And we are live and it is my pleasure to introduce our special guest today, Adam Curry,

aka, he's a pod father. He's been around about as long as anybody in podcasting. He's actually a big part of the reason podcasting is what it is today. And it's a great, great thing to have you on today, Adam. Thank you for agreeing to do this.

No, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Most of my audience probably knows who you are, but just in case there's a few that don't, you kind of go back to the beginning when you started podcasting. And what made you choose that form of media?

Well, the, the history goes back actually to 2000 so that predates podcasting, which Dave Weiner and I, I guess you would say invented, but sometimes I think discovered is a better term.

That was more 2004. In 2000, I was living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands had just moved back, had had a, took a company public in, in the States on NASDAQ and had a whole, whole interesting career was kind of going to retire, which is dumb idea.

And in the Netherlands, which is a really densely cabled country, they had cable modems, which provided this tremendous benefit of not having to dial in and tying up your phone lines.

You had always on internet by no means what had it did have any speed. It was still crap. And, you know, the coming kind of out of a multimedia world, a television world and radio world.

I was disappointed with the experience of clicking something, waiting, and I'm not kidding, five or 10 minutes to download a video. I was looking more videos than audio.

You know, then you, so after that happens, you had to click it and it would open up a player and just, you know, that was like a minute video. It was, it was not an experience.

And I, I, I wrote a blog post called the last yard and the idea was, if we, you know, since your computer is on all the time anyway now, why can't you have it look for something that knows you'll want.

So a video or a MP3 file or I didn't really know what that meant, but I was thinking more video at the time and just have your computer download that in the background.

And then not tell you that's doing that until it actually has it on the drive and says, hey, there's something new. Then you would click on it would play immediately and that would be a trick to shift time.

Dave Winer was developing RSS at the time with blogs and he had a piece of software called radio user land and it created an RSS feed and you could also subscribe to RSS feed.

There was all in one and I came up with this last yard idea and I said, well, why don't we attach like make a file attachment to RSS, which was really for blogs at the time.

That way it's like attaching, you know, a file to an email and then the aggregator on the receiving side can decide what to do with that.

So actually flew to New York to convince him to do this. He was in New York and he did not think it was interesting until I wrote an example in his own code of his radio user land, which when he saw that, he said, OK, I'll do it, but you have to promise you never ever use my code again because that was a horrible thing to see.

So, OK, that's fine. I'm not a grad, I'm not a coder at all. So then we were kind of like the only people playing around with that. And it was just, you know, I'd see we had auto downloading.

So when something came in and there was a little folder on your desktop and that's where the video files or whatever else we were doing PDFs, all kinds of stuff.

And then I saw my first iPod in 2004 and I was like, holy crap. This is not a digital walkman. This is not a jukebox. This is a radio receiver. I used to have one just like it. It was little Sony, like a square solid state AM radio. My grandmother gave it to me.

He had a nine-volt battery, put it under the pillow at night, listen to the basketball games. And so then I said about rigging an RSS feed with Apple script so that when there was a new item, it would download that item and then put it into my into my iTunes, you had to still synchronize with iTunes.

And then it would create a playlist based upon the parameters of the blog post title. And so before you know what I actually transformed my iPod into a podcast player.

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