Can Web3 be the thing that saves the independent podcasting industry? Joe Casanova comes on this week’s show to talk about how Web3 is creating the next era of collaboration. Joe founded, Furlough, a community of professionals, entrepreneurs, experts, students and marketers, to create a community that fosters growth through collaboration. Joe also shares some simple ways that podcasters can get started with Web3!

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Y P fam what's going on?

My name is Hector Sanon.

I've been producing podcasts for almost a half decade now, and this

show is to help you learn what does and does not work when it comes to

marketing and monetizing your podcast.

And on today's show, we talk with Joe Casanova.

He's the founder of furlough.

It's a web three community that's really designed to help creators take their

vision and their impact to the next level.

And we've talked a little bit about web three on previous episodes,

Especially our episode on NFTs with the host of the NFT for newbies

podcast, , but this episode goes deep on the power of web three and really what

it does and why it's so important for creators to even start paying attention.

And so if you're completely confused by the concept, I try and have Joe

break it down into something that's really relevant for you today.

I know you're gonna enjoy this conversation.

Let's get into it with Joe Casanova.

Joe welcome.

And I'd love for you to ingratiate us or welcome us into the web three world.

Cuz right before I hit the recording button, you were just

talking about how people get you know, intimidated by web three.

And, and I, I definitely feel that.

So I cut you off.

Where were you headed with that?

I have a reference like my uncle, I'll never forget.

we had a car that was just beat up and he wanted to get rid of it.

And he's like, can you help me list it on Craigslist?

And I'm, I'm like, yeah, but it's like Craigslist is built so that the

user experience is so frictionless and easy so that they could have as many

people on that platform as possible.

And he's like, oh, but you know me, I'm not good on with technology.

And, and that's a limiting.

I've already had so many time people put limiting beliefs, especially as it, you

know, pertains to crypto and web three.

And in my community we've been issuing non-transfer one FTS

they're known as so bound NFTs.

And I tell people I'm like, stop calling them NFTs.

That's like, if I'm gonna go listen to a new song by Kendrick or J Cole,

whatever, any artists, and it's like, Hey can you share me that MP3?

Say we don't talk like that.

They're songs they're tracks.

So let's call these NFTs for what they are in our community they're points.

And the more you engage, the more points you get and, you know, the, the level of

immersion that is happening, especially with discord, I've worked with social

media influencers back since my space, I was a social media influencer on my space.

And then um, Instagram and, and even TikTok TikTok is great

because it's an interest based.

Where you don't need followers and your content can be in front of a

bunch of people that are in your niche and in your wheelhouse and

these platforms you look at, 'em like, where, what engagement is there?

Your like your comment you're sharing to another person that you

don't even know that your followers like, who they're sharing to.

And the closest thing I think TikTok has to, it is obviously duets and stitches.

And I still don't think that's true engagement.

Like what you and I are doing right here right now is engage.

Full speaking, full talking and then that's, what's so cool about discord

it's videos on screens sharing going deep eight hours at a time.

And before this call, I was just talking on discord.

That's why I have you know, other people in my ear.

And what people don't realize is web three is built on web two and

we wanna try and overcomplicate.

The only difference is, is all the information transactions, all the, the

history of logs of what's going on.

It's not hidden in some private server that the admin has.

It's just public.

And once people stop trying to get so overwhelmed by this and freak themselves

out because there's name words like interoperability, and you hear different

layer ones to zeros, and it's just you, it can get easily confusing here, but

when you take a step back, I mean, it's just, it's really a natural progress.

Yeah.

What what's interesting is that, I think it's hard.

Maybe it's hard.

Maybe it's easy.

I don't know for people to put it into perspective.

I was fortunate enough to kind of been at a place where, you know,

I saw web 1.0 to 2.0 transition.

I was UN unfortunately not.

I was too busy doing stupid stuff to pay attention enough to what was happening.

And so I kind of missed that boat, but, but I was there to see that kind of

switch and, and you know, all of the.

All whether it was success or money or all, whatever it was right.

There was so much wealth that was built on the back.

And so for me, I, I don't wanna miss this next kind of transition.

Can you help to put it into perspective though, for people who are like,

like, what is, is it even possible to kind of fathom or understand what

this web three world looks like?

Because I, I think that that's where a lot of people get caught up is they,

they, they don't have a, like you said, a perspective or they don't have a, a

focal point or they don't, you know, it it's so, so vague to so many people.

, do you have a way to kind of crystallize or make that a little more concrete for.

Yeah.

I, I would say that without a doubt, you know, it, it goes down to

what utility is and purpose of it.

And I was asked like, oh, what do you think about making my.

It was a startup that kind of logs information.

I, I'm not gonna get too deep into it, but everyone's trying to make an NFT.

Everyone's trying to digitize things and I don't think everything needs to be an NFT,

but there are some incredible use cases.

One of my favorite use cases is tokenized communities where you

say, Hey, this community let's furlough, which is my community.

I own.

Any day I can go delete community and that's it like I'm there.

I am the face of it.

I make the decisions of it.

And that will never be everyone else's community because I own it.

And that's a problem.

But with web three, that problem is effectively solve.

And now the people that are a part of it, they aren't thinking, oh,

I'm doing this for Joe instead.

They're they're thinking I'm doing this for.

and you can distribute ownership just like stocks, but instead of

stocks use NFTs and give it back to the community and ultimately like a

true democracy, a perfect example.

I mean, is you, whether you, whatever the election, whatever left, right

red, blue side, you're on this, isn't a political conversation, but

there was the idea of voter fraud.

And the reality is if you can grab every wallet.

And treat it.

Let's say like a social security where anyone can go on this public ledger

and see who voted what, and I don't know your social security number,

but I, so I can't check it, but I can ask you, do you see yours there?

And I can see mine there.

We can go around and ask a bunch of people to make sure it's all true.

If it's transparent, there are real world cases that are being solved.

I mean, every day, We saw defi, which is decentralized finance.

This was summer of 2020, I believe was an incredible run

that really led to that bear run.

Following that we saw NFTs.

Obviously we know how that story went, which was actually pretty interesting

because when Facebook announced the meta name change, which was for the metaverse,

we ended up seeing even more activity driving towards these metaverse projects

and still way too early for the metaverse.

But

Joe, let

me, let me bring you back a little bit and only, only.

I think for so many of my audience we're podcasters and, you know, they're, they're

just trying to figure out podcasting.

They're just like, damn, they just figured out how to get it, how to get it.

You know, maybe they're a lot.

I find a lot of 'em are six months a year in which is, you know,

they're, they are, they got the, the technical side of it down.

Maybe they're, they're getting into kind of being a, a content creator.

Right.

I think that that's where, where most of 'em see themselves as

kind of this content creator.

And what you're saying is that.

Most of creators, almost all the creators runs right outside of a few exceptions.

They've been building their, their platform on someone else's territory.

They've been building their own.

They've been building on, on YouTube's land, on Facebook's

land, on, on tos or wherever.

And what web three presents is an opportunity for you to build

that platform and, and have that ownership be someone else's, but to

actually have that ownership and.

Have

To the next level, give that ownership kind

of the community if you want.

Is that, is that what I'm hearing?

Am I on point with that?

Or, or do you have any more thoughts

on Absolutely.

Yeah.

Web one was an audience think radio broadcast web two is sharing social media.

Web three is ownership.

And with the ownership, as I was saying with the community, you give ownership to

a community they're gonna play full out.

And if you have a fund in which your community votes on what are the guests

on your podcasts, they can vote on who they want you to interview, right?

And it's no longer the Joe show, the Hector show or whatever, and your show.

It becomes the show of the collective group of people who

are supporting you since day one.

And guess what?

The earlier they are to support you.

When this becomes impulsive.

Number one podcast in the world, they're gonna be right there, reaping the rewards

with you because they diamond hands.

It, they didn't let go because they always believed in you.

And they were part of getting that exposure.

Think about podcasters.

Like, I mean, I, I deal with this issue.

We work with a lot of interns and people that are voluntary

to from the community and.

Podcast, like it's, it takes a lot of work to set it up, coordinate the guests,

get the podcast there, do the interview.

And then when you're done.

Okay, cool.

Let's put it on the channels where there's Spotify or any platforms that

you, you get it on and then you have to transcribe the article, right?

And then you have to distribute it, maybe some content marketing thread and

some relevant Reddits, and then maybe go and reach out to a bunch of podcast.

If you have a community of people that are listening to you, even a

hundred concurrent viewers or listeners that are listening to your podcast.

And let's just say 10%, that's 10 people that can grab your

content and put it all around.

That could screenshot it.

And post it on their Instagram stories and tag, you know, the download link.

And that's, it's a way to incentivize your community by not just saying,

Hey, like support it and will grow.

It's saying like, no, you have direct incentive, personal incentive,

cuz what you own will grow in

value as this grows to gives 'em skin in the game.

yeah,

you talked about this kind of tokenized community thing,

which I think is really great.

What are some other, maybe no brainers obvious use cases for, for someone like

a podcaster and then, and maybe, and if there's some that are, are novel or, or

maybe not so obvious, we can get into those as well, but I would love for just

for people to kind of see outside of.

You know, what are the other possibilities?

Cool.

I got, I think three from top of mind.

First one is token gated commerce.

Without a doubt you can offer that there's a store that only certain

people that were there listening to a certain episode or got a secret

phase and you kind of gamify it where they can unlock rewards, which is on.

You know, commerce, which is Shopify, WordPress, and it's actually crazy

to think how easy it is to make a token gated commerce store.

There is a Shopify app.

There is a WordPress plugin.

You install, find the NFD, call it today.

It's really that

just so I can clarify, what that means is someone.

They own this NFT or this, these points or this picture of card, whatever.

However, they kinda wanna CLA you wanna kinda wanna classify.

Cause I think you, you, you make a great point about not calling it an NFT, cuz

it's just, it's some, that's, that's a classification, but they have this thing.

And then because they have this, they can put in and they can verify

through this website and now they can access this other content.

Right?

So apple is doing this with subscription plus, you know, Spotify has their thing.

Everybody kind of has their own, you know, their own membership thing.

What you're saying is you can, you can own all that and run.

Run that outside of Spotify or apple taking their, their kind of big goals,

you know, share whatever they take.

That well you can offer I'm saying Shopify,

so you have Spotify, right?

You can do token gated content where you can only unlock this podcast, this

episode, this round table, this mat, whatever valuable piece of content,

because at any of the day we listen to podcast cause we're grabbing value,

whether it's educational or whether it's entertainment or just straight engagement.

Right.

And creating these premium contents and putting token.

Paywalls, whether that's in the NFT, whether if that's just, it can be free,

which leads to my second one with the, which is proof of attendance protocols.

These are known as co-ops and they're doing these a lot with concerts.

And by showing up to a concert, your ticket becomes a proof

of attendance protocol.

Co-op where it has proof that you attended.

And when you check in the picture of it might actually change colors because it

shows that you are at a physical location.

Something that we are doing right now is we offer PO.

At the end during every one of our events in the form of a QR code.

So for anyone that does video podcasts, this can be something that

can be a great use case where you show a link, they scan it, and now

it has proof that they're there.

So if they listen effectively to, let's say you do it at the end of

every episode and they have 10 co-ops, they've listened to your episode 10

times, and you have proof on chain.

These are the people you wanna reward and

Hmm.

That's so cool.

I think one, one thing that happens with podcasting is there's

this it's very distant, right?

It's almost like you're, you are shouting into a, an echo chamber almost.

Right.

And without, because there's, there's no real, real way to create this engagement,

but what you're kind of presenting is this verifiable way to, you know, identify

your top listeners or, or to identify, you know, downloads or, or whatever it is.

I just, I think.

whatever

backside of that, the ability for, for stats

and, and tracking and, and kind of having some, some real transparency

in the industry, I think is just huge.

There was one more that I think you had was there, is there

another one that you can think of?

The third thing, and I think it's still a little too early for

this, but this is right around the corner.

Especially now, which I mean, going to that, when I had a train of thought that

I realized that the podcasters might, might not, you know, make too much sense

for, but I truly believe that there is gonna be a new meta that comes into

fruition, as I said before, was defi.

And then, you know, metaverse, and, and then eventually, I mean, NFTs as well.

There will eventually be a meadow, which is known as DSO

and that is decentralized social.

Where Instagram doesn't own the content you own the content.

By people consuming your content.

You're awarded that currency of whatever blockchain game or ecosystem it's on

and decentralized social media is there.

It is today.

just don't think, I think it's that it's early stages.

I think really have a YouTube channel where instead of paying YouTube

bread or YouTube premium, right.

You're just buying these tokens and to watch these videos, you

award 'em these tokens, and as a platform grows, you grow with it.

You become an early adopt.

On any one of these decentralized social media platforms and just

consider it to redistribute your existing content on these channel.

And one of these platforms take off and you are an early adopter besides being a

massive influencer on a Webre platform.

Just like all the people that were rewarded, all those fitness people

that were super vain, posting shirtless pictures, and after their workouts on

Instagram, in the early days that are now million, you know, follower, huge

professional personalities, like that can be you in your, in your niche.

And the crazy part is besides having all that clout, right.

All that, all those follow.

You're gonna have ownership your tokens, your, you will be making a

lot of money in the process because we're talking about tokens that

are equal to currency, whatever it may be, whatever it's valued at the

time.

So this is it's so exciting and I'm Joe, I'm just

selfishly glad our universe as collided.

Because I think that you know, we're at the beginnings and.

And I think that that creates a challenge, right?

Because we're not, we're not quite there yet, but I think if someone were to turn

a blind eye to this, they would be, they would already be getting left behind.

And so the challenge is like, how, what, what can we do now?

Or how do we start positioning ourselves?

Right.

As a podcaster?

How do what, like what, what steps can we start doing with the.

With the knowledge that it might not break, you know, or I don't know what

your timeline on seeing it, but, but it might not break in 20, 22 or 2023.

I mean, we might give better chances after that, but like, we know this is

not a, a three month timeline, right.

Or I don't know what, what, what, when your head, what's the timeline

that you see it hitting on?

I, I honestly, a part of me thinks with the

narrative being like impending pen recession coming, the world's

going, everybody's cutting budgets.

And they're just like, it's not that we need to cut budgets right now.

We're just, we're preparing and we are gonna focus on our runway.

All I keep seeing is crypto slightly move up to the right.

And I keep thinking like, what if this is part of the narrative to

tell you to do one thing, which I continue dollar cost averaging and,

and just, I believe in this, I'm a builder we're building in this space.

So I'm thinking definitely long term.

But without a doubt, at least without community, when we do these proof of

attendance and we give them the QR codes where they can mint an NFT to

me, that's the first thing you need to do is really set up a wallet.

Buy little Bitcoin buy little Ethereum, you know, nothing crazy.

Buy five, $10, do something because the second you do, you

are in the top 5% in crypto.

The second you meant one NFT and there are free min out there.

You can buy one for $10.

If you want, you are in the 1% of crypto and you just gotta get involved.

Get in this space, join some discords of interest based discords whatever

your podcast is, whether it's in the creator economy, whether it's

in marketing, entrepreneurship, business, eCommerce, whatever it.

Like UN find a web through community that's there and

just kind of get immersed.

And I think immersion's the best way to educate yourself and just wait for it.

Because one of those groups, there's gonna be one person that posts on a

chat, this crazy new up and coming decentralized social media platform.

That's really all it change takes to

change your life.

Yeah, I think about, you know, the, the Ashton

Kucher or Kim K kind of did this, but there were, there are always these,

these examples of people that kind of rode that early wave of, of social.

And so I, and I think that you're right, that we, we definitely

have an opportunity there.

I'm gonna play devil's advocate for a little bit.

Because I think one, One challenge that the podcasting world is having

is, is discoverability and it's it's.

mm-hmm

A result of, of kind of their, their ethos, right?

I mean, the, the idea for podcasting was to be built in a decentralized

fashion via RSS feeds that wasn't, you know, was not centralized.

And then all of a sudden apple comes along.

Spotify comes along and, and there's this massive move towards centralization,

even with YouTube jumping in the space.

The great thing about, you know, Instagram and TikTok, even YouTube

is that they have this engine, right.

It's a centralized engine.

How does, how does that work in a, in a de you know, in a decentralized world?

Or how do what's the, I don't know, maybe if it's a technological solution,

but what is the solution to creators?

Being able to get discovered in a, you know, in a web

three world,

Honestly, it's, it's going back to the web threes built

on web two, and these engines are, are gonna be a lot of similarities.

And that's why, if you just take this web three web two out of the equation,

you just look at it for what it is.

And it's not an NFD.

It's a company.

It's a company that uses these tokens to operate and it it's gonna

be very transferable of skills and awareness and perspec, all this stuff.

It's just very similar and discoverability.

It's the same thing.

You get early, put out a lot of content at volume, dominate the attention and provide

loyalty so that people keep engaging.

You're gonna get discover.

Just right now, there's no competition right now.

There's barely any platforms.

I think podcasters podcasters really thrive on.

There's definitely some out there, which I'm sure by the time, you know,

you're listening to this recording, there's probably 10 more because

there's no way that we're lonely people having this conversation in this space

and early adopters put out content.

And the cool thing is if you're already doing the work, it's just,

just, just as gonna be as easy as, instead of uploading a Spotify.

And apple podcast is uploading

to another.

Yeah, I think you're right.

That, that seeing that part of it really demystifies it and, I think people get,

um, I know I'm getting lost in, in the opportunity because, you know, it seems

like there's so many different ways.

and we'll wait and see.

Um, One thing that came up in the, you know, the podcasting industry

has its own, they have their, it has its own industry talk.

Right.

And so one of the things that came up last week was that, um, one of the

guys in the industry was talking about.

The futility of, and I, and I mean that like, by it being futile of giving people

crypto right now that you know that the, the amount of Satoshi or that it's just,

it's basically like giving people pennies and it's not peop his thesis was, creators

and podcasters are more, They're they have more benefit to set up a, buy me a coffee

account or a Stripe account or something that is in, in very much of the, you know,

the old system rather than getting in.

What's called like a, I dunno if you're familiar, but I'm sure the

value for value system, which is, you know, based off of crypto.

So for something like that, right.

Where, you know, they, they, they're talking about the average, you

know, give in Satoshi's amounts to.

20 cents or something like that, like something obscene, right.

Where it's just, it's almost a, like, if someone were to hand you

two dimes for your, your performance or your work or almost be like,

you know, um, a slap in the face.

Yeah.

An insult.

So, so what just, what are your thoughts on that?

Or is it that just timing and, and stuff like that, but I, I'm

curious on your perspective on that.

you know, if you asked me a year ago and I'd simply be like,

oh, look at Gary V he's doing great.

Right.

And with his collection of V friends being dropped, and I mean, if

you ask me now what the state of how the world is and the narrat.

You know, I, I don't think it's really, it's good to be an early

adopter, but at the same time, not everybody needs to have an T net.

Everyone needs to be in crypto.

And at least my advice is the stronger you are on web two, the stronger you'll be

in web three and having a real audience.

And most importantly, having a community is, you know, is

definitely gonna be a huge asset.

But with communities, all crypto is, and tokenized communities

is putting rocket fuel attached.

It's giving your community ownership.

So in the gaming space, having this conversation in the gaming space, the

second you throw NFTs, the whole like discord had a Jason Citron, the CEO of

discord said one comment about doing a meta mask integration and the entire

community turned on 'em to the point that anytime discord posts something

on Twitter, it says, we're never gonna let you forget about that NFT stuff.

Some industries, they're just, they, this is not the place and

this is in the wave and it depends really what your audience is into.

If you're talking to, you know, I guess I could have a very, very old boomer

audience and why are you gonna try?

And on-ramp them to web three.

It makes no sense.

But if you have a drop shipping or young entrepreneurs podcast, it,

the audience might have an overlap.

And it was definitely something worth in, you know, looking.

Joe, this has been selfishly just awesome.

You, I was doing some research into furlough and what's cool.

Is that it just seems like something that the podcasters need, you know, one.

One of the best growth strategies is through collaboration.

And for some reason it seems to be the last one that's chosen for most

podcasters, but that seems to be kind of what your community's all about.

And, and I'd love for you to just talk a little bit about what you guys

are doing or, you know, what, what furloughs, you know, has going on.

Absolutely.

During the pandemic, I had to pivot my, my business because the pandemic just

was not friendly time for traveling.

And I had a few boutique hotels.

I was doing a lot of content trips with influencers and that all you know was,

I think, of the past after the pandemic.

And I started Twitch streaming and I Twitch stream business.

And.

Started collaborating with a lot of people and ultimately grew this community

brought in some new partners and we host 50 events every month, and you

know, we have a startup accelerator.

. And you know, entrepreneur, startup, founders, eCommerce

owners, and marketing profess.

This is a place for them to collaborate.

And we truly believe in collaboration leads to growth.

And we have our own podcast built into our wonderful ecosystem slash community.

And that's known as building public radio.

So bring a lot of startup founders to just talk about their vulnerabilities

and truly feel like this is a place where I didn't have being a solo.

My five startups.

Like I was figuring this out as I went and even talking, I mean, there'll

be a room where someone's my mentor.

Like, I mean, in his forties and there's a kid who's 15 years old and we have

someone else like Boris who's like in his thirties, who's very successful.

And you're just watching this wisdom, get past this kid who just

stumbled across this sun disc world.

Like, I can't believe this is free and I've always, you know, just wanted to

create a space for those great minds.

I, this is not a profitable venture, but we're building something that I

think is gonna, you know, makes some insane impact because when you think

of e-commerce, e-commerce you think Amazon technology, you think apple

sportswear, you think Nike, and then you say digital marketing, digital services.

There's no real brand that fills that gap and not a place that people can go to.

So we decided to build it and it's been a, it's been one.

I love a

journey.

That's

for

sure.

well, yeah, I imagine anybody who's decided

to build something in these times is, uh, you know, there's a little

it requires a little crazy and a lot of passion, I would imagine.

Um,

for sure.

I'm a masochist.

I it's.

So there are sometimes I'm like, wow, we really are too far deep.

Now there's no turning back.

And honestly, a lot of people have bought into the vision.

At the end of the year, we're doing a free mint that create, that

turns the community into a Dow.

Everything will be rolled over right now.

Like I said, it's a centralized community based around me.

People are in it.

They're, they're really take making it, you know, a great space for

greatness and soon they'll own it all.

I'm very happy to give it away.

So then finally I can be a consumer of it.

Yeah.

Yeah, totally.

Where do, can people get, find out about that or, or get connected with furlough?

of course, furlough.com.

That's our website and furlough on social media channels.

And the discord is definitely the place to go

Discord, LinkedIn.

We have a great community.

That's O obviously active on LinkedIn and then furlough TV that redirects to our

YouTube where we're just broadcasting all of the events we're having in discord.

Really.

I think the only discord

community that's actually doing that,

Yeah, I love it.

go get connected.

Y'all and, uh, I'm sure we'll have Joe back on a, on a follow up, because