Podcasting 2.0 for March 7, 2025, episode 213, The Substrate. Oh yeah, baby. Hello, everybody. Welcome once again to Podcasting 2.0. It is the only podcast you need to listen to, except for those five others that we listen to. It's a great podcast because it's not a podcast. It is a meeting of the board of directors of the future of podcasting. It's all being done right now. In fact, we are the only boardroom that never charges a tariff.
I'm Adam Curry here in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and in Alabama, the man who always says yes first and figures it out later. Say hello to my friend on the other end, the one, the only, Mr. Dave Jones. That was a long one. Yeah. I was worried about you running out of steam. I thought you were going to run out of breath. Come on, man. I'm a professional pronunciator. I went to school. I went to the Connecticut School of Broadcasting.
You know, we were talking about the roadcaster in the boardroom before the show. We had a similar discussion at my day job this morning. About a roadcaster? No, no, no. This is about the IT you could dub it the IT Indian burial ground effect. Please do expand. You've experienced this. You just don't know it. Okay. We've all experienced this. This is when you get something working. So you get a computer working perfectly. Everything works fine.
You deliver it to the end user and it screws up horribly. Oh, yes. Then you go and get it and it works fine and bring it back to your office and it works fine again. You can't find anything wrong. You read, deliver it to the end user and it continues to work fine. Wait a minute. What is this called? It's called the this is the IT Indian burial ground. This is somehow. Do you know, have you seen the movie Jeremiah Johnson? No. With Robert Redford? No. You haven't seen this movie?
I can say no again. This is a must watch. Okay. Wait, Jeremiah Johnson? Jeremiah Johnson. Let's see. This has got to be the 70s. Okay. Early 70s maybe. Jeremiah Johnson, Robert Redford. Yeah. What year? 72. Yeah. This is 1972. You need to watch this movie. It's a great movie. But, you know, so the sort of the plot of this movie is long, by the way. I want to say it's like it says an hour and 48 minutes. It's got to be longer than an hour and 48 minutes.
But anyway, so the plot of this movie or one of the one of the plots of this movie is, you know, they they go through an Indian burial ground. Oh, this is where the meme is from. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Robert Redford looking at you and doing the nod. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I recognize it. Sure. I have not seen it. I'm pretty sure I haven't.
Okay. So part, you know, part of the subplot of this movie is that they they they're trying to get somewhere quick and they run up on this Indian burial ground and their guide says, hey, we know we can't we can't go through this. And this is this sacred land. And you're only allowed to go in once a year or something like that to do like a ceremony or something. And. You know, you can't you can't go in here, it's or you'll be cursed.
And they're like, oh, man, we're in this we're in the middle of this ravine. If we have to backtrack and go around, it's going to take like two more, two extra days. And so they just kind of like, look, you know, look around a little bit, make sure nobody's watching. And then they just like, you know, book it through the Indian barrel middle of the Indian burial ground.
You know, of course, this ends up very, very bad for them because now for the rest of the movie, they start getting tailed by and like attacked by by these Native American warriors. And you never exactly. You can say Indians. It's OK. Oh, yeah. I think I said Native Americans. I think that I like the term Native American. They don't. I think it's they don't. They like American Indians.
I like American Indian, but as an American Indian, they get they get tailed and attacked by these American Indians that that you're never exactly sure if they're real or if they're sort of like spirits, you know, that are taking vengeance for their for their violation of this desecration of this Indian burial ground. But eventually the.
It's determined they somehow paid their dues or whatever, you know, they've they've they've been hurt enough to where, you know, the the the Indian spirits or they let them off the hook, you know. Yeah. So I think I think what we determined was when what happens is you somehow you've you've violated some some spirit, you've desecrated the spirits. And then you've been you're being punished in the walking back and forth and having to eat crow from this user.
You do that enough times and eventually you satisfy the spirits and the curse is lifted. And now this laptop works. That's that's that's a running theory. That's the philosophy. OK, I get it now. I see nothing else. Yeah. Nothing else makes sense. Yeah, I get it. So that's the same with the roadcaster. Mm hmm. Yeah, it doesn't it doesn't make any sense. You you're the roadcaster. The roadcaster messes up and it excuse me, it works best when you run it.
And then at some point it gets the curse and you have to you know, you have to reboot it and go through the pain of watching the reverse progress bar and then the regular progress bar, which takes five minutes to boot. Really? Something's wrong. It shouldn't take that long. It shouldn't take something's wrong. No, that's got to be you got to get another micro SD card. That that's that's the weakest part of the whole system. I don't even have an SD card in it. Oh, well, there you go.
Put an SD card in. It'll boot within seconds. This is this is this machine is is a child. It needs constant supervision. Well, it's made in Australia. So it's probably the aboriginal spirits that are that are also valid. Yes. Also valid. Yeah. Yeah. So before we start, I've been working with you, Dave Jones, for 15 years. And if you listen to the latest power power podcast, weekly review interview with Adam and Dave. And you said it quite well there. You know, Adam comes up with some idea.
You say yes first and then we go figure it out. Absolutely. But in 15 years and we've been through some things. I've never actually seen you get irritated by stuff people are saying to you. And I saw it today. On the social. And I need to talk. Yeah, well, let me just say let me just say something. Don't poke the bear people. I'm Dave's mama bear. You got to go through me. You when I read things like this is just a boys club, the founders, blah, blah, blah. Come on.
Let's be a little mature here, shall we? With our language, that's all I ask for. Yeah. James's comments seriously ruined my entire day. I could tell I noticed it because when you throw it on. Oh, Lord, I mean, you're clutching your pearls. I mean, we got church ladies swinging the handbags. I'm it. I had a I had an argument with my wife this morning that I read that came from this because I was aggravated and I carried it into my relationship. I want to I want to.
I guess I want to talk about this in this way. The reason the reason that I have thick skin, 99 percent of the time on. On this project is because if it's a self-defense mechanism, if I don't, if I let this stuff get to me, it really gets me hard and I cannot. Deal properly with it in my own life. So sometimes if you think you're being ignored, it's because it's for a good reason. It's because I'm trying to keep my emotional and mental distance from criticism.
I see you, Chad. Yes. And I realized that after I said I was normally I would have said that's what she said. But you were in such a serious mode. I'm like I'm like, oh, man, you got to fight with Melissa's like I'm like, oh, I can't believe what he just said. I'm holding my tongue like that's what she said. OK, let me read. Let me go back to let me go back to it. It really gets to me hard. How about that? That still sounds kind of bad. It's not OK. It's not OK. It's better. Let me go.
Let me let me do a deep cut back into into the history of of it lands heavy. Yeah, there you go. Thank you. Much better. Those boys, those would be so, so, so, so, so be. Yes, it lands heavy. Thank you. Thank you. Let's strike that from the record. Nope, nope. There'll be no edit. So sort of a deep cut back into our project history, the when we had we were in this project with Dave Weiner called the World Outline. Yeah. That's how we met. Yeah. Easy to for poets in those.
I think those Google groups are still out there. You can just search for easy to for poets and you can see the stuff that we were doing. But. The the way that that whole project ultimately blew up. Was a few things that happened back to back. One of them was the one of them had to deal with you and your interaction with Dave, and one of them had to do with me and my interaction with Dave. And. This was. What happened was I made a I made a code change on your on your machine.
Gosh, you remember this stuff I've forgotten all about. And please go deep. I want to remember this well. So the way the way that this project worked was Dave did all they wanted at all of the coding in this what in this piece of software called Frontier Frontier Userland. And I had it and it was it was its own thing with its own programming language. And it was which is not necessary to understand.
But if you but what would happen was you could run you could download the software and run run his code. And so it had the appearance of an open source project. But what you found out over time was the source may have been open, but the project itself wasn't open. But the project really belongs to Dave Weiner, and he was going to be the one that was going to write the code and and do those kinds of things.
And it doesn't it was not open source in the traditional sense of being an open source project where other people could contribute. And so I didn't understand that at the time, because the open source projects I've been involved with before you did, you know, you you did pull requests, or I mean, they weren't called that then because this is before Git even existed. But you did code submissions and that kind of thing. You waited for approval, you talked it out and that kind of thing.
That really wasn't how this thing went. And so what happened was we had this river of news, HTML page. Yes, subversion. That's right, Eric PP. Yeah, this river of news that was part of the of the of the product or the software. And so I was working with a with you, Adam, to what one of the things was happening is you could fall back at that in those days, you could follow a Twitter feed as RSS. Twitter create also spawned an RSS feed for every timeline.
And so you could follow your time, your Twitter timeline in your RSS reader. A lot of people don't remember that. But at some point, yes, they killed the RSS feeds. So what happened was I created a link expander. Some link expander code in JavaScript that would take a Twitter shortened URL and expand it into its original URL so that you didn't have to click through Twitter to to do it. And so you could see where you were going to end up going instead of just this bland URL that was obfuscated.
And so you were like, yeah, I want I want that because I want to be, you know, you needed that that functionality. So I gave you that code and you installed it on your on your server. So then Dave did push some more code later and you mentioned something to him about this other Twitter expander URL code and he got very angry. Which I know is shocking, but he got very angry and just laid into me, told me that I was that that I was not allowed to touch his quote, his code without asking him first.
And he just basically treat, you know, talk, talk to me as if I was a child. This resulted in me feeling embarrassed, publicly ashamed, you know, like I had I'd never been talked to like this. And I thought Dave Wiener was this incredible, you know, person that I did, you know, that I didn't want him to lose, lose respect for me and all these kinds of things. I was young. I was I was probably, I guess, in my early 30s.
And and so I ended up on this 45 minute long phone call with Dave Wiener, essentially apologizing to him and all this kind of stuff. And when I was finished, you know, I just felt I felt that I that that I had no respect for myself. I felt that I had not. I felt I had lost my own integrity. Gosh, Dave was very good at making people feel this way. I know exactly what you're talking about. He has a special way of making people feel small.
Yeah. And at that point, I just lost every bit of desire for this for the project. I hadn't I didn't care about it anymore. That was pretty much it. I was done. And then, you know, a couple of weeks later, you and him got into it about a separate issue. And that the pretty pretty much the whole thing collapsed. Well, he he I woke up one day and just pulled the plug on the servers. Right. He just shut. I don't remember why, but he just shut it down.
It's like, I'm not going to do this if people do that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. He shut the servers down because of me. Oh, yeah. And then later you had a problem. And he said in his you had a problem in production with no agenda. And his response was RTFM. Yeah. Yeah. And that was it. And so that pretty much was the end of it.
And so this this is what I've been afraid of with all open source projects that I get involved in is a repeat of that, because if you if you make people if you are mean spirited and you try to hurt people's feelings or make them feel bad about the work they're doing. That is the result that you're going to get. You're going to get people who don't want to participate and who just want to go away. And that's the way I felt this morning. I was really just tired of the entire project.
I felt thoroughly innervated and just done. You know, and honestly, I'm going to have to work through that those feelings this week. I'm just going to need to spend some time this week just trying to figure out. My orientation to the project, I mean, I'm not stopping, I'm not leaving or anything like that, I just. I don't I can't let this sort of stuff get to me in this way or else I will leave, and that is something that I can't let happen.
What James said to me felt hurtful and denigrating, and I'm not going to go through that again. You know, and the thing about it is this is all we're all volunteers here. This is all donated time. And the point that needs to be made about that is this is as good as it gets. There is no if we if what we want in podcasting is a group of people that's dedicated to building technology for podcasting, building open protocols and open specifications. This is all you're ever going to get.
Nobody cares enough to pay for this sort of work. The podcast industry does not care. They've proven that time after time after time. They there will never be a standards body. There will never be a some sort of working group with a board and with a with committees and all these kinds of things that just is not going to happen. And if you think it is, you are living in a fantasy world.
What we have right now with podcasting 2 .0, a group of people trying to build these the namespace and these open protocols. That is as good as this thing is ever going to be. Even if somebody like and what I mean is people volunteering their time. Even if somebody like Apple stepped up to like fund this or fund some sort of real standards body, we'd be right back stuck in the same place that Mozilla is right now. They never will to be to be to be, you know, first, first of all.
But even if they did in some kind of weird world where that became where that worked out, then what you are is your Mozilla who is always beholden to Google for their annual donation in order to survive. This, this project works this way in it.
And, you know, James says last week he had all these criticisms of the project, all these criticisms of this is why I'm down on 2.0, because you have to harass people and you have to, you know, you have to get angry at people to get anything done and you just get ignored and you have, you know, you spend your time building a, you know, writing up a huge document and nobody ever says a word about it, you know, and I was getting just all these criticisms, you know, and they're all aimed at me.
I understand that. It's nobody, nobody's, you know, it's obvious. We know that's, I'm sorry, but that's as good as it gets. What you get is, I'll tell you what my, what my day looks like. I wake up, I get about an hour, sometimes an hour and a half to code on Godcaster. Then I go to my day job all day. Then I get home, do all my family stuff. And I may get 30 minutes at night, maybe to work on namespace and index stuff.
That's typical. On Friday, I have to run home at lunch, eat lunch while I'm doing this show, then run back to the office. So that takes all that away. What happened this morning was I scrolled through, I was going to start working on Godcaster on a new feature that we're working on. Sorry, I was going to, I was going to start working on that, but I just read James' message, you know, and I was just like, screw it. I can't, I can't even do this. I can't. I was so upset.
I'm focused on coding right now. So I lost, I lost an entire hour of coding time on Godcaster because of that. And that's what I can't allow to happen. This is also why there might be a sense of being ignored because the GitHub is a place where I find it very difficult to work now. Oh, GitHub's always turned into that. It turns into a flame war. I never look at the GitHub. I can't, I can't, it gets my blood boiling.
I had to turn off notifications about a year ago from the GitHub because there was a person in there that, you know, that is pretty much gone now. There's a person in there that was just relentlessly criticizing me and my decisions. And I was like, you know what, I can't, I can't read a post that has 12 paragraphs of criticism of me and then also be productive and get some stuff done. Like this is, I can't do this.
So I turned off the notifications and that's why I do most of my work on the Mastodon, trying to, because it's a quick turnaround and I don't have to deal with all the political bullcrap. But now it's getting into the Mastodon and it's becoming, it's getting harder and harder to focus on getting stuff done because even when you give people what they want, what they've asked for, you get even more criticized when you give them what they want.
And I'm just, I'm just sick of all the political part of this and I'm going to have to figure out a way to work around it. If I may quote from our brother James, and with that I mean the Apostle James, understand this my dear brothers and sisters, you must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. Human anger does not produce the righteousness God desires.
So get rid of all the filth and evil in your lives and humbly accept the word God has planted in your hearts for it has the power to save your souls. And we all should, I mean I repeat this to myself every morning, quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to get angry. That's really where we have to be. And it will help everybody if you just think of those three little short terms, quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to get angry. It's changed my life, it really has.
So I was right when I saw, I saw what happened. I felt you brother, I felt you. And, and, and honestly I'm, my, you know, I, what happens is for people who don't live like you and I do, you want to pull the plug. I was like, yeah, why don't I shut down the Mastodon for a day? I'm like, no, no, no, this is not where I got to reset my thinking. How much does it cost you to run the Mastodon each month, by the way? 150 bucks? Yeah, yeah, about 150. 150 dollars? Out of pocket.
Yeah, I don't deduct that from the, from our fund. I don't know why, I just never did. I'm like, I kind of enjoy it. Yeah, and it's, you know, it really, again, again, it's, it's a group of people doing the best they can with busy lives, donating their time for nothing. And we're all doing it. And we're all, we're all doing it for nothing. All of us. Yeah. All of us, everybody, everybody, James included, we're all donating our time.
So can we please like give a little bit of, um, of grace to each other when things don't go exactly the way that we think that they should? Um, I always have, I always have to point out, and this goes for you, it goes for people who do podcasts, it goes for pastors. I always have to remind people, these kinds of people make it look easy. That's, that's the problem. No, they make it look so easy.
I know you have, I mean, my, my prayer for Godcaster, and I'll be very open about this, I hope that, I hope that we, and I've actually, uh, our partner, Gordon, we both agreed. We, we hope that this can get you away from your day job. There will be enough revenue so that you can stop doing what you're doing and only do things that you enjoy doing. Uh, although I'm sure you get some joy out of the day job. Um, but you know, people just need to be reset once in a while.
And remember how this came about, what, what the project was set. The project was only set out to create an index. And then we created a namespace for one reason and one reason only to add value for value payments, which is kind of an experiment. And then everybody came in and we must go back once in a while and say, Hey, you know, this was the community that, that, that brought in all these ideas.
And, and, you know, I never said you, Hey Dave, let's create an open source project where everybody can come in and want stuff and bitch at you. I don't think I said that. I don't think that was the original intent. Um, if you had, we may have had a double take the first time you would have said no to me.
Um, you know, but it, and it's, I have my own kind of version of that, you know, the, and it's, and it doesn't affect me the same way, you know, the chiding of, uh, you should be doing speeches. You should be going to all these podcasts, conferences. How come you're not out there? Well, I have other things to do with my life and, and there's no upside. You know, there's no, in fact, I, we tried it once and we got shoved in a back room at lunchtime.
And like, that was, that was a very embarrassing moment, you know, from the podcast industrial complex. So no, no, I'm just not going to do that. And so go, you know, I don't block people. I think that I don't, I don't do stuff like that. I don't, I don't block and, you know, mute PI. No, I do. I mute, uh, a few people that, uh, do like political stuff. So like, I have certain things muted where it's like anything that says Trump in it.
I have that muted or Biden or things like that to keep that out of my timeline. Cause I need to focus on, I want my podcast index timeline to be just, uh, relevant to tech stuff. But like, I'm not going to mute people or block people or any of that or any of that stuff. It's just not what I do, but I am going to be, you know, I am going to be open about the way that it makes me feel. And, you know, I do have thick skin, but everybody has a breaking point.
Everybody has a point where they just, you, you know, you break them down. And I felt that way today. So, um, and it all had to do with the stupid image tag and explaining this to somebody is very hard because it seems like such a tempest in a teapot. Um, and when you're just like, you know, Oh, I'm so depressed and why the images tag, you know, it's like, what are you even talking about? But a key question for me, is everything okay with Melissa though? You, you guys made up? Oh yeah, for sure.
Oh yeah. No, we're, we're fine. Cause I'll come right out there and I'll explain it to her. No problem. I'll hop on my hop in my plane. I'll buzz out. It only take me five hours, but I'll get there. Uh, so we, you know, this, no, that's all fine. I realized what was happening and pulled that back. So, um, you know, but the image tag, but this, again, I'm not stopping this work. I'm just, I'm just not.
And because I just think it's so important and we've had such success and we've had, and we're going to have more success in getting these things out into the world with, with, with, um, with, with podcasting tech. And, and now I want to go to, if you'll let me continue now, I want to go to, go ahead. Well, no, I have one more thing to say, but I don't know if you're changing topics. Uh, slightly, but go ahead.
Yeah. But all, all I wanted to say is that what started from the beginning as a resource that we set up value for value in people's minds. And it's good to, to reiterate this from time to time has somehow turned into a, every podcast app has to have every single tag. Otherwise it fails. Podcasting has to be this. It has to have all these things. Every single app has to do it. Every hosting company has to do it. Newsflash. It's not going to happen. That has never been the intent of this project.
That's important to remember. We are not on a mission to convince Apple to adopt every tag or Spotify or any of that. You know, to me, it's just as futile as, you have to have a video to be a podcaster. It's, it's noise. It's all just noise. And what I love is that we have proven and are in the process of proving and others have as well that you can build other things with this. It's not just one mission to make everybody adopt, adopt, screw the word, adopt this, adopt.
Not everyone's going to do it. Not everyone's into adoption. Some like abortion. They're not going to do it. They're not going to do it. It's, it's, it's a futile mission, but having a cool resource to create things with and do your own thing, that's your own individual mission. Everybody do what you want to do. And if you need something, we'll work with you to create it and to, and to make it workable for what you want to do. Okay. That's all I need to say.
Um, the podcast image tag, uh, let's, you know, hope we can discuss it here because I think, um, the thing is, so I, I dis, I disagree. I disagreed that the podcast images tag, uh, needed to go away. Um, I didn't think I'd, I did not think it did. We had a difference of opinion on that and that's fine. People can have differences of opinion. Everybody's entitled to that. Um, but James felt so strongly about it that I thought, okay, you know what, I'm going to back off.
And for the sake of keeping, um, I respect James a lot. And, um, because of that, I want, I thought it was more important for, um, I thought people, people in relationships were more important than technology. And so I said, okay, even though I, I said to myself, even though I disagree with him, let me think about this and consider what he's saying. And if he feels so strongly about the podcast images tag needing to go away, fine, I'm okay with that. Let's kill it.
Um, so that was, that was sort of one step in the thinking. The next step was if we're going to kill it, then, uh, even though I don't want to, but if we're going to, then we need to do this in a proper way. And having another tag that just takes its place, um, doesn't make any sense to me, excuse me, to me. Um, because then you have to have backwards compatibility with the source set attributes. So the podcast images tag only has one attribute and it's called source set the source set.
Everybody agrees that they don't like the source set attribute. So let's just kill the whole thing. But if you can maintain the name images, now you have a conflict and you have to maintain some sort of backwards compatibility. Otherwise it's just a big confusing mess. So if we're going to deprecate podcast images tag, we just need to get rid of it altogether and we need to make a new tag. And so my, okay, well there's a, there's a new opportunity here.
I'm just going, I'm just going through what my thinking, because I've, it may not be obvious, but I've been thinking about this all week. I've been thinking about this image tag and how to make everybody happy and how to keep and how to move forward on this topic. I've been thinking about this the entire week. And I finally came to a set of what I thought would be good, a good, a good package of ideas. And I put it on the GitHub yesterday.
So these are the thoughts that led me to the, to what I posted yesterday. We deprecate the images tag altogether, get rid of the whole name and everything, make it go away. And make it go away by, make it go away. I'm actually going to create a deprecated section, a deprecated document that still lists these tags. And not even deprecated, it's going to be called something else because the banner tag is going to go into this same document. These are tags that are, let's just say unofficial.
How about that? Not deprecated, but unofficial. Things you see in the wild, you may see in the wild that we're no, that we're no longer active, you know, there's, excuse me, that we're not, that are not part of the spec that we're actively maintaining. So the images tag goes away along with the source set attribute. We create a new tag called image. So podcast colon image. And now we have an opportunity to have some cross compatibility with the iTunes image tag.
So we take the source attribute, the SRC attribute, rename that to href. It's the only now, it's now the only required attribute. That makes it essentially identical at its base level before you add any other attributes. It's directly a drop-in replacement for iTunes image because it looks exactly the same. So we start there, then add on a set of attributes that give you progressively more functionality. And so that would be the alt attribute, which is like HTML.
So it just gives you a text that you can, for accessibility, you can put this. Now these are all Nathan's. So far, this is all Nathan's stuff. You know, okay. He, he introduced, this is based on his spec, Nathan Gathwright, the alt attribute he added to give you some accessibility help. He added the aspect ratio attribute, which is classified as what I, which I changed from optional to recommended. So that's just going to be a straight aspect ratio, one to one, which would be square 16 by nine.
We all understand aspect ratios. This would give app developers a better sense of what they're getting size-wise. James likes the media thumbnail tag because it has a width and a height. So again, because I'm trying to accommodate his strong desires in this regard, I added width and height. Width is listed as recommended. Height is optional. The reason height is optional is because, the reason height is optional is because all you, all you really need is aspect ratio and a width.
Because if you know the aspect ratio, you can already know, you can determine the height. So that's optional. Then you have a type attribute. So I added the width and height. Now type attribute is something that Nathan added, and the type attribute gives you a MIME type. So this is going to be an image, or is this going to be a video, like an mpeg4, mp4? The type, it's optional because it's not needed most of the time. You're going to assume this is an image.
And most browsers or web views, you're going to be able to handle jpegs, pngs, all the standard stuff that you're going to get 90% of the time. If you have something that's odd, like let's just say, let's say you're trying to deliver like a TIFF, or a video, or you're going into something like a video, like a motion image, then you can use the type to give a hint. And then finally, you have purpose, which is the one that was the most sort of complex. Right.
This is, this is the one, yeah, this is the big one. Right. And again, this is another, this is something that, that Nathan added. And, you know, based on some, some stuff that me and him talked about and Stephen B. The purpose tokens are something that we would maintain. It's a list of things we would maintain. These tokens could be something, it could be like artwork. These are the ones listed as examples. Artwork, social, canvas, cover, publisher. We would have a list of these.
And they would link to the definitions of what these are. And these are meant to come from what's going on in the industry already. Okay. Like artwork and publisher and canvas. These are, these link out to Apple's documentation to say, okay, there's an acknowledgement that Apple is, Apple, their guidelines and their requirements for art are very important in the podcast world. Every hosting company is going to have some sort of connection to these descriptions and these documents.
They're going to know them already. And it's all something that we could immediately agree upon. So we, all you can say is, you know, hey, if you, if I deliver you an image and it has a purpose of publisher, then you know where exactly where to go to find out what that is. It's Apple's documentation. And we have a link to it right here. So if an app developer sees that purpose, they're going to know exactly what they're supposed to be getting.
And so there's a, there's a, there's a list of these and these are all just acknowledgements of already existing art related things that are happening in podcasting. Now you can, you can do your own thing. And that's where the flexibility of this thing comes in. You can do your own thing. You can have a, in the example that Nathan gives in his documentation is, is a purpose of true fans slash hero.
And you, you know, you could put as a podcaster, you could put in an image with a purpose of true fans slash hero. And that tells true fans, hey, hey, I know that you have a hero image that requires this sizing and here's, here it is, I'm giving it to you. This is the thing that you want and here it is. And so true fans could hook into that and get the thing it wants. And if it doesn't see that image, it can fall back to one of these other things and try to make it fit.
So the purpose to the purpose attribute is extremely flexible. I think it is really sort of the magic that makes this whole thing really shine. So, and there's a whole list of use cases there that show different ways to use, you know, different ways to use it. So I think it, and here's, so to, to sort of wrap up this, this discussion, if the, if the, the hurtful criticism type language can be left out, we can still get to this same place and also enjoy the process.
I think that if we can agree to formalize this, this tag, then I agree that this is a better tag than what podcast images was, but I really don't think that we had to get here in this fashion. Amen. And so that's pretty much all I think I'm going to say about that from here on out. I just, it's just going to be, I don't really want to talk about this anymore. I just want to have a discussion about the technology. Right. Well, I just need to say one more thing. Sorry.
We have multiple, we have people from multiple cultural backgrounds and I had lived in the UK, I lived in Germany and I even have to, I, Comicstripblogger is my best example. It took me over a decade to get used to how he speaks. Everybody just be aware that how you may speak or, you know, the cultural way that you communicate may land differently with others.
And so what you may think is not very offensive or, you know, just be a little, a little more thoughtful with how, I'm guilty of this too, by the way. And so that sometimes we forget about that because I'd see Moritz posting something. I'm like, ah, and I have to remind myself, oh, he's German and Germans have a different way of communicating. Very similar to the Dutch, by the way, which can be sometimes direct and harsh. And Comicstripblogger is the best example.
He needs a Chad GPT translator when he posts, you know, it's like, come on, man. So there's just some of that. Anyway, backslash on that. I can take it. I can take this one step further into something that we, that I've been thinking about that goes along with the image thing. And I think it's probably a good example of how this new version of the image tag would be useful.
And it's got to do with what we were talking about within Godcaster and some of the other things we've been saying with True Fans, sort of the Rachel Maddow page. I think one good thing about if we can agree to formalize this tag is, let me post this in the boardroom. Hang on. Let's see. Let me post this URL. Paste. Okay. So if you go here, this is Apple's channel for focus on the family. Okay. For their organization, this is their channel and it contains all of their shows.
Maybe you can put that in the show notes or something that way. Yeah. You got it. Okay. This is what we're trying to replicate with the publisher feed, the publisher medium. And I think in order to make something like this work, to get a similar effect in something like True Fans or Podverse and these various apps, I think Fountain would probably want to do this as well. Stephen B with Ellen Beats.
In order to get something like this, where you have a channel of shows with nice artwork that makes sense, like this big image at the top. I think that can be a very good use case for the image tag, for the new version of the image tag. So you would have like, you know, you'd be able to specify in your publisher feed, your publisher medium feed, here's the art that builds this quote unquote channel or this publisher display.
So then you would see that big art and you would see all the different assets that go along with it. Maybe even a motion hero movie type thing. And I think that's enough. If we can formalize this tag, then we can then go a little bit further and combine with some documentation that says, here's how if you want to do a distributed open source version of a quote channel, then here's how you do it.
You create a publisher feed, you include this, you include the image tag with these purposes and blah, blah, blah. And we can just sort of like build out a document that describes how to make the equivalent of an Apple channel, but for everybody else, not just Apple. Yeah, man, this is good. This is, I'm glad you brought this one up. Because the public, we all know, I mean, that's why we built the publisher feed, because we know it's the, is your favorite word.
It's the substrate that everything, you know, that, that you, that we can build this thing on, but then we need some sort of documentation that says, here's how you kind of build the display of it. But I think, but I don't, none of the, none of the other sort of image stuff we have really seems to fit that, but this would. I like it. Yeah, I like it. It's needed. Just thinking out loud.
And even just looking at this focus page, like obviously what is happening at the top in that banner is not what they want it to be. Yeah, I don't, I wouldn't think so. No, but that's probably just, you know, reasons, right? Just whatever, however, Apple is doing that. Yeah. It makes it difficult for them to get a nice image in there. Yeah. We could define what like sort of a standard for, for what this is and we don't have to create it from scratch.
We can do exactly what James has said and we can use the existing specs that are out there because there's a few, you know, this, you know, like Apple spec also, it just, it defines what these things can sizes. So I want to talk about the lit tag for a second. Yeah, let's do it. I'm going to champion this for personal reasons, but also for broader reasons. The lit tag is getting attention.
In fact, I have a meeting next, I think, I think Wednesday with Soundstack who run live 365 and other things. No, yeah. The lit tag is an enormous opportunity and I'll just tell you one opportunity right off the bat because there's not a lot of apps that support it yet. So in Godcaster, which now has 249 stations and frequencies, in Godcaster we give the ability for people to, for a station to have its own RSS feed.
And so when you click on that, you know, subscribe on your podcast app button in the Godcaster, it pops up a list of recommended podcast players. Lo and behold, the ones that understand the lit tag are featured. So, and these stations are going to start educating their listeners, we hope, because that's always the biggest, the biggest bottleneck. But we're doing it with the interface to say, hey, these are the podcast apps that are recommended for this feed that we're giving you.
Now, down at the bottom, we also have Apple because you can still, any podcast app will be able to subscribe to the feed, just don't get the live. And these radio stations are begging for live in the car. And they're going off building their own apps with all kinds of, with varying results, I should say. It's kind of like, you know, where there's a need, a bunch of people pop up with picks and shovels. And quite honestly, I'm underwhelmed with what the app companies are doing.
They basically have a shell, they throw in some, you know, WordPress page and some other things, and then they'll do a listen live, which is the equivalent to a radio station website that has listen live, a button at the top. But people are looking for a better in -car experience. And this is, this is a great way to get people to use your app. So consider adding the lit tag. I would hope that Apple is listening because man, could they, they could change their lives, but okay.
And for hosting companies, there was a discussion on podcast weekly review about this and how, and I fundamentally disagree, you know, not everybody's dumb or lazy in America. I met a lot of people who were very animated and very excited and want to figure things out. So hosting companies just may not want to add this capability to their, you know, of a, of an ice cast server, but you can do deals.
You can do deals with all kinds of companies to integrate that into the workflow for somebody who wants to go live. It's a, it's a, it's an integral part of podcasting these days. Going live is a thing. It will be very easy for someone who may even be just doing it on YouTube. I mean, it works in reverse, you know, Hey, I'm, I'm going live on rumble. I'm going live on YouTube and I'm going live in these podcast apps.
It's worth adding it to your app and it's worth considering it for your hosting service. And I'm just going to remind everybody, every single show lit is the future. Yeah. And, uh, Franco's working on it. Of course he is. I mean, there's this it's, it's going. It is. And, and, and, you know, and obviously, uh, episodes dot FM, but we'll add it as well. It pops you to the top. You know, every single time I go live with no agenda, I send a episodes dot FM link.
Let me see what actually that looks like. And I think, uh, episodes dot FM, uh, just show for the, if I'm, if I'm, uh, promoting a lit tag, it pops up and we also have, uh, episodes dot FM in our list on that Godcaster. Let me see what it shows. So it shows, yeah. LM beats podcast at a Curie caster fountain, true fans, pod verse, podcast guru, get your app in that list. People. Yes. That's where you want. This is where you want to be. That's free promotion, free promotion for you.
Should we play a song? Oh yeah. That'd be great. Yeah. It's a short one. Uh, this was recorded at the slow flower studio. I believe that's somewhere in, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right. S L O E. I think that's slow. I think so. S L O E. S L O E. Yeah. I think so. Someone will have to correct me. Uh, it was performed live. This is, uh, Joe Martin, who was the first value for value artist we played. This is stranger, so lovers stayed in, gone left instead of right.
I've done a thousand things instead of meeting you that night. You could have called a friend. You could have called a quiz. You could have walked home before midnight, but you didn't. It happened in a minute and you almost passed me by. I was holding the door. When you threw me a smile, life's twists and turns lift us where we began. We went from strangers to lovers and back to strangers again. It can all change so damn fast. Our future plans became your past.
What I miss the most don't sound like much, but it's calling your number, you picking up. It only took an hour of an ordinary night for you to steal my heart without even trying. Life's twists and turns lift us where we began. We went from strangers to lovers and now we're strangers again. It took about a year to know it wasn't right. I didn't want to change. You didn't want to fight. Life's twists and turns lift us where we began. We went from strangers to lovers and back to strangers again.
From strangers to lovers and now we're strangers again. Very mindful, very demure. Joe Martin. Hashtag. I love that guy. Beautiful songs. The British never sound British when they sing. Oh, I mean, he speaks very British, like Northern British when he speaks. Yeah. Well, that's the beauty of the English language. Whenever you sing it, it just sounds better in American English. Can't help it. Everybody's American when they sing. That's right. American. America, baby, America.
Let's see, what else did you have, Dave? Anything else to talk about on the list? By the way, I want to thank Sam for interviewing us and James did a good edit. I'm always like, oh man, you know, they take 45 minutes down to, I don't know, 17 or something like that, but it was good. It's magical. Yeah, it got across the message and I know they released the full interview as well. That was great. It was good. We even got someone wanting a demo right after the show came out. So it worked.
Thank you. Oh, really? Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. There's a, there's probably, there's someone I do want to talk about with Franco. So he emailed me and he brought up Castamatic. Yes. I'm sorry. Yes. Yeah. Franco from Castamatic. Everybody loves Franco. Of course, everybody loves their doctor. He brought up an issue that, that I've honestly never considered and I really don't know how to solve it. And so it's this, it, our, our feed is a, our podcast is a perfect example of this.
So if you go, let's see, www.podcastindex .com.org, excuse me. You still www. I don't know. I remember when the advertising industry back in the late nineties would say dub, dub, dub. Oh, that's like pod. Dub, dub, dub. Please never say that. No, no. Okay. So if you go to podcastindex.org and search for a podcast, our show podcasting2.0, we're for some reason, we're number six in the list. So if you go down there, you, what you see is mp3s.nashownotes.com. That's our URL.
Yeah. Okay. Well, if you click that, you get forwarded to feeds.podcastindex.org slash pc20.xml. Yes. So if, if somebody subscribes using this URL, the mp3 dot, yeah, no, no, no. If somebody subscribes using feeds.podcastindex.org in their Castamatic and then Castamatic checks with the index to, it tries to look up a show in the index using feeds.podcastindex.org slash pc20.xml. It gets nothing. It gets nothing because that's not the URL we have for the show.
The URL we have is the pre-forwarded is the 302 redirect. So that's a problem. I mean, I don't, I don't know how to fix that because I mean, it's really not, did you see what I mean? Like I don't, if you know, if you're trying to do sort of like a reverse lookup this way from a destination URL to a canonical URL. How do you find the destination or the origin? Yeah. Where do you find where the thing came from? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how to solve that. I mean, I don't know.
Now the index database, the index database does have a column in the feeds table called, so there's two, there's two URL columns in the feeds table. Well, you can't look in the DNS, Dreb, you can't, the DNS reverse lookup record doesn't have the full URL though. So it doesn't help. So if you like, there's two columns in the index database for URL. One of them is just called URL. The other one's called original URL.
And so the, like what, what we've been using is what we've been using is, so the URL is the current URL that we have listed. The original URL is like, if they've moved from one host to another, that was their previous host. So what we could do is, you know, replace that original URL field with the, you know, we could, we could put both in there and that way they would return if looked up for both. But what if it has like three redirects? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know what to do with that.
This, this kind of feeds into a question I've had and I've sent it to you on email, but I'm sure it goes into the big podcast index bin. So sometimes people will request to have their original index entry. So, you know, podcastindex.org slash whatever the number is for me to replace their RSS URL with the new RSS URL. And sometimes I can, and sometimes I can't. And I can't figure out why I sometimes can't change it.
The reason sometimes you can't is because there's already a feed, a dead feed in the index with that same URL. Right. I figured, but I thought that the dead feed URL would then no longer be recognized. It was marked dead. It's still an, it's still a unique index in the database. Okay. So it's, it's, it's, it's my lazy programming that it's not telling you that more clearly. Well, I understood it, but how do I fix it?
You fix it by, you fix it by, well, I'm going to have to fix it because I'm going to have to fix it by changing it. Oh wait, can I, as an example, on the dead, how about this? On the dead, on the, the entry that's marked dead, can I change the URL there to some, you know, foobar thing and then go and change the new one and then go back and change the old one? No, you can, but I'm going to have to make it where that shows up. Oh, okay. Well, I'm just, I just want to make it easy for you.
So I don't have to send those requests to you. It's okay. I'm, I'm going to have to just change that in the dashboard where you can go to make it where, when it does that, it tells you what's happening and then gives you a link to go to that other one to change it. Oh, okay. Or something like that, some sort of way. It happens maybe twice a month, so it's not a huge thing, but it's a thing.
You're right. Like Nathan and Daniel and, and, uh, and Eric are saying, you know, and, and Cotton Gin are just saying, they're all giving good, you know, that's the way the things you're describing the way that, yeah, that's the way it should work. But like, I don't, some people just come in in a different way. So like, if let's see, I'm trying to remember why there was some reason. Well, probably while we deleting a record probably requires a whole new table update or something.
I'm sure it's some database overhead. If you're deleting a record like that, um, we're not deleting the record. We're just marking it with a dead flag. Yeah. Yeah. Flag. Um, let's see. I'm trying to remember back when we moved from mp3.na show notes from void zero CDN over to Linode object storage. I'm trying to remember why we did a 302 redirect instead of a 301. Do you remember why? Let me hold on a second. Let me see. Maybe this will help. Okay. There's some reason why we didn't just change.
Let's go back in time. Maybe this helps. Here we are. We're back in time. Do you remember now? No. Hmm. I don't remember. There was some reason. Well, I know why we did it. And that was, we figured there were so many people subscribed to mp3.na show notes .com that we didn't want to screw everybody else up. So we just did a redirect. I don't know what kind of redirect we're doing though. I could probably look it up. Yeah. I think it's a 302.
Yeah. Um, so the, but see, if you have a 302, if you have a 302 and somebody comes in, if somebody like, okay, if I'm subscribed to mp3.na show notes.com and then I want to give somebody, somebody, if I want to give that URL to someone else, like if I want to share it to somebody else and I just go in and grit and like, look it up on my PC, click on it and we'll go to the address bar. What I'm getting is the destination URL. And I'm going to share that to this other person.
They're going to subscribe to it, but now they're subscribing to the destination, not the read, not the, the mp3.na show notes.com. So it's just sort of like this accident that slowly leaks out over time. You end up with this mix. Um, so I, it feels like to me, um, well, we, we, we have a 302. Should we make that a permanent, uh, change, uh, to a, what is the permanent 301? Uh, yeah, man, I guess we could. Yeah. That would help. We probably did it temporary just because we were temporary.
Yeah. Yeah. Cause we would make sure we didn't break anything. Yeah. Um, it's like in case we needed to say, Oh crap. And roll it back. You know? Right. Right. But I think, I think all of your feeds are that way now. I think they're all hosted. No, only no agenda and a podcasting 2 .0. All the rest, I still use sovereign feeds to uh, download the RSS file, drag it into the FTP and then hit the pod. Okay. You, you are also doing it for a MoFax too, right?
Same. Um, so I, I guess there's only one, the only solution I can think of is just to, for these, whenever one of these feeds happens like this, we have to put in that alternate URL in the feed record. Right. I don't know any other way. I don't know any solution for it. Cause like, why don't you just add another column? Let's do that. Put a new table in, spin up another database. You add a new column to a table that has, you know, 4 million records in it.
And now you've locked to the database for two hours, 30 minutes. Yeah. Whatever. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That's not fun. Uh, and, and this, this, uh, this fantasy where you can, uh, with my SQL eight, where you can add a columns without locking the database. That is a lie. That is a, that is not true. Like you, you basically don't, you read through the documentation and at the end of it, by the time you're finished, you're like, Hmm. Only one way to find out run the command and click lock.
Yep. And you're like, okay, according to all the documentation, this should work. And you hit execute it. And you're like, dang it. I guess we're way, I guess I'm popping popcorn. Hey, should we thank some people? Yeah, sure. Let's do it. Okay. We've got some nice boosts today coming in, uh, starting off with 1500 sats from Oystein Berger coming in from podcast guru. And he, uh, boosted Joe Martin, the only one so far on the live show. Joe Martin makes music. Great.
Heard this on podcasting 2.0. Thank you. Perfect. Perfect. Booster Graham. Outstanding. Cause that comes through even on, uh, if you're, uh, if you're using a different kind of, if you're using LNURL pay and that, by the way, that's working, that's working real well. My strike wallet just is filling up with one sat streaming, uh, payments all the time. It really does work well. I did. I got, I jumped on the fountain, uh, uh, the thing in Waco. Oh yeah. How was that? I missed that. I was at NRB.
How was that? It was cool. Yeah, it was really cool. I threw a few boosts into the mix. Yeah. It was really neat. Excellent. And always seen of course, takes over the live stream right after the board meeting and, uh, and plays his, uh, his crazy music. Uh, Dreb Scott, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Thank you very much. Drabby says, Dave Jones, you are a scholar and a gentleman. We all love and appreciate you and your efforts. Thank you. It's true. A triple seven from Sam Sethi coming in from true fans.
As I said in my interview with you both, it's a thankless task and I'm thankful for you both. That's not a thankless task. Just sometimes gets a little, a little pressure -y. Yep. Uh, dude named Ben, Salty Crayon, 2, 3, 4, 5 in the Satoshi land coming in from CurioCaster. We're such a bunch of misfits volunteering on a passion project. We love to improve on and break and from time to time and break from time to time. Karma plus plus for Dave. Keep your chin up. Dave says BR with a thousand sats.
You're a podcasting treasure. I don't know if I'd go that far. Uh, Harvat came in with the 33 magic number. We heard that blasted in during your, uh, your soliloquy. So I had to turn it down a little bit, even 33,000. Yes. The soliloquy that you were doing a soliloquy. Yeah. You've never heard of a soliloquy. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Soliloquizing. That's, uh, that's what we called podcasting in the early days. It's a soliloquy. Nah, it's just basic people talking to themselves. Soliloquizing.
Soliloquizing. Almost made it. Uh, 33,333 sats from Harvat. Thank you. Harvat. Bit punk FM, 42, 42. Just want to say thanks to y'all in this community. There's a lot of positivity in this community. I did a lit poetry thing today and the chat came out to help and support. Thanks for enabling this. Uh, yes. Coming in from fountain there. Uh, punk is a great name. I just love it. Good name. Yeah. 1701 from Lyceum, which is Martin Lindeskog. He says, I'm glad to see you are not lost in space.
What is your spacecraft starship called? I have a road connect TM podcasting software on my Mac book air M two. I want to hook up several road NT, USB mini microphones to my laptop. I got some kind of robotic sound in the recording. I am running with scissors. All the best Martin Lindeskog. I'm not, I have not, uh, not use that set up, but I'm going to guess that has something to do with your Mac book. Apple does strange things with the USB.
Uh, a hundred sats from none of your business, none of your bidness. Thank you. Just says howdy from, uh, from fountain. Uh, another salty crayon boost. 33, 33 says bat signal Lima, Charlie. Yes, indeed. And, uh, we hit the delimiter.
Oh, we got, um, well, I guess some of these monthlies, uh, these PayPal's are going to be mixed in, uh, as in out of order, not in a, well, I didn't separate out the month, the, the monthlies from those one-offs cause it's all, uh, didn't have time to print them today. Um, but I saw just run through all of them. Kevin Bay, five bucks. Thank you, Kevin. Appreciate it. Chad Farrow, $20, 22 cents. Thank you, Chad, for everything that you do, brother. Cameron Rose, $25. Thank you, Cameron.
Uh, new media. That's, um, Martin Lindesco. No. Uh, one dollar, one dollar. Is that Martin Lindesco new media? Yeah, that's his thing. Yeah. It comes through. Okay. Thank you, Martin. Uh, Mark Graham, $1. Thank you, Mark. Uh, pod page, Brendan over there in the gang is a pod page, $25. Thank you. Nice. Uh, 10 bucks from, uh, Ron McKinnon. He says to help keep up the service. I use podcast index regularly. Thank you. All right. You're welcome, Ron. You are, uh, Randall black.
Hey, Randall, uh, five bucks. Thank you, Randall. And then we got some booster grams. Again, let me go down here to the bottom. Okay. We got D Schwartz, row of ducks, 22, 22 through fountain. He says, sorry if I missed you already mentioning DNS boost. All right. Uh, Bruce, the ugly quacking duck podcast, 22, 22, a row of ducks podcast guru. He says, tech talk. Enjoy it. Even if I don't get it brought me into 2.0 podcasting. Thank you. All right. You're welcome.
You're welcome. Uh, D Schwartz, again, he says, uh, 22, 22, he says, why not start with something like DNS? Probably the best known distributed database as a start for the distributed index. It just didn't. If you try to add it, it's like a trash heap of everything. Throw it into DNA. It's just not built for that. Like you can't, I tried to do this with goods. I tried to make a good lookup service that was based on DNS and you would, uh, and it worked.
So you could, what you could do is you could look up, you could put in a good dot, uh, it would be the good.good.podcastindex.org. And what you would get back would be a text, uh, entry of the URL of the podcast. And it worked, but what you're going to end up with is like four and a half million DNS entries. It's just not, it's not scaleable. Yeah. DHT is the way to go. It's built for that. You know, Kyron from mill mortals podcast, uh, or satchel Richards, uh, one, one, one, one.
He's through fountain. He says, watching versus listening to podcasts. I feel the same applies to listening to audio books versus reading the book. I can usually tell if someone has taken the time to sit and focus solely on the book versus listening likely while doing other distracting tasks. Yeah. By the way, at the NRB, a lot of people were interested in the audio books feature. Oh, the medium. Oh yeah. Oh my goodness. Yeah. I showed different medium, uh, examples.
And when I said audio tech, do you, you did a tech, uh, I did presentation. Yeah, I did. And it, you know, no one threw anything at me. So it turned out okay. But, um, yeah, a lot of people were like, wow, I could do audio books in this. And like my pastor does audio books and I'm doing an audio book. And yeah, we can, uh, we can do that for you. That's cool. Um, cast peeling 2000 sats through fountain. He says wallet was empty. So a boost, let's see.
So a boost versus streaming says, thank you for the work. Thank you for the boost. Uh, let me make sure that I'm in the right spot. And I am really comic strip bogger blogger delimiter. Ah, comic strip bloggers open in the wallet. 37,000 sats, 37,026 sats through fountain. He says, howdy fellow Gentiles, Adam and Dave.
Today I'm sending you $33 to celebrate one Oscar 2025 award to a real pain movie, a movie about Jews, but set in Poland note, Poland still looks a little bleak because it lost 6 million citizens murdered in years, 1939 through 1945, including 3 million Polish Jews like Roman Polanski and Jesse Eisenberg and 3 million ethnic Poles like myself and Martha Stewart. We're laughing about dead Jews calm down.
And Poland lost 40 years of economic development under Soviet occupation after 1945, no Marshall plan from USA, et cetera. Yo CSB. That's a depressing note from CSB. Now I will say, interestingly enough, because of his booster grams and he boosted into many different shows, Curry and the keeper as well about this movie, I watched it. Um, it was a good, it's a very cute movie. I mean, it's a lighthearted comedy, I would say.
And, uh, and I made the mistake because the main, the mistake I made is because Tina got mad at me because they're like, you know, let's just watch the Academy Awards. And like, don't, it'll get better. Just hang in there. And, you know, an hour later, something will happen now it'll get better. Nothing, nothing got better. Uh, but it was fun to see Kiernan Culkin, uh, when, uh, best supporting actor, it is a very, uh, what's that term? It's an endearing movie. It really is.
And, and it also reminded me no offense, uh, comics or blogger, but I don't need to visit Poland because the architecture is still like, you know, post-Soviet world war II. It's like, Oh, the whole thing kind of looks depressing, but it was an uplifting movie is a fun movie. And he had promised, uh, that he would boost every single show who, uh, who read his booster gram. Everyone who, uh, talked about the movie, uh, would get extra boosts for every single Oscar win.
So we got, uh, he came, came through connoisseur blogger, good to his word. Yeah. I bet the country, I bet the Polish countryside is beautiful. Oh, it looked, I mean, it's in the movie. It looks beautiful. Yeah. Oh yeah. Of course. Cause we, um, I met, you know, I met my wife in, in, uh, Russia on a mission trip. I didn't know this. Where in Russia, what year?
Uh, this was in 1998 that I met her and, uh, we, we were on a mission trip, a church mission trip together to, uh, a city called Lukovice, which is, I think like 45 minutes Northeast of Moscow. And so, you know, Moscow was, uh, Moscow was like depressing. Oh yeah. It was really bad. Although it was probably just starting to climb out and you would see in downtown Moscow, you'd see, uh, you know, like Hermes and Tiffany and Rolex stores. It was, it was like huge, rich, rich portions.
And then just poverty at the other end. Yeah. And like you would go. So I remember, you know, we were walking, we're walking through Moscow. This was, I guess the wall fell in what, 91, 90, less than a decade after that. Um, and I, we were walking downtown Moscow and you would go into these, um, they had public bathrooms. And so then you would, you know, you would go down and they were all underground. And that's where you met her in the public.
No, no, uh, you'd walk, you'd walk down into this public bathroom and because basically there was just no public services whatsoever anymore. They were all just backed up and just like, like feces everywhere. It was, Oh, it was sound like it was like a murder scene in every one of these things. It was awful. But then you get out into the, um, to the countryside and it's just like, it's like a completely different world that everything's beautiful.
And like, it's like, it's like they don't, they haven't been even been informed that anything's wrong. They're just, they're just still like, you know, killing chickens and eating, you know, stuff. This is funny though. The past, the preacher that we went with. So, um, the, the missionary that was hosting us, he said, um, uh, cause well, to, to frame this in a little bit, the Southern Baptist, the Southern Baptist, there was a big contingency of, of, of, uh, Baptists in, in Russia.
That was a big denomination in Russia. And of course it was all underground during communism, but there's tons of Baptists in Russia. And so, um, that's how we connected over there. Cause I grew up Baptist. So then we went, um, so the, uh, this Baptist preacher in, uh, in Lucovici asked our preacher that was with us to do a funeral service. And so one of, for like somebody's dead, like mother.
And so he, he said, you know, the, the pastor that was with us, he, he said, I always carry three things, an extra sermon just in case I need it. Um, and my notes for doing a funeral and a wedding. He's like, cause you never know when somebody's going to spring one of those things on you. And sure enough, he's some, they asked him to do his funeral. And so he's like, yeah, I'll do it. You know, sure. I'd be glad to. And so they show, they, they drive him to this house in the middle of nowhere.
They drive into this house and he, they go inside and there's the, there's the old lady on the kitchen table. No way. Yeah. Straight up. She's just dead on the kitchen table. You know, I shut flowers in her hair and they're like, all right, go. He's like, Holy cow. So he's just doing this sermon.
And then he said, then they, after this, after the funeral is over, they, a bunch of dudes came in and they lifted her up and in like, like pushed her out the window to some other dudes who lowered her in a coffin and buried her in the backyard. Wow. That's how I want to go, man. Just lay me out on the kitchen table, baby. Yeah. He said it was all done in 45 minutes. Well, there's that nice and quick. Beautiful. Beautiful. All right, brother. Well, you have yourself a great restful weekend.
You doing anything this weekend? Uh, I am, uh, sanding a room of drywall so I can paint it. Oh, that's right. Dave has also been building his house during this past five years since you've been doing podcast index. I forgot to mention that. Yeah. This house will continue to be built for the next until, until I die forever. All right, brother, have yourself a great weekend. Thank you so much. And thank you very much. Boardroom. Y'all are good. We love you all.
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