Sam Sethi: 0:12

Hello and welcome back to Pot News Weekly. I'm joined today by a friend of the show. His name's Russell Harrah. He's the CEO of Pod two and he's also the co-founder of a radio station down in Perth in Australia called Dream One. Russell. Hello, how are you?

Russell Harrower: 0:27

I'm very well, Sam.

Sam Sethi: 0:28

We've had you on the show before. We've talked about various things, so we'll come back to talk about the pod fund in a minute. But one of the things you've been working on is a new piece of RSS technology called Secure RSS. That sounds very exciting. One is secure RSS.

Russell Harrower: 0:44

So we love open RSS, but there's a fundamental problem with that technology, and that is if I'm a podcast that wants to do a bonus episode and charge for that bonus episode, we've made it a little bit too easy to access that free file. So what's secure RSS does is we put a layer of like a payment method in between accessing that amp three file. So we use a technology called L for O2. You can get information about that at L four O2 dot org. And it basically in a nutshell is a macaroon and that invoice that goes to the podcast player, you pay that through the podcast player, they get the unlock and then they send that unlock back to us and voila, you have access to that employee file.

Sam Sethi: 1:36

Okay, Now, apart from that macaroon, it sounds very simple. So it's standard RSS that's delivered to a podcast player from a host and I can then pick on the buy button, I guess, or some sort of button that then sends a token back to you that there's a confirmed payment and you then unlock that file for me to play and listen to. Now is that going to work for what type of content? Audiobooks, I guess is one, but is that the only type of content?

Russell Harrower: 2:07

No, absolutely not, Sam. It's not just audiobooks. We're looking at doing TV shows, movies, music, and also you've got podcasters who want to do that bonus episode. So that's one of the beautiful things about Pod two is once they develop a product and technology, we will roll it out to all of our clients.

Sam Sethi: 2:27

But we we already have a model called Value for Value that's been introduced to podcasting, and that's the idea of the user paying what they want for the content that they receive, the value they receive. Now can't we just continue with the V for V model with audio books and films? Isn't that just the easiest way without having to put all this extra technical secure our sets on top of it all?

Russell Harrower: 2:52

As much as I would love to say yes to that question, they have a has its place. I'm not saying it doesn't. However, a TV show cost a little bit more than $0.50 to make and an audio book as well. When I pitched the idea to some publishers, they were like, As long as I get to charge what I want to charge and I still make my money, then I'm fine. So there is the one out there from the community of creators who want to be paid fairly for their work. And I think that's the difference, though. You for value is a gift, a donation. For us, it's about paying for art and that is what we all do. At the end of the day, we create art and one of the biggest things that we've noticed too is there's a lot of AI bots scraping out data and scraping out creators data. So we will be really advocating to our creators to go secure and use secure RSS technology. It may also mean that they don't charge for we've got F for AI too, which is a method that we use with a select number of players that they can unlock content and there's really actually no real time currency coming to us, but they can unlock the K that way. So there is technology still going, developed and worked out, but for it was designed for, for yet transactions where let's say true fans for example someone pays for an audio book for, let's say it's 20 bucks they would pay in their fate and then 30 days later three fans would pay us our commission part of that. So it's delayed payment. Unfortunately, we can't get for it to be real time, which we could, but we can't.

Sam Sethi: 4:45

What you're saying is users can pay either in a micropayment Bitcoin format, which is what the podcasting community has been working on as a way of making small donation payments or they can pay in traditional currencies like dollars, pounds, euros, etc.. And I think that's great because I think when it's a sizable item like an audio book or a film or a music track, the creators should have the option of choosing whether they want their fans to pay as they go on a donation basis. You know, I value and therefore this is the amount I want to pay you or the creator can say, Look, know, I've put a lot of time and effort into this. This is the value I'm setting and I don't want anything less than that. So I think it comes to a point where the creator chooses how they want to be commended, and that's the right thing to do, really.

Russell Harrower: 5:40

I think it is interesting because, Sam, you've got a feature on for fans where you can stream an episode and you get charged for streaming. Unfortunately, though, I can get around that system by just going to podcast index, for example, and finding the podcast on there and then listening to that and pay file. So we actually enforce what three fans is doing by saying, Well, if you want to earn streaming money, then you can put your content behind secure RSS.

Sam Sethi: 6:11

Cool. When's this going to come out? When can we start to see some of this stuff?

Russell Harrower: 6:14

Then show what we got. Our very first audio book that will be released in January when we were in the studio last Sunday and this Sunday recording it. So it's up to me to edit this great book by Scott Patrick Michael. It's called Clean. It's by our very first publisher that signed with us called Upswell Publishing. They're based here in Perth and it was such a pleasure to work with them. They came into the studio, they recorded it and pretty much one take. So hopefully some slight more editing and we should get it out in the second half of January.

Sam Sethi: 6:53

And just to remind everyone, so that will be available from Potter. So it'll be in an RSS format. Podcasting apps that support Secure RSS will then be able to add a buy button to the page on their app. The use will click the buy button. It'll tell them the price in both stats and fit, and then the user chooses. Once they've chosen that, then sends a confirm payment token back to pod two who then unlock the audio file for you to use. Now I think you're also extending it with an option for buy or rent. Explain that to me.

Russell Harrower: 7:33

So we know that people want to be able to rent a book for 24 hours or maybe seven days. So we do have the option. It is up to the creator of the audio book or whatever it is. It could be a TV show, for example. They will have that available in their dashboard on Pod two to say whether they want to buy option or rent option. The advantage of going through a podcast player is that the creator gets to keep 100% of their recommended retail price. That is really important because Terry and the owner of actual publishing, she said to me on Sunday, there's too many people taking money from the middle and if I can get around that, I will. So that's one of the really good things with Pod two and true fans is everyone wins. Clearly true fans get to keep back, the creator gets to keep 100% of their earnings and that's what it's about. If we as a community can solve a huge problem where publishers don't feel like they're getting ripped off, then what a great community to be part of.

Sam Sethi: 8:39

Indeed, as much as I love the fact with my CEO of true fans, I have to be also very clear. Other apps like Fountain Pod First podcast Guru and others will be playing in this secure RSS game. So other podcasts that will be using secure RSS as well. So that's important.

Russell Harrower: 8:59

Yes. You say that the only app yet to confirm that they're using it is true fans. We've sent documentation over to Oscar at Fountain. We haven't heard whether he's implementing it. He's got a lot of stuff happening over at Fountain so it may not be on the to do list, but with Tesla, we're true fans. It works on true fans. So that's why when I am speaking, I'm going to speak about true fans at the moment. But that's not the only place that we can get audiobooks where the very first podcast hosting provide a tour. So partner with Kobo Books. So all of our authors and publishers that publish on Pod two, they've got the option to do a deal with Kobo and get it out on their platforms as well. And clearly that goes to many other retailers.

Sam Sethi: 9:48

Sir Russell Moving on now, looking into the future, is this whole idea of cross up comments again, the unicorn that's been within the industry for a little while. The idea that I can leave a comment on one podcasting app and it will appear in another podcasting app under the same episode, and that's really one of the ways that I think the podcasting to, to oh, community wants to aggregate our efforts together, which is something that Spotify and Apple and YouTube will ever do. So we've got the fabled Cross App Commons. Russell Now you've proposed one solution. There are several solutions out there. One of those solutions is something called a booster. Graham Live once booster grab live shows.

Russell Harrower: 10:34

So it's a open source app that you can run in your server and think of it like an SMS. So back in the old days, believe it or not, SMS used to have a character limit where it was 160 characters to send a message. Now unfortunately, the new Elon address, or Lightning wallet's the provider of those lightning wallets may have a limit. Most limits are about 250 to 500. So the problem with that is I can't do my really long paragraph comments and the creator can't see them. So what we did was we caught the comment in a local database and then we still allowed the payment to be made. And once the payments made, the creator can say the comment. Then from an app side, all the app needs to do is pull the comment from the comment section of the RSS feed and voila, you've got plus comments working on everyone app.

Sam Sethi: 11:43

Okay, so I like the idea of cross out comments. I can send it to a central server that you have and then other apps can do the same and we can then through technical methods, pull those comments in and match them up from each app. Do we need longer comments? I mean, seriously, it wasn't Twitter. The idea of limiting content to 140 characters and everyone went that makes it so much less worthy. I mean, there's enough rubbish put out in the world without it having 5000 character word comments.

Russell Harrower: 12:16

Well, it's not just text comments. We might want voicemails or video messages. Now, the Lightning Network, I don't think it can store a video message in the comments section, so it needs to be done elsewhere. So that's one of the advantages of the Histogram Graham system.

Sam Sethi: 12:35

Okay. Now, James Cridland, my co-host over the weekend, also proposed a couple of things. One was using something called the Social Interact tag. Now I was on the 30 mile walk, so I have no idea what was being said other than picking up messages. So what had James suggested?

Russell Harrower: 12:52

Okay, so the social Interact tag is a very smart tag. Unfortunately, apps haven't really embraced it and neither have podcasters. The idea of the social interact tag was that it would be a place where the creator of that podcast could say For this episode, all of my comments live here. Now that could be a Mastodon server, it could be a nostalgic event server, it could be a WordPress website. The problem with that is that the reason why app developers didn't want to develop for it is because it's too hard to get that data and feed it in. There's no standardized way of saying, Oh, this is a comment. Now fast forward a little bit to today what James has really thought about it. He has looked at the RSS 2.0 community. They have a comment tag in their RSS specs. It's called comment and it is an example standardised feed of the comments. So each item has title description source. For example, and is a already existing standard that is used by news organizations and other companies out there.

Sam Sethi: 14:14

So basically we started off with bootstrap life, we then went to social interact tags and now we're saying that we can all loop back to RSS comments that already exist within the standard RSS spec.

Russell Harrower: 14:29

Correct? Now, I'm not saying that we're losing Bruce the ground live or social interact or or any of that kind of stuff because they all actually work together. So one of the unique things is as a podcaster I can say, okay, well my comment section is only going to show people that boost to my server, so people who donate to me are going to be able to be featured as my comment section. Another person might say, Well, I'm a developer and I use Activity Pub or Twitter, so I'm going to create a system that takes loads, tweets and and tweets and show them in in my system. So it really allows the podcaster or the creator to pick and choose what they want. Someone might say, Well, I don't care where the comments come from, I want every single type of comment in my comment RSS feed. So if they can code it good on them, like it's literally as long as you stick to the standards which has already been existing by the RSS two point I specs, then it makes it super duper easy for an app.

Sam Sethi: 15:40

We will see what happens because it sounds like there's a lot of flux in the system about which way to go. It's still the fabled cross app comment and we're not quite there yet. I think. Look, Russell, we could talk for ages. We better cut it short there. Russell Remind everyone if they want to find out more about secure RSS, where would they go?

Russell Harrower: 15:59

Sure. So you can head over to pod two. That's potato dot com. You can jump onto LinkedIn or search me. Russell Parallel search pod to send us a message and we'll jump on to Matt along I'm on there as well.

Sam Sethi: 16:16

Lovely Russell thank you so much look forward to seeing secure our space out in the wild.

Russell Harrower: 16:21

Thanks Sam.