This Week in Startups - E1096: Podcasting State of the Union featuring Overcast’s Marco Arment & Oxford Road’s Dan Granger

Episode Date: August 14, 2020

Follow Marco: https://twitter.com/marcoarment Download Overcast: https://overcast.fm Follow Oxford Road: https://twitter.com/Oxford_Road Follow Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis Thanks to our partners... SendPro Online from Pitney Bowes - Try it free for 30 days and get a free 10-pound scale at https://pb.com/twist LinkedIn Marketing - Get $100 off your first advertising campaign at https://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups Vanta - $1k off your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist

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go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. And Vanta. compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. Hey, everybody, it's this week in startups, and I'm really excited about today's podcast, because I've got two of the smartest people in podcasting, and one of them makes the greatest podcasting app, in my opinion.

His name is Marco Arment, and he created the Overcast podcasting app, which if you don't use or pay for, and you're a power podcast user, you don't know what you're missing. It's literally like every innovative feature that you see in every other podcasting app was an overcast six months ago. It's basically the roadmap for every other app. Welcome to the program for the first time, Marco Arment. How are you? Thank you very much.

Nice to be here. and thanks for that amazingly awesome introduction. I hope I can live up to it. Well, I mean, I just, you know, when I look at a product, I think the thing that, you know, you look back on after investing in 200 companies, when you see great product, it's undeniable. And I know you worked on Tumblr as well. What was your role at Tumblr?

I don't remember, but I know you did very well. And you had major contributor to that, correct? Yeah, I was basically like David's employee the whole time, like as he was starting it. So I was the lead programmer. I was doing a lot of the back end stuff, a lot of the server stuff, and it was basically just me and David for a while. And then we eventually hired more people. Yeah. And that was another one of those transcendent products where you just looked at it and you're like, wow, the amount of craft and nuance in the product. And when I saw, you know, and no offense to Spotify podcast, which is fine, or, you know, Apple's podcasting app. It's great.

There's a lot of great apps out there, but what's really, I think, unique about Overcast is you made it for power users. Correct me if I'm wrong, because you can make lists of your podcast, you can put them into subgroups, you can change the speed of each podcast. You can do the speed based on each podcast. So if you're listening to me or Ben Shapiro, you wouldn't put it on more than one X. But if you were listening to somebody who talks, you know, like Sam Harris, you know, Sam Harris needs a 1.6. and then you also have the smart speed button where chops out the blank spots instead of audio doing that.

Then you have the sleep timer which can end at the end of the podcast or 30 seconds. I mean, the feature list is just so brilliant. Tell me about the start of why you created Overcast. Well, I mainly made it because I'm a nerd, I'm a podcast listener,

I'm a programmer, and I wanted to do it my way because that's what nerds do. And so I made an app that was like my ideal podcast app. But also I wanted to make a stake in the ground. That at the time, the trend was already starting. An Overcast has been running, it's been out since 2014, and the trend was already very clear then that there would be efforts to slowly lock down podcasting into Wald Gardens. And I wanted to really make sure that I could

put a stake in the ground and make the podcast client ecosystem even more diverse than it already was to just make it harder. Because if the ecosystem is really diverse among a whole bunch of different apps that are all just using the open RSS based ecosystem, then no app is going to have an easy time coming in there and locking that down. And so that's part of why I decided, not only am I going to make my preferred app, but I'm going to make it try to have a wide appeal and make it free up front, which at the time, almost none of the other third-party apps were free. Yeah. But I make it free up front and figure out some other way to make money down the road, which I went through a bunch of stuff and eventually did. And there's a pro version. And I think the pro version lets you turn off

ads if you want to. And I turn the ads back on, by the way. Thank you. Because I want to see who's advertising because I'm just curious. It's like a discovery thing. If people will pay and we did some experimenting and paying for it for this podcast and it was great. We got like some really targeted users.

I was like, I want to actually see the ads because I'm curious who's investing in their podcast. Also on the program today is Dan Granger. And he runs a firm called Oxford Road. Now, if you're a civilian podcast listener, you may not know what that is. But Dan co-hosted this week in marketing, which was a podcast I started when I started a podcasting network in 2011 that I eventually shut down just to focus on this one because I couldn't find enough great hosts and couldn't manage all these big personalities. Welcome to the podcast. Dan. Explain to people what Oxford Road does. So we're an ad agency. I think the unique thing about us is we got in very early to the podcast space pre-serial.

And we've worked with some of the best brands. One of the things we were. were able to take advantage of was the renaissance that was happening in audio at the same time as the renaissance that was happening with D to C brands. So we were very early with companies like Dollar Shave Club, Legal Zoom, you know, companies that now we all know, but at the time what they were doing seemed very novel. So we were able to kind of ride both waves at the same time and build a business very fast that was able to serve both of those constituencies and to great a fact. And to great effect. And so we've, you know, been able to expand. It's not just podcast, but that is our signature dish. And we're really an audio first agency. Okay. And so I brought both of these gentlemen on the

podcast, one from the standard side and the consumer consumption side and one from the business side in terms of advertising to talk about the state of podcasting in 2020. As many of you know, I started this podcast under a different name, Calacanuscast, 12 years ago, I think, and 11 years ago for this one we've done over a thousand episodes, but I think it's a good time to pause because there's been a lot of activity. I want to start with the big seismic event, which Marco you alluded to, which was, hey, this was built on open standards by a friend of ours, Dave Weiner, who led RSS, a really simple syndication, is that right? And then he added an attachment, the ability in your RSS fee to add an attachment. That was the key moment that enabled podcast. And correct,

Marco? Yep. And ever since then, it's grown and nobody has been able to strangle it or control it. So just like the web, just like blogs, which actually blogs has been kind of deprecated. We'll get into that. But the web and email and of course podcasting have exploded all on this open standard. Marco, when you saw the announcement that Joe Rogan had, has his show, I believe, licensed, not bought. for what looks like, man, $50,

$100 million for some number of years. I don't think all the details are out. You were like, F this, I think, on Twitter, was your quote. Explain why that is so problematic to you and to the industry.

The main thing is that podcasting has gotten to where it is and is as great and awesome as it is for all the reasons that anybody who's ever heard of RSS should already be familiar with. You know, it's this wonderful open ecosystem with a wide variety of producers and consuming apps and this

great ecosystem that isn't controlled by a single entity for the most part. You know, Apple's kind of an asterisk in certain ways, but for the most part, it's not really controlled by an individual entity. And you can compare it to something like YouTube, where if you want to make video that matters at all today, it has to be on YouTube, basically. And so that you have this one company, this one platform controlling the by far, like the majority of this really important medium. And you look at doing stuff on the web. And if you do stuff on the web, you are really beholden to Facebook for traffic. And you're really beholden to Google for, like, for inbound search.

And so you had these like these couple of massive companies that control a massive part of your business. And like in the case of YouTube, it's even worse than the web because you have to do all of your business on their platform as well. And podcasting doesn't have that right now. And it never has. Apple has been the directory of choice, and Apple still has the largest app to consume podcasts, but they have really been fairly benevolent in their ruling of podcasts.

They've really taken a very light hand to it and have really embraced and empowered the open egos of as much as they really could. So this one company having this massive share hasn't really been a problem for us. And then everybody who's not Apple is all kind of, you know, working in the same ecosystem for the most part. And then the difference is that Spotify did what a few other companies have tried to do before and have met with mixed success, which is to kind of create a walled garden of podcasts that tries to become the default way people listen to podcasts. And that normally wouldn't go very far. But the difference here is that with a combination of Spotify's immense existing market share, people listening to music using their apps, and also an immense amount of money they've put into it, Spotify has been able to not only acquire a pretty big chunk of market share pretty quickly, although it's not as big as most people think it is, but it is still a substantial market share.

But also they've been able to now really put a pretty big push of buying exclusive content for Spotify. Right. And this is where it becomes tricky. Because if you're just trying to get listeners, then everyone's still playing on basically the same footing. Everyone's still, you know, there have been a couple of premium services before that had inclusive content, but they weren't very big. They didn't go very far. So for the most part, you know, an app like Overcast, like my app, it can it can compete pretty easily as well as any other app that's like Overk. I mean, there's hundreds of podcast apps out there. And we could all basically play the same catalog of content. And so it's this wonderful ecosystem of all this creativity and all these wonderful tools and different apps for different preferences. It's with a few exceptions, very privacy respective, very creator-friendly. It puts a lot of control in the creator's hands. Yes. The creator gets to decide, hey, I have this RSS feed. You can use it under these rules. And if you break those rules, I can restrict your access to it.

When we get back from this quick break, Dan, I want to take. your temperature on what you think the Joe Rogan Spotify deal is. And if that is going to become an ongoing trend and what it means for the business of the open source, open platform world of podcasting when we get back on this week's startups. All right, with SendPro online from Pitney Bowes, you can simply print posted champs and shipping labels even when working remotely, which, let's face it, a lot of us are doing for as low as just $4.99 a month, you'll have access and discounts of up to 40% off USPS priority now. And you're now going to get up to 62% off UPS daily rates.

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That's pb.com slash twist. Experience a savings in your shipping costs with a free trial of SendPro online from Pitney Bowes. All right, Marco Arment is here. He's M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T on the Twitter. He's pretty active. And he has a website, Marco.org. And of course, he makes the best podcasting app. And my personal opinion, the one I use my daily.

I'll use Spotify from time to time. I'll use iTunes, the Apple podcast. But Overcast is my default, mainly because I love the queue and I love the custom settings. The queue to me is everything. I just start at the top of my queue. I work my way down. and I have my paid podcast in one area. It's just a great product.

Dan, when you hear Marco talk about, hey, you know, Spotify now has this big chip stack. I'm adding that piece. And they're going to take something like Joe Rogan, which is, I think, the number one podcast in the world, and they're going to say, you know what, it's now going to, we're going to control it. We're going to control it 100%.

Maybe there'll be clips here or there, but no more RSS feed. It's not going to be available on other players. It's an exclusive. Whereas when they bought, Bill Simmons's company, I think, for 200 or so, 250. They said, hey, the podcast will almost all be available, still on RSS. We may cherry pick some content. What do you think about this change?

We've only seen a couple of examples. And then there's Luminary, which I think is failing. Pretty hard, actually, because, I mean, there's so much great content out there that, for me, like Russell Simmons, I'm interested in maybe listening to Russell Simmons, but I'm not interested in paying for Russell, not Russell Simmons, Russell Brand. Yeah,

I think that they're the one that is the easiest for everybody to see how that one's going. I think there's probably a lot of situations like Luminary, we just don't know as much about their financials. But to get back to the Rogan thing, I mean, look, to me, this is another domino to fall that, for those of us that have been working in this field for a long time,

you know, a decade or longer, some of us, you know, it's been getting gentrified for a while. And, you know, I think to some extent this is, this harkens back to like Howard Stern moving from terrestrial radio to Sirius or XM at the time. But I think it suggests a general trend. And this really started in 2018. You know, the shot across the bow that I saw was when I heart picked up stuff media for like 55 million. And then one by one,

you keep seeing these things happen. Now, Rogan, because he's top dog, that one's getting the most headlines, but I think this is just one in a succession of many. And unfortunately, I think that it is, unfortunately, I think that this is the new way that this is going to go. You know, this is Starbucks moving into the hipster town. And everybody goes, oh, man, it's getting so commercial. It's going to happen. It's going to ruin some things that we love about podcast. It's going to open up opportunities as well. And I think, what is the opportunity to open up? Yeah, potentially better, listener experiences, you know, you've got real horsepower behind groups like Spotify that are coming in and can actually, you know, like how long have people been complaining about discoverability

and recommendations, you know, how about navigability being able to go, you know, you can't talk to the thing right now, but, and we may talk about this later in our conversation here today, but, you know, think about the opportunity with connected voice. And what's going to happen as that industry keeps emerging and what real players are going to be able to do to evolve the listening experience. And they're also just going to be able to resource some programs that is really, really hard in kind of the rag tag way that most of us have come to love the industry. So I think it's both. I think there's a good and a bad. But what you have to understand is that there's really two worlds that are starting to split off here.

This place was built by venture capital back. startups. You know, I was at the beginning and we launched brands like Dollar Shave Club, zip recruiter, Blue Apron, Meandies. These were companies that came in and we put them on podcast because frankly, they couldn't afford to do a lot else other than, you know, search. And that's why we've had all these crazy promo codes and vanity URLs for all these reasons, because these are performance marketers. They're counting customers when they buy the ads. Now, that's not going to be what gets podcast to the next level. That's what got us here.

What gets the ecosystem to the next level is when they get brand dollars. So Coors Light, which is a sponsor of our podcast now, and I'm popping open to Chris Porz Light ones in a while. You know what I thought when I saw it, Marco, and I think I may have respond to you on Twitter about this is what I like about this is I think it now turns, I don't want to see, you know, the top 200 podcasts all get taken off the market. But if one or two get picked off and they become platform specific, it's almost. like, you know, Issa Ray going from YouTube to HBO and having a bigger budget. Okay, fine. But it opens up

another slot because the number one podcaster is gone. We all get to move up one in the ranking. So as long as it doesn't become a huge trend, if people want to cash out like Howard Stern did and lose, you know, because I think Joe Rogan loses audience in this. He's going to lose audience. So, Marco, what do you think about that as like a sort of counter? And is it, is it okay for people to get cherry picked? Or do you think we're actually in an existential? problem where what happened with RSS and blogs was Twitter, I don't think, supports RSS anymore. Medium doesn't support RSS, and RSS players all went, all the RSS readers went away, except for maybe FeedBarner.

I mean, RSS, there's still a, you know, community of nerds like me who use it every day. But, you know, certainly it isn't as big as it used to be. And I think that's largely because the world of blogs isn't as big as it used to be. and that has lots of effects or causes to it. I think you can point directly to social networks and timelines being the way people consume and produce most information these days as probably the biggest reason. But going back to your question, I think, you know, there is some degree of certainly audience loss. Like, you know, when Howard Stern moved to Sirius, he did, like I went with him, but most people

didn't go with him. He lost 90% of its audience. He went from 20, 30 million a day to like two. Right. And this is why, you know, when somebody like Rogan moves to a single app, he does have the advantage that Spotify is a big app. And by most numbers, Spotify seems to have something like 10% market share of podcast listening apps. And that's a lot. You know, that's, and they achieve that fairly quickly, so that's not nothing.

But that's not the entire market. Right. And people, people know from the world of video apps. Like, you know, if you want to watch your TV shows through an app, you have to have 17 different apps to watch all the shows you want to watch because every network and everything has a don't thing. Nobody wants that. Consumers hate that.

Nobody would accept that if they had much of a choice. And right now, podcasting has gone all this time where the vast majority of content people listen to can be accessed in one app. And it's even better. It can be one of like 100 apps. But it's like you can just have one app on your phone and hear all your podcasts. And so when. When one or two podcasts have been purchased and moved to exclusive deals with somebody,

they do lose a lot of audience. And we do, like, I hear from them from, you know, overcast customers. I hear from them as, you know, I see people online complaining to them that they can't listen in their podcast app anymore. And the biggest thing I hear is they mostly stop listening to that, to those shows. I think that's the bottom line. Like, didn't, like Russell Brand, and we have the corollary of Howard Stern, like Russell Brand, like he must have a fraction of the listeners since he went to Luminary, right?

What was the size of the check you think it took for? Does anybody know the details of the Joe Rogan deal? And then what does Luminary pay people to move their podcasts and lose 98% of their audience? Do you know, Marco? Do you know, Dan? Yeah, I don't know the Luminary numbers. I mean, look, let's be honest. That show was not a much of a known quantity in the ecosystem.

previously. It could have been, though, because he gets great guests. Yeah, I mean, but look, that's the problem with so much accessibility on this stuff, though, is there's a million celebrities that have a podcast now. There's a new one born every day, and they all have amazing guests, right? So you've got a bit of an overchoice problem, and I think it makes it. And so what you see happening is when you talk to a celebrity and they're like, oh, I'm thinking about starting a podcast, but they don't realize is they're going to have their famous friends on and they're going to get 20,000 people listening and they're not going to make any money for a long time if they're doing it that way. Yeah. But I, you know, I think with Rogan, he had crossed over. I mean,

he's on a whole other level that really nobody else has seen, except for maybe like an IRA glass. And, you know, good for him for cashing out and getting his money. And I don't know. I think there were some projections and is probably, I suspect, north of a hundred million that he saw that he's going to see for that. But what is it? Did we know the duration of it? Is it a five-year deal? a four-year deal? Ooh, it was a long time. I haven't looked at it. I'm guessing it's going to be like a five-year deal.

And they just represent it. Do you think they'll take the ads out of it, Dan? That's what we're waiting to find out. I got some clients that are hoping that he doesn't, as am I. But again, like, that's, I think it's one step at a time. Like, step one is like move them over, show that you did it, right? And then they're going to have to figure out if they're really going to push the revenue aspect of this because right now everybody's competing for share right everybody's trying to show that

they've got critical mass they've got real numbers now when they actually have to start justifying the purchase uh they may find that subscriptions they can give away 90% of the audience they get on their platform and only give it to premium subscribers and they may need to do that math later but i think they're going to have to let the dust settle see how many people follow them over see what those numbers look like and how much they can get from advertising whether or not that pencils without a subscription component, I'd be surprised if it doesn't land in a hybrid model. All right. When we get back from this quick break, I want to talk to Marco about video podcasts.

People have been reticent to do video because, let's face it, it's 10 times as much work to do video. But I wonder if you're thinking about with Overcast and, you know, now everybody's zooming and Zencaster is going to start, which is a recording tool for a recording podcast, has got a video beta. They're working on Josh over there. So I want to know what you'd think. of video in relation to the sort of next decade of podcasting we're back on the Sweden

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All right, we're talking about the state of podcasting with Dan Granger. He is at Oxford Road. That's Oxford underscore Road on the Twitter. And of course, Marker Armand, who is very famous for being just a product genius. You probably know Tumblr, which was just transcended in the micro blogging space, really defined it along with Twitter. And then Overcast, which I think, what's the footprint of Overcast now? I think you show how many paid users you have on like the page with who's paying. Do you still do that?

It's just like I show like how many have upgraded this week. So it's never like a total, but it is a running number. But percentage wise, market share wise, by Libson's numbers, which I think are the most broad numbers that are publicly released anywhere. By Libson's numbers, I have roughly like two and a half percent market share of the podcast space, which sounds like a little. And it is percentage wise a little, but it's actually one of the biggest apps by having it put you in the top 10, right?

For sure. Yeah, I think I think it's putting like the top three actually. It depends on how you're ranking. But yeah. I'm very happy with it. And what is the, and then the model is, I don't even know what I pay. Is it 50 bucks a year, 30 bucks a year? Not even.

So it's free for almost any use. But if you want to be able to turn off the ads for podcasts, I don't run ads for anything else. I run ads for other podcasts that are just little visual banners in the app that if you want to get more listeners to your show, you can buy an ad and overcast and promote your podcast. It's a native ad, of course. It's a podcast player.

And so if you want to turn off those ads as a listener, you can pay $10 a year. That's it. It's only $10 a year. I feel like I'd pay $10 a month for it. You can if you want. Okay. Change my subscription.

Well, I mean, you just think about it. I use podcasting apps at least an hour. I use your app at least an hour a day. It's always in my top three. It's like Twitter, my superhuman, and then overcast on my top three apps in my weekly report on my iPhone. When we left for the break, I wanted to know how you think about video today and where that's going.

Are you seeing more of it? Do users want it? I like people are doing video clips now. What do you think about video? I think it's a totally different thing. And it always has been and it always will be. You know, right now we're doing a lot of video stuff because a lot of people are at home.

A lot of podcast listening did go down. I think I saw, I forget the exact numbers, it was something like a 15% decline during the worst of the U.S. quarantine this past spring and then it slowly has come back up again since then to the point where, now we're pretty much at pre-quarantine levels of almost all metrics I have. But although that's scary in a different way.

But anyway, for the most part, I think video has always been separate. And video podcasts have always been something that you create for different reasons and that you consume in different places and different contexts. One of the reasons why people love podcasts, audio podcasts, is that they can listen to them while their body is busy doing something. Their eyes may be busy doing something, but that their brain and their ears can listen. So, you know, obviously the biggest thing people usually do listen to podcasts is commuting or otherwise driving. But also you can, like, I listen all the time when I'm walking my dog or even just doing dishes.

Or we can put on a podcast while my wife and I are having breakfast together and we can just listen to a show together. It's, there's ways that you can play podcasts while you are otherwise like visibly occupied, like your eyes are occupied doing something else. Right, which has always been the magic of, you know, like even Howard Stern or back in the day, other, you know, national personalities. Yeah, it's in the background at work. People are working in a factory. They're working at their office. They could have it in the background. Maybe somebody gets upset. Maybe somebody doesn't. But does that mean you would never, because we have a video feed. I think it does pretty good. Do you think you'll ever support video or do you support video now? I never noticed. I don't support video now. And I don't really plan to. I mean, unless things really radically change, I could obviously reconsider. but right now I don't I don't see the need for it I think I can make a I can make a much better app that is much more focused on what it does well by only doing audio because that's what most people want other podcast player I think all right so Dan going over to you with video I have recently been investing in our YouTube presence uh in fact like we're doing clips and we've got 140,000 subscribers or something we get a nice 10 20 30 000 video views each each episode and

you know it's obviously some of them break out over time. And I'm thinking I'm going to keep investing there because we do this to build deal flow for my angel investing business and because I love doing it. It's not really a business as such as a standalone business. What is the what is the percentage of advertisers who care about the video component? Do they care at all? Do you video podcasts have an advantage over audio only ones? And what do you think video plays into the future of all this? Okay. So long and short, I think it's a good idea for content creators. You know, If I were Marco, I'm not sure I'd do anything different than what he's doing.

But if I'm you, I would absolutely, you know, I'm big into Omni Channel. I think that some of the most successful shows that help advertisers grow and really drive performance are the ones that don't limit their distribution possibilities. And so, you know, some of the best performing shows that are out there are simulcasts through everywhere that people get podcasts, but then also on YouTube. Because for the same reason that you say, you know, Rogan's going to live. lose people when he goes to Spotify. People are partial to their primary platform. And as such, you're going to benefit from being somewhere that they like to get their content. So it's not that

you're necessarily doing something visually interesting. It's just that there's people that want to consume it that way. So give them what they want. What do you think about these pop-up podcast like talk products? Marco, are you on Clubhouse yet? or some of these other ones that are going to like do more spontaneous audio. Because for me, podcasting is really special, I think, because people who don't feel comfortable in front of a camera, I did TV work for a long time, so I don't have a problem with it. But podcasting makes it really easy for people who are shy,

I don't want to be on camera to do this. And it also takes out 90, I would say at least 95% of the work. Editing and handling video files is just a disaster. So what are your thoughts on those new spontaneous audio ones and the state of the creation tools because I always thought overcast pro should be a podcast creation app where I could be listening to a podcast and overcast and then maybe build a podcast myself. Have you ever thought about getting into the podcast creation business or this kind of like listen together or clubhouse type features?

So what's the disclaimer that I haven't seen clubhouse yet because I'm not cool enough to be on the beta and frankly that that's wise I wouldn't probably even try it too busy doing my own stuff. But with that caveat, I think, so these are actually two very different questions here. So question number two, which I'll take first, of course, is whether I would have creation and overcast. And I think, again, this is like a very different area of a product. And the, I think the biggest reason to have creation be bundled with a player is if your goal is to make a big ad network and use the players metrics to inform the ad network. And we see that a lot. We see that throughout the industry. Obviously, Spotify has done that by buying Anchor.

that's part of the, that's part of the thing there. Some smaller players do it as well. But I'm not really interested in that, in making that kind of business. That's not just where my passions are or my skill set, frankly. So I don't think,

I think I'd rather just keep Overcast being a player. And I do also make production tools, but they're not part of Overcast. They're their own things. What are those? So I make one called Forecast. That's probably the big one. It's a post-production tool that lets you add.

it's a very fast MP3 encoder unless you add chapter markers. Oh, we use it all the time. We love that. Yes, you do. Did you come out with the chapter? Was that your innovation chapters? No, I didn't make chapters. I did take advantage of a couple of parts of the spec that no one else was really doing to make them a little bit more interesting and a little bit,

there's a little bit more dynamic functionality you can do with forecast and overcast. That's not yet why they support another players. You can have a chapter that shows up without appearing in the list. You can just display an image or a link in a certain time range, but not have to be like a semantic chapter per se. Anyway, that's an nerdy thing. So it's almost like a, it's like a shadow chapter. Yeah, basically. Yeah, I like that a lot.

Yeah, I've had so many people pitch me the ideas about we need to extend the podcasting standards and build and support to all these clients so that we can do rich content. I'm like, okay, what does that mean? And what they describe, what they want to do usually boils down to being able to show metadata at a certain time range. It's like, well, you can already do that, you know. Like, we have that already. It's called chapters.

It's supported in almost every app. But nobody uses it. Like, is it in Apple Podcasts doesn't do it? Spotify doesn't do chapters. I never see chapters. Spotify doesn't, Spotify is not a great podcast. No, it's like, by these metrics. But Apple does support chapters.

They have forever in the M4A format and they recently had an MP3 chapter support, which is what forecast generates. It's not every app supports all of the. the features of chapters, but almost every app supports at least the basics. And so it is a great way to display timed metadata along with playback. And it's also respectful of the content creator, because when people hit that chapter, you haven't ripped up my podcast and put it on your servers, and now I can't see data on listens, right? We're just directing people to it. It's all client side. This is all happening client side. Like you as the creator bake the chapters into the file as ID3 tags,

and then the player plays it and it's whatever you specified and if you don't put chapter there you gotta do a better job you gotta do a better job and overcast of like explaining people that it's there because you have to swipe left

to see it I think it should be the default like when you're playing if chapters exist why doesn't it just show chapters by default is it just like some hidden Easter egg right now?

No well I mean it's it shows them kind of like above the scrubber bar and a little like chapter forward button but admittedly yeah the now playing screen needs a lot of work this is an area where I'm working quite a bit actually. I love your now playing screen. I'll be totally honest. I love that I can

very quickly change the speed. I love your forward in advance. But I just think chapters is, I would love for chapters where if you clicked on them, it would open to a transcript or it opened to a rich transcript of links. What do you think of, Dan, clips? And are you thinking about clips because we are doing a lot of work on doing clips on social media? And as you know, I put in my second reply on Twitter, the advertisement for that podcast to give them extra play. I want you to talk about clips of podcasts when we get back on the screen start. All right. This deal from Vanta is so good. I want to start my ad read with it. Vanta is giving our twist listeners. Think about this, a thousand dollars off their first SOC2 by going to Vanta.com slash twist. That's not a joke. One thousand dollars off

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this going, so I want you to take advantage of it right now. Vanta.com slash twist. All right, listen, podcasts are taking over. Why are they taking over? I'm going to ask my guess in a minute. My humble opinion is, man, social media is just a place for fighting and bickering and just bots and stupidity in the overwhelming majority of the noise. But when you want to have a long-considered conversation like we're having now, podcasts are such a reprieve from the inaneness of social media and the lack of depth. And we kind of get back to expertise. And boy, do we have expertise today?

Dan Granger runs Oxford Road, which is one of, I don't know, one of the top three agencies in podcast thing. I mean, you kind of pioneered this all. Yeah, I think that's fair. Thank you. and you started working with all those D to C direct consumer companies, but now it's expanding. I'm curious what you think of clips and what you think of sort of micro content

and this growing trend where people are clipping up the podcasts and people maybe consuming little pieces of it. Right. Well, first of all, as a promotional tool, you know, samples are always the best if you can do it. And when you're in entertainment of any kind of product, you want to show a trailer, You want to give people a taste of what they're going to get if they come for the whole thing, right? So I think as a promotional vehicle all day long, everywhere you can get it where there's a like audience that might have an interest in that. I think you're touching on something that's very important when we talk about what the next revolution is going to be in the space because the thing has to keep evolving.

And I am predicting that I think multi-length content is going to be a big deal. Wait, to find what multi-length content is. basically not every show has to be an hour long. Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah. The show ends when it's not interesting, which is how Howard Stern started doing it. Right.

Joe Rogue and I do it, everybody. Right, but at the same time, you know, if you, I don't know how far you've gone with Alexa and flash briefings, but I think there's a very interesting model that's starting to occur, where you can actually string together little samples of your favorite news outlets and get them in bite sizes

and through voice command, tell them what you want next, put them in any order that you want, and it's in constant rotation and being refreshed all the time. Now, that hasn't really connected yet with the personality-driven ecosystem that is podcast. Right now, it's very focused on news, but I think that's going to change. I'm calling that right now. I think that's going to be a big, big deal because, look, I may want to hear everything that you have to say this week, and yet I've only got 10 minutes for you.

Can I get a best of? Can I get it curated so that I can have some of so I can have the highlights or I can pick and choose more. I think the best of and the clips is kind of interesting. The thing I don't like, which I'm seeing more of Marco, is people taking my show and other shows, clipping them and then inserting advertising in between them. And I think Stitcher did this to me at some point. I went bonkers on the Stitcher people.

I was like, guys, what are you doing? like you're put your because they were selling ads in front of the podcast and you didn't get a taste and I didn't get my beak wet and I'm like hey guys you're and the reason I found out about is because one of their salespeople I think I'm listening if it wasn't Stitcher I'm sorry but it was one of them and I and I turned out I knew somebody who was running and I said if you're going to if you're going to have your salespeople saying they're selling ads before my podcast or in between my podcast and this week in tech or whatever it is like I'm I'm going to block you from using our feed and I'm going to send you a legal letter

and they backed down and they said, well, what would it take? I said, don't do it. I don't want your ads anywhere near. I don't want you selling it. I don't want 30% of what you sell. I don't want 100% of what you sell. I don't want you selling against my ads.

What are your thoughts on this sort of growing trend? Well, the good thing is that that has mostly not happened recently. I think you're right. That was Ditcher back in the day and they did stop doing it eventually because it caused so much blowback. But the good thing is that...

I got it right. It was Ditcher, right. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's right. The good thing is that now you are in full control for the most part. That platforms like Spotify, I'm pretty sure either already has announced plans to do that or at least when you sign up for Spotify to have your podcast playable in Spotify, you agree to let them do things like that. And that's why like, you know, apps like Overcast, I don't have to ask everybody to play their podcasts. I don't have to

have you opt in and agree to my terms. I'm just reading your RSS feed and playing what's there. And if I don't, like, if I don't inject my own ads in the middle of your show, that nobody has any problem with that because that's fine, right? I'm just playing the RSS feed that's there. But if you have a platform that's going to start doing that to your content, that's going to really, like, modify it like that, then they have to get your permission by most interpretations of the copyright issues here. So the good thing is that those platforms, if they still exist at all,

tend to be opt in. The bad thing is that if Spotify gets so much market share that, you pretty much have to opt in to have your stuff reach a big audience, then you basically lose control of yourself. And this is the YouTube problem, right? Like, if you want to have video out there in the world that anybody sees, you pretty much have to agree to whatever YouTube dictates. Right. And so, again, like, this is why I try very hard to not let this happen in the podcast space. If any app gets, like, significant market share and they start dictating terms, we're all going to have to agree to them. And that's not a good point.

place to be for creators or listeners, frankly. And so that's why it's so important to keep this ecosystem as open as possible and to actively fight against, you know, entities like Spotify that are, that are going the other direction. Yeah, I mean, I think, I know Daniel pretty well at Spotify. And, you know, I gave him some advice on the early on with the podcasting stuff, just our email, like, hey, you know, this, you know, you should probably do this. And we were part of their beta, which was very nice of them to include us. And I guess we're going to be part of the video thing when they open it up. they're not doing you a favor

well here's the thing i the way i look at it is as long as they allow i would prefer they opt people into any advertising program um and just me because you know defaults matter we always say that in this industry the default matters and if daniel were to do it where he defaulted it where he started putting ads against my stuff and i didn't have a choice i would write a blog post and i would say how wrong he is and i would challenge every other podcast

to do that. So he's a reasonable person who I think respects content creators. So I don't have a problem with exclusive content, but I would have a problem with like you this is why YouTube makes me a little nervous even investing in their ecosystem is because you're right Marco, like they could just

delist you when you spent a year building on it and you're just like oh where's my channel and then you had no recourse. You can't even, there's nobody to talk. I mean, I can. I'm Jason Calcana's. I can email Susan Wojacki if I want to and you're going to respond or else I'm going to go ham, but on Twitter or something. But, you know, if you're just a civilian or somebody who's a small podcast, you can't get any recourse.

That's the problem with these big platforms, isn't it, Marga? Totally. I mean, the reason why podcasting is so great for creators and for listeners, but especially from the creator side is that there's basically three big things that ruin everything else that we don't have here yet. Distribution gatekeepers, ad tech. And I forgot the third one. No, ad tech is a good one because we don't have that. Like our ad tech is so primitive. Right.

That's a feature for me. Me too. And I fight to keep it that way. Well, I don't want you taking my data of my listeners. I don't want YouTube taking it. I don't want my users to give up any of their data. Oh, number three was algorithms. That's what it was.

So we don't have like recommendation algorithms that really control what people see and what they don't see. They exist in the podcast ecosystem, but they're not really major influencers in what people see. I like your, you have collections, right? you have like ranked lists and collections. Yeah, those are pretty much just top lists combined with like how many users are recommending them at any given time. And that's about it. And, you know, for the most part, yeah, for the most part, I'm doing a basic, you know,

for most, most shows are added by search by name. Most, most new podcast subscriptions are not happening by casually browsing the categories. They're happening by number one is searching for them by name. Yep. And number two is the recommendations of like listeners who like this will also like this. And that's just based on who subscribes to what. You also created, when I search, because I do this before I have a podcast, I got the Nicola, you know, the car company CEO on the public trade car company.

I searched for him in Overcast. And not only did it look through the podcast I subscribe to, it looked through all podcast descriptions. You do that, right? You have like an index of all search? Yeah, I have a full text search on the server side, yeah. See, this is the thing for discovery that's been amazing for me because the way you do it is so brilliant. Up top is, hey, he's been on this week. in tech or, you know, Nicola's been on, you know, this podcast. But then here are a podcast you

don't subscribe to that he's been on. So you have to create that entire search index and keep it maintained. See, this is a killer, killer feature. I love that feature. But were you the one who said your date is my liability? Yeah, pretty much. Like, you know, especially... Explain what you meant by that. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, ever since GDPR, I've taken an even larger privacy stance, but, and I'm actually going to go further in this direction, an upcoming version of Overcast. I'm going to probably anger some people, but I don't care. The idea here is, like, I don't want any private data. Like, if I can, like, private data should be treated like nuclear waste. Nobody should want to possess this. And if you can get away with doing

your job and having your company function without getting a piece of private information, you should not capture it. And so Overcast has gone very heavy in that direction. I was always, you know, pretty privacy focused. But, you know, in recent years, I've tried to to do as much as I can to get rid of as many email addresses as I can. I've stopped logging IP addresses anywhere, even like in server logs. There's just no IP logging, nothing based on IP addresses anywhere in the system. So you don't know what I listen to? If unless you have an email address in your account, then I could, you know, then it's sitting there in the database. But if you have an anonymous account, which is the default and it has been for some time, and you can convert

an email account to anonymous with one click, then I have no idea what the other thing you did. That was really smart is people were doing the old tracking pixel in their show notes. And I noticed, because I was listening to Scott Adams' podcast, which I like to listen to like all the people on the far right, or people on the far left. And it's one of the things I love about podcasting is I can listen to Rachel Maddo, Ben Shapiro, Sam Harris, you know, and Scott Adams and get like a view of the world in 15 minutes of each of their podcast that's incredibly diverse set of perspectives.

But when I looked at Scott Adams, he's always trying to hawk his books, like his influence books, but you turn those images off by default, you make me click to see them, right? That's right, yeah, because, you know, again, like I think ad tech really has ruined a number of things in other industries, and I try to keep it relatively at bay for podcasting. Now, there is the giant hole that when you download the podcast,

that download request is going to the publisher's servers, and they can do whatever they want with your IP address at that point. But I don't like any ability for them to track what's happening in my app without my knowledge, you want that my customer's knowledge. And so besides that download request that I really can't control for again copyright reasons.

Besides that, I try to block any attempt to track like when they've played the podcast, when the podcast has been viewed in the app, et cetera. That I think they have no right to and it opens up too many problems. So you could actually...

You can't cash my MP3 file because it's mine. But if I... If you automatically download it, it's on my hardware, then I'm not hitting it live, therefore they can't see that. And you could theoretically cache the show notes so that they don't know that they opened. That would be the thing you're referring to possibly doing?

Yeah. Oh, I mean, I already cash the show notes. They're just HTML. But like a lot of, a lot of, you know, packages would add tracking pickles, as you said, to the show notes. So that way, when the app displayed those show notes in a web view, it would load that image and send the tracking pixel info and give them another IP address. They would try to associate with the first one, et cetera.

It was a whole thing. So what is the new feature? that you're going to do to make it even more privacy? What's the new idea here? Well, podcasting has a pretty big problem in its ad tech world, and that is for GDPR compliance, you need people to opt in to being tracked. And there is no way to opt in to a podcast app to the tracking that's being done on a publisher server. And they can tell you once you've played the podcast, by the way, we do these things, like, you know, they could say that in the audio, they don't, but they could and they should.

But there's no way for you to know before you have already given them your IP address by downloading one of their files. And so what I'm working on is a way to disclose what hosts people's files and what services they're putting their files through and linked to their privacy policies right there in the app so that everybody can see before downloading the podcast. This podcast uses this tracking package, this stats package, this ad serving platform, etc. And here's their privacy policies. I'm not touching those stats packages.

I just put ours on AWS, and I've been having all those companies pitch me that they're going to be able to build all this data. I was like, no fucking way by letting you anywhere near those MP3 files. And then I was like, some advertisers was like, we'll pay you. But we're not going to do it unless you track all your customers. I told them to fuck off. I was like, I don't care. I don't need your money.

Like, I don't want you. It's kind of creepy. Anyway, Dan, I got to get you on this because you're on the inside of the business. And you want to have data and you want to have attribution. What do you think of Marcos's position and mine, which I'm. is kind of in the middle. I, you know, I would be fine with people opting into it, but I don't, I don't like these, you know, hardcore data, you know, intermediaries. Do you like those? Are clients putting pressure on you to do those? You know, in my world, we were talking earlier

about all the promo codes and vanity URLs, which is so archaic, right? It's ridiculous. And you have, I've never met with a company that didn't say we're a very data-driven organization, but like getting people to execute a survey that says, how did you hear about us properly is pulling teeth. And most of the time people get it wrong. So there does need to be advancement. We are seeing some success with some of the new players that are coming out and allowing for pixel-based attribution.

But I mean, look, when it comes to the whole privacy thing, I'm personally in the camp that it's like, wouldn't it be great if we could keep our own data to ourselves and didn't and knew what we were opting into and not? but at the same time, look, I have an iPhone, I have Alexa. I've sort of surrendered, and I'm hoping that, you know, the people in power are going to be benevolent with that. Yeah. But I'm just trying to operate within the confines of my reality on it.

What do advertisers find so appealing about podcasting today? And how has that changed from the beginning? I mean, we had Volvo sponsored the auto blog podcast 15 years ago, which, we started the same month, Dave Weiner created attachments. And we just happened to have Volvo. We said, can we read an ad for Volvo during the podcast? It led to a big thing. What if there's a Volvo story on the podcast?

And then we read an ad. I was like, yeah, that kind of happens on the radio, too. But how has it changed? You know, five, ten years ago when you were some of your customers from Oxford Road of what ads here, what were they thinking about in the five to ten year window? And what did they think about now and going forward to the next five years? I think at the beginning, it was so appealing to D to C brands because they were saying, hey, we've got a new way to do something.

Like, you know, it was novel that we could ship razors to your door on a schedule, right? That was innovative, right? And at that time, innovative people understood, well, hey, look, if I'm looking for early adopters, this is a great way to do it. The barrier to entry is lower. And I can get, you know, Alec Baldwin to read my commercial for free if I spend, you know, 10 grand on his podcast versus if I go to CIA, it's going to cost me half a million. Ah, that's a key. Wait, explain that key observation. What would it normally explain that?

That's a very interesting one. The endorsement is key, isn't it? Yeah. Oh, well, and that's all it is. And by the way, that's what all of this migration, all of this gentrification we're talking about is going to kill that or at least reduce it. You know, we'll get to a billion on the back of host red ads. Okay. But guess what's going to happen then? it's going to be dynamic insertion. You're going to go to break. They're going to jam these shows so full of commercials that people won't recognize. It'll sound like radio in many cases. Okay.

And so when you came in, it was like all the barriers to entry came down. I mean, I came out of terrestrial radio. And people would sign half a million dollar, million dollar contracts to lock up a radio host that 90% of the country never heard of, but they could command that. Then all of a sudden podcast, it's like, yeah, well, Adam Carolla or Joe Rogan will read your spot twice and talk about how great your product is. And there's no commitment. There's no talent fee.

There's no talent agent. I mean, think of the barriers to entry that have come down and the accessibility of talent that you used to spend a boatload of money to get access to. It's become very commoditized. Celebrity has become very commoditized. So that's really changed. And I think it's going to shift back more the other way. But when the New York Times does their podcasts.

Yeah. Because I know Kara Swisher, I talk to Kara Swisher is a good friend of mine for a long time. And she loves to read the ads. I love to read the ads. We don't have a problem with it. But other journalists are like, I'm not reading a fucking ad. Are you crazy? Right.

They don't want to do that. I listen to like still processing is my favorite of the New York Times one, which I think they're on hiatus is kind of a bummer. But they love reading. They don't read the ads, I don't think. Pete Bahar, my other favorite, one of my other favorite, he does Cafe Insider, which is paid, and then he does state June with Prit. He, Prit Bajar, the former Southern District Attorney of New York, he reads ads for Casper.

Right. How does that, Sam Harris won't read an ad, obviously. So how does this, which hosts will read ads and which doesn't occur in the industry? And how does that impact buys? In the future, so if we're talking about the future, I think it's going to be similar to what it is now, where most hosts do read ads, it's just that there's going to be 10 more minutes per hour of commercial programming that they're dynamically inserting, right? So you'll read the ad, and then Spotify is going to play a break after your ad. That's something that the ad agency

in New York put together, and it's going to have their sonic branding and all that. Is that good or bad? It depends on who you are. If you're a major corporation that's going to be the thing that takes us from a billion to $10 billion, you're very happy because now you can, like, I think, let me go back to the question you asked earlier, because I want to answer that, which is, you said, what's different now versus then? Then it was about what's podcasting and how does it work, and I can be a part of something that's innovative. And now it's all FOMO. It's like every big brand is jumping in because they're tired of people hearing, how come I hear all these other companies and I don't hear you guys? And there's a lot of peer pressure, right? And so they

have to be a part of it. The hype on podcast, you know, there was like, they estimated $60 million of, of ad revenue went to promoting three different podcasts that one of the major networks was releasing. I believe that the podcast has more free earned media from people talking about podcasting than there's actually dollars in the channel. So there's a lot of hype and whether or not we can continue. What does that mean exactly? The free earned mean, explain that for people who don't know what you're saying. Well, so think about it this way. COVID hits the media ecosystem like a Mac truck, right? And all of a sudden, they've got giant holes in their spotload.

And you've got content creators like radio groups that have 24-7 programming with, you know, 10 to 20 minutes of an hour of ads that they're not selling. They're not getting cash for. So they're taking that value and putting it behind their podcast because that's the future. That's what the brands want. That's what everybody's talking about. So literally somebody did an estimate that there are hundreds of thousands of commercials just to promote podcasts going out right now.

That makes a ton of sense. Yeah. So now we've basically, this is like we're in the pick and shovel era where like the podcasts are promoting new podcasts. Marco, what does it take in your estimation to make a world class podcast that develops an audience? When you look across the data, you see all these new podcasts starting. You see the founder, you see the podcasters giving up.

Maybe they don't publish regularly. But you also see ones that break. out, if you, in your gut over, you know, a decade of being involved in this, what do you think the keys to becoming a success, what makes for a successful podcast host slash podcast franchise? Well, I think it's, it's two main things. Number one is that you have to have some way for people to want to listen to you. You probably have to have an audience already from somewhere else. That really helps a lot. You can build up from scratch on podcasting, but it's much harder and much slower. If you have an audience already established in some other place, then you can bring them

over to a podcast much more easily, and that gives you a nice little boost. But ultimately, what will keep people there and what will let it develop long term, you know, I mentioned earlier that, like, we don't have a lot of, like, algorithmic players in podcasting. We, we basically have a subscribing model, very similar to RSS, where listeners choose individual subscriber or individual podcast to subscribe to, and then they will receive. every episode of that podcast and they will listen to usually most of them and so you really have to build these long-term relationships with listeners and the way you do that besides getting some of them in the door up front the way you keep them there is with host chemistry and you have to have

chemistry as the hosts of the show whatever format it is it has to keep people interested and involved and nothing does that more than good personalities of the host or hosts and if you have that over time, if you build that over time, people will stick around. And that's why advertisers are so, so, you know, into podcasts. And that's why our ads work so well and command the best CPMs in the universe, because people listen to us. They really listen. They listen to every episode. They listen to what the hosts say. That's why host read ads are somewhat uncomfortably so effective. And that's why listeners stick around. And they listen to the whole show straight through. you're like, you can look at, you know, all the listening data that you can get from places like

Apple Podcasts or other platforms to see, like, how far do people listen before they drop off the episode? And the truth is, most people don't skip the ads, and most people listen all the way through. That's what I was about to ask you, because I know for me, I always listened to the way Howard Stern read the ads when I was a kid. And you grew up in New York, too, or in the area? Ohio, but I listen to Howard. But you listen to Howard as a kid. I'm not sure how old you are. I'm 49. I'm Gen X. so you maybe listen to him in the 90s or whatever.

And he would listen to a Snapple commercial and he would belch in the middle of the commercial. He would make a joke about Jackie. And I always try to have a little fun. And what I do, my secret, and you know this, Dan, is we have whitelisted advertising on this podcast because we were lucky enough to be sold out and I don't need to make money from it.

So I said, I'm only reading ads for things that I feel like I like. And in the early days, I just said, if you want to be on the podcast, I'll go, tell me what your product is, I'll go buy it and try it and use it. And I would actually do that. And then I'd say, okay, you're okay to be on. And we turned down so many advertisers. I turned down like, I don't want to mention too many names, but like LifeLock.

And we may have done a short ad with them or back, but it wasn't Backplace. It was some other backup software. Anyway, all my users complained about this backup software. It wasn't Backplace. I take it back. Because I can't remember which one it was, but the problem was my users were power users and they were trying to backup a terabyte. and these things would be like,

unlimited backup until you got to 100 gigs and then they would narrow you down to uploading you know, five kilobits or some bullshit. And I was like, guys, I can't read your ad. It's just too much blowback. And that really, I think, sort of helped it. Dan, what are you, what are your thoughts on the, what makes for a sponsor that ad?

Because my secret is I whitelist the advertisers. I say no to one in five, maybe two, maybe one in three. I just like, yeah, no, I don't want to read that, Ed. And then I always insist on doing, an onboarding call with them. And I say to them up front, do you want me to freestyle the ad

or do you want me to read the ad? And if you want me to read the ad, I don't think it's going to work that good. But if you let me freestyle a little bit like I do for Dell or I open a crisp cores light or Zendesk or LinkedIn, whatever it is, Zendes. You know, we always have a great experience with those advertisers, NetSuite, etc.

What is your best practice for the advertisers with the host red ads? Have fun or don't have ads? Fun, Dan. Look, I think it's, if we can get you to have fun, we prefer it, right? But at the end of the day, you've got to think about it a couple different ways. Number one, a host red ad is always going to beat an ad that somebody else writes and inserts into your show. 100% of the time, that's why as we get more dynamic insertion, you'll see bigger premiums for the host red. Now, when you're doing a host red, does it matter if you believe in the product?

we know that it doesn't hurt. It's not always a straight line, though, correlating from your passion to the performance. And Bill Burr is like the great case study for that because he can do an ad where he is insulting the advertiser the whole time and it will work fantastically well. I know that. I don't listen to Bill Burr's pockets.

I got to get around. Look, the exception, that's exceptional, right? But I've seen people pour their heart and soul out for a commercial. Nope. and then you got somebody that's insulting them are totally apathetic and it works great but here's what I think the common denominator is it's your relationship with the audience

and if they know that you are somebody who has character that says I don't say things that I don't mean then that gets you don't have to spell that out in the ad for the audience to know that they know that intuitively and that does cause so so when like we've got hundreds of millions of dollars of performance data in house from all these different brands and you know thousands of podcasts

and what we see is there's an influence factor that nobody publishes that every show has. It's purely based on the trust and engagement they have with their audience. And the ad will be a beneficiary of that to the extent that you have already established it with your audience. But does it help if you go the extra mile? Of course we like longer ads. We want passionate ads. We want ads that are interesting. All of that helps.

But none of it matters if you don't already have. Who is the best readers of the podcast crew? Who do you think? Like, just give me top five, six, right off the top of your head, people who just, they just riff and they do a good job. And your advertisers come back and say. I'm going to erect a monument to the unknown host because, like, it's the long tail of ones.

It'll do like an eight-minute commercial. I don't like that. I don't know. But let me tell you something that works. The more you tell them, more you sell. Absolutely. That's a little over the top. That's a little over the total.

Who do you like, Marco? Who does a good job reading ads, you think? You like these or you find them distasteful? Marco. I do them in my show. You do them in your show. Who do you read for? Lots of brands. I think we might have some of Oxford. Who do you like to read most? Who do you like to read most? I think my favorite one to read right now is probably Linode because

I use them. They're a host, a web host. And I use them for my server hosting. And they basically let me freeform it. And they, and you know, it's simple stuff. Like they buy a lot of inventory. They always pay on time. They're really easy to work with. and make it easy people and I love Linode legitimately that's why

like I sought them out as a sponsor because you know Jason like you were saying like I want to be able to use almost everything that I'm doing a sponsor read for and that way I can actually say legitimately I use this I like this

this is what it's good at and people trust me for that because they know that I have standards about that and if I'm like you know sometimes I'll read an average something I don't use but then I won't say I use it

like so you don't want to lie and be like I love vape pens These vape pen back in the day, I got offered a sponsorship for e-cigarettes. I was like, I don't smoke. But like, no, no, you just got to hold it in your hand when you're at the poker table. They literally said to me, we'll pay all your buy-ins for every tournament you want to play at the World Series of poker. You want to play 100,000.

You want to pay a quarter million, whatever. We just want you a cigarette hat, e-cigarette thing. This is a lot of money. And they said, whatever you win in the poker tournament, of course you keep, it's yours. I was like, well, fuck that. I'm not smoking e-cigarettes. It's terrible. That's going to come out to kill people.

no fucking way am I doing that. Like the writings on the wall on that one. But Coors Light, I actually like Coors Light. It's like one of my favorites. So I crack open to Chris Core's Light. I thought it was hilarious that Coors Light even recognizes podcasting. And I was like, I'll drink a Coors Light on air because I'll drink a Coors Light after I'm off. Fuck it.

I'll hit me with a Coors Light right now. I'll fucking crack it right now. I don't care. I love a Chris Coors Light. And then they're like, Odell. I go, what about cancel culture and using, Dan, and we'll wrap up on this, and I appreciate both of you guys giving me the hour.

Dan, you have people like Ben Shapiro who is like this brainiac Harvard kid who sometimes says something stupid. He might have some very old worldviews and doesn't like transgender people or think that that's in a, you know, like basically it could be a religious person who doesn't believe in premarital sex, whatever.

And then you have this huge contingent of people now who are saying, hey, if I don't like what you say, and now I'm not saying, I mean, listen, I am 100% in support of trans people. People should be able to be whatever gender they want. They should make love to whoever they want or not be asexual. Rock on is my position. I could not disagree more with Ben Shapiro's thing that, like, you have to taunt trans people. It's low, it's disgusting. Trans people get murdered in the streets. So like, literally FU Ben Shapiro for, dunking on trans people who are just marginalized and hurt and endanger their whole lives. And it can't be easy to go through that experience. My heart goes out to them.

Put that aside, people have tried to cancel Ben Shapiro for his feelings on, you know, as a very devout religious person, his feelings on premarital sex, etc., etc., homosexuality, or how he feels about trans people. What do you think of this? And you're an agency. So how on earth do you deal with whether it's, you know, Ben Shapir on one side or maybe on the other side you have, you know, Joe Rogan having Alex Jones on who, you know, said the people from Sandy Hook was a false flag and that those children, those poor parents whose children were murdered, that that was done for political reasons and was like the fake space moon landing. How do you deal with this? And how do you mitigate it? And how do you mitigate it? And is this an acute issue now in podcasting? It's getting a lot more difficult when you have opinion-driven content, right?

And I think we're seeing the studies. The country is more polarized than it's ever been. People are less proud of being American. You know, we're the United States and we've never been less united in our thinking. Everything seems to become a political issue, right? Whatever it is, the world got sick. It's Democrats versus Republicans somehow, right? And so this is something I'm very, very focused on and actually launching a podcast called Oxford Road presents the divided states of media.

Because brands don't know what to do. They want to do right. They want to support causes that align with their values. And they've got a business to run. And I don't know that it helps anyone for them to be partisan. Do you really need Cores to be a Republican or Democrat supporting company? And is that even good for society, right? I just needed to be ice cold and it's made in the Rockies.

Exactly, right. The worst that ever. So, by the way, I need to be ice cold. So listen, you know, Shapiro's one that comes up a lot. And look, I know Ben Shapiro and I think that... What's he like? What's that kid like? I think he's a decent guy.

I really like him. And I think that I don't agree with everything that he thinks or says or how he says it. But I also think that most people's understanding of Ben Shapiro is based on what they heard somebody said that he thinks. And, and, and what my problem is with advertisers is that we don't have due process right now. We have somebody said something on Twitter. It's blowing up. Now media matters is threatening me or sleeping giants. And it's a reaction. Everything is a teacher create. Sleeping Giants is a partisan group, really focused on Twitter that just, that just harasses sponsors. They're all about Fox News. They're really focused on Fox. And it's like they're saying, basically the

assumption is... Oh, I got you. They're the ones who are going after what's his name? Who's the Star guy? Tucker Carlson. But the reality is, and it'll be somebody else after Tucker Carlson. They usually go after who's on top. But the point is it's not about going after Tucker Carlson. What they're doing is they're going after the sponsors. And they're doing all this if then logic. Because you allow your ad to run adjacent to this content, then you must hold these views based on the sound bite or else we're going to shame you off the platform. And it puts a lot of pressure on it. And people are not thinking rationally. How about you call Ben Shapiro or call his company if you were a sponsor and go, now people are saying that you have some very insensitive, problematic, hateful, whatever the

accusation is, give the guy a chance to defend himself. And who knows, maybe he'll rethink the things that he's saying are the way that he's thinking about them if you actually have a conversation with them. But the problem with the knee-jerk reactions is there is no conversation. And so everybody gets further and further split apart. And I don't think it's good for brands because if you can't, the things that drive your business, whether it's Facebook or talk radio or certain podcasts or Fox News or things that truly can keep the lights on for your business and keep your employees employed, we need to slow down a little bit and really take things in context and have a conversation

before we just, you know, there should be a process. There should be a process. I could sit down with Ben Shapiro honestly or maybe I, how I'm on my podcast or I'm going his, maybe Nick would set that up. I could sit that kid down and I could explain to him why he needs to not change his position on certain issues like trans people, but why he has to take a different approach? Because when you're as influential as he is, when you talk about whether it's, you know, radicalization of certain religions or trans people, you have to take into the effect that

whatever percentage of people in your audience, I always think about this, the people suffering from severe mental illness in your audience is 1%, 2%. I'm not talking about depression or, you know, anxiety. We all got that right now in the pandemic. But I'm talking about people who are, you know, could do something dangerous in the world. Right. It's 1%. Right. Or it's 0.1%. Now you get into the law big numbers. You got 300,000 followers, you got $300,000, downloads. You got $3 million. downloads, you do have to take into account as a media personality that if you were to say something insensitive about trans people, that one of those people could take it and double it and triple it. So you want to pull back those things and explain them and contextualize them so that those people do

not become victim. It's something I've learned because I was always very, I don't know, opinionated kid from Brooklyn. And I changed the way I phrased things as my profile increased because I don't want. want anybody to be hurt by what I'm saying. I used to use the word retard where that's retarded when I was on the early days of the podcast. And I grew up. I didn't know that word was, you know, I'm talking about 12 years ago. And then somebody who's very close to me, I'm talking about like one of my 20 best friends said to me, I've never told you this, like a poker buddy.

My brother, sufferals from mental, he's mentally, you know, challenged. He's the R word. And when I hear you say it on your podcast, it really hurts me. And then I used to say, I had a catchphrase in the early days of the podcast, I just say, I'll kill yourself. Like, when somebody would be like, do something really bad, I would just say, that person just kill themselves, like, really like you're a horrible human being. I like I would say it about somebody who was a murderer or whatever. And then a kid email me. He said, my dad, Jason, I'm one of your biggest fans. This is an email. And I get very emotional when I read this, when I think about this email, he said, my dad killed himself. And I listen to your podcast and I just wait for you to say the words, kill yourself, and it just makes

me think of my dad. I never said it again. Yeah. I never said it again. And that's when I start to realize, you know, with great power comes great responsibility, the Spotterman line, it's, it's not, the reason that phrase sticks in people's minds is because it's true. Marco, what do you think is people have the right to protest and the dollars do support these podcasts, but what do you think about the sort of moment we're in right now and how influential these podcasts are getting? I mean, you know, culturally, you know, I'm with you that, you know, I have said things in my younger years that I have later learned were exclusionary or insensitive. And I've, whenever I've, you know, realize that or been notified of that, I've tried to do the right thing

and, you know, get them out of my vocabulary or, you know, really become a lot more conscious about like what I'm saying and what I'm not saying and et cetera. And I think that's the right approach for, you know, for personalities. And then, you know, for the apps and for podcasting, you know, I'm lucky that my app is a 30th, the market share of Apple's app. And so if Apple wants to, you know, delist a podcast from their directory, they're going to get, that's going to be a big impact on somebody. And they're going to, you know, they're going to be in the press, and it's going to be controversial and everything. And podcast apps are in this weird place where, like, you know, like if there is something like the Alice Jones podcast that was delisted a couple years back

or whatever that was, um, podcast. apps apps are kind of like web browsers in the sense that, you know, they can access publicly available content. And so there is a place in most podcasts apps where you can add an RSS feed just by URL. So if you know the URL of the feed, you can add, you can still add, you can still add Alex Jones to your iTunes to your Apple podcast, but Apple's not going to list them in the rankings. Right. Or the directory. So the directory is different than correct. The URL you type. Meanwhile, I mean, it's very powerful. Most people, again, most people find podcasts to add to their podcast app by searching for them by name in the directory. So if you're not in the directory,

you're not going to get many subscribers. But, you know, in one level, like podcast apps can be relatively neutral. And, you know, in the same way that a web browser shouldn't block you from entering a certain URL if you type it in. Yeah. You know, I don't think it's appropriate for my app to totally ban the playing of a URL if you type it in. However, I also, again, like because I have such small market share relative to Apple, I'm, just like other people are free to, say what they want for the most part, I am free not to promote them if I want. And so if there is a podcast out there that has content that I consider either, you know, illegal or hateful or otherwise problematic. Yeah, it's your house. That I, yeah, I don't, I choose not to promote it in my app.

And now what about this? I do that with a pretty light hand, like, you know, only fairly egregious offenses, you know, will get you not promoted in overcast because frankly, I don't have the resources to go out there and police everything. I'm one person. You know, I don't, I don't, I don't, I'm one person. I only speak one language, and I only have a certain number of hours in the day to work. And so I'm not, I don't make it a point to police the directory myself, but when I get reports of podcasts that have really problematic content, I will remove them from like the promotional areas. So you can still search for them by name, usually, unless they're real bad. But, you know, I'm not going to remove through my top list. If somebody's got a white supremacy podcast, it's going to get dinged, then you're going to take it out.

Oh, yeah. If I hear of that, that's gone. If somebody told you, hey, this is the URL for this white supremacy, this is like a super education, this is the URL, you know, KluKlaux Klan.com slash RSS, you know, would you actually block the URL consider, would you consider that if like people came down on you? I think that would fall into like the web browser thing. I don't currently have a mechanism to do that. I mean, I could build one. But that's never really come up because, again, like, that's.

such an education where people are going to actually go add URL manually. And, you know, typically these, these, you know, hate podcasts have like four listeners. I mean, we're not talking about a lot of people here. That's one of the reasons I thought, like the, I was always taught, and I'm of a certain generation, Gen X. The ACLU used to fight to protect the Klu Klux Klan, literally marching down Main Street in cities. And we were taught in college, protect the worst speech so that all speech remains free because you don't want to into a situation where people can't say what they want. That's what we were indoctrinated into this.

And now we're living in this world where people are saying, no, no, no, no, no. We need to, words actually do hurt people. Words have damage associated with them. There is fallout from these words. We need to control the words. And I don't actually, I'm not smart enough to have an answer for it. But I think, Dan, that's what you're going to try to do with this new podcast. That's our exploration and to try to figure out because.

I'd love to be a guest on that. It's okay. Well, we'll book it because it's really important. And brands, I think you look at the business roundtable and companies are taking a new level of responsibility. Explain what that is. Business roundtable, you know, a hundred or so of the top companies in America all came together and said, here's the purpose of a corporation. It's no longer just about shareholder value.

It's about stakeholder value, which includes suppliers, employees, the community around you, right? Customers. Yeah, customers. And I think to some extent, there's always been there. But the evolution is that brands are getting more political. They are taking a stand on social issues. And I think that customers, that's resonating with them. So that's getting rewarded.

And that's the reality we live in. But the problem is where, you know, when are you supporting free speech and when are you supporting hate, figuring out those lines, try to figure out what's constructive. And how do you actually truly promote civil discourse from diverse points of view? without alienating one side. And finding those lines is a very difficult challenge for companies today. And we're going to try to help them navigate that and get perspectives from people like yourself who are working in this ecosystem as we just try to, because there's no right answer.

But I do believe, listen, let me just say something. As the father of a special needs child, your story earlier about this is the answer, if there is one. because it's redemptive, it's beautiful, and it was corrective. If it were just somebody blasting you on Twitter and canceling me, yeah, right, you wouldn't have had that, you wouldn't have evolved in that way, you wouldn't have a different level of discourse. Well, and think about how terrible I would feel if I still had that in my vernacular, which, by the way,

was when I grew up in Brooklyn, that word was second only to the F word in its usage. in Brooklyn for nights from the 70s through the 80s. I've been there. And I feel so much better about myself. Yeah. I feel better about myself that I removed it. And anybody, when my friends use it, I take them aside. And I say, have you heard of the, have you heard of the R word challenge?

And they say, no. I say, go to this website and let me tell you this story. And I say to them, and I was just on a thread with a bunch of my friends. And somebody kept saying, a blacklist and white list. and one of my friends said, listen, I know this is going to sound silly to you, but take white list out and call it a band list. Because what you're saying is white and black, white is good, black is bad. And for people, you may not come up on your reader as a white person,

and it might seem silly because the word has been in the vernacular for so long. But we're all trying to evolve as a society and get somewhere here. And if that's hurting somebody, even if you, because like a Ben Shapiro would think that was silly and over-policing. it's not silly if it's hurting somebody right but listen i think the point is i do think that you know ben is like a lot of people who are rational actors that don't want to hurt people um and i think that you you in your case in your example it wasn't that you got called out or shamed and some people believe that shame shame leads to change i believe that relationship does and somebody that had the the respect for you to pull you aside let you protect your dignity and just say this

is hurtful to me. That's what made a difference. And so it hit me so, I mean, I just, because I just spent, I spent a year thinking about all the times we use the R word at the poker table for a decade. And he sat there and suffered. And I just said, I didn't want to blame him for not telling us, but, you know, society evolves and we all need to evolve. And they create a little bit of space for a conversation.

That's why any podcasts are so great. I love podcasting. All right, listen, I took you guys for 75 minutes. This has been amazing. We got to do it again in six months or so or a year. Two great guests. I've been really wanted to have Marco on for a long time just because I love having product people. And, man, in terms of product people, you don't get to meet or recognize who makes the greatest products in the world all that often.

But, you know, there's Elon Musk. There was Steve Jobs, Johnny Ive, you know, at Com Doc. com Alex too I believe and really Marco your products have always just been some of the most beautiful products made on it and uh you you don't raise venture capital you just build you just build you just build products and they really what it is like I like I like working alone I'm not a good manager of people I like working at home and my hat like I have my family life so I I do what I can as a one person company yeah my friend Phil Kaplan does that too he I don't know if you know him from he did the fuck company thing then he did Ed Bright and then now he's doing

distro kid. And he's kind of like you, this like, I'm going to build one company, and I maybe have some support people over here that I do, but it's like these solo developer product geniuses. It's just great to have you on the podcast, finally. Thanks for coming to Marco. Thank you so much. Follow Marco Arment at A-R-M-A-R-C-O-M-E-N-T and Marco.org. Dan, really appreciate that you were doing this week of marketing back in the day.

You called out the Ashley Madison CEO. Presently, I know. I've got to give you credit for that. We're going to pull that clip. And congratulations on getting into podcasting early with Oxford Road. If you're looking to spend money on podcasting and do it wisely, you need to email Dan at Oxford Road.com, right? Is that your email?

You can email me. That's fine. For your audience, yes. Email Dan at Oxford Road.com. He'll walk you through it. Or go to Roxford Road, Road, and sign up for our newsletter, The Influencer, and our new podcast. divided states of media. I love it.

I love it. All right. Thanks, guys, for coming on the pod, Dan and Marco. And we'll see you all next time on this week in startups. Bye-bye.