Episode 227: Gimme Root!

Podcasting 2.0 for July 4th, 2025, episode 227. Hello, everybody. Happy 4th of July. Happy Independence Day from America to the rest of the world. That's right. We're foam finger number one, chauvinist all the way. This is the official board meeting of podcasting 2.0 where we talk about it all and a lot about ourselves and all kinds of interesting stuff when it comes to podcasting. We are, in fact, the only boardroom that has always been independent.

I'm Adam Curry here in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and in Alabama, the man who will give you two monitors, five if your manager lets you. Say hello to my friend on the other end, the one, the only Mr. Dave Jones. You said chauvinism. It reminded me that I never told you my accidental misogyny story. Well, you know, to be fair, we were having such a good time with Rocky and you didn't want to screw it up because, you know, it was that was a good show. I'd listened to it again, actually.

I did. I had a lot of fun. I got a lot of good comments. People like, did you? Yes. Rocky should take over the show. You guys don't need to show anymore. Just let Rocky do the show. Get rid of Dave. No, no. The thing about getting rid of me, Rocky and Dave. It's the Rocky and Dave show. I got you. That does sound like a cartoon from the 70s. Rocky and Bullwinkle. Yeah. Yes, indeed. We are we are live and lit, everybody. Finally, I thought it wasn't. I thought it wasn't going to happen.

Well, Stephen B is is working hard and on on the 4th of July, which I appreciate. I just think we had a little problem with sovereign feeds and I haven't had a problem with sovereign feeds for a long, long time. I mean, I can't even think how long it's been since I've had to reach out for help. But of course, it of course, it always happens on a holiday. That's when stuff always breaks. We know that's the law of the jungle.

Do you know how scared I am to go on this upcoming trip where I will be in the wilderness with zero cell coverage for about six days? I keep telling you, just give me root, baby. It'll I'll take care of everything. Give me root. Give me root. I need root. Yes, you can have root. I'll give you root. Having root and knowing what to do with root are just completely like I've told you, I've told you my root story, haven't I? I don't think so.

I think early day, this was on-ramp before, maybe it was it was on-ramp before we became Think New Ideas. And we had, I'm pretty sure we had Anheuser-Busch. So we had budweiser.com. Maybe we didn't have budlight.com yet. We're probably still building it. Planetrebock.com. And we were building it all on a sun spark station. I want to say it was spark five. Does that sound right? Either spark five, maybe a spark 20. No, it must have been a spark. I think it was a spark five.

Running Solaris. Running Solaris. And there were two problems with this machine. Apache. I guess it's all Apache, right? Yeah. One was the first problem we had because we had our machines called like everything from, you know, sci-fi names like say we had Nero and we had Neuromancer. These are the host names. Host names. Yeah. And I think like Neuromancer or something showed up in a referral log and someone, a client saw that and said, we're being hacked. There's hackers.

So that was that, but that wasn't the root problem. The root problem was, I think it was probably one of those, funny enough, it might've been a holiday. I was the only one in the office and I think we were running out of disk space and like, oh, okay, well I'll just remove some of this junk here. Oh no. Yep. Oh no. So I did an rm-R star, which was the right thing to do if it hadn't been root access in the root directory. And it literally, it deleted the shell. I mean, it deleted everything.

Everything. Everything. Literally everything. It recursively just, and I'm like, hey, the machine stopped working. But your disk problem is fixed. The disk problem was fixed. Unfortunately, we had to then back it up, you know, restore backups from tape. Oh, that takes hours. Days. It took a long time. You know, the old school, like Legato, was it Legato tapes? Was that what it was? The Legato backup? LVM. I can't remember. This can't be pre, this is probably pre LVM.

Cause like the, the, um, so when I used to work at an insurance brokerage, it was my first IT job and we ran a huge AS400. Ah, nothing like a little bit of AS400 baby. I love those machines. The, and so the AS, so we had a new guy who had only been there like a month and he was a. He got blamed. I can already tell the end of the story. New guy got blamed. Oh yeah. I mean, it was totally, it was, it was totally his fault. But we, so there was like a holiday.

And this is Cobalt that's running on these four, these four hundreds. Yeah, it must be. No, no. RPG 400. Oh, right, right. That was the IBM OS. Yeah. Uh-huh. RPG. And so he, uh, so every night there was a huge sequence of batch jobs that would run, that would generate all the premium invoices and all this kind of stuff for all the insurance lines that we had. Oh man. Thousands and thousands of pages, uh, policy expirations, all these batch jobs. Big, big batch job.

Sure. That's what, that's what they're good at. And we had a night operator that would run this every night while he was on vacation and nobody in the, in the, in the MIS department wanted to stay because it was a holiday weekend. And so they're like, let's get the new guy to do it. Let Mikey try it. He doesn't like anything. This guy had never, uh, I mean, he, he was a history major in college. He had no like zero, zero. He had taken like one programming class.

That was the extent of his knowledge of computers. And so they got in there and they're like giving him like not, he's like, they're like, you're going to, here's all the things you're going to have to do over the course of the next eight hour shift are going to work. And they're like, just type this command. If you see it say this, then type this other command. But if it says this other thing, then type this third command. And they just over fire hosed him with information for like 45 minutes.

And they're like, okay, you good? And they all left. And dude, I mean, it was two o 'clock in the morning. He had been releasing batch jobs on top of other batch jobs and he screwed the system up so bad. They had to work all weekend to restore everything back to the way it was. Oh man. And I'm like, it's y'all's fault. You should have never done that. That's so bad. You know, AS400 was my client, the AS400 division of IBM. It's a great product. It's still in use.

Yeah. Except they wanted to, they said, look, um, we, we love that you're going to, cause we were just a website building company before front page existed. Remember, remember front page? That was so good. So I was like, how big are you? Uh, you're IBM. Yeah. Cold fusion. What was the other one? There was another, uh. Dreamweaver? Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver. And so like, well, you're IBM, so it's $50,000 a month for your website and maintenance, maintenance. And they said, that's okay.

Which they all typically did because in the land of the blind, one eye is King. And they said, but it has to run on an AS400 web server. Oh, gross. Did not exist. No. So we built it. We built it and it sucked so bad. I remember the first web server in an AS400 that, that, um, was a part of, it was the worst pile of crap. It was horrible. Yeah. Because everybody had at the back in the day, it was, uh, a dynamic website included the directory CGI dash bin. Bin. CGI bin.

Yeah. And the bins in the CGI bin directory were not very good. You know, didn't work. Perl scripts. They were all Perl scripts. Yeah. Usually. So I, so I'm having, I'm using Python. Is Python known to just over time slurp up memory if scripts are running? Is that a Python thing? No, that shouldn't be a Python thing. I mean, I mean, it's possible, like, I mean, I mean, it's, it's a, I think Python is a garbage collected language.

So it's possible that it will grow over time, but it, it shouldn't leak memory over time. You know, like it should like level off. Yeah. I'm also seeing my swap file is almost 500 megs. So maybe I can increase my swap file. Swap file? What your, like your system, your swap partition? Yeah. 500 megs is not a big deal. It's full. It's at 493. How much, how much RAM is on this VM? Eight. Eight gigs?

Eight, eight to the G to the B. If you do a free, if you do, if you run the command free space, Free Nelson Mandela. Yeah. Yeah. Run that and see what that says. Free space dash one M. That's it. Yeah.

I think you may have to run it as pseudo, but yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm using 37 gigs, 3.7 gigs and the swap is 495 megs. 3.7 out of eight. That's not, that's not a bad. Yeah. But it started like at 1.8 with the same process running. So it's just grown over time. It's grown a gig in a week. Well, as long as it doesn't, as long as it doesn't continue to grow. I know. I know, but the more processes I might have to run, I don't know, something called channel streams, I'm going to run it.

But you might not have, like, look, what I'm saying is like, it might not be dependent on how many channels. I mean, you may be able to spin up, you know, 25 more in there and it only grow by a hundred megs. Oh, doubtful, but Oh, I mean, try it, try it. I'm thinking maybe it's, maybe it's liquid soap. That's a, you know, the Oak, Oak camel based language. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. That's possible. I'm thinking that, that may be growing.

Yeah. Well, I mean, liquid soap, I mean, usually languages themselves don't have memory leaks, but you know, like, Yeah, well, it's okay. We can do the show. No problem. I just have this disturbing H top monitor to my right. Like first thing in the morning, forget Bible study. Let me look at the H top. Okay. All right. Whatever you see, that was your first problem is monitor is, is keeping it up where you can see it.

You should just, that's why, that's why when you asked me if there was something wrong with the web hook server, I said, no, because I don't see it. No, there's nothing, nothing I can see. No, I mean, it's not really, it's not in front of me. So I'm like, no, I mean, prove it. You know, we, we've had such a wonderful, a wonderful week, by the way, happy 4th of July, everybody independence day for America. This is our 249th birthday. I heard you James Cridland. I heard your snide more remark.

It's okay. I don't even want it. Oh, it's like a independence day. Apparently still for us, not for anybody else. They're still sour over it. That's the problem. That's the problem with my, I need, I need a, I need an, uh, I need old glory up here in the studio. I'm not in the patriotic mood right now. Let me get old glory up. You got old glory there. You get, can you, can you raise the old glory? I'm doing it virtually on the screen. There we go. There you go. All right. I'm good.

I'm good to go now. We've had, we've had such a fun, a fun week because we got to experience what many members of the boardroom have experienced for years, which is customers, users. Yes. And, uh, and now I understand why Steve jobs at one point said, Hey, look, you're holding it wrong. Okay. You're just holding it wrong because it works fine in the lab. We were held it like this. You're they, they actually were holding it wrong. They just had never been explained how to hold it. Right. Exactly.

Technically he was, he was being correct. Well, yeah, technically it was kind of rude, but it's really interesting. You never know. I think you said it. You never know how your users are going to use your products. You just don't know. And then you go like, Oh, well, that's interesting. And the things that they don't use, like, well, what's wrong with you? Why don't you use that? It's so obvious. Power users. Well, power users are the worst.

And I consider myself to be one of those big offenders. No, you're not. See, you're not a tip. Okay. Let me define power user though. Let me be, let's, let's get accurate with this thing. A power in, in it support circles, a power user is somebody who. Is convinced that they know more that they know either as much as you do or more than you do. Yeah. Okay. And so, and they don't like that. Anything that they've done is, is your problem, not theirs.

So like, but you're not like that, you know, a lot of, you know, I mean, you're a very technical person and you know how to, you know, do some coding, you know, how to run some systems, you know, I mean, like, you know, a lot of stuff, but you also are self-aware to say, there are some things I don't know, and I'm going to have to ask advice or help or whatever. The power user never considers that their problem is their problem. It's always the IT department, MIS department.

Yeah. That's my favorite MIS department. Yeah. It's like, Hey, I, um, uh, I know we're running windows 10, but I went ahead and upgraded to windows 11. Um, uh, just, you know, I force installed it with a USB drive. Can you, uh, and now all my apps don't work. Can you fix that? Gee, clearly it's, uh, it's, it's the, it's the machine. It's the machine's fault. It's the machine you gave me. It's not my upgrade path. Yeah. Right, right. Well, I also have the scars to show for it.

Yeah. You learned it the hard way. You've earned your stripes. Yeah. Yeah. Some. Yes, for sure. Hey, good news. Um, after Rocky's appearance yesterday, wheels are in motion. I'm signed up podcast movement, August 19th, 1 30 PM pending, but I'll just say it looks like that's happening. And I'm very grateful to the soundstack folks for, uh, for making that happen. Cause you know, they're paying for it. They, they, they pay for the session.

Okay. So because they pay for it, it's not going to be in the break room next to the snack machine. Exactly. And it's 1 30 PM. So it's after lunch, not during lunch. Like we were, it's after lunch. That's good. Yeah. And, uh, yeah. And they're, and they're all emailing me like, oh, we're super stoked, man. This is great. It's going to be fantastic. I remember, I remember you from MTV. That has a lead with that. All that's, all that's missing is, Hey boomer, looking forward to seeing it.

Podcast movement, boomer. That's, that's all. That's all. So what are you, what are your plan? I mean, like, what's your plan? Are you going to fly? Oh yeah, no, of course. I'm taking advantage of it to fly myself up and back. I'm going to do one day. I'm not even hanging out. Oh, like I'm coming in like a rock star first skirt. How you doing girls? How you doing? Let me give you a little podcast in 2.0 stuff. Yeah, I'll go up there. We'll get it. I'll get in nice and early.

And, uh, and then, you know, I, and that's the good news. I can leave whenever I want. You know, because yeah. How does that work? Do you have to pay for like storing the plane while you do your thing and then come back? Uh, well, it all, it all depends. So it's, um, it's Dallas.

So, uh, we'll probably go to Addison, uh, which is, you know, I mean, there's, you have multiple choices of airfields, but it really comes down to your FBO in the, in the jargon, your field based on your field -based operator. So you can sometimes find a guy, you know, with a hanger and a toe, like a manual toe, or you can just roll up to million air, a million air where all the private jets go. And, um, you know, they'll come out, they'll wash your plane. They'll fill it up. They got a lounge.

You get some coffee. And they send you a bill for eight grand. Actually, if you, if you, the way it works is if you take fuel from them, then there's no charge. Really? Yeah. If you don't take. That sounds okay. Yeah. If you don't take fuel, then, uh, then there's typically a charge and it depends of size of aircraft, but it could be $50 to $400, I guess, depending on how big your aircraft is. Yeah. So they take care of it and you get a nice, you know, it's protected, nice parking spot.

And they'll keep it there. And, um, since it won't be, so it'll be August. So it won't get dark until nine, even though we can, um, I think, I don't know what time our, we'll be back by eight. I think our field closes at eight here in, uh, right next to the house, basically five minutes from the house. Do you have to be, is it a specific type of certification you have to have to fly at night? Is that separate?

Not at night, but, uh, to fly, uh, IFR instrument flight rules, which means you're under control by the, um, uh, the air well, there's okay. Longer answer was first answer. Yes. If you want to fly with air traffic control, which you really want because Dallas is super busy and, and, you know, you want to come in like the big boys do. And so they'll sequence you and they'll vector you and all that stuff.

If you're VFR only, then you, you're going to be kind of like a hobbyist and they're gonna, you know, get you in when they can. Uh, but you, you can also get flight following, which means, Hey, you know, if you see me about to crash into somebody else, would you let me know? It's not quite the same as, um, as IFR vectoring. Now, this is okay. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but this is, this is, uh, I think, uh, I don't know if I'm understanding you're right.

Are you saying that you can choose to fly with no air traffic control? Yes. Well, it's not like no air traffic control because when you, um, when you're flying with it, okay. So there's all these different airspaces. So when I, when we take off from Fredericksburg, we're technically under San Antonio. So we'll, but we don't have to call San Antonio for just going to fly around. We'll just say, okay. Hey, everybody out there near Fredericksburg, we're going up now. Here we are. Look out for us.

That's basically it. But then if you fly into, if you're about to fly, there's all these different airspaces. And so we fly outside of our own aerodrome. Then you want to call, uh, San Antonio and say, Hey, we're VFR. We're tootling around. Here's what we're doing. We're going to be here. This is what we're doing. And they'll be okay. And then you can say, well, we're going to go to Dallas. Could you give us flight following? Which means they'll keep, they'll give you a number.

So then your transponder is squawking a code and they'll say, okay, that's a, that's curry over there. And, and they expect that you'll, you'll be at a certain, um, altitude. You can't go above a certain altitude. So maybe it'll be like 5,000 feet or it could be, it could even be 9,000 feet in some cases before we have to get oxygen actually. Um, and then, so you can just fly around as you go from airspace to airspace.

Then you'll, you'll call the air, the ATC and say, Hey, I'm a, I'm about to head into, um, well, this case there's what's in between us, like Waco. Maybe if we go via Waco. So I'll say, Hey, Waco, we're going to go into Waco's airspace. We'll call Waco and say, Hey, we are, this is what we're squawking. Okay. And now when you're IFR, you file a flight plan. You have this, these pathways, it's like a highway in the sky and you're going to go from point to point. And the air traffic control.

So when, before we leave the ground in Fredericksburg, we'll call San Antonio, they say, okay, uh, you're good to go. Uh, when you, uh, once you're taken off, this is your heading direct towards this point. And then as we're flying, they may adjust us. And so they're basically in control of the routing. So we can't just tootle around. We have to stay on that highway. And if they say, Hey, you know, uh, change direction to this because we got these guys coming in.

It all depends on the, on the busyness of the airspace. And then you can ask them for permission to go to another out to go to a different altitude. Yes. And you do, you have to say, Hey, uh, uh, I'm at, I'm at eight. It's a little choppy here. I want to go to eight and a half or well, it depends on which direction you're flying to, but let's say eight. I want to go to nine. Uh, then they'll say, okay, it's approved. Go ahead to nine.

And then if, if there's really bad weather, then ATC will likely say, Hey, you know, hey Curry, uh, looks like he got some bad weather. Would you like me to route you around it? Or I can say, Hey, I don't like it up here. Can you route me around it?

Okay. Okay. But then the trick is when you get to Dallas, it's so busy because there's five airfields up there and from the air, they're all pretty close and there's everything flying every which way private jets, um, you know, it's a big Southwest, uh, hub at love field. And so if you're coming in and they're sequencing you, first of all, you're slower than everybody. So they are, nobody likes you in general because you're slower. Yeah. Right.

You know, it's like you're playing behind a slow guy in golf. Yeah. Yeah. You're going slow. And then depending on how confident you sound, they're going to, they're going to get you in. So if, if you don't sound confident to the controller, the controller is going to be very careful with you and it's going to make you fly. But once you go that way for 15 minutes and we'll bring you back.

But I've had it where I've been flying in the like, okay, um, uh, I forget what my call sign was at the time. November Delta two, seven, seven Shira, or they'll say, um, what is it? Cirrus, uh, Cirrus Delta Shira. Uh, we've got a Southwest. He's going 300 knots. Uh, I'm just going to have him pass on your right hand side T Casaware, which means your collision warning is going to go off, but don't be freaked out because I'm going to have the Southwest airplane pass right over to your right.

Yeah. That sounds like not fun. No, that's cool with that. You're waving at each other. The pilot's waving. We're waving back. Oh really? Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh, that sounds scary to me. And then you also have military stuff flying all over the place. Yeah. This guy's, this guy's doing 700 miles an hour and you'll pay no attention. Oh, that's freaky. Oh man, that's freaky.

And then the worst part is when you're landing behind a seven 37, as an example, you're coming in and say, okay, your sequence behind the Southwest seven 37, uh, be aware of jet wash. Yeah. I mean, jet wash is no turbulence. Oh yeah. No, if you come down in the fresh jet wash, it can flip your panel plane upside down. Whoa. Yeah. So when, when they say be aware of jet wash, I mean like, what does that mean? Good luck, buddy. Good luck. Could you, don't crash on the runway.

We have other planes coming in. If you flip, try to go to the left. Try to flip over that way. Yeah, but this is so interesting. I had no idea that you could like choose what level of ATC you wanted. I thought you were just in the system and you had to follow the rules all the time. No, well, we're also America, baby. This is where the, this is 249 years of freedom. So in Fredericksburg, we don't have an ATC. We don't have no glory. We don't have a tower or anything.

So, you know, no. So you roll up to the runway and you're already monitoring, of course. And like, uh, okay, uh, you know, call sign. We're lined up runway two to Fredericksburg or Gillespie is what we should say. Gillespie will be taking off. And then you hope to hear someone say, oh, you know, I'm coming in final. I'm like, oh, you're coming in final. I'll wait for you. Now, but do you hang your arm out the window and do the like stop left?

No, you hang your left arm out the window with your cigarette. I'm ready to go. But here's what's even crazier. So, um, uh, Bernie, the Bernie stage airport, which is, you know, it's an hour drive, but through the air, it's 15 minutes. We share the same frequency. So when you are making your call outs around either Bernie or the Fredericksburg airport, which is known as Gillespie, you have to always start and end with Gillespie.

Otherwise, somebody in Bernie may think that you're coming in on their runway when you're actually coming in on the runway here in Fredericksburg. Because they're close enough. You can hear it. You can hear each other. Yeah. And we're on the same frequency. Great. That's great. This is why, this is why we have a $60 billion for upgrade of the ATC system in the big, beautiful bill. It's actually more, there's probably more like a trillion. It's like 3 trillion.

I think no, no, no, it can't be that. It's, it's like, it's, it's tens of billions. This, this is when it's, it's one of those things where you find out how loose, how loosey goosey the system is. And you're like, man, I've got so much mad respect that there's not any, that there's hardly ever any crashes. Well, there's all kinds of crashes all the time. You just don't hear about them. I mean, you can go into the, here's, here's my secret website. Pprune.org. P-P-R-U-N-E.org.

That's the pilot something. This basically pilot freaks who go there. And we talk about all kinds of stuff. Pilot's rumor network. There you go. And look under accidents and close calls. Oh no. That's the one. And there's, there's incursions that happen all the time. Someone runs off the runway. Someone lost the, you know, this, most of these are not a big deal. It's like bad day. Everyone walks away. No one was hurt. You only hear about it when someone crashes into a house and they die.

Delta 737 loses a flap. Yeah, minor, minor, minor. It's a minor issue. In a way, but in a way, David, in a way it's like being a sysadmin. You've got stuff happening all the time that users have no idea happened. And they have no idea how close they were to total Armageddon. Right. This, I mean, Delta Boeing 737 lost a wing flap midair. Nobody knew until it appeared in a Raleigh driveway the next morning. Yeah. You might not know. I mean, you've got plenty of flappage. It's all good.

Yeah. There's a big, there's a flap just laying on the guy's driveway. It happens all the time. Oh man. Anyway, I feel like I've been enlightened. Anyway, so, but long story short, my buddy, Maverick, my periodontist, he just bought himself a half of a TBM 850. So I'll be flying that up with him. A TBM 850. Now, now, now you're talking. All right. I got to look this up. Turboprop. It has stairs. You don't get in over the wing. It has stairs. Oh, you don't have to crawl up over the.

No, it has stairs. TBM 850 is a high-performance single-engine turboprop. Yeah, that does 300 knots. That thing's, that thing books. That's fast. So you can, you're rated for like, you can do that one? He's in it. He has an instructor's license. So I can fly, I can fly it with him next to me. Yeah, I can fly it. I can fly it. It's, but it, it's fast. You know, it's no joke. Does it have, is it a pressurized cabin? Yes, it does. Of course. So we'll go up to. So you can go high.

Yeah, we probably, going to Dallas, we'll probably go up to 13, 15,000 feet. Oh, that sounds fun. Yeah. And it'll take, it'll take 40 minutes, you know, instead of five and a half hours drive. I'm looking at it. This must be like planes for sale or something. Yeah, that's a, that's a cool looking. How many people can it see? Six passengers, two pilots, six passengers, single pilot IFR. So you can fly it by yourself without a co-pilot. Can reach a max altitude of 31,000.

Oh yeah, you can get way up there. Yeah. Then you can really, really, you can really book and get really fast. Um, man, this that's terribly impressed. Priced from as low as 1.8 million. Yeah, for a, for a banger. That's the, that's the entry model. It's the basic model. That's a banger model. Well, I mean, you, it all depends on what equipment you have. What, uh, what instrumentation? I mean, all this stuff is glass. These things fly themselves. That's the beauty of it. It flies itself.

But there's no fun in that. So you hand fly a lot anyway. So yes, I'll be going to podcast movement. There we go. Nice. Yeah, well, there we go. Um, I think the, uh, the big conversation in, uh, over on, I know you're not be happy. You're not a member of the, uh, podcast discourse hub on WhatsApp. Oh, I really don't want to be in the, whatever that is. No, but, um, interesting conversations. Um, you know, man, I have such heart for the, for the hosting companies.

What a business that is, you know, the amount of churn that they have to deal with people who come in, especially if you have a free tier, everyone's starting a free tier and then they just die off and don't do anything. And, you know, so basically it ate up resources, you know, that you never get paid for. Um, but the, but the big talk is HLS video or HLS, I guess, in general, audio and video. Have you kept up with, uh, with these conversations?

Uh, no, I got, um, I got an email, uh, from Kevin over at Buzzsprout saying that, uh, they're going to be talking about some stuff in the, in the, in the namespace. Um, in the namespace, are they going to sit in the namespace repo? Oh, in the repo. Just sit in the namespace and just have her ever look at blockchain cook marshmallows or we're here in the namespace. I'm not, I've been, I've been so focused on the, uh, getting the images tag.

I really haven't paid any attention to any conversation that's happened. Yeah. Well, um, they're all looking at it and, uh, um, a fountain already eats it, which is good. And I, I think they're doing, uh, you know, with the fountain RSS blue gold bundle package hosting, uh, I think they're, they're going to be serving HLS video. That would make a lot of sense if they have both ends of it.

And I'm pretty sure that Sam Sethi is, I think he's, you know, he's going to be doing, he's going to do the full end to end too. He's going to do hosting as well. Okay. Yeah. I think, yeah, I think I saw that. Yeah. Yeah. So he's going to do HLS video. I'm just hoping that it's not like, uh, you know, the thing is, it's almost like VHS beta max to me. You know, just because you can do video doesn't mean that people will migrate to video on podcasts.

I'm just not sure that, that that is the culture anymore. If it ever was, I mean, sure. Lots of people have put video into their podcast feeds. Um, uh, the new media show has done it for over a decade. Uh, I still only listen to audio and it's always fun listening to audio, uh, then listening to Todd complain about the video not working. Okay. Um, I'm just not sure, you know, and I, I appreciate power to them all. I appreciate it.

But I wish we could put some energy and dev cycles into some other things. That's just me. Um, you know, you're torn. I can tell. Well, I mean, I don't know. Maybe I'm not sure I'm torn. I'm just like, who knows? I mean, I, I don't, I don't know that we can predict anything really. I mean, I don't, I watch a lot of you. I want to, I watch a lot of YouTube and, and I've been trying to sort of figure out what exactly it is that I'm looking for. When I watch you, when I go to YouTube. Porn porn.

Uh, yeah, uh, they see how to, how to approach this here. But I listened to a lot of podcasts and a lot of YouTube and I watch a lot of YouTube. And so clearly they're not the same because I'm doing both. It's sort of like saying, I watch, I listened to a lot of music and I watch a lot of movies. You're doing two different things right now.

I real, I realized the Venn diagram of podcasting and YouTube does overlap in a certain way because there are shows that it's literally the same content on their podcast as it is on their YouTube video, just without the, just with the video removed. Um, the, so I understood that. So it's, they're different, but they don't have to be, uh, excuse me. They're distinct, they're distinct, but they may not be necessarily different. And so that's the way I approached it.

I was like, well, um, I've been trying to pay attention to what, when I go to YouTube, what, what am I looking for? Like, why am I there? And, and I realized that most of what I'm there for can fall under two categories. Um, how to do a thing like an instruction, instructional type video. And that would, that's a broad category that includes not just, uh, hey, I want to, I want, I want to build a closet organizer. How do I do it from scratch?

But also encompasses, um, here's how to use this new Python library or here's like explainer videos. Here's an explanation of the way, uh, larval, uh, larval 12 works and how you would upgrade an app from 11 to 12. And I would presume you're doing that on desktop because that stuff gets a little too tiny on the phone. Yes. Yes. I almost, I almost never watch YouTube on the phone.

Uh, the only time I ever do that is, um, is if there is a specific video and I'm under some sort of pressure to get a piece of content quickly. And that's all I can find. I I've paid, I've, I mean, I've paid a lot of attention. I've looked very closely at behavior for over 20 years of what people do.

And I find that people who believe they consume podcasts on YouTube really, uh, aren't, um, they may get, you know, the whole mechanism still works differently with what you're, what you're following, what you're, you know, who you're following, what you have the alarm bell set for, et cetera. So there's a, there's part of the serialized nature, but what I see. So Tina is a great example. She, and she has her phases of Megyn Kelly. Megyn Kelly goes in and out.

Megyn Kelly's talking about, you know, the show business thing. She may not be that interested, but what gets pushed to the top often in her feed or whenever she opens up YouTube will be clips, shorts and clips from the Megyn Kelly show. And she winds up watching 15 minute segments instead of the whole show. And I think, I think that that's a big part of the difference with, uh, with the YouTube podcasting experience. Also, you know, so Chad F says, you know, I'm watching kill Tony.

I think a comedy show, uh, a live comedy show on stage. That is, that is so much more when you have video. I mean, it, it, a comic, it helps to see the comic, I would say eight times out of 10. And you're going, I agree with that. And that's much more of a YouTube show. Now you may consume it like a podcast, but remember I wrote it on the tablets. Podcasting is audio. That's just it. Now a podcast feed is valid with anything you put in the enclosure. I'm okay with that.

I just am not convinced for any reason that people will be using their podcast apps to consume video on a regular basis. I mean, it's great if you have a feed and you have a Roku app and people can get it there or something, you know, something of that nature. Um, but I think people, I mean, it may, it may even be that the podcast, the audio version, I have this myself when I, you know, for me, it's all serendipity. I look at my feed. Oh, there's a new Joe Rogan.

Cause Joe Rogan is never really, um, it's never really a schedule. It's like you get three in a row, then three days of nothing. And then, you know, one and then two days later, one, it doesn't really seem to be rhyme or reason to it. So I'll see it like, oh, and I'll start listening. And if it's a guest that I want to see, I may switch over to YouTube. But not on the phone. You know, then I'll sit at my computer and then, and I'll sit at my computer.

I'm like, wow, I could be doing so much more with my life than watching this, you know? And so then I'll probably go back to audio. So I'm just not convinced. It's a, it's that important. I think this is still a remnant of people believing that YouTube has stolen podcasting far from it, far from it. That there's a video I posted in the boardroom. The title of it is unhinged rant about YouTube getting worse. It was not as unhinged as I was hoping it would be.

So I was going to pull some clips, but it just kind of was, it was kind of unclipable. So I just, I didn't. But I mean, what, one of the, one of the things he talks about in there is that YouTube is inserting, is turning on ad, mid-roll ads. Mm-hmm. And some, you know, like sometimes you don't even, you as the, as the channel owner, creator, don't, they just turn it on without your knowledge, you know, knowledge of what they do. They do it. Someone does it. And then you get, yeah.

And then you get 12 mid-rolls in a, in a 20 minute video. That's pretty annoying. And so the, um, so, and that was the, the other thing is, is AI, um, AI, AI commenters. AI videos in general, just type in any topic and you'll see the first 20 are all AI generated videos. Right. AI voice, AI video. It's, it's highly annoying.

And so, and he's, he talks about, you know, this is kind of apropos to what we were talking about last week with, uh, with chat, with live chat, AI, um, commenters in YouTube, in YouTube live chat. And they just, they get in there and there's like, he was, he was quoting very high numbers, you know, like 80% of the YouTube live chat is just AI bots now. Oh, really? You can, yeah, you can tell because they all use the same avatars. They're all like avatars of like hot chicks. Oh, how annoying.

Yeah. He said, you can, you can disable three different avatar. He said, you can block three different avatars and you get rid of like 80% of your comments all at once. They're all using the same avatars, but, um, I mean, so this, this is all, and so there, so how do you, how do you interpret that? I mean, one thing you can say, one, one thing that's obvious to me is that part of this is at least because YouTube is free.

Well, if I can just say, I will wager that unleashing bots on your own live chat or on your chat, regardless of whether it's live or not, I will wager that pushes you up in the algorithm. That's the reason why they're doing it. Oh, you're probably right. Engagement. Yeah. And because I got, I got some very interesting messages from people about the talk we had about, um, basically chat in live or chat in general. Uh, one of them was from, uh, Rob from Focus.

Hmm. And he says, you know, we're not live, but we're so interested in being able to have. And he, I, the feeling I got from him, cause it was just a text message back and forth was because everyone understands the, uh, everyone understands the moderation issue. The last thing you want is to have to go in and moderate, you know, comments on a show. Oh, awful. But when it's an ephemeral chat, man, that's so great. Cause it scrolls, it scrolls and it's gone.

Like that horrible thing someone said is gone. It just goes away. It's more about the audience, the live studio audience being able to interact with the person if they're doing it live and with each other when they're just watching it. And I don't see a need for it to be comments that stay there forever. You know, I was like, ah, I also find that highly annoying. I won't go, Rogan won't look at his comments. He says, I don't look at comments. Why? They only get me mad.

That's absolutely the case. Yeah. I mean, the, it's, if you have, if you have a free platform like YouTube, you, you're going to get that kind of stuff. But the one thing that I could, you know, the one thing that podcasting has going for it is that it's not free. Right. I mean, to, to have a podcast, you have to pay somebody most of the time, you know, Spotify, Spotify for creators slash anchor. That's, that's the exception.

Um, you know, they're willing to, you know, under, so underwrite the freeness of that platform, but then they also suffer for it because they've got millions of spam feeds bull crap on there that are just garbage. So they're, they're paying the price for that. But if you're, if you're, you know, if you want to do a podcast and have your, you know, 90% of the time you have to pay a hosting fee.

Yeah. And if you're going to be hosting a video podcast, you're going to have to pay a higher hosting fee more. Yeah. So if you're paying $50 a month, like the signal to noise ratio within the video podcasting realm would be very high. You would hope it would be. I mean, like, it's not cause I mean, that's a high barrier to entry for spammers. Um, well, but, but, but yeah, but, but yes, but there's no benefit to the spamming.

There's no algorithm that's going to rank you higher anywhere just because you have more people chatting. It's still free for users to chat and they can still do whatever they want to do there. But the incentive model is clearly, is just clearly, uh, monetary based upon more engagement in your content. That's the same thing is happening to Spotify. I was watching, uh, what's that guy who breaks down music all the time? Older guy in the studio. I like him a lot. Oh, Rick Beato. Beato. Beato.

Is that his name? I think so. Yeah. I'm pretty sure you're the white hair guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so he says, you know, look at what's happening with, with Spotify. There's all these fake bands that appear and they have, you know, they even have videos they've got, you know, band shots, cover album art, and they're completely 100% AI. And, you know, and they have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of listens. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I, you know what, they're real listens.

Uh, but, but all that money goes directly to Spotify because Spotify, as far as I'm concerned, I have no proof. Spotify is behind most of this. This is all about the royalties and I'm sure they get better placement. You know, they'll push that, they'll push that ahead. Well, that's what some, I think, uh, I forgot what channel it is. I may have been on Rick Beata's channel a couple of years ago.

That's, he was describing the phenomenon of you start, you search for a specific artist and start to listen to them. And then, um, when it auto, when it goes into its autoplay form where it starts to give you other things, it's always stuff you've never heard of before. Yeah. Like I hate, I hate, I hate to do this to you, Dave. Can you give me 45 seconds while I go check my brisket? Yeah. I'm really sorry. Yeah. Wrap it, wrap it. It's 4th of July, man.

Just, just, just, I just got to stick the thermometer in. I'll be back in 45 seconds. Hold on. I'm back. How's the brisket? 183 and I need to go up to 182. So it's perfect. Perfect timing. You pulling at 182? Yeah. 192, 192. Uh, a one, yeah. One, I thought 182 seemed a little low or, yeah, you don't go all the way to 205. No, no. Listen to Chad F. Oh, this is Dave's solo show. The one we've always wanted. I promise you don't want that show. Thanks, Chad. That's not a show anybody wants.

I feel so loved. I feel so loved. Um, I just, I mean, so this is my mixed feeling about, about this is I, I don't want, I, I feel like it will not succeed, but at the same time. What are you, what are you talking? Are you still on? What are you talking about? Yeah. Video podcast. Yes. I feel like, I feel like video podcasts are not really going to succeed as a thing, but at the same time, I want to see them try it.

Like I just have a, I have a dual sort of have two things in my head at the same time. I want to see people try, because I may be wrong. Yeah. It may be a smash hit. I don't think it will be, but it may. It could be. It could be. I mean, it's possible. I mean, what I was saying earlier is that, you know, that you've got that how to type video and then you've also got sort of pure entertainment that requires a visual component. Yeah, sure. Like television.

Yeah, but it's a specific type of television. Like it's, it's more like, um, oh man, how would you describe? So like one thing I like to do is I like to put on, uh, there's a class, there's sort of a, there's a, a guy that does what they call silent hikes. I don't know if you've seen that kind of thing, but it's, um, it's basically just a, he'll, he'll go, he'll go backpacking in beautiful places in the area on earth. And then, but there just won't be any, any talking. It's just him.

It's almost like a documentary of him just going through these beautiful places and showing, you know, it's just a day in the life of him. Sounds like a great audio podcast. I mean, it would be completely useless as audio, but I like to put that on like over in a off screen. I can't, I can't have words when I work. No, I can't. It's so distracting. So podcasts are out while I'm, while I'm actually doing any kind of real work, a podcast or not.

I mean, I mean like coding or, or, or it work, I can't concentrate. So I like to put on something that is just sort of like a background noise. And occasionally I'll just look, I'll look over at it and just have, you know, a moment. I'll have a moment and, uh, and it's nice. But that just, and it would be nice to have a video like that as a podcast. Well, I think the bottom line is it still comes down to screen size.

The content that works on video on mobile is going to be a podcast that you could watch or just listen to. It's going to be something that is very specific for like talking heads, talking heads or dancing. I think TikTok basically, if you look at TikTok, you know, it's, it's all the camera shots, it's all mid to close. Um, or it may, it may zoom out for dancing, you know, stuff like that. Uh, but it's just for storytelling, et cetera.

You're going to watch that on, on a computer or on your television screen. I just don't see it as a, as a great mobile experience, except for the doom scrolling of TikTok, you know, people like, hi everybody. I didn't, I really didn't want to talk about this, but I've got to tell you my dog died and you know, and all that kind of stuff. Um, it's personality driven, you know, one person sitting right in the middle of the screen, uh, makeup tips. Maybe that would work.

The other, well, the other part of this, that's a, this sort of, um, seems to me to be an unsolvable problem, uh, is that, well, maybe that's not the right, maybe unsolvable. It's not the right way to say it. Um, let me, let me just describe what I'm thinking. So that, that second, okay. So that first class of video, you're, you're doing a, a, a sort of a how to type, here's how this thing works video, right? That naturally lends itself to like baked in post reads for advertising.

The second type of video where you're watching some sort of like documentary or more like film style thing that really doesn't know. I mean, you don't want to be mid rolls, kill that experience. It takes you completely out of it. You're, it's not a good experience for the watcher. And so that's going to be, so you're going to have, and the way YouTube does that is they monetize those videos back to the creator of the video with a revenue share from YouTube premium subscribers.

Though that sort of setup doesn't work, doesn't exist in podcasting where you have subscribers to, right. And to the entire platform that's called podcasting, you have individual apps and that's, that's the individual apps, true fan, true fans, a fountain, a podcast guru, you know, the, these individual apps that allow for a funding tag and that kind of thing.

Those would have to really become the drivers of these because you would have, that's the only way you're going to be able to monetize those videos. I just don't think advertising for a video like that in a podcast is even really going to work that well. I don't know. It's just hard. It's a hard nut to crack, but I do want, I want to see them try. I want, I want to be proven wrong about this. And you know, fountain has just enabled pure Fiat V4V in their app. So I didn't know that.

Yeah. Yeah. Oscar ping me about it. And cause you know, with Korean, the keeper is doing the test for that. It's actually pretty successful. Yeah. And so, you know, if you're using fountain, you can just tap on it and you can put in any amount you want and send it off V4V and it goes direct to our Stripe account. And I said, well, that'd be great if I could use it on a no agenda. He says, you know, we're going to figure out how to get that into the, how you can put that into the funding tag.

Okay. I'm all for it. Great. I wish we did more with the funding tag. I really do. Oh, it's critical. It's it's critical. And it's the way it's the way if, if, if, if video podcasting is going to work, the fund, the funding tag has to be part. That's a very good point. Yeah. A very good point. They are linked. Yeah. In my opinion. And it works so well when you have it in the app. I mean, and we currently keeper still gets the majority of people sending booster grams.

But, and, and, you know, of course it screws it up because, you know, now you're not reading it in the same place. You got to go somewhere else to look if someone's in a note, but all that, I think we'll get integrated eventually. But Nathan's right. And Nathan's right. It's between funding L402 alternate enclosures chat. I think someone could build a Twitch like hosting consumption experience. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's what Fountain is going to try.

Yeah. I mean, TrueFans kind of has already built. TrueFans already built it. Yeah. Once they get their app, the world will change. Um, I think, didn't they release in the app store? They're out of beta, right? Right. I don't have the, I, I was told I was going to get on the Android beta, but I haven't seen it. Maybe they're not, maybe I got a notice about it, but maybe they're just open beta and not invite only now or something. I'll have to go back and look.

Um, but the, uh, the images tag there, the image tag, that's, that's formal now it's in the namespace. Oh, good. And what do we need to know? That's done. That's done. Finally. It only took a year, but it's done. Um, I mean, how, how should I go over it? Should I mean, I'm sure we're all familiar with it, but. Um, made a cut, let's see, I made a couple of, I thought you were going to do a blog post about it. Oh, I am for sure. Okay. Yes. Yeah, definitely.

Uh, let me see where to, where to kind of start on this. Um, oh yeah. So true fans is on the app store. Nice. Yeah. I thought they were in, I thought they were open now. Uh, so the, the difference, oh, is that right? Nathan, did you, yeah, you did a video of it. Yeah. So Nick, so Nathan came through, uh, Nathan Gathwright, the, the author of this, of this tag, a few things here. Let's let's, let's explain this.

Um, Nathan is primary author of this tag and he came through a couple of days ago with a demo page that is linked to in the namespace on this tag. And I'm trying a couple of things differently here. Um, let me go over to it image. Yeah, there we go. Let me paste it in copy, think paste. All right. So the, the tag has, um, a link in it to this demo tool for lack of a better term that, that Nathan built.

So you can click, you can click out to that, to that tool and then you can pick, you can upload images and then it doesn't really upload. I think it just all in browser, but you can select images and then it will lay it, it will, it'll show you mock -ups of the various images and the way they're going to look in different formats. Uh, and then you can click the code button and it'll show you the XML for the podcast image tag that you need to use in your feed. I'm putting this on the show notes.

So you, you can essentially play around with different, with different looks and then get the code, get the XML for what you're trying to do, which makes this. Oh, that's really, yeah. That's very cool. Yeah. Very cool. Now it's not exhaustive because this is a big tag that has a lot, you know, that has a million different use case scenarios. So it's not exhaustive. The tool itself is not exhaustive, but it will, it will get you started. Yeah. I'm putting that in the show notes as well.

Cool. And there's tons of examples in the name, in the tag, uh, the tag write up. Uh, showing everything from just very simple all the way up to, you know, like the most complicated example of purposes and aspect ratios and everything, video and all this. Um, so let me just run, let me just run down. So this, the podcast image tag, it can exist in the channel. So that means it would apply to the entire feed. Mm-hmm.

It can exist in an item, meaning it is at the, at the episode level, or it can exist in a podcast live item. Um, the, there can be multiple obviously, because that's what, that's one of the, uh, the superpowers of this tag is that it can, uh, so let me, let me pause going back to, um, Tom, Tom, Tom Webster made a comment and I'm not throwing him under the bus here. I'm just, I just go ahead. He just, I just want to, I just want to call out this line of thinking for a second.

Cause I think, I think there was a miss. This has been part of the problem with why it took this tag so long to come to fruition. He just made an offhand comment. He said, well, you know, we should be focusing on blah, blah, blah. Rather than a duplicative image tag, meaning that we already have one from the iTunes namespace. Why are we doing this again? So, and again, I just wanted to use that as an example of this. You get this similar sentiment sometimes.

So, uh, the reason that this tag is not duplicative. It's expanded. It's expanded. It's expanditative. Yes. Um, so this, this tag, we would not be doing this if it just simply duplicated something that already existed. That's, that's of no value. So this has much higher, uh, levels of use than just the, the iTunes image tag. So the iTunes namespace image tag has one attribute, href. That is a link to the image. That image is assumed to be one-to -one aspect ratio square, uh, you know, square.

And it's assumed to conform to Apple's documented spec. Now we, we all know that people do not adhere to this, but that's what it's supposed to be. That's what the assumptions are. And people by, by Apple spec, it's gotta be at least 1400 by 1400 and they recommend 3000 by 3000 pixels. Right. People put all kinds of nonsense. By the way, if you don't do 3000 by 3000, it may not get published. Okay. This, so, and so, you know, and Apple has to deal with this.

They, in their system, they, you know, flag you as not, you know, not being up to the spec and this kind of thing. But because of, because, so they can do that. They can give you errors and deny you from being listed because they're Apple.

Other apps just take whatever that tag gives them and they just have to do the best they can because they can't just, they can't just not display the image and say error or something like that because they're going to get a, they're going to get an email from the podcaster saying, Hey, my image is not showing. And then they're going to have to go through this long back and forth of support emails saying, well, it's because it's not 1400 by 1400. You're holding it wrong. You're holding it wrong.

So apps are just regular podcast apps that are not Apple are just stuck with doing the best they can. Um, the, so that's, that's the way the image tag currently exists. That's the way we do images and podcasting. Some apps support the, the bear RSS 2 .0 image tag, which is the silliest tag I've ever seen in my life, but they, some do support it. Um, that's, and that's fine, but it is of no value here. It's a silly tag.

Um, so that left us with that left us with, how do you get, uh, how do you provide different types of images that are not just square to a podcast, to podcast apps and platforms? There's lots of, of needs for this. Um, one is, uh, has been clearly demonstrated by Russell Harrower at pod two. Um, down under who created an early version of this tag called the banner tag.

He was trying to allow for banner images and, uh, just, you know, non-square or something, you know, four to one, something like that. 16 by nine, that kind of thing. And so he, you know, he sort of forged this path. And we tried this with the images tag, uh, early on as well to try to allow for multiple image sizes to be done that, you know, that went nowhere, uh, and was highly criticized.

And so we've tried this a few times and we, uh, Nathan finally cracked the code when he wrote the image spec for the new image tag. The image tag has, as its base use case, it's identical and fully replaceable for the iTunes image tag. You can have a podcast colon image tag with just an href attribute, and it's expected to work exactly the same as the iTunes image tag, right?

Whenever we have a tag that duplicates a base level of functionality with another namespace, it, in my more than opinion, my strong opinion, it has to be at least backwards compatible with that base use case. You have to be able to drop it in and it just function exactly the same. The, uh, that's just, that's just so coders and, and platform developers can just keep their sanity. So now you say, okay, we've got that base level of use case covered. Let's go up the chain here.

What, what else is needed? So the first attribute that was, that was added was alt, just like HTML. It's an excessive accessibility function. It allows you to put in some alternate text if the image cannot be displayed for some reason, or if the person can't see it, it's all fine. Aspect ratio is the next attribute it's recommended. And it just defines a aspect ratio value. So it's using slash notation. So one slash one, 16 slash nine, four slash one. Um, he made it match CSS syntax.

So CSS has an aspect ratio, uh, idea in it, and it uses that syntax. So we're just, we're just following things that are familiar to everyone. Um, so let's say you wanted to provide two different wide images, a 16 by nine and a four and a four by one. Great. Do it. Put two image tags to put two podcast image tags in your feed, a 16 by nine and a four and a four by one. Done. Easy as pie. Now width is the net width and height are also attributes that are, that are possible in this tag.

And we've gone down this road before. Okay. So we, we've talked about, um, we've talked about width and height as being proscriptive or descriptive. Ooh, what does that even mean? Well, you know, Well descriptive, I understand. Proscriptive?

Well, so what you're saying is, so imagine how the way HTML works, you have an image tag in HTML, the image tag is not telling you, the image tag is not, it specifies, it specifies a URL going that leads you to the image, but in the image tag has a width and height attribute, but the width and height, they're not telling you how wide and how tall the image is at the source. It's telling you how, what width and height to display the image at.

So you can point it at a, at a square image and then give it a width and height that are not square. And it's going to skew the image in the browser. You're, you're, you are prescriptively telling the browser, show this image at this pixel height and this pixel width. And it can, it doesn't, the browser never cares how wide or how tall that source image is. It's going to do what you tell it to and it's going to squish it and make it look funny if it's, if it's wrong.

So that's not what we're doing here. We're not saying, here's how to display it. We're saying, here's what the image is. So this is not a prescriptive height and width attribute. This is a descriptive height and width attribute saying, saying when you, hey, hey, podcast app, this image I just told, gave you an href for, it's this wide and it's this tall. It's describing it. And so then that, and that is much better in this case because, because RSS is not meant as a display markup language.

It's meant as a data exchange language. XML describes data. It doesn't tell you how to show it. XSL tells you how to show it. That's a style sheet layered on top of XML. But XML itself doesn't, doesn't do that. So that's a, that's kind of a critical distinction there. That's why iTunes, the iTunes image tag itself doesn't have a height and width is because their documentation says it's supposed to be square. So they don't, they don't care because you like, that's not what it's for.

So because this, the width is recommended, not required. And it's because of what I just described as to why it's not required. Because you've already got an aspect ratio that you can define and that's all you need. Because again, it's not, this is not a display function. I hope that all makes sense. It's a little cumbersome to explain. No, I mean, I get it. I get it. Okay. So the type is the next attribute. And it just describes what type of media this is. Is it an, is it a JPEG? Is it a PNG?

Is it a video like MP4? So you can have motion, you know, you can have motion assets here. You can have a moving background or something on a banner. But you have to say that. And it's optional because most of the time, if it's a standard image type, like a JPEG or a PNG, most of the time, I mean, most, most web views and browsers and that kind of thing can figure that out on the fly.

But if it's anything out of the, if it's anything just even slightly non-universal, like a TIFF or a GIF or a MP4 or something, you want to provide a MIME type to give a hint to the app or the platform. So there's that. Then finally is the, the, the thing that is, the wildest part of this, of this spec, but also the absolutely the most powerful. And the thing that I'm just like, I love the most about it is the purpose attribute. Yeah. This is the one, this is where it all comes together for me.

Yeah. And, and let me just describe, let me, let me describe the attribute as it's written in the spec. It's an unordered set of case-insensitive, space -separated tokens following the W3C syntax, which we link to. This value should not exceed 128 characters. This allows podcasters to indicate the suggested use of this media. The reason, okay, so the reason this is so powerful, well, let me read from the notes section. It says the purpose type for the purpose attribute. I should rename that.

Actually, I think that's bad wording. The purpose attribute is encouraged to provide an expected use case to app developers as a display hint. Why was this podcast image included in the feed? What did the podcast creator intend to be done with it? Is a particular app or platform media asset being targeted? See a fuller explanation of the purpose attribute. So, and then there's a whole section on purpose tokens.

So this thing says, the purpose attribute says, all right, I have a specific, you're not just saying, okay, here's this, hey, hey, here's this, hey world, here's a four by one image. Okay, great. I mean, I appreciate that. But what, I mean, I, what am I supposed to do? That's great. I mean, thanks. It's the purpose thing. The purpose attribute goes one step further and says, this four by one image I just gave you is meant to be this thing.

For instance, social is one of the tokens recommended for social preview images. So when you, when you link to a podcast on X, it can, this can be the OG, the open graph image that comes in. Circular is one that Daniel came, you know, has to be put in there, recommended for images that are expected to be cropped like as a full circle.

So that you can define, you can define this image as like circle safe, you know, where you, where you say, okay, this image, if you, if you make it into a full circle and cut all the corners off, it's still going to be fine. So there's these different use cases that you can give. And the one, the one that's most relevant, I guess the most recent recently is the, the, the Apple showcase hero image.

And we, I think we talked about that maybe two weeks ago, where you can have, they, they have a specific, they have a specific image sizing requirement for what they call a showcase hero image. And that will, if you put that in there, you're more like, I think the description was, you're more likely to be a featured podcast because you have more complete and better artwork.

So you can include this, this type of image into your, into your feed and give, you're essentially giving this image to Apple and everyone else for them to use. And everybody, because that purpose is in there, we all then by default know what it is. Yeah. This is going to be a four by one or I don't know what the spec says, but well, actually, let me open it up because we link straight to it.

This is going to be a, yes, four by one image, 43 specifications are 4320 by 1080, Photoshop, layered PSD, Photoshop document. So which should be ignore, ignore on my, on the, on the app side. Right. So you should, so this, this is a way for you to provide a funk, you know, just a very specific funky type of image for a single app's use. And then if other apps want to pick it up, they can and use that same thing. So this, this is to me, the most powerful part of this spec.

And I think you can have multi, you can have as many of these in there as you want. And I expect what's going to happen is over time, we will develop, um, we will, we will develop a set of use, um, usage guidelines around this. We can't dictate any of that stuff, obviously. Right. We can't say, well, here's how you're going to, you know, here's how you got to do this. And here's how you got to do that.

I mean, we can, we can put some, some sort of specification guardrails on it, but it has to sort of evolve over time as people begin to use things like the social purpose, um, and the canvas and, you know, episode artworks and that kind of thing.

It will take, and, and then guidance from platforms like Apple, Spotify, you know, uh, and, uh, smaller platforms, you know, like Pocket Cast, True Fans, Fountain, you know, it, it will, this thing will evolve over time so that hosts then have a more clear idea of what to do in the feed. Um, but I think, I think this, this tag took a very long time to develop.

Um, I, I'm very thankful to Nathan for tackling this and for, uh, James and everybody keeping with it and, and just, you know, and, and not just throwing their hands up and not, you know, in, in staying, staying with the program. And I think, I mean, it feels really good to get this thing shipped. I think it's a great, I think it's a great piece of work. Good work, everybody. Yay. Hold on a second. I'm looking for my, uh, my favorite jingle. Yeah. And you're looking for the horn.

No, no, no, no, no. I'm looking for, looking for this one. Oh, there's no winning. We don't like to foster a competitive atmosphere, but we laugh a lot. Now everyone hug and share a secret. Yay. Share a secret, everybody. That's great. Yeah. So I mean, I feel really good about this. I like it. And as soon as I have it in sovereign feeds, I'm going to be using this stuff. I want to publish with it for sure. Uh, what I hope, so let me talk about my desires. Oh, it's in your DNA.

My desire is that we get some guidance from the big, from the bigger players about, about how they expect hosting companies to use this tag. Yeah. That would be ideal. Yeah. So if, if Apple, Spotify, whoever can come out and say, okay, if you want a showcase hero image or a channel banner or something like this, if you want these, these things in to show up in your feed, uh, to show up in your, in your podcast on our platform, here's how to use this.

Here's, here's what you need to put in this tag. And if they do that, oh man, that would be awesome. Wouldn't it? Genius. It's just, it's just pure bliss. This is something I think that Apple could really get behind this because they're all about the aesthetics. Oh, totally. They're all about it. And I, and by the way, uh, it's not 3000 by 3000, 1400 by 1400 is the minimum requirement for Apple. And thank you, Ted. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Ted. Because so many times, because you know, I'm still a sovereign feeds user. I'm, I think I'll always be a sovereign feeds user. And so, you know, I have to, I have three different image sizes and I copy paste it into sovereign feeds. And from time to time, I put the, uh, the 512 by the 512 into the feed image and Ted Hossman, I think he literally sits there at Apple. I'm like, oh, there's Curry again, but he approves it.

And then sends me an email, say, dude, can you please fix it? What he does is he's hooked into pod ping so that he sees when you post the show and he gets the bad signal on his phone to check the image. He's like, oh, let me check Curry's at work. Let me see if he did any good. Yeah. I really appreciate that. Um, because you know, you, you can easily publish walk away and then you come back to your Twitter timelines, like right. But think about it.

Think how wonderful it would be to be able to upload banner and different kinds of images that Apple could make it look really good on their, um, uh, on their app. Yeah. It could be a game changer. Oh, it's game changer. And the other breaking. And the other, uh, the other thing that I'm doing for the first time in this, in this, uh, formal formalization process for this tag is putting in the credits of who authored and contributed to the development of the task. Very nice.

Uh, and that, so that's at the bottom of the tag, uh, spec and, uh, lists like this one lists, uh, Nathan Gates, right. As the author, I think it's Gathwright. I always say Gates for some reason. Gathwright as the author, uh, Russell Harrower, James Cridlin, and Daniel J. Lewis as contributors. And, and I want, so, so that I need to go to the next step here. These, the credits need to be in all of the tags.

I would like every tag to have a credit section so that everybody gets the credit that they deserve for their contributions. And as a bonus, we'll send you a badge you can put on your website, which links back to us. Uh, yeah. Do you remember that top 5% badge? Uh-huh. I remember all that stuff. Like the... Congratulations. You're now a top 5% website. Put this badge on your website. Then it's back to us.

Link back to us, links back to us for all our Google juice or what, no, Alta Vista at the time. Yeah. This is such a cheesy way to get backlinks. Okay, good. Are you monitoring the, uh, Bristol? We're at 190, so I've got two degrees to go. Oh, you're, you're about to, you're about to have to run out and do, uh, pull. I do have some good news. Um, I discovered, uh, the problem with my memory. Uh, B12? No. Huh? No. Uh, I guess I had installed Postman under Snap. Snap, Snap is your first problem.

Postman is the second problem. And I never, you know, I don't know why. I installed Postman, but I know I could only install Postman on the server. Yeah. Yeah. Cause you know, you were like, Hey, just get Postman for your API. I'm like, okay, I'll get Postman for my API. And I put it in and then I realized, oh, uh, this is a headless server and this is a, a graphical user interface. So I just, I forgot about it.

It was probably sitting there trying to open up a, a screen display and Snapd was just running. Everyone's running a muck. Oh, well, I can tell you that Postman has had memory leaks for its entire existence. If I leave it up on my machine running for a couple of weeks, I will run, I will run a 32 gig workstation out of room. Well, so literally I got back a full gig the minute I disabled it.

Yay. Nice. There used to be a, there used to be a, uh, there used to be a, an IT joke that's back in the Novel Network days that, uh, nope. Uh, was it, uh, you can solve any problem by uninstalling the Novel Network client. Except for your networking. Yeah, right. You can, you can fix any problem by uninstalling Snap or whatever you do. Yeah. All right. So, uh, why don't we wrap this up and, uh, thank some, uh, some of our boosters.

I will start with our, um, uh, with our live boosters, uh, uh, Martin Lindeskog. He's just been on a tear. Happy Independence Day sent via TrueFans iOS app. Oh yeah, there we go. I think that's the first one from the, from the app. Nice. Uh, 1776, another 1776 Liberty boost. I got a network error. So I try again and he sent that twice. So thank you. It's working. And another 1776. Thank you, Martin. I don't know if it's intentional, but we appreciate it. And he says happy Independence Day.

Again, Cole McCormick, McCormick with 1000 sats. He says, I pretty much grew up on YouTube. Oh man, I feel so old. I grew up with faces of death on VHS. Uh, yeah. Been paying for premium for a long time. And you guys should check out the channel BOG. This guy makes what I would describe as software experience documentaries. Highly entertaining videos of a guy installing software he's never used before and figuring out how to use it like postman. Exactly. Beautiful. Salty crayon.

1776. Howdy boardroom. Happy 249th. America. UK will be at work all day today. Five by five in the pipe. That's right. And there's the delimiter. So over to you, Dave. Uh, we check, check this out. $500 from transistor. Oh, transistor. Wow. Well, thank you very much. That's highly appreciated. Wow. I don't think, I don't think they've ever donated before. That is highly appreciated. Just in case. Wow. Thanks guys. Yeah. Uh, they, uh, included a message, a gift

from your friends at transistor.fm. Thanks for all the hard work you do behind the scenes. Wow. Thank you very much. That, that means a lot. It really does. Uh, let's see, we got, um, these are, these are mixed up because I didn't write them down for, uh, Chad Pharaoh, $20, 22 cents. Thank you, Chad. Appreciate you, brother. Uh, Cameron Rose, $25. Thank you, Cameron. Kevin Bay, $5. Uh, Mark Graham, $1. Podpage. That's Brendan in the, in the girls and boys. I'm a, I'm a pod page user, man.

I love pod page. It just works. It just works. Martin Lindeskog over at the new media. That's $1. Um, oh, there's a, there's a, we could not, uh, process your recurring payment. They'll skip that one. Um, John McDermott, $4 and 76 cents. Thank you. Thank you, John. Appreciate that. Uh, oh, Oscar Mary, $200. Thank you, Oscar. Oh, we got a, that's a baller. Hold on a second. It's a baller shot. Carla 20 is blazed on the Impala. Uh, thank you, brother. Oscar over there. Fountain.

Yes, very, very kind. Mercy buckets. Joseph Morocco, $5. Oh, and that's it. Yeah, that's it for the PayPal's. We got some, uh, booster grams. Let me resort this so I can go old to new here. Um, oh, Caspian. I haven't heard from, we haven't heard from Cass in a while. That has been, has been a bit. Yeah. Is that, is that Dutch for cheese? Cass. Yeah. K-A-S is Dutch for cheese. What, what is the Dutch word for vacuum cleaner, by the way? Stofzuiger. Yeah. Stuff sucker, right? Something like that.

Stuff sucker. Yeah. Stofzuiger. And that kind of what that means? It means a dust sucker. Okay. I love how literal Dutch is. Dust sucker. What is that thing? It's a dust sucker. All right. Um, 2100 sats from Cass. He says, uh, his message is grep star dot log. That was for our previous show. Yeah. Yeah. Paul Erskine, $67.89. Through Fountain. He says emptying this wallet for unfortunate reasons. Have fun pushing the RSS. Oh, I'm sorry. Hope everything's okay. See loss on Linux.

One, two, three, four through Fountain. He says satisfying episode. Oh, that's good. Uh, Kevin, oh, Kevin Bay. 300,000 sats. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Paula! Shot Carla! 20 inch blades on the Impala! Thank you, Kevin. Podcast guru. He says, uh, thank you. Thank you, Boost. In honor of everyone who listened to, stream sats and boosted my show sats and sounds. My 100 episode run was a blast. Oh, I guess, I guess he ended it. Is he ending it? I guess sounds like it.

Well, at 100 episodes, that's a good run, man. That's beautiful. Uh, thank you. Appreciate that, brother. Uh, uh, Bruce, the ugly quacking duck. Row of ducks. 2222 through podcast guru. Like a guru represented today. Yeah, repping. Uh, Rocky was a great guest. Chat with live will be great. Thanks, Adam and Dave. Go live. Go live. Let's see. And I think you already got. Well, we don't have the delimiter. Yeah, but you got salty crayon. I got salty crayon five by five in the pipe.

Yep. So we got the delimiter, comic strip blogger, Mr. CSB. 13755 through fountain. He says, howdy, Adam and Dave. Giving birth to a wholly new podcast is a struggle. Today, I recommend a wholly new podcast entitled two and a half bins that yet doesn't have its own feed, but is living on the RSS feed of older podcast at www .lotuseffect.show. They're in Bimro's phone boy and phone boy's girlfriend. Phoenix. Talk about information, technology, industries and stuff. Who knows?

Maybe this new podcast will survive. Maybe not. Dot, dot, dot. Well, you got comic strip blogger in your corner, so that's always good. He is pimping you. He is definitely pimping you. Thank you to all of these boosters and PayPalers. We appreciate you so much. Podcastindex.org down at the bottom. A red donate button for your fiat fund coupons. And of course, any of the modern podcast apps. We accept it all in your booster grams and your sats. And it's so much appreciated.

And thank you, boardroom, for being here on this Independence Day. I'm sure a lot of you had other things you can do. Everything here got canceled. We've just been under a deluge of rain. Is it still raining? Yeah. First world problem. The pool is overflowing. You have brisket problems. You need to go. I do. And Dave, can I email you the RSS feed or send you the RSS feed later for you to update so that we can actually publish? Yeah, sure. Okay. No problem. We're doing this.

We're going old school. Yeah. Next week, I won't be able to do the board meeting because I'll be in New York. I will be out for the next two because I'm going to be gone two weeks. I'm not going to be. I'm going to be gone two weeks in a row, like 10, well, 10 days. And they're going to overlap. We're on a summer holiday. I will be in the in the wilderness. All right. So we'll be back after the two week break, everybody.

Dave, make sure you send me your root password because, you know, you're going to be in the wilderness and you want me to type that rm-R star, everybody. Boardroom, thank you very much for being here. We keep going. We keep moving forward. Thanks for tuning in once again to Podcasting 2.0. You have been listening to Podcasting 2.0. Visit podcastindex.org for more information. Go podcasting! I'm telling you, just give me root, baby.