Adam Curry Was the First Podcaster | Joe Rogan

Before we go any further, we should give you credit. You're the reason why all this started. You are the original Podfather, the legitimate one. There's a lot of people claiming that. You're the guy who made the very first podcast. You even came up with the name of it, right? No, I didn't come up with the name. Who came up with the name of it? Well, let me go back to the beginning because actually the technology of podcasting was invented in 2000. So before anyone was podcasting, before there was an iPod, interestingly. I was living in Amsterdam at the time and I was working with Dave Weiner who really invented blogging and he had created this RSS syndication format. And he had software where you could blog and then an aggregator, kind of like Google Reader at the time and you could read blogs. It was kind of like a two-way communication thing. It was interesting and a lot of people were starting to use it. And in Amsterdam, they had cable modems rolled out everywhere. Cable modems were sold at the time as always on internet. It wasn't fast. It was just fucking on. You didn't have to dial in, which was, oh my God, this is great. This was a huge improvement. You didn't have to kick someone off the phone line, all of that. So the experience of multimedia was shit. You wanted to hear a song or play a video. It was like, click, wait, wait, wait, download, wait. It would probably download and then open up some kind of player and then it was not an experience. There was nothing there that made sense. And I always wanted to broadcast on the internet. That's always been my thing from the moment I saw it. So I came up with this concept of the last yard. So what if you had a little thing running on your computer in the background that would know if there's something you wanted, let's just forget how it knows part, it would download it and it would tell you that there was something new when it already had it on its local hard drive. So you remove the whole wait experience because you don't know. You don't know that this computer has been downloading something you've wanted. It just tells you, oh, it's here, which is, you know, it's not abnormal in media. You're the six o'clock news. Most of it's produced before the actual broadcast. So I took this idea to Dave and I said, we need to come up with something that can download a media file that I program somehow, like this is going to show up. And then it downloads it and only tells me when it's there and I can click on it and it plays immediately. And it took some convincing. He didn't exactly understand what I was saying. He probably thought, fucking MTV guy, get the fuck out of here. In fact, that's exactly what he thought. And then I actually demonstrated to him what I wanted to do in his own software. And he said, okay, I'm going to do this, but only on the condition you never, ever, ever fucking use my software again because that was horrible what you just did. And so we created the enclosure element in RSS. And so for two years, we were doing back and forth, you know, like movie files and stuff and, oh, click, and it would open up and the experience was good until I saw my first iPod. A friend of mine said, oh, look at this. And I'm like, well, this is the white one with the big click, click, click, click, click, click, the big wheel on it. That was a good one, right? They got hot after a while, like big hard drive. And I looked at it and went, this is not a digital Walkman. This is a fucking radio receiver. Because I had one. I had a Sony AM radio trend receiver, which is, you know, little solid state thing. Like, this is a radio. This can receive radio programming. And so I set about, again, with my fantastic programming skills to make a little application and the iPod at the time, you still had to sync it to iTunes. That's how you got music onto it back in the day. And so you could put an MP3 file into a blog post, basically, but it was a special attachment, really. And so this program would just be looking all the time. Is there something new? Is there something new? Oh, there's something new. Download it, then click, trip it so that it's synchronized to the iPod. And it worked. Now, not being a programmer, actually Kevin Marks, a guy who was working at Apple, sent me a version of the script that actually worked that was helpful. And I set about creating a radio show, which we didn't have the name podcast yet. And I wanted to be able to talk to developers, software developers, who could create receivers. So we had iPod or iPod or X, iPod or lemon, all these different applications, which kind of did the same thing. And because I was talking to developers, I called it the daily source code. So I did every day, and source code is kind of what the developers work in. And I was really talking to them, like, okay, well, the guys over in New Zealand, they've created this version of the app and it's really working well. And we discovered all kinds of crazy shit, like you subscribe to a feed, because no one had thought it through. We would try and download everything you had in that feed all at once. So I was trying to download 50 episodes. And we still had kind of always on internet. So everything would crunch and die. And this just kept building and building and other people started doing these. And we called them soliloquies and little bundles of joy and all kinds of really dumb names. And Danny Grigoir, a guy who was just listening, he said, oh, this is a podcast. And the name stuck. Now, Ben Hammersley from The Guardian years earlier had actually used the term podcast somewhere in an article, which there was no podcasting at the time, but he envisioned that and called it podcast. So he's the guy who named it. He used the term, but I would say Danny Grigoir really named what we were doing at the time. And that's when I didn't name myself the pod father, where people started calling me that. And it just grew from there. And that went really fast before I knew what the BBC was calling and the interviews here and there. I'm like, holy shit, something blowing up here. And it wasn't until, that's a big moment was I got a call from Steve Jobs. And he says, well, actually it was Eddie Q, who's big man on campus there now. He says, can you meet with Steve? I'm like, let me check my calendar. Fuck yeah. So it was in, where's the D3 conference? Like San Diego, I think. Went there and I met with him for an hour. And it was, and I had, I've met a lot of interesting people. He's a busy dude. My best meeting to date had been Quincy Jones, where I got drunk with him for an hour on the live radio show. Oh yeah, that was fantastic. So here's Steve Jobs in the flash. Now, the first thing I noticed is he's got a weird list that I'd not really heard before. Really? Yeah. It's like, well, okay. So he hides it when he does those? Maybe when he's projecting, but he was much more personable. And it's just the two of us. But first he's mad, he's fucking pissed off and he's yelling about, they fucked up Wi-Fi. And I learned later that his plan always for the iPhone was to not be a cell phone, but to use Wi-Fi networks around the world. And because Cisco or whoever had changed the way Wi-Fi works and the way the authentication works, that it really wouldn't be that seamless. But that was his vision. And so actually I thought to myself, dude, you should probably calm down. It's going to make you sick. And then he was talking about, oh no, Eddie Q says, yeah, the RAA called and they got a problem with how we're able to record sounds on the Mac, breaking any kind of encryption. And I said, oh yeah, it's actually kind of important because in order to record stuff, we're using like audio hijack pro and all these different kinds of tools. And I said, mom, I hope they don't do that because it's kind of important for production. And Steve went, fuck it, tell them to fuck themselves. This is tools our guys need. And then he said, Adam, I'd like to put podcasting in iTunes. Are you okay with that? I'm like, are you kidding me? Yes. I'll give you my director. I built a directory of podcasts. I'll give you that to start it off. Absolutely. And then it was kind of funny. So then maybe- What year was this? 2004, something like that, I think. Yeah, 2004, 2005 timeframe. And then Jamie, you can find it if you want. It's a pretty funny video. So he announces this on stage, playing my podcast where I just rail on the Mac. You can take a look, it's pretty funny. It's like, it's the one video that really legitimizes me in the world of podcasting. Thank you, Steve. I really appreciate it. Oh yeah, you got to check this out. This is hilarious. Well, you could try to sell podcasts, but the whole phenomenon is so great, it's free. And I think what we're going to see is an advertising supported model emerge just like free radio. Here's another, Adam Curry is one of the guys that invented podcasting. And he has a podcast called the Daily Source. Let me go ahead and subscribe to that. And we can go listen to his latest one. Just click on it. Daily source code show number one, 180. Something remarkable is happening here. Radio is springing free of the regulated gatekeepers who've managed what you can hear since radio was invented. It's jumping into the hands of anyone at all with something or nothing to say. With $16 million worth of airplanes strapped to my ass, then the next generation radio content in my ears. I like to think I'm flying into the future. Podcasting is Adam Curry. That's right. It's show number 180 and it's Friday, everybody. Thank God. I've actually had to restart the show three times. My Mac has been acting up like a motherfucker. I don't know what's going on. I think it's something to do with the file system. Okay. He knew exactly what he was doing, bro. I'm telling you, he knew exactly. Oh, yeah. I had to. I'm sure he wouldn't play a clip that he didn't know. I love Kara Swisher with her mouth just like, oh, yeah, what's happening? That's hilarious. And then he sent me an email later and he said, I'm going to introduce you to some people in venture capital, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, which I kind of took as the thank you. And I went on to raise a lot of money from those companies to build my podcast network. What year was your first podcast? The first one that you released? Well, so that was 2003, I guess. 2003. Wow. So what was going on before you? Was there anything? Was there any other? Well, people have been putting, well, we had real video and real audio, if you remember. So that was kind of like the low grade streaming stuff. But this really made, it did two things. I mean, it solved the bandwidth problem for downloading. That was the first. And now that's no longer an issue, of course. But it put the subscription model into place. And because neither I or Dave Weiner have ever patented any of this, it's completely free and open so no one owns it. And that was the mission. I'm very proud of that. That's beautiful. Because otherwise, if someone, Spotify is now trying to buy podcasting by buying up all these networks and they'll make it exclusive. And granted, they're trying to switch from a music company to an audio company. But ultimately, look at all the applications that are out there that are really good. People love them. The Apple Podcasts app, I use Overcast. I like that a lot. There's tons of different ones. And it's all because there's an open standard that no one can control. And Silicon Valley loves controlling shit. In fact, Apple loves controlling shit. This is one of the few things Apple has done that is in a walled garden locked into Apple stuff. It's interesting because they're not even monetizing it. No. And they have many different ways they could do stuff or they could help. But I don't know why. I don't know why they're not. I think it's an oversight. I think they thought for the longest time that it was just this thing that people did that was no big deal. And then it's become so enormous, but they still have this model that they're operating under. That it's just they're just aggregating. Could be. And what was interesting is when they started off, they immediately started to highlight NPR programming, which I'm grateful for. WGBH in Boston did a lot with putting their first programs making those available as podcasts. But kind of the beauty of the amateurism of podcasts and got pushed down a little bit and it was all BBC and PR PBS. It's a little too much for me, the Radiolab. I love Radiolab, but I know what you're saying. It's very produced. It's very, like people answer questions for the guest instead of like they'll cut in. So what he said was this and like, why don't you just let them say it? Right.