Today it’s my pleasure to welcome Sam Sethi to the show. Sam is the CEO of Podfans, a soon-to-be-released marketplace where listeners can both discover and support the shows they love. He is also the owner and managing director of River Radio, a podcast-first 24/7 digital radio platform based in the UK, and the host of Sam Talks Tech podcast, as well as the co-host and editor of Podnews Weekly.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Sam's vocal advocacy for the value for value system of supporting podcasters financially
• the variable model of payment that Spotify needs to get into
• why more media outlets will take on the podcast-first approach to content
• why sponsorships and advertising will continue to decrease when it comes to monetizing podcasting

Connect with Sam:

• Sam on Twitter
• Podfans
• River Radio
• Podnews Weekly

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Contact me: danny@dannybrown.me

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So you might only listen to a 30 minutes podcast for 20 minutes. That's all you pay. You don't pay the 30 minutes. That's the same with music. You could do that with music, with video, with audiobooks. It's not limited to podcasting. And that variable model of payment is really what I was trying to say earlier that Spotify needs to get into because people will pay, you know, listen to more stuff than the average or less stuff than the average, depending on where you are are. And they could then make more money or at least feed the long tail.

You're listening to Pod Chat, the show that invites leaders of the podcast space to share their insights on the trends that will help you grow your podcast. I'm your host, Danny Brown, and today it's my pleasure to welcome Sam Sethi to the show. Sam is the CEO of Podfans, a soon to be released marketplace where listeners can both discover and support the shows they love. He's also the owner, managing director of River Radio, a podcast-first 24/7 digital radio platform based in the UK, and host of Sam Talks Tech podcast, as well as co host and editor of Podnews Weekly. He's also a vocal advocate for the value for value system of supporting podcasters financially. We'll be chatting about that and more in this episode. So without further ado, Sam Sethi, welcome to the show.

Hey, Danny. How are you? Who is that man with all those things? God I didn't recognise him?

It's funny, when I read bios and achievements out of some guests like that, sometimes I think you forget exactly how much you do right. When you're a guest or when you're not a guest or whatever.

Yeah, no, I'm a busy person occasionally.

And before we start, I feel it'd be really remiss of me as an Arsenal fan to point out you're a Liverpool fan and you're having an interesting season this year in the Premier League.

Oh, look, the Arsenal fans are out of the bloody woodwork now, aren't they? Two or three seasons ago, you couldn't hear about an Arsenal fan, you know, Highbury the Library, as it was known. You wouldn't hear a word from them. But, yeah, no, great team this season. You've got young team. Arteta is doing a wonderful apprenticeship before he's the manager of Man City. So enjoy him while you've got him because he'll be replacing Pep. But no, good luck to you. I think you'll win it, or if you don't, you'll come close second, like Liverpool did three years in a row. And really frustrating to have it go by one point, but that's about it. Really great team so far this year. We are pants. We won't make Europe. That's about us, really.

It's just interesting. I guess I'm not invested as a Liverpool fan, but as a neutral, I can't say I'm neutral. I've got friends that are neutral and watch the EPL and they're just like, curious how it just fell off, as you mentioned, champions, second runners up, et cetera. So it's interesting to see how that pans out next year. Maybe a big rebuild for Klopp without.

Serious investment and a brand new midfield will just be mid table for a few years.

Maybe you can get like, a crowd sourcing, value for value fan campaign going.

Maybe we could sell an NFT to the Kop.

Now, you've got a very strong background, as I've mentioned in the intro there, you've got a very strong background in the digital industry. Initially writing about startups and sponsoring some of the earliest digital events like LeWeb and Techcelerate in Manchester, England, back in 2007. What were these early days like? Because that's pretty digital pioneering days right there.

Well, I was there even before that, so I was the European Product Manager for Netscape, so I remember having to go around and explain what the web was and what an URL was and what a browser was. The first early web pages were rubbish. I mean, they were, if you remember, rubbish. And it was difficult to get on to the web. Most people didn't have a TCP IP stack, most people didn't have a browser. So how did you get the stack? How did you get the browser, then? How did you find a URL? Because guess what? Google didn't exist. And so, yeah, the early days were interesting and then the early days of London and the tech scene were fun. I mean, there'd be about ten or so of us, a dozen of us, like people like Soul Klein, Mike Butcher, Mike Birch, who Sol Biebo, Michael Acton Smith, who does Calm and who had Mushy monsters. So all of these are friends. And what we would all do is organise events and invite other startups and VCs. So it was a bit of we used to call it www, meant the wild, Wild West. It was very back of a fag packet. What are you doing? Can we find some investment? Can you grow it? But it's grown from there now. It's a very mature London tech scene, like it is in the Valley. But, yeah, in the early days it was great fun. It was just find a venue, speak about the web.

And I imagine it's similar. It sounds like it's similar to the Alley's podcast. And before Apple came, a lot of itunes, I guess, before they came along, and you had to control the MP3 upload on a server and getting out and feeds and how you'd actually listen to it. So it's cool to see how tech evolves and makes it simpler, but also, I guess, can make it a bit more complex. We were speaking, Ella, about the Roadcaster Pro Two and how that's a really complex piece of kit for the average podcast, I guess.

Yeah. I mean, my favourite expression is from Edward Debono, the guy who basically came up with the statement complexity as fail simplicity. And I fully, fully agree. All too often, the challenge of tech is to make what is a very complex task as simple enough for the end user with no technical skills. And as I was saying, the days of the complexity of getting online are now. Nobody cares. I mean, through COVID, everyone managed, even my 91 year old father in law managed to get onto Zoom, right? People manage these things, right? And that's great because it's become simple enough. And I think with modern podcasting, I'm sure we'll get onto it with value for value of micro payments and digital wallets. It's all complex, it's new vocabulary, it's new words and people are like, I'm not sure I understand this and what's the value for? And do I really want to do this? And it reminds me of the very early days of people going, the web is a bit rubbish, really, and I don't really know if I want to do that. But now, look at this.

And I guess that probably ties into the Viral Tribe that you were co founder and CEO of that match celebrities and the digital footprints to brands and via the podcast and video channels, for example. So how did that come about? What was that?

Well, obviously, as you mentioned earlier, I've got my own radio station, which is fun. And just before we get onto Viral Tribe, the radio station isn't a traditional radio station. We're not a music radio station. I don't believe music is the future of radio. I think Spotify, Apple, Amazon, you can get your music where you want now. And kids don't use radio. My kids have never really bothered with radio, but talk radio and communication in that sense is where I think radio has its footprint in the future. And so what I did was I created a hyper local radio station that fundamentally was a podcast radio station. So every show is only 1 hour long and all those shows are broadcast live. So I managed to get a shoutcast server connected to Dab, which is the broadcast capability of car. There's an alexa. There's web. So suddenly we could take what we're doing now, but do what people are saying we should be doing, which is live broadcasting it. So I've worked out how to do that already with a roadcaster in a studio using a piece of software called Butt, which stands for a broadcast using this thing. Really simple piece of software. And so I've gone through that learning curve. So that was great. And I think we've got 25 shows, they're all on Spotify and Apple, and it all works, right? It's great. And so we're moving that forward. And while I was doing that, somebody approached me and said, hey, you know a little bit about podcasting, do you want to do something with us? We've got loads of celebrities and we got loads of sponsors and we want to do something to do with podcasting. And I went, okay, so one of the guys used to run hello magazine and the other guy used to run the Evening Standards. I thought, fairly decent credibility. Unfortunately, they decided that they'd pay themselves and not pay me, which didn't really work well with me, strangely. And as I was building the whole technical platform, I went, Actually, I'll just take my toys and go and do it myself, which is what I did. So Viral Tribe may exist with those guys, but they've got no technical platform. I've taken all the IP with me and that is now what we call Pod Fans, which is my new baby, which I'm building. So, yeah, so Pod Fans is the.

Child of Viral Tribe, and obviously you mentioned that River Radio at the podcast first radio station, not like the traditional digital radio station that plays songs with charts or US imports, et cetera. And I'm wondering, are you seeing more of that kind of convergence where media companies are getting more into podcasts and CNN, I mean, I know the company I worked for, Captivate, was purchased by Global a year ago, and that seems to be merging a lot of the podcast and first approach that you mentioned with River Radio. Do you think that's going to be something that more media outlets take on?

Yeah, I do. I think. Look at the BBC with BBC Sound. You know, one of my favourite programmes is The Curious Case of Hannah with Hannah Fry. I can't remember the other, Rutherford and Fry. So The Curious Case of Rutherford and Fry, that's broadcast on Radio Four on a Thursday at three in the afternoon or something like that, I have no idea. I never listened to it. Then I just subscribe to the podcast and that, to me, is where I get that content. And I think Global, you mentioned Captivate being the acquired company, the news agent, brilliant show, my daily listen that goes out. I don't need to listen to Global Radio to get the news agent, I just want the news agent. So now, in many ways, I don't expect my listeners on my radio station to listen live. They can do that's, their choice, but I expect more often than not, they'll just subscribe to one, maybe two shows and that's all they'll ever listen to River Radio for. And I'm quite happy with that, really.

And I know we spoke about what you mentioned earlier there about Pod Fans, and we'll definitely talk about that later in the episode. Podcast advertising and sponsorship, obviously it's been huge for the last couple of years as a discussion point and an investment point from brands throwing a lot of money into podcasting. But what lessons have you learned from what you did at Viral Tribe? What you've been doing, maybe with River Radio? What you're planning to do with Pod Fans? What lessons have you learned from how you see sponsorships and advertising as a monetization, not talking about value for value at the moment, and where that will lead to as we start to move into 2023. 2024.

So on the radio station, we don't do traditional radio ads. They take too long because we're hyper local. We work across three counties, berkshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Local businesses, by the time they've done copy, got a voice over artist, pay for the ad, blah, blah, blah, they just don't want to pay the amount. So we do sponsor only local sponsor shows. So I've got a wine show called Uncorked, and that's sponsored by Harrow and Hope, which is the local wine producer. I've got a show called The School Of Parenting, which says what it does on the tin about parenting. And we have a local school uniform company that sponsors them. Right, so we went for sponsors. It's really, really hard, though, to find them. I mean, look, you got to convince them that there's a value in it, there's an audience. Chicken, me, egg. Have I got an audience? Have I got a sponsor? Have I got a show? If I get a sponsor, I've got a show, then I get an audience. Which way does it work? I don't know. So we've taken the view that will create the shows first, then find the sponsors and then build a bigger audience, hopefully with things like Pod News, which I do with James. We were very lucky to get Bus Sprout as our sponsor from day one. We throw in a few ads from Bus Brow ads into the middle of it occasionally from time to time. But that's not our bread and butter. I mean, if it was, we wouldn't even be going now. There's not enough money. There's not enough money to buy a coffee, let alone anything else. So sponsorship is great. Now, going forward, though, in 23, I don't think sponsorship is going to be easy. I think the economic hardship is going to make it much harder for companies to find sponsors. I also think advertising is going to be diminished and so your CPM rates will drop. And I think subscriptions are a waste of time. I think Apple subscriptions and the soon to be announced Spotify subscriptions and other subscriptions, I don't really see them as valuable. We were asked by Apple to put Pod News into a subscribed. We realised if we did that, we'd go from the audience we have now to about a 10th of the audience. It just doesn't make any monetary value set. If if we went into subscriptions and everyone was paying us £100 per episode as a list now, but we lost nine tenths of our audience and we still made the same amount of sponsorship money, maybe we might do it, but the reality is we'll lose nine tenths of the audience and we'll lose probably nine tenths of the money as well. So I don't believe right now 2023. That that's going to work. Look, Spotify's big announcement on Monday was they're laying off 6% of their staff. They've lost a tonne of money. Their market cap has gone from 78 million down to 15 million. They've dumped a tonne of money into exclusives that haven't worked to pay Joe Rogan 200 million. And yet look at it. Share prices dropping. They're not making money, they're doing layoffs. And shows are leaving from exclusives. The problem with Spotify is they've got a fixed ceiling, 999 or 1499, depending on family or individual. Now, if you're a massive listener of, I don't know, Coldplay or Beyonce or Bruno Mars, and you listen to 20 or 30 tracks a day and you're a podcaster and you listen to audio books, you'll get more value than the 999, but they can't charge you more because they've got a flat fee. They need a variable fee. They need a way to be able to say, right, Danny is a really heavy user of music. Sam's a really heavy user of podcast. The amount that you consume is the amount you pay, but they haven't got that model. So I think Spotify in 23 is going to suffer a lot more than they think they are. Yeah, I'm not sure that it's a good model for them right now.

It seems similar to the issues that Netflix are going through at the moment. Obviously, there was a Darwin of the streaming world, and have been for many years, and then obviously, the HBO came along, disney Plus, Apple Plus TV, or Apple TV Plus, whatever it's called. They're struggling. They've had a lot of pushback, obviously, from subscribers about they're offering an ad free model, but it's going to be a reduced quality. If you want to share your account, you can have a family plan, but you're only allowed to use it based on IP, which is going to mess things up. Because if your wife is in London on a business trip and I'm at home and my kids are at university, that's three different IPS. So they're going to tell me I can't have that. I need three. So it's interesting to see how, as you mentioned, what models are going to come in from.

We know from a fact the advertising led model where you don't pay for a subscription on Netflix has failed massively. That's not worked at all. The uptake has been low and people don't want it. I was talking to Mark Ask with earlier today on Twitter. We were arguing about do people want features and functions of all this complexity? And as I said earlier, the complexity will be hidden. It will become simple. And I was saying to Mark, nobody wants ads. Look, if you can pay for or not have ads, and that's proven. I watch and I pay a subscription on Spotify or Netflix or Apple TV not to get ads. I do that specifically if I had to watch the ads and wait for them, I'd just die. I mean, it's awful. I don't watch ITV Hardly Now and I fast forward everything I can. So ads we know people don't want, they just put up with it. It's a compromise. We know that subscriptions are not what people really want. What would be lovely as we keep I keep harping on about is people consuming or paying only for what they consume. That would be the perfect model. And I think I've joked with James, I've joked many a time that I think Netflix and Spotify will have to merge. The reason is Amazon has movies, music, podcasts, apple has movies, music, and you look at the various stacks, whereas Netflix just has movies and Spotify just has music and podcasts. Right? They both have a hole in their offering. And so I've called it spotflix. Spot Flex is going to be the new 2023 company. I keep predicting this so much so I bought the domain Spotflix.com. And Danielk, you're more than welcome to come and buy it from me for loads and loads of money. But yeah, and I think both companies need to do something because they're going down fast.

Pod Chat is sponsored by Podnews. Get a daily email with all the latest news about podcasting. It's free@podnews.net from jobs across the industry to events and conferences. You'll find the latest podcast and info in the daily newsletter. You can add Podnews net to your daily briefing on your smart speaker two. Just search for it in your smart speaker app. And now back to this week's episode. And it's funny you mentioned that conversation with Mark as we recorded this episode. I saw that tweet exchange and I thought it was interesting the points that we were both bringing to the table. And it ties in nicely to the question of value for value and monetization and paying for what you consume. Obviously you mentioned the advertising budgets being cup sliced all over the place as brands are letting people go, unfortunately. And the economic, you know, outlook doesn't look great for the next twelve months at the very least. So it's getting harder. And obviously you're a huge proponent of value for value. We'll talk about Pod fans soon. For anyone not aware of value for value, what is it and why are you so excited about it?

So the Pod father, Adam Curry, the guy who is credited with inventing podcasting, came up with a concept many years ago which was, look, I will ask you to pay for my content that I create, but I won't tell you how much to pay. I'll just ask you to pay me what you think it's worth. In fact, strangely, we don't know this, or many people don't know this. The price that you see in a shop is only a tender offer price. Do you remember the good old days of RRP retail recommended price and they removed that because you can't do that legally, you can't have an RRP. So they put a price. And fundamentally, if you were brave enough, you could take that up to the counter. And Pod Chat 1999, I'll give you 1499 for it. No, I want to bathe. 17. Nine. No, I'll give you that. You could barter that price. That is literally what it's available. You could say, I value this garment or this drink or this piece of food at this price. But we don't. We're too embarrassed, we're too British. But that same model of value for value is now brought to the web. Now, why have we only just heard about it? Why is it only just becoming, I guess, known about or popular or underground, even? It's still very underground. In my days at Netscape, mark Andreessen, the founder, said that one of his biggest mistakes was not inventing a micro payment system. And in replacement of that micro payment system, we did two things. One, we created an advertising led model because that was any way to monetize content. And two, we created hearts, likes, thumbs up, collapse in medium as a way of giving sentiment back to the creator that I appreciate what you've done. Now try and take 100 follows or 100 likes to the bank and see what they do. They won't. They'll laugh you out the front door. So a micro payment system didn't exist. Libra was tried by Mark Anderson, but no one trusts Mark Andreessen. So Bitcoin came about and off that a 1,000,000th of a bitcoin is called a satoshi or a sat. The guy who invented Bitcoin was called satoshi. So these SATS are micro payments. They're peer to peer payments. You don't have to go through a gateway, you don't have to go through a banking system or a third party if you don't want to. Now, when it first came about a couple of years ago, people were like, oh, I don't understand this. What's a sat? I'm not sure. What's an invoice? How do I pay? Where's the digital wallet going back to what I said earlier. Where's TCP? How do I find a browser? What's an http URL blah, blah, blah. It's terminology that we're all a little bit not familiar with, but as it becomes more familiar, people are becoming much more comfortable with it and the technology is becoming much easier. So nowadays, value for value is in. Fountain, as an example, really good app on Pod verse. Another really good app, custom Pod. All of these have got digital wallets built in. They've got the ability for you to be able to pay a small amount of money. So you Danny, somebody listening to this podcast say, hey, I really love this interview that Danny has just done. I want to give Danny 10,000 SATS. Now, again, there's a couple of things that people are a bit scared of. 10,000 SATS? That sounds like a lot of money. Am I going to get bankrupt do I have to take a mortgage out? No, 10,000 SATS is probably a pound, right? So at the end of the day, somebody could say that's what I value this podcast at, Danny, I'll give you a pound. But to get your credit card out and then give that through a PayPal gateway or a stripe gateway, you lose a lot of that through the payment of the gateway. By the time it gets to you, I suppose the incumbent, where's my wallet? I can't be bothered. Right? So now you have within one click access the ability to just pay 10,000 SATS or 100,000 SATS or whatever number you want. You can even pay just $0.10, right? And that's an immediate payment, peer to peer, from the listener to you directly from their wallet to your wallet. And that shows the value that they give you for the content you create. And that's what value value is. I love it as a way of doing it. Now, today, Fountain have just announced that they are doing what they call value per minute, which Pod fans does as well. Oscar and I are good friends and we've spoken about this. We have very similar thinking. And so now the way that it works is in Fountain you can set the amount you want to pay per minute, so you set your own value. In Pod fans we do exactly the same, but we also allow the host to set a suggested value like a retail recommended price. Yes, we are using that. So Danny, you could say, anyone listening to my podcast, I'm going to charge you 100 cents per minute to listen to my podcast. That's what you want it to be. That's your suggested price. I might go, actually Danny, I only want to pay fifty cents per minute. Or no, Danny, you being a cheap skin. I want to pay you 1000 SATS a minute, right? It's my decision. But the way that we do is we take the time of the podcast times, the 100 SATS to give you a suggested value might be 7000 SATS to listen to this episode. That's great. Now we then charge you per minute as you listen, which is great. So you might only listen to a 30 minutes podcast for 20 minutes. That's all you pay. You don't pay the 30 minutes. That's the same with music. You could do that with music, with video, with audiobooks. It's not limited to podcasting. And that variable model of payment is really what I was trying to say earlier, that Spotify needs to get into because people will pay listen to more stuff than the average, or less stuff than the average, depending on where you are, and they could then make more money or at least feed the long tail. So I think value for value is the model that will be the future of the internet bumper, which is an analyst agency. Jonas Boost last week was talking about something called listen time as a metric rather than downloads. So you might say to an advertiser on this, I get 10,000 downloads, therefore at £25 CPM, great. That's my earning capacity. That's great for the big podcasts. But on the long tail of those that are getting 100 fans or, you know, 50 fans, they're not going to make a single penny, really, with 25 pound CPMs. So value for value is a great way for small podcasts and big podcasts to get from their true fans real value.

And I think that ties that's a really good explanation for anybody. I mean, I just really dipped my tone of value for value I only really looked at about six months ago, maybe because I like to consider myself a techy person. But just the terminology and the whole implementation seemed really confusing and it still does a little bit to me. So I'll be pinging you for help on that. But I think that goes back to River Radio and your hyper local sponsors, where it really brings value because your listeners are in the area, the businesses are in the area. And so you're bringing value to your listeners who then take their value to the brand or the business, who then bring their value back to you because it's a complete circle where everybody wants and it seems like value for value and obviously Pod fans comes into this and plays into this nicely.

Yeah, so Pod fans, it looks like when you see it, it looks very Netflixy. It's a progressive web app, so it's not an iOS or Android app. We're not going to pay the Apple tax or the Google tax. So what we've done is we've taken a curated database so it's not all 4 million podcasts. We didn't want to do that. We want to cherry pick some of the best podcasts out there to begin with and then allow people on the platform to suggest podcasts that they want to get added to our database. We set a bar. So we'll say, for example, if you suggested one of my podcast, SoundTalks technology, great. You go and find it, pull it down, and there's a voting button. Now we say you have to find ten people to vote for it to get it added to our database. Now, if you can't find ten listeners to come onto podcast to tell me to add that podcast to our database, then, well, you're not going to get on it. That's just it. But the main thing we've done is, as I said, we've created an environment where the host basically can come on. They can manage their whole podcast in the back end admin. They can set their own price for what they want people to pay to leave a comment, to leave a clip, or if they want how much they want per minute to pay for their podcast. So that's really simple. They can do splits if there's two. Or three or four people. So James and I do a split 50 50. On Pod news. Adam Curry and Dave Jones do much bigger splits because they've got other people they want to pay. You might just have 100% split, which is just for you. Right? So I don't know. So we can do splits, we can do guest splits. So if you look at Adam and Dave, every guest who comes onto the podcast index their podcast, the guest gets a split as well of any stats that are paid by their listeners. So again, it's just a really nice model of you can take every bit of value that's coming in from the listener, and you can decide where to give that value back in terms of, is it a producer, is it an editor? The people who gave me the music, somebody else who's given me a clip or a guest? So in podcast, we allow people to come and find what they want. We've created a really interesting search engine that uses all of the podcast 20 index tags. So you can search not just by title, but by name, location, category, keyword, country. You can create your own library of things you're listening to. And then we've got a whole bunch of analytics stuff you can do. What did I listen to last month? How much did I pay? What value did I give? How long did I listen to it? What's my listen time? What's my listen time compared to other people? So I'm listening to this show here and I can see what other people listen to. Did they listen to the end? Do they listen halfway through? So all of that comes from the fact that we can use value for value in real time streaming sat, and you can't do that with downloads and you can't do that with subscriptions and you can't do that with advertising.

And I wonder obviously the goal is value for value, but I wonder if that approach you mentioned about the lesson time and the drop off and where the audience is sticky and where the show is sticky, if that will help. Because I think there's still maybe confusion around value for value, and maybe it got a bad reputation, for want of a better description, because of the whole bitcoin shenanigans came out in the last six months. I guess with what happened there, with some of the Dodgy players in that space. So what's podcast? I don't know, I mean, you mentioned it there, it seems really clear what the goal is for Pod fans and how it's different from, say, some of the stuff that's on the market now, especially for the podcaster and the creators that help that podcast come to life. How will you make it an easier uptake from people that might be looking at value for value, but it's not at their education level or expertise level?

Yeah, we don't even want to give those words we don't want even people to have to think about it. So the onboarding, when you come to pod fans, is using gamification. So we've created 30 different verbs within the system. Join, login, activate wallet, first episode, whatever. So the way it works is you would create an account. You would say, welcome on board, daddy. First thing that you can complete is put your display name in. Second one is upload your avatar. Third one is activate your wallet. You don't need to do more than click one button. Fourth thing is put your country code in. So we know what country you're from and what currency to display the SATS in. So we put the SATS in, obviously, 5000 SATS, but in brackets, in small amount, we'll put your local currency because you're in a learning curve, right? Maybe in six months we won't show that local currency. But now we need to we need to know that 5000 SATS is 70 P, or it's $90. Sorry, $0.90, right. So people need to feel comfortable that the amount that they're seeing is a small amount and they're not going to be losing their mortgage. So we bring on you on board in a very gentle step by step process. And at the end of that process, guess what? You've got a load of SATS in a wallet that you now have. You don't need to know how you got the wallet, it's just there. You don't need to know why you've got all these SATS, but that's the gamification. We have rewarded you for completing the task we wanted. And now you can listen to your first episode. So you listen to your first episode, and we take money out of that wallet and you're streaming. And happy days, we've made it with one click. Top up. So again, if you've got a credit card and you've run out of SATS, but you need some more SATS, you can just one click with your credit card, go to Moon Pay, upload £30, which will give you a load of SATS. I can't think there'll be probably 300,000 SATS, plenty to play with. And there you go, your wallet is back. So a year ago, you couldn't do that integration with Moon Pay. A year ago, you couldn't give that wallet easily because the lightning network didn't exist. A year ago, we didn't have this gamification onboarding to reward your activity with SATS preloaded into a wallet that you can now start to use. So for the average user, they don't need to understand all of this value for value. They just need to know, I've got a wallet with some money in, and that episode says in order to play it, I need to pay so many SATS. So I start streaming. And if I run out of SATS while I'm streaming, I can top it up. Simple, that's all it has to be.

And I think when you look back at some of the stuff that was strange when it first came out. Nobody talks about doing a search anymore. They say, go google it. You want to learn more about me? Google it. So we get to that stage where we've got verbs, like we can pay for stuff, for phone, I can use apple pay or google pay or whatever it's called, a google wallet, apple wallet, I'm not sure, but I can tap my form at the shop and it's there. We don't know how it's there. We just know I've got money in my bank, I can pay right away. So it sounds like you've definitely got that figured out. As to removing that fear of the technology behind it and the terminology, which I think is maybe where I struggled at the moment, at least for laymen like me.

Yeah, look, as I say, complexity is fairly simplistic. We as technologists, which is what I was saying to mark. I said to mark, asquis earlier, if Henry ford asked his customers what they wanted, they'd say, a faster horse. They wouldn't have said a car. Right? And as a technologist, mark and I, and you and anyone else who's a technologist or an entrepreneur, we are visionary in the sense that we can see the future of technology, or we think we can, at least we try to see that future, and we try and bring that technology into mainstream use. Now, the first iterations of it are gaffer taped and a little bit put together on the back of a plastic bag. But eventually we get it right, and we then smooth it out, and then we get feedback, and then it gets implemented, then it gets adopted, and then it goes mainstream. And that's really what we have to do. And I think in the twelve months I've seen since value for value and digital wallets and satoshi's came about, it's become so much easier. And, and just one clarity for you. Bitcoin and crypto are not the same. And there's a lot of people who go, oh, it's all in the same bag. That dodge coin crypto, that sam friedman bank, the FTX no bitcoin is 21 million bitcoin. It's a fixed it's a bit like digital gold. And there are a million stats, 100 million SATS per bitcoin. Right? So on the other side is Aetherium nftx sorry, sam bankman, free dodge coin and all that, that I wouldn't touch with a barge bowl. It is scam where right, as far as I'm concerned, and I think it's been proven to be scam where most of the time. But bitcoin is something that I think we'll see a lot more. People feel confident the price of bitcoin is going back up as people are more confident that it's not the same as the other stuff. I think the way that we talk about it is don't trust verify. And that's what bitcoin is about, verification in a digital coin.

And I appreciate that clarification, because that definitely goes back to the other point about making it super simple for people to understand and trust, which is where the growth will come from. So I appreciate that. As I say, I like to think I'm techy, but I know in this space and this whole conversation, I am anything but. I appreciate that. So, Sam, this has been an education. I knew it would be. Listening to your shows and you talking online and in your podcast about this. I knew it would be. So thank you for coming on today's show.

Pleasure. David.

For people that want to learn more about Value For Value, your podcast, that you run River Radio or even get to learn or get the jump start on how they can be involved in Pod fans when that launches, for example, where's the best place to connect or hang out with you?

Yeah, don't tell anyone I'm still on Twitter. I'm not a big fan of Master Dog, I'm sorry. We should be an advocate for decentralisation, but I just find it really rubbish and so sorry, but, yeah, I'm still on Twitter, so at Sam Talks Tech or at Sam Sefi or at join Pod Fans, so or at River Radio Live as well. So, Miniat, I'm sorry there if you want to know more about Pod fans, we're pre alpha right now. We will be doing the alpha in probably two weeks. We're trying as fast as we can to get the alpha out the front door. So if you follow app, join Pod Fans, you'll get to see some early screenshots. You'll get to know when we do open the door for the alpha and the beta, we are going to be at Podcast Movement in Vegas. That's where I'm on stage doing a live demo of it all and launching it. So no panic or pressure there. With river radio at river radio live. Again, you can find all of our shows on Apple or Spotify. And yeah, James and I do pod news. Pod News Weekly. It's an industry podcast. I mean, I wouldn't say it's a consumer based podcast, so we do go into the weeds. We talk about this stuff that we've just talked about, value for value extension tanks, we talk about all of the hosting companies and some of the new apps and we talk about what's going on in the industry. So it is a bit niche, I'm not going to say it's not, but that's what we designed it to be. Yeah, so reach out to me on any of those and more than happy to engage if that's what you want.

That's awesome. And I will be sure to leave the links, as always, in the show notes, so make sure you check them out wherever app you're listening on. So, Sam, again, I really appreciate and looking forward to finding more about Podfans.

You're very welcome, Danny, and thanks for inviting me.

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