapters for no agenda. Adams had a couple of requests for features that I just haven't been able to get to yet. And one of them is to be able to listen to the show and as you're listening, kind of Mark areas within the show to add a chapter is right now, From what I've heard from Greg Scott, his kind of process is to do half of it on the phone. So he'll listen to the podcast, hit a button to Mark that as a community chapter. Then once he finishes then transitions back over typer catcher studio pulls in the chapters and tags and images and things, and puts that together. And that's two separate steps right now. And. So that's one thing I'd like to add some tooling around that to make it easier. Long-term I think there's a huge opportunity to also do some kind of AI managed Cree ways to create chapters so that I already have kind of a basic test version of this that doesn't work very well. But once you have a transcript up for a podcast which you can already do, like very easily automated Then it will read through the transcript using GPT three, I'll chunk out different parts of the podcast. That's one area that could get a lot more sophisticated and how you actually do the chunking right now. I'm just doing every five minutes and then trying to using GPT three, it will actually summarize that particular. That chunk of five minutes and create a chapter from that doesn't get you artwork, but that kind of gets you down the path. If this was it's also not very accurate either. Sometimes

Gene:

Yeah, you've got two points of failure there. You've got the GPD three interpretation. Then you also have the voice text airing, which is at best going to be 90% accurate.

David:

Exactly. So that once, if you have some sort of a issue with the transcript that can really throw off GP three summarization but there's some interesting things going on in that area as well that I was exploring a little bit previously Google has a new Model, I guess you'd call it called Pegasus. That's specifically made for summarization. And so that's something that I've also been looking into that seems to actually do a better job. GP three is much better at being generic. It can do some really amazing kind

Gene:

Hence the name.

David:

tasks. Whereas the Pegasus and a model I've been using seems to do a better job at just straight summarization. So I think, yeah, there's some opportunities for some. Some

Gene:

Yeah. It's always interesting to see what's coming down the line and it's all API driven, so you can swap things out. As needed I use Buzzsprout and really like the way they use chaptering which is very interactive. Really, I ended up only having to listen to my podcast twice and not even fully in order to have it ready for the publish button. So after we record this episode, I will listen to it one more time for audio editing purposes. And I'll tell you a little more about how I do that later on. And that typically takes less than the duration of a podcast using the tools that I've got and then I'll upload it to sprouts and then add the the chapters information. And that typically only takes five to 10 minutes. So even for a two hour long podcast it's not going to take anywhere near, so really. Best case scenario in, I could have a podcast published with chapters, with artwork, with links, with all the features of podcasting 2.0, roughly one hour after finishing recording.

David:

That's pretty good. Are you, can I ask how you're doing the chapters though, in order to do that, are you taking notes as you record on areas where you would want to add chapters? Is

Gene:

I should. My my audio editing software allows me to do that, to have timestamps with notes. I don't bother because I find that if I start doing that, I won't be listening to, either the

David:

Right.

Gene:

and if I'm doing it just solo, if it's just me recording then I don't really. Neat to do that because it's fresh enough in my head. Cause I do it immediately afterwards that I just fast forward to where I roughly remember talking about different topic and then pick it up from that. Let's say I didn't do that for a few days and I came back to it, then I could use the transcript because if I'm doing a solo recording, so it's not an interview. Then I will use pretty much the same phrases every time I shift topic. And I'll say something like, let's see what else. So all I have to do is search for it. Let's see. Or the word, what else? And that is a automatic divider that I can get out of the transcript.

David:

That's interesting.

Gene:

It'd be cool if that was done automatically as well. We're not quite to that point, but in general, I think just being able to fast forward right through it. The way the buzz sprouts set up it really makes it pretty straightforward. The only issue I'll tell you, I probably spend as much time looking for for a second good image to go with the chapter as I do any other part. Okay. Quite often they, if it's, news-related the image in the actual link that I'm putting in there is crappy. And so I actually go out to the web and do a search for a better image for that topic. And then use that.

David:

Interesting.

Gene:

Yeah. Let's not talk about other products that's talking about yours. So you were doing this before podcasting 2.0 because chapters were included. So what have you added on or what have you learned is like a cool new thing that hyper casher that is now after jumping on the podcasting 2.0 bandwagon.

David:

Yeah, so yeah, there's a ton of stuff that podcasting 2.0 is added that I still wanted to get to. There's a lot of things that are still in the pipeline. I think transcripts is probably the biggest one that Dave Jones has been on a terror about recently that I really want to follow up on soon. So I stay in his good graces so that one's coming soon, but some of the things that we've added already that that I like the biggest one would be mostly is community chapters because before podcasting 2.0, that wasn't possible. Really. I had. No chapters and they were in the cloud, but there were only available for hyper catcher that podcast only. So I really liked the fact that hyper catcher studio can host some of the podcast chapters. And if it's done that way, you can also add community chapters to the podcast.

Gene:

let me ask you this. Can somebody do community chapters for podcasts that already has built in chapters?

David:

They could, if the podcaster was using hyper catcher studio, so you could use community chapters for any podcast, really. It's just that the way that podcasts hypercapnia studio is set up is that I really want the podcast or to be in control of, obviously what chapters get shown. So they would have to, you could always send, you can always. Let the podcast or no. Hey, I sent you some community chapters, check it out on at this link. And that's actually probably a good marketing thing I should be doing eventually once it's at a point that it's,

Gene:

Yeah, because I think that is a unique feature that you could end up maintaining as a competitive advantage for your product. And I know right now, it's great because everybody's working together. It's really a fun feeling. I was around for the beginning of the commercialization of the internet. Adam and I have fond memories of a lot of this stuff early days. And this is what it feels like to me. This is like back when I could reach out to developers at Mozilla and say, Hey, can you fix this? Or can you tweak this because it's not working. And they would respond 10 minutes later, Dude, I remember the front page. Listed all the new websites that went up the previous day, literally all the new websites. And so for awhile there in the early nineties, that's how I spent my lunch is going through and clicking on every new link on the internet.

David:

wow.

Gene:

Right.

David:

It's amazing to think that would be

Gene:

I, and I'm sure people that are much younger than me are going, what the hell? You're insane. How can you do that? Because that page only had maybe 60 links at max is a, between 20 and 60 each day. And then obviously it kept getting bigger and they stopped bothering to do a manual list of them. But it's what I'm seeing right now. And the I haven't interviewed him yet, but like the guy that has the service for creating wallets for podcasters.

David:

Oh yeah.

Gene:

yeah, I forget his name, but it's a Toshi something. And he's literally like posting every couple of days or maybe every day, he's Hey, five new podcasts using my service. It's this is what I remember. That's how long is it going to be until there's 150 new podcasts everyday signing up on his site to use the wallet feature. And he's not going to be able to do that for long.

David:

right. Yeah.

Gene:

And people haven't started hating each other yet, which, inevitably always happens. You'll get into camps where it's you're in the, yeah, you're in the Netscape camp. You're in the camp. And then they're very competitive with each other, which hasn't happened. But I love the idea of the community stuff. So the community bookmarks is great. There's another app. That's doing. Community based or publicly shared, I should say clips. I think pod vers is doing that if I remember. So it's allowing people to take a clip from a show and then listed through whatever backend they're using as a publicly accessible. Here's a clip from the show. And here's the name of the clip? I love that stuff because that's really like the second layer on top of podcasting. It's the community layer. And it's allowing people to do something that the podcasts or myselves isn't going to do, or isn't even capable of doing a lot of times. And of course, no agenda is a wonderful example of that to the nth degree, to where the majority of the things besides the actual show being recorded, the majority of everything else is done by outside people. Predominantly as volunteers. So everything from stores to buying merchandise, to, like you mentioned, doing chapters to all these things are done by third parties voluntarily for the show, rather than by Adam or somebody that you know is on his staff to do that kind of stuff, which is really cool. And I certainly think, I don't expect every show to do that, but it's a nice aspirational model, right?

David:

Yeah. I think there's some really cool kind of things that are popping up around podcasting 2.0 and some of the apps that were already there doing things, before it came along and are now integrating and part of the community. And that's one thing I'd like to do more of with hyper capture studio is just finding ways to integrate. Some of these things, and I'd really like to be able to eventually one thing we've talked about previously that on the social network there. Is doing something around like link sharing and having some way to allow to share between podcasting 2.0 apps so that you could, it was something that came up in the last podcasting 2.0 podcasts as well, where Adam. Someone was mentioning w why can't I just create a QR code for my podcast and, show that to my wife and she can subscribe. That's the one thing that, that, that really started sticking in my head. And I started thinking about that how to make that sort of a thing possible. So that's another one of those, one of the things I'm hoping to do with hyper catcher studio sometime soon, there's a lot of things, a

Gene:

yeah, it does feel like there's a little too many steps and then really we can blame Apple for this because once Adam handed over the index to them, to Steve jobs they were grateful and gracious and did nothing with it. They literally added what six elements in no nine elements in 10 years. It's like really guys that's it there's been no expansion once it was there because to them, this was a marketing tool. That's this wasn't about technology. This was about, Hey, look, what you can do with your iPod. It was another selling feature of the iPod that, that wasn't available to anybody else. And then of course, with the phones it became less exclusive. And then podcasting became something you could do on something other than a phone or an iPad in general, but they've ignored and neglected it. And so it's really cool to see it be resurrected. And that's why I really love the fact that. It's called podcasting 2.0. Because I think that's a very descriptive way of summarizing it. It is a whole generation newer and better and more featureful than what was around just a year ago.

David:

I am really looking forward to Apple's new follow button though. Changing that over from subscribe, of course, but

Gene:

Yeah. Major change.

David:

It made your change, but no, you're right. This has been super exciting to see, I think even in kind of the podcasting apps space that was one of the reasons why I started hyper catcher as well, because, when I was looking at some of the existing apps, I just started thinking I think there's some interesting things that could be done with podcasting that just aren't being done yet.

Gene:

And we're not even talking about video. We've got a couple of people on the social that are. Really making sure that video is capable of being utilized here as well. Which for a lot of us is like what video podcast. That's not a podcast, but it really,

David:

that will be a

Gene:

yeah. Come on guys. We already have images that you can put a new image on every second. How much of a stretch it is to have one every 60th of a second. I'll look at that. We've got video. So it's coming, then there's no reason to push against it. Then for the audio purists, you could still get audio only podcasts. Not everything has to be video, but there's no reason not to open up the standard to include the broader stuff, like video in there. And then potentially eventually, 3d VR stuff can be on there as well.

David:

right.

Gene:

So I do want to ask you about your backend though. Because while. Hyper catcher is your user side of the app or the app that people would use to download podcasts and stuff. I think for the podcasts, there's listening to this, they'd be more curious about the backend.

David:

Yeah. So hyper capture studio is the backend. It's still very much in production. When I mentioned earlier, my, my background I've been an iOS kind of app developer for. Pretty much my whole career in the last year or so, I've been also getting into backend development at work. And so that's spilled over into some of my developments outside as well. Since I'm getting more used to that So hyper catcher studio came out of that kind of becoming more comfortable with web development API development, that sort of thing. It's still, like I said, it's still very much an alpha, so there's a few bugs in there, but it's working it's work and Adam's been using it for no agenda for the last few months, which has been really fun to see And really these, as he's mentioned before, he's great at finding things to break and finding bugs. So it's a lot better now than before he started using it. So

Gene:

So what is it, what does it do and how do you get to it?

David:

Yeah. So you get to it by just going to studio dot hyper catcher.com. And from there you can sign up and so you basically would need to submit your podcast. So say you're a podcaster. You submit your RSS feed and in the RSS feed, you have a email. Owner email, I think it is or admin email. There's a tag in there that will let you know this is the owner of this RSS feed. So once you submit it, I send, there's an automated feature that sends out a email to you with a with a code that will, once you. Hit the link that will verify that you own that RSS feed. It's gone to your email, so you own it. Then you can come back into a hyper capture studio and you'll see your podcast feed in there. And from that point you can add a chapters and you've used, Bud's sprout. It's very similar kind of UI to that. Or you'll just see you add a button add chapter and you can just add them Okay. Had additional ones delete some of the differences that the biggest difference is the fact that you can you will also see a secondary list. That is your list of community chapters, which are anyone who's listened to your podcast. If you told your listeners to submit. And they happened to use your studio. They can, as they're listening, hit a button and submit the community chapter to you, and that will show up and a secondary list that you can go through and, accept it or reject that chapter to be added in. The community can do some of the work for you.

Gene:

And then how does that, so does that generate an updated RSS feed or how does that the chapters that are created, how do they end up working?

David:

Yeah. So once you hit publish immediately hyper catcher, the app will immediately start seeing that. So I've got a direct connection to the database there. So you won't need to update the RSS feed for it to work in hyper catcher. For any of your other podcasts though. That's where podcasting 2.0, really comes in. And and that there's a chapter's tag that has a link to a URL or a Jason file. And so you can. Do it a couple of different ways right now in hyper catcher studio, you can just download your chapters, Jason. So once you create your chapters you just hit a button and it'll download that file. And the current chapter spec for podcasting 2.0, and then you can upload that chapters file anywhere and just put a link in your RSS feed. And the other way is that you can. And so that would be static though. So there's no way for community chapters to come in that way. The other way is to basically put a link in the database or a link to a cloud bucket, basically where that Jason file is going to live and it can be dynamically updated as you push more chapters to it. But so that, that's another kind of side of this that is very much alpha right now and that you need to

Gene:

Yeah, you got to have access to your raw feed to do that, and actually be able to tweak it yourself. Yeah. So are you connecting to any hosting platforms through their API APIs? Will, can you import your stuff to Buzzsprout directly through API?

David:

not right now that's something we've thought about. I haven't really reached out to anyone yet. Casto pod, however developers reached out there and we're working on an integration to do something very similar to that. So that's one platform where hopefully that will be available

Gene:

yeah. Capsule pods getting pretty excited about podcasting 2.0

David:

Yeah. So I'm super excited to be working with them on that. And then we've also got some other ideas about some possible ways to eventually maybe wrap the RSS feed and be able to add chapters that way. So that there's some ways to do it, but

Gene:

Cause I think that's a huge thing is to be able to. Talk to the hosting companies and Buzzsprout has been very good at implementing podcasting 2.0 stuff. Proactively their API is really good too. So like I O I upload everything, including the transcript directly from my recording app into Buzzsprout through an API. So I don't have to do any of the manual crap. And if you could have a way through an API. To load in their chapters. If there are any for podcasts that are created on there and I can log into your app and look at any community, suggested chapters hit the accept button there. Okay. Button there, or whatever or an arrow that shuffles them to the bucket of official chapters, whatever method it is, and then hit update, and then have your API refresh the chapters that are stored on bus sprouts. That would be killer.

David:

Yeah. That's a great idea

Gene:

Yeah, because that's, there is no community, anything associated with bus route directly.

David:

Yeah. As far as on that, that should work. As far as I know, I would just need to talk

Gene:

Yeah, of course there was work. I just thought of it naturally with Rick.

David:

Yeah. Yeah. I see no barrier to that whatsoever, except just, getting in touch with some of these hosting

Gene:

and they are very proactive and of course, I'm way over selling them at this point. But like I probably talked to their support once a week, literally every single week. And they are very responsive. They've solved every issue that I've brought to their attention, even to the extent of reaching out to a another app developer on my behalf. To get them to fix something and then let me know. It's taken care of. We reached out and got it fixed for you. I'm like, Jesus, this is better service than I get from, other like large companies.

David:

Yeah. That's very

Gene:

Yeah. And I don't know, I have no idea how many guys work at Buzzsprout, but my experience has been super I'm trying to get them on a, onto a podcast so far. We haven't set up a time yet, but I have the hosting companies that I've used in the past and I've used a lot including Todd's company raspberry or no

David:

blueberry

Gene:

blimp blubbery. And I've used the, all these guys in the past. And in terms of just what Buzzsprout is capable and willing to do just blows me away.

David:

Yeah. I use bus ride as well to host my, a tutorial

Gene:

okay. There you go. Yeah. So you know all about the interface.

David:

Yup. Yup. Yeah. I like it as

Gene:

I don't know the exact number, but I saw somewhere a stat. I think there's a little over three and a half thousand podcasts posted on there. It could be way more. I could be way off

David:

I would

Gene:

I could be, but that's the number I saw. And I'm maybe it's just this month. I don't know what it was. It was a Buzzsprout number and with that many podcasts. So

David:

yeah. Something tells me it's a lot.

Gene:

that could be, but you never know.

David:

Yeah.

Gene:

Yeah. So let's let's wrap up by thinking about what the future of podcasting two point holds. Are there features that you haven't yet part of the standard that maybe you'd like to see coming down the road? Is there something that you've heard about? That's not in the standard, but you're pretty excited that people are talking about w what are your thoughts on that?

David:

Yeah, for me, it's really catch up at this point. So there's already, there's so many cool things that are in there right now that I don't support yet. Obviously the, we do what is it? Donations, the basic donation page one. I, that's not the name of the tag, but so that you can put your link to your, your Patrion page or something

Gene:

value tag.

David:

Yeah but funding is the big one where you can actually put the value block in your RSS feed and get that connected in with your wallet in some way. So that's something that is still very much at the top of my mind, something that I'm really focused on hyper capture studio right now, and, improving that experience for people. So that's where most of my work has been going, but that's something that I definitely want to support seeing to start getting involved in some of the some of the Bitcoin flying around late. And that's super interesting to me. And that's actually something I've got set up already. So I've got the lightening nodes set up

Gene:

Oh, you do. Okay. I was going to say that's a learning curve and a half, man. I've just gone through it myself.

David:

Yeah. So I didn't, I'm not as hardcore as some of the other guys. I think Adam mentioned you actually set up your raspberry PI, right? I did not do that. I just I'm amusing uh, hosted node and

Gene:

yeah. Using voltage.

David:

Yeah. Using

Gene:

Yeah, I've got a, I've got a voltage node. I'm still waiting on my personal node and it's not a raspberry PI. It's actually running on an Intel system, but it's still churning through 2016 data right now. So once you download the entire blockchain. Depending on how much you allocate to your CPU and memory and everything else, it's going to go through and validate all that crap. And now look, maybe I'm an ops here. Maybe there's a command that says skip validation and just get to the end. Maybe that exists. I'm just letting the thing do what it wants and what it wants right now is very slowly taking about two or three days per year to validate the stuff. So somewhere in about a week and a half, It should be up to 2021 in all, its a blockchain validations. And at that point then it'll be a fully functional current,

David:

Wow.

Gene:

but then you, but that's the that's the Bitcoin node. Cause then that will talk to the lightning node, which is the next thing to set up and I've got it already installed. I just can't flip it on until this thing is done. Synchronizing.

David:

right. Yeah. So Ellen pay also has a nice solution to that as well. So you don't have to worry about any of that. And that's another thing that I've been looking at. I just wanted to have my own notes so that I can test. Sending payments around. So I've

Gene:

And then quickly realized the cost of all this isn't that cheap. Everybody thinks that, Oh yeah. It's a super easy Bitcoin. It's all digital. Yeah. Except you pay fees everywhere.

David:

Yeah. The lightening fees haven't gotten too bad yet. Obviously compared to Bitcoin where it's just crazy

Gene:

Yeah. Yeah. Moving Bitcoin to the lightning node, you lose about 15%

David:

Yeah.

Gene:

opening channels on the lightning node. You lose about 15%. The actual transactions aren't too expensive. They're usually a Saturday too. They're not too bad, but yeah, all this stuff, I was the second somebody else about the same topic. I said I've put a hundred bucks that I spent on this. Now I have$46 sitting there. So that's my overall, like all fees for everything comes out to about 55%.

David:

Once, once you got that$46 though, that'll last you a while. If you're just sending a few sets around, hopefully

Gene:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've got other wallets that I'm doing and it's this is my spirit. And Adam kept trying to talk me out of it. It's like, why are you doing this? Don't do it. Don't set up your own. I was like, I'm doing it for the learning experience. I know it's a pain in the ass. I want to understand that better. And this is going to force me to understand that better, even though with the frustrations. And there are frustrations. Like I've literally run into an issue where nowhere in any instructions did it say, I need to have an HTTPS in front of a field that I was supposed to answer. And I was just copying whatever I had in the voltage dashboard. I'm capping directly into this thing and it's it's not taking it. Why not? What's wrong. It's everything looks exactly right. I'm literally following what's on. Videos literally following what's in the description. Nobody freaking mentioned that I have to change the URL to start with HTTPS. It was like, it took two days of just going, what the hell?

David:

yeah.

Gene:

eventually it's just, yeah, a lot of it is just not documented at all. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why I'm trying to do, I'm trying to figure out the right way so I can. Provide more guidance and documentation to people. I'll do more podcasts specifically about setting up nodes and transferring money and making sure the payments are set correctly. And that's one, like one of the things, once you get going with adding a lightening payments to your setup, something that we run into is the percentages that you set for who gets how much right? The breakdown of the donation. It only works if you're sending minimum of a hundred SATs, so a hundred or more sets because there, there are no fractions in the percentages that are being used for this stuff. And so what happens is for example, when I hate to throw him under the bus, but I will cause he knows about this and he's fixing it right now. But for pot friend, he said his on 10 PSATs per minute donation and no option yet to tweak that number. When you have a 10 cent donation, then the 1% donation to the podcasting app and the 1% donation to the network turns into a 10% donation to the podcasting app and a 10% donation to podcast index. And so right now, everybody that's using pod friend is actually donating 10% to each of those and an 80% or what's left to the actual podcaster. And what's left is usually either 70 or 80%, depending on the fees that you also have in the backend. And if your intention is to take 10%, then that's fine. It should be set to that. But when you're, when your app is saying, we take 1%. But then when it actually comes out, it's 10%, that's a problem.

David:

Yeah, and totally unintentional

Gene:

it's totally unintentional because his thought was I don't want to put it at too high a number, cause I want to encourage people to use it. Totally true. Totally fair. But it also totally screws up with a percentage base and the, I think the intent of podcasting 2.0, because it's all voluntary, an app doesn't have to take 1% and the app could take 50%. Google could come up with the podcasting app that supports this tomorrow and take 30% like they do for YouTube. That's their usual charge is 30% of whatever the super chat button does. So you give five bucks, then the person's only getting, what, four bucks out of that, and more like three, three 50, because Google took the rest of it. So you could take more, but the goal is to be explicit in what you're doing. So that when there's competition, that's part of the comp competitive difference is that our app does everything, the other apps do, but we only take 1%. And these other apps I'll take two or 3% or we take 2%, but look at all these cool new features that we have that nobody else has.

David:

Exactly. Yeah. That's the route. I'm hoping to be able to go.

Gene:

Exactly. Exactly. So it all depends on and people forget that, as much as we can bitch about PayPal. PayPal only takes two and a half percent. You're still getting 97 and a half percent. And that's as a business, if you register as an individual, they don't take anything out.

David:

Yeah. As long as they, as long as they like your politics and everything

Gene:

Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

David:

all just disappear overnight.

Gene:

can totally disappear overnights. And I think that it is absolutely awesome to have a different way to do it through through a mechanism like lightning, but also lightning could disappear overnight too And take all the money that's sitting in the network with it. So there's going to be hurdles along the way in general. And I would certainly treat anything that you have in the lightning network as being. More risky than when you have sitting on the Bitcoin network, which in of itself is more risky than anything you have sitting in the real world. Now, Bitcoin has been appreciating like crazy, which is great, but also the U S government wants their share of that appreciation. There's now a question on tax forms that asks explicitly if you've invested in any digital currencies But, you got to remember all this stuff is only as good as a combination of the software it's running on and the companies that are maintaining the equipment.

David:

And I guess lightening even more because they're a bit, obviously less decentralized

Gene:

second tier. Exactly. So the way I recommend is you put five or 10 or maybe 50 bucks, whatever you're comfortable when in, into a wallet. Specifically for this purpose, you're going to give all the money in that wallet away too, while you're listening to podcasts anyway. And so if the whole network shuts down or if you lose your wallet or something happens, it sucks. But it's not that big a deal because you wouldn't have kept that money. Anyway. It's not an investment account. It's a giveaway account.

David:

Yeah. That's definitely the way I've been thinking about it so far. I think that makes a lot of sense. I'm hoping that most people understand that. And I think that so far, everyone has been putting real good, like tutorials or messages in front, on the podcast that this is experimental.

Gene:

Yeah, it's very true. And I think we're going to have more podcasting apps like yours doing what pod friend did and just making it super easy for people to just, here's the address you need to fill this wallet up. It's only for a fixed amount. We're not going to even let you select the high amount to fill it with, because we don't want that money in there. And then if you have money, transfer it. If you don't click this button, it'll take you to a place that'll, you can translate your local currency into it. Because most people aren't aware of this stuff that most people do not currently have Bitcoin wallets.

David:

Yeah. That's one thing that I've been really hoping for is some way that, for people that do have Bitcoin Y wallets and are using breeze already are using one of these lightening wallets already. When I first started looking at this, I was really hoping to just find a way. I really don't want to integrate a Bitcoin wallet or a lightening wallet into my app. And there are, however, there are APIs that made that a lot simpler. So now it makes more sense, but I'm hoping for there eventually to be some sort of solution where I can just say, Hey podcast, this user just listened to, 10 minutes of this podcast and they want to split it out this way, send that invoice or something over to. A lightening wallets. That's really specialized in this. And really, that's their main kind of focus is on how light and how to move lightning around how that payment kind of side of things works and then outsource that to them and have it finished there. I know that's what the splits and things that's not really possible right now, but like best case scenario, that's really the way I'd like to, I'd like to integrate.

Gene:

And the current apps predominantly create a wallet on your behalf and then store some value in there that you can donate from. And if you run out, they'll tell you, you should re up. And the only one that isn't doing that right now is pod station where they connect to your wallet, but the problem with them and again, I'm not trying to throw them under the bus. I just had the interview with him as well, recently here. But it's not connecting to a wall it's connecting to a node. And so you raise the difficulty level of the people that are going to be able to use that app right away, because it has to be somebody who Has a node running and is familiar with how to set those things up. Or I guess you can use Ellen pay, but LM pays really, it's development interface. It's not something the average person is going to be able to utilize to set up a wallet for themselves.

David:

Yeah. It's interesting how everyone's taken a different approach to this. I'm super interested to see how this kind of all progresses in the next few months here.

Gene:

Certainly from the ease of use standpoint, what people want is I have an app, ABC. That is my wallet. And all I want to do is in that app, just say max out at$10 to my podcasting invoices, and then. Set up some kind of API invoice transfer from podcasting apps. That'll just basically send an invoice to your wallet for a aggregate amount of SATs and then take that amount and then split it up in the app as it received it, that way the app doesn't maintain the wallet for you. It doesn't even have to have its own wallet, I guess maybe it does just for, a split-second of holding the. The SATs as it does the split cast split second. There you go. But that's really about it. Like expecting every single podcasting app to set up a new wallet for you on the lightning network. I don't think is realistic

David:

yeah. Yeah, it's, that's a tough one,

Gene:

and then certainly not persistent ones. And then like breeze. If the app isn't running your wallet is not on.

David:

right? Yeah. I get that notification every once in awhile, make sure you haven't connected to the lightning network in 24 hours or something. So open up the app and make sure it re sinks.

Gene:

Yeah. Yeah. And I think Sphinx is doing it continuously. They opened up actually a fairly sizable wallet on your behalf, but it's it's, the interface is clearly geared for techies. All if you've got anything else, I think you've mentioned how people get ahold of your backend there. Your app is available in the iTunes store or the app store, Apple iOS

David:

Yep. Yeah, so you can go to hyper catcher.com. We've got like a blog there that people can read up on different things around podcasting, 2.0 stuff different podcasts that are available and get a download link for the app. And then. Studio dot hyper catcher.com is the backend. If you have a podcast that you'd like to add chapters to that's it's getting better. It's not the easiest way. I'd still say Buzzsprout is probably the easiest way to do it, but the studio dot hyper catcher.com definitely going to be seeing some exciting things there pretty soon, I think. So if you want to get in there and get your podcasts set up for it definitely recommend that.

Gene:

I appreciate you taking the time to do the interview and I'm sure. We'll have a lot more features coming from you and more people will be coming up with more suggestions and giving you more work to do as well.

David:

Yep. I hope so. Yeah. Thanks a lot for having me, Jane really appreciate it.

Joe Rogan Fan
Podcasting 2.0
Delayed Gratification Sucks
Chapters and Transcripts
Sharing metadata in 2.0
Blockchain learning curve
Lightening Math