The Pomp Podcast - #1014 Oscar Merry On Pioneering Listen To Earn With Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Oscar Mary is the co-founder of Fountain, a brand new podcast player where the audience actually gets paid to listen to their favorite podcast. It uses the Bitcoin Lightning Network and is fascinating enough where I got excited and actually invested in the business. In this conversation, we talk about podcasting 2.0, how Fountain works, why podcasters would want to pay their audience, and why it's so cool to onboard brand new users to the Bitcoin community via Fountain. I really enjoyed this conversation with Oscar, and I hope you guys enjoy it as well.

Starting point is 00:00:44 Before we get into this episode, though, I first want to talk about our sponsors. First up is LMAX Digital, the number one institutional crypto exchange. They offer clients the deepest pool of crypto liquidity on the planet, underscored by 100% uptime track through volatility spikes. They leverage LMAX Group's liquidity relationships and ultra-low latency technology. LMAX Digital is the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading and custodial services. If you've never heard of LMAX Digital, it's probably because you're not an institution. They have no retail, only institutions. They feature a central limit order book streaming spot Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash, all paired with US dollars,

Starting point is 00:01:21 euro and yen. Elmax Digital, they're secure, they're liquid, and they're trusted. Learn more at elmaxdigital.com slash pomp. Again, elmaxdigital.com slash pomp. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep is the single best product that I have purchased over the last three years. It completely changed my life. I'm not joking. Pay attention. The Pod Pro cover, which goes over your mattress by Eight Sleep, is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. You can go to 8sleep.com to check out the Pod Pro cover and you save $150 at checkout. They currently ship within the United States, Canada, and the UK. I told you it changed my life. It helps me sleep

Starting point is 00:02:05 deeper, helps me sleep longer. I feel much more refreshed and I have better energy. You want to know how I have relentless energy every single day? Because I sleep on an 8sleep. Seriously, Go check it out, 8sleep.com slash Pomp today. listed on the US exchange at DEFTF stock ticker and the Canadian NEO exchange at DEFI. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit their website at defi.tech. I'm really excited about what these guys are doing. I've become an advisor to the business and I highly suggest you go check them out. Go to their website at defi.tech today. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast

Starting point is 00:03:14 are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got Oscar here with me. Thanks so much for doing this. Thanks, Pomp. Great to be here. Absolutely. Let's start with this idea of podcasting at the intersection of really audio and Bitcoin, right? I think there's tons and tons of people who have been trying to figure out how can we use Bitcoin for podcasting. I've been pitched a ton of different ideas. Some of them

Starting point is 00:03:53 are interesting. Some of them are less compelling. But I think when I talked with you guys at Fountain, it became really obvious to me how the world was going to change at this intersection of Bitcoin and audio. So let's just start with like, what is Fountain? Yeah, thanks, Paul. So Fountain is the only podcast app where both listeners and podcasters get rewarded for the value that they bring to the platform. So as a listener on Fountain, you can earn Bitcoin just by listening to your favorite shows. And as a podcaster, you can get paid directly by your audience as they're listening in the app. So there's two important questions that I want to address here. The first is why should you get paid to listen to podcasts? I know it sounds a bit crazy. And the second one

Starting point is 00:04:38 is why should you support the podcast that you love? So I'll go through each one in turn. Firstly, why should you get paid to listen to podcasts? It sounds crazy, but it's actually not. So let me explain. The time and attention that we give platforms every day is incredibly valuable. So if you think about every minute that you spend consuming content, creating content, watching ads, listening to ads, that directly increases the value of the platforms that you're using. So think about the ones you use every day, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all of these platforms would lose their value if it wasn't for you and the time and attention that you give them. But yet none of them reward you for it. So Fountain is different. On Fountain, you get paid for the

Starting point is 00:05:22 value that you bring to the platform. So Fountain pays you right off the bat just for being here because we recognize that value. And that's how you can earn Bitcoin just by listening to your favorite shows. Podcasters will also pay you through promoted clips and episodes. So if they have additional content that they want to get out there, they can do that by paying you in Bitcoin. And then finally, other fountain users can actually pay you as well if they like the content that you're sharing. So that's how you can earn on fountain. But we also think it's really important that you support your favorite podcast. Because ultimately, there's incredible knowledge, insight and wisdom that comes through the podcast medium.

Starting point is 00:06:03 I mean, take this show. How many people listening right now have learned so much from you, Pomp, and your guests over the years? I know I have, and that's why I think it's so important to support. But there's an issue with the existing platforms. If you think about Patreon

Starting point is 00:06:17 or some of the premium subscription apps, the problem with these when it comes to podcasting is that they break the connection between when you're actually listening and the action of supporting in fountain you can support directly from the player so you can stream money per minute to your favorite show and you can also send a boost which is a custom amount with a question or a message or just a thank you to the host um so yeah that's fountain basically you can earn bitcoin whilst listening and you can support your favorite shows and this is all

Starting point is 00:06:49 powered by the bitcoin lightning network for the first time ever we have programmable money so one of the things that uh when i first saw what you guys were doing that was fascinating to me is um if you really think itunes was the first podcast platform that got you know considerable adoption and was at one point i think 80 90 of the market uh and it's because they came pre-installed on ios devices and so like that's a pretty good moat to have to gain market share and then i think most people kind of just said like hey podcasting is not really a thing but like these guys have one that you know really small space and then audio became bigger and bigger audiobooks podcasts all this stuff and spotify was like well we're in the audio game we're an audio business like we

Starting point is 00:07:28 want to be in that game but we can't get pre-installed on the devices so like what's our angle or what's our moat gonna be and they're like well we got a lot of money and so they just started to buy up uh exclusive intellectual property and this is obviously the joe rogan uh deal that they did they did call her daddy and a bunch of other uh episodes and so it was like okay one uh platform has one on the pre-installation uh kind of front another platform appears to have one on they're going to spend whatever it takes to acquire ip that leaves if you want to have a third player in the space like what is the other advantage and when i first saw this i was like oh wow this is really interesting because what you guys are essentially doing is you're using a

Starting point is 00:08:10 innovation and payment technology to allow for less friction between payments of podcast or audience or audience back to podcaster. And other folks could at some point try to go figure out how to do this. But you really need to be experts in audio and podcast, but also experts in Bitcoin and lightning and kind of how that ecosystem works. And so it feels like there's an opportunity for a third kind of category to be created here. And the first one to do it at scale is going to win, right? Is that kind of a fair way to evaluate it? Yeah, exactly. And I think the actual payment is more than just the financial value. It's actually a signal that we can use

Starting point is 00:08:49 to make the platform better. So if you think about it, if you're listening to a show and I'm following you on Fountain and you send a 50,000 sat boost to your favorite show, that is a signal to me that that episode is worth listening to. And that is badly needed in podcasting

Starting point is 00:09:06 because there is no discovery because of the nature of the long form episodes. So we think that by attaching a payment to every action that you take in the app, you can actually create high signal that then will drive discovery for podcasters, but ultimately a better listening experience for the user as well.

Starting point is 00:09:24 Yeah, it's fascinating. I keep hearing podcasting 2.0. Obviously, Adam Curry's talked about this quite a bit. Explain to people what exactly that means. Yeah, so podcasting 2.0 is a philosophy and an organization spearheaded by Adam Curry and Dave Jones. And really, it has two goals.

Starting point is 00:09:41 Number one is to preserve the open nature of podcasting, which is something that everybody loves so much about podcasting. It goes against the trend we've seen recently around walled gardens and big platforms trying to control an industry completely. Because podcasting is open, you can always just host your own RSS feed and take your podcast wherever without any censorship. So that's the first part. And then the second part of Podcasting 2.0 is really to extend podcasting

Starting point is 00:10:09 and start adding new features. the community is working on things like live streaming, bringing live streaming to RSS, bringing video to RSS, bringing tools like chapters. And again, ultimately, that just leads to a better listening experience. And obviously, the most exciting part of this is the value spec, which is what allows a podcaster to actually receive sats and also send them out to guests, which is one of the really exciting things, too. Yeah, it's fascinating to think about uh most people don't realize the rss feeds are open right and you can do so much with that and it's beneficial for the person uploading the podcast but it's also beneficial for people who

Starting point is 00:10:46 want to build tools or interfaces or various other things around that open ecosystem and so uh it takes all the great aspects of open source software uh and brings it to this audio format in a really unique way that just isn't really available in many other um platforms or content types. Yeah, exactly. And if you think about it, like, if you wanted to innovate on the YouTube platform, you couldn't do it as a developer, you couldn't go and start a startup that would, you know, add an interesting layer to YouTube. But because RSS is open, you can do that. And what's really interesting as well with lightning is if I'm a podcaster, and I want to completely self host, I can literally set up my RSS feed on a server, run my own lightning node, put the pub key in my

Starting point is 00:11:31 RSS feed and self-host everything. So it's completely open. Yeah. It's fascinating. As a podcast, I think about this and I say, Hey, I am probably less interested in the audience sending me money. It's great that they do. I love that they're supporting me. But to me, my eyes light up because now I can share value with the audience, right? So I think that there's some podcasters who are going to love, Hey, I can get paid from the audience. There's some podcasts that are going to love, Hey, I can pay the audience. And there's some that say, I love that I can do both. Right. And each one, uh, kind of used features differently. Uh, but for me, what's fascinating is like, if I can stream value to the audience, if they were already going to

Starting point is 00:12:10 listen, now they can make a little bit of money and not necessarily going to be life-changing money, but it could help them buy dinner, you know, at the end of the week or whatever, but it's a cool way to give some portion of value to them for listening. And I feel like they've given me so much in terms of the audience and learning from them that uh that you have that ability but the streaming component of it uh is also very unique where it sounds like i could probably uh say hey if you just start the episode you get some you know value and then every minute after that you get more value or like how can i program this uh in the steady state to uh can i pick like when they get paid how much or like how does it work yeah so we're just getting started

Starting point is 00:12:49 but the really exciting thing about the Lightning Network is we have full flexibility. Think of a use case and we'll be able to do it because suddenly we have programmable money. I'm really excited to see the different ways we can do this. Right now, what you'll be able to do as a podcaster is promote an episode or promote your show to a level whereby anyone that comes in

Starting point is 00:13:13 and listens to the latest episode will be streamed money per minute for listening to that show. Yeah, I mean, that's really interesting when you start to think also, like, maybe it's not life changing money in the United States, but people all around the world who have access to these audio platforms now, you know, it doesn't take that much money really for you to earn in order to make it meaningful, given what the local, you know, monthly salaries are. Exactly. And actually, I think we will get to a point where it can not be life changing money, but be significant income. Because actually, if you look at the podcast advertising CPMs on other platforms, so where podcasters are currently promoting their shows, the cost per new subscriber to your show can be as high as 10 or $15. So if you think about taking that money and instead just paying it directly to the listener to sample your show or

Starting point is 00:14:07 episode actually it can go a long way and that's that's a significant amount of money if you think about listening to a sample episode for 45 minutes or one hour and getting paid ten dollars for it yeah if we flip around the table and now the audience like streams any money how does that work in terms of like do i have to hook up a bitcoin wallet or like where does that go yeah so as i was saying this is a completely open system so if you want to you could self-host your rss feed run your own lightning node and just put the pub key in the rss feed but fountain actually offers a podcaster wallet service so as a podcaster you can sign up on fountain.fm claim your feed and then we will provision you a lightning wallet and we will basically lightning

Starting point is 00:14:50 enable your podcast on top of that we'll give you detailed analytics on who's supporting your show the most over time which episodes are bringing in the most so you know great analytics there but the really exciting feature that we have is this concept of episode level splits so what this will allow you to do is each guest that comes through the studio here you'll just be able to ask them what's your fountain username i'll put you in the splits give you 50 give you 20 and then again because it's programmable money that will just flow out for that episode and it will stay that way in perpetuity i think this is incredibly exciting for actually onboarding new people to bitcoin because there's a lot of bitcoin podcasts out there where the guests are not necessarily

Starting point is 00:15:34 in the bitcoin space but you can say to them hey thanks for coming on the show to reward you for your value i'm going to give you 50 of the sats that come through this episode also if you're interviewing someone that has a good cause maybe it's an open source project you can ask your audience hey guys send a boost just like you normally do but this will go straight to the actual cause that we're talking about today so i think that's incredibly exciting yeah it's fascinating to think about the idea of allowing the guests to make money on the podcast that they appeared as well like drastically changes the relationship uh and also uh it's pretty cool because now if like i'm a guest on someone's podcast and like hey you're gonna get 50 percent

Starting point is 00:16:14 of the uh sats that are streamed right there's a lot of people who say like i'm gonna promote the shit out of this, right? I'm really going to go and make sure that a lot of people listen to it. And so it feels like a win-win both for the audience and the podcaster. 100%. Yeah. If you start to think about advertising, like what's the impact on the advertising market here? Is this kind of a zero-sum game of like either people get advertising dollars or they're using something like this or is it accretive? Like what's your thought process? Yeah. So I don't think this is a replacement of podcast advertising. There is a magic in

Starting point is 00:16:47 podcast advertising, because there's a trust that exists between the host and the listener. So I don't think we're going to replace that. I think this just is an alternate advertising mechanism that actually benefits everybody, the advertiser, the podcaster, and the actual listener. Because one of the things that everybody I'm sure listening knows about podcast advertising is people skip the ads. People are so good at skipping the ads on their favorite shows. It's quite ridiculous. With fountain promotions, you can't skip the ads. And also you get paid per second for listening. And what this does is number one, it captures your attention as you're listening to the ad. But number two, if you're not interested in that product or service, and you don't want to

Starting point is 00:17:29 hear any more, you can just pause the ad, and the money stops streaming, and it just flows back into the budget for that campaign, which actually at the end of the day is going to drive results for the advertiser so it's beneficial for the user because they get paid to listen again coming back to this concept of the value of time and attention and it's beneficial for the advertiser because they'll actually be able to get higher click-through rates to whatever service we also have attribution in the ads as well which is another problem with podcast advertising so yeah we're really excited about this and for podcasters as well if you want to promote your show you know come and do it on fountain because users get paid to listen and you know it's just a much better

Starting point is 00:18:09 advertising model than the alternatives out there. And it feels kind of like a no brainer, right? If, if you're listening to podcasts, you might as well listen to it on fountain because you get to listen to the podcast and you get paid to do it. Like that's kind of a no brainer in my opinion. Exactly. And whether you want to keep that money for yourself and stack those stats or you want to give it back to your favorite show, it's completely up to you. Yeah. And I guess also part of this is, uh, when we talk about advertising, it could be advertising in terms of, Hey, I have sponsors on the show and therefore, uh, do I share some of that with the audience? Like, how does that work? Uh, but it also could be, I want to promote the show to

Starting point is 00:18:41 new listeners as well. Right. And there's, um, uh, quite a number of people who, whether they're running Instagram ads or Twitter or email marketing, what, you know, all kinds of things that they do in the marketing world. Uh, you now can just say, well, if you listen to an episode, I'll just give you some money. Uh, and that's pretty compelling, right? For people to come listen to a new episode of your podcast. Exactly. Because you're actually taking the activation action as you're doing it. So if you think about the steps in the funnel from something like an Instagram ad, you have the cost per impression, then you have the cost per click, which might take you to a website, then you actually have the cost per listen to that podcast. And then you have

Starting point is 00:19:21 the cost per subscribe. With fountain promotions, it's all in one. So as soon as the user actually starts listening to the ad, you know, they're taking the action that you want, they're listening to your podcast. Obviously, you guys are just launching this. But what do you think the rates would be? Like, is this something where if I want one new person to listen, it's like a dollar per person, 10 cents, $50? Like, do you have a sense of a kind of ballpark what what that would look like? Yeah, so I think we're still experimenting at the moment. But what I can say is that I think we're going to be able to significantly beat the rates for traditional podcast advertising. So if you are promoting your podcast on Facebook, or Instagram, or some other platform, I think we're

Starting point is 00:20:03 going to be able to significantly beat the rates there yeah i mean that would be uh that'd be fantastic a lot of people would be very interested because also for new podcasters as well right now if you're just starting out with a podcast and you put a hundred dollars behind instagram ads or facebook ads it's not going to get you anywhere and you don't have the budget to go and promote your show whereas with this you can actually set a very small um you know either the sats per min or the max sat value for a clip and you can get in front of users to sample your content in a way that doesn't you know cost hundreds or thousands of dollars yeah when you think about the impact on people who start to listen i'm assuming in the beginning you're going to get bitcoiners right

Starting point is 00:20:47 people who want bitcoin and so hey i'll listen to podcasts whatever but my guess is like over time the narrative goes from like hey this is how i can earn bitcoin to just uh i tell a friend like you get paid to listen to podcasts right and so then my friend joins they may or may not know anything about Bitcoin. And like, in some way, this could be a way to onboard people to Bitcoin without actually having to tell the Bitcoin story as much as just like, first come because you get paid. And then over time, you learn about Bitcoin, because that's the asset that it is. 100%. And one of the most interesting things that we've seen over the past few months is we are actually onboarding new users to Bitcoin that have never owned any before. And what's so interesting

Starting point is 00:21:25 about this is because they are not buying Bitcoin for the monetary philosophy, or the investment thesis. Obviously, we're big believers in that. But users are coming to Fountain and buying Bitcoin for the first time just to support their favorite shows. And what's really interesting is they do they come back and do this again. So every couple of weeks, they're topping up every month, they're topping up buying more Bitcoin, and purely using it for its application, not for its investment thesis or monetary philosophy yeah it's fascinating to start thinking about essentially completely free instantaneous micro payments that are being done across the lightning network where it is allowing two people who don't know each other to transact in a automated way via this

Starting point is 00:22:09 idea of streaming money like that was a utopian dream early on and now you all have created this way to do it uh and the part that i like about it is and you don't know who the other person is if the podcaster's paying the audience they have no clue who it is right could be a uh middle-aged woman in the midwest could be a young teenager in indonesia like it could be literally anybody uh but they're allowed to transact on this open system in a very unique way uh and then vice versa is if you're the podcaster receiving money you have no clue who's giving it to you right and so uh it creates this like new digital economy uh that looks a little different than anything that we've ever seen before right it used to be you'd have to do business development or

Starting point is 00:22:56 you'd have to like you know what's your name your bank details your address whatever and now i can send you any material amount of money uh you don't have to do that now yeah it's incredibly exciting and i think we're even with what we're doing with fountain i think we are just scratching the surface of what's possible and I think the opportunities are endless it will just take creativity in terms of how we can set up different systems that at the end of the day incentivize better content because that's what it's all about again if I see that you've boosted 50,000 sats on an episode that's such high signal there is no higher signal than that because it's money you know you've put your money behind that boost and so yeah that's what I think is so exciting about

Starting point is 00:23:39 this system. Yeah, it's, it's absolutely fascinating. And is the idea that you can take this streaming money concept and bring it to pretty much anything over time, but you all are laser focused on on audio? Yeah, so we're really excited about audio, we think it's such an amazing medium, because you have the person speaking to you in your ear. And there's been studies that have shown how powerful that is compared to other mediums like video or words. So we're really excited and focused on audio. But the interesting thing about podcasting is people think of a podcast as audio that you listen to, but a podcast is just content hosted on an RSS feed. So it doesn't have to be just audio. One of the things that we're looking at, as part of the podcasting

Starting point is 00:24:24 2.0 community is things like live streams, things like adding video. So you can think about hosting the live stream of this show and you see the boost coming in in real time. But then when the episode turns into an episode that sits there, you'll be able to go back and see those boosts. So the live stream becomes a podcast after the live streams ended. So there's a lot more we can do, but we're starting with audio just because we believe in it as a medium. Yeah. There's a path to this being a very, very, very large business opportunity, but also a complete paradigm change in the way that content is put onto the internet and the way that capital flows, right?

Starting point is 00:25:05 If you really think about some unique way, Mr. Beast grew his audience by giving money to the audience. It wasn't to everyone. It was just to the people in the video, right? Walks to the store, hey, buy everything you can and grab it 60 seconds and I'll pay for it.

Starting point is 00:25:22 Here's a Lamborghini or whatever. And in some way, the transfer of value was really powerful for him to build his audience. But imagine if he could give every person who watches one of his videos some economic value. Exactly. And think about the biggest podcaster in the world, Joe Rogan.

Starting point is 00:25:40 How did he grow? He grew through his clips on YouTube. And what you can actually do in Fountain is you can create clips from episodes and then podcasters and other Fountain users can boost the clip. So you can actually, one, earn from creating clips, but the podcaster can incentivize their audience to create clips, which is ultimately going to

Starting point is 00:26:04 lead to growth. And what I think is so fascinating about this is take an hour and a half episode of a podcast. The moment that you think as the podcaster is the best moment to create as a clip might not be the same moment as me, might not be the same moment as the third person that listens. And so by taking that power of clipping, giving it to the listener, incentivizing it financially, I think we're going to see massive growth for podcasters that can jump on this and actually do it effectively. Yeah. I, uh, I tend to agree. And I think, um, people are drastically underestimating this. Like when I first saw this idea of podcasting 2.0 and kind of streaming, my first reaction was like, I don't want the audience to send me money. Right. Like, like I I'm

Starting point is 00:26:48 fine. Like keep your Bitcoin. Right. It was kind of like my general approach to it. Uh, but then when we started talking and I was like, Oh, wait a second, you can invert this in, like you can stream backwards, I was like, this is so much bigger than just, do they pay? Do you pay? It's a payment technology innovation that is now brought to a sector where payments just previously weren't possible. If my podcast was sitting on iTunes or Spotify outside of me being like, Hey, here's my Venmo ID. Like, you know, if anyone liked this episode, go ahead and Venmo me. Like that'd be super weird. Uh, I probably get a lot of weird messages. Uh, and so having it done in this way not only one allows everyone who doesn't have access to venmo to participate but also two

Starting point is 00:27:30 there's a streaming component and and just feels more kind of digitally native and and uh more effective as well exactly and the difference between you asking somebody to go and send you money on paypal versus press the boost button in the player and this works both ways as well it's just it's a massive difference yeah i completely agree um where can we send people to try this so if you're a podcaster or you simply just want to listen to podcasts where should we send them yeah so you can download fountain on ios and android we're live on both platforms and if you're a podcaster and you want to find out more about the podcaster wallet or our promotions offering just go to fountain.fm or you can just send me an email oscar at fountain.fm

Starting point is 00:28:14 awesome and then where can people find you and nick on on twitter yeah so you can find us on twitter my twitter is mary oscar and nix is just nick molster so yeah give us a follow give us a dm and we're always open to trying out new creative ways to apply this tool that we have which is the incredible tool of streaming money yeah and i don't know if i said this but literally i found so compelling i invested in the business and uh we're gonna put the podcast up on this so that people can participate as well uh and uh if you are listening to the podcast every day you should do it on fountain because you may earn some money we'll uh we'll be announcing more soon but uh i think it'll be pretty effective for people to uh to use fountain as their main player uh whether

Starting point is 00:28:56 listen to our podcast or other podcasts but but ours for sure we'll we'll be on there and streaming money to people awesome all right guys thank you so much for uh for listening i appreciate uh you coming in here and uh and talking about i'm super excited to see people's reaction once i want to start using fountain thanks paul thanks so much for listening to today's episode i really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to palmscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with

Starting point is 00:29:34 over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to palmscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode. Thank you.

The Pomp Podcast - #1014 Oscar Merry On Pioneering Listen To Earn With Bitcoin

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