Episode 237: FF-P-MEG

Podcasting 2.0 for October 10th, 2025, episode 237, FFPMeg. Hey everybody, it's good to be back. Are you kidding me now? Two weeks and so much has already happened. Welcome to Podcasting 2.0, the official board meeting of all things podcasting. If it's going on in podcasting, it's talked about here. We are in fact the only boardroom that gets none of the $3 billion in projected advertising.

I'm Adam Curry here in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and in Alabama, the man who's every man's philosopher and an agent of change. Say hello to my friend on the other end, the one, the only, Mr. Dave Jones. I guess it's because I don't have FFMpeg installed. You need FFMpeg. Everybody in the world needs FFMpeg. Well, I just, I mean, I figured it would just be there. I mean, I couldn't build a robot out of FFMpeg. FFMpeg, sudo apt-get. Install. Install FFMpeg.

Unable to locate package FFMpeg. Well, that's a problem. You forgot to do a sudo apt update. How could you not? Like, how could this, this has to be right. I actually had to build FFMpeg from source to get the RTMP module. Now, did you have to do this? Oh, yes. Or did Grok just tell you you had to do it?

No. No. After I found out that it did not include the RTMP module, I went to looking, but it's always interesting then, because, you know, it might install it in a different directory than you expect it. And if you don't explicitly tell Grok what's going on, you can go down a rabbit hole for an hour or two. Sudo apt-get install FFMpeg does not, does not work. Why is this? I don't understand. Where is it? Where is it? It says no, unable to locate package FFMpeg. What is my problem?

You got no package, man. Your package is no good. I've heard that, but now I know for sure. You got no package. It's weak. Let's see, cat. Okay, cat etc message. Oh, Eric. Ericpp is trying to be helpful. Nix-shell. Okay, yeah. Now, we're not all running on Nix. Oh, Nix, oh, yeah. No, that's not. I'm on like Ubuntu something. I don't even remember what version. Ericpp, you may not have a spouse or a girlfriend.

If you're on Nix OS, then I don't think you can have a relationship with anything else. Oh, I'm on Ubuntu 20. I may be off. Oh, no. I may be off long-term support and I can't install packages. Is that really what this is? I guess so. If it is, then I'm gonna be really annoyed. Did you kill your stream? Well, it killed itself. Oh. It gave me an encoder error and just killed it and just died. Oh, no, that's no good. That's no good. Hello, everybody.

Welcome to Podcasting 2.0, where we take you to the command line, every single show, just to let you know that we have no idea what's going on in the world. I certainly have no idea what's going on right now. Is it Snap? Am I gonna have to resort to Snap? Let's bring in the memory leak that is known as Snap. I'll tell you what, while you're doing that, why don't we bring in our special guest for today?

Because he knows a lot more than just what he's here to talk about, which is, of course, shameless self-promotion of a product. But that's what most people should be doing here. Please welcome the owner, creator, the proprietor of PodChapters and many more, Daniel J. Lewis. Hey, guys. Hey, Dave, try and stick some JSON in it. Ah, there it is, there it is, there it is. Sue, your comments are not helpful, Daniel. Pseudo apt, this is horrible. This is horrible. Pseudo apt again.

I'm just gonna try, wait, unzip. Let's try to, okay, that works. So it's not a package problem. Yeah, that's what she said. The package is fully operational. Your package is fully operational and loaded. Yes, it's ready to fire. But this is not, but the, is it caught? Oh, I see what my problem is. I'm such an idiot. Okay, now we all want to know. Now we all want to know. Misspelled? I misspelled FFPEG. Ah! I typed FFPEG. Oh, there you go. FFPEG, okay, for anybody who's won, FFPEG, FFPEG.

For anybody who is curious, FFPEG is not a real package. But it's a show title for sure. FFPEG. FFPEG, oh brother. That sounds like a concealed carry kind of thing. It's almost lewd, but in a way that I can't fully understand. Well, snap, I had to use snap though, which is also not good. So what we're doing here is, for those who are wondering, for the podcaster, godcaster, I'm sorry, we have, I don't know how many hundred stations we have. And we create these channel streams.

So you throw a bunch of podcasts in a player and then it plays the most recent episode of whatever's most recent and does that in a loop with station IDs in between. And we've enabled a way to take over that stream and go live. IceCast was pretty simple. Most churches use RTMP. So they're streaming video to exciting platforms like YouTube and Facebook. So exciting. And since we refuse to be streaming video, we have a little RTMP to IceCast bridge and it actually works. Except for the metadata.

Metadata is turning out to be a bit of a problem, not because of the RTMP to IceCast or how we are doing metadata. Okay, it seems to be working. Yeah, hold on, I can see it rolling. You do see it rolling? Well, I see you're being probed. Yes, your stream is active. Player eight, player eight, player eight enters the game. Scanning. Okay, it has not crashed on me on the output yet. Is it actually making a file? But this is all useless anyway, because I didn't start at the right time.

So it's going to be way off again. Oh, that'll be fun. Let me see, I can check and see if we're live here. It freaks out all the apps. Is it actually making a file? This is crazy. There you go, you're live, okay, you're live, awesome. It works. Well, okay, it's creating .ts files. See what I'm trying to do is, like a good computer guy, I changed the settings on OBS right before the show. Oh, of course, yeah. Like I connected to the stream, I heard Daniel's voice and I hit settings.

And I went in there and just started twiddling with stuff, because what I want to do is I want to record directly to HLS instead of having to re-encode afterwards. That way I can just go, shoot it right up to Linode. We had the funniest episode with VoidZero. On Wednesday, he sends me a note, which I will read verbatim just because it's funny. No agenda? Yeah, for no agenda. He says, fixes changes and updates today. Any report of the stream being offline?

I'm aware of it, migrating a bunch of stuff. People won't notice. Yeah, everything broke. The stream broke, the website didn't update. Wow. But it's like, you know what's going to happen. It's like, just don't say no one will notice because there's always something you notice. It always breaks. It's hilarious. I thought Martin knew about no change Thursdays and Sundays. Well, he did it on Wednesdays, to be fair. That was the good part, but I'm like, no, just don't do it.

Don't do it, man, and he did it. Do you make changes? There are some people in the universe who have the ability to make Mercury go in retrograde. Precisely. Daniel, do you change critical parts of the infrastructure of PyChapters like on Friday night? No way. No better than that. No, that's not a good idea. I, however, still have a tendency to do that. Oh, you just pushed to production, that's you. Oh, I go, yeah, I'm hacking on production. Staging is for pussies, absolutely. That's what it is.

You're a real man. Well, I had the wonderful experience of a dev server that got, I logged into the dev server. I'm like, why is it, why am I, is everything in 100 CPU cycles?

What is, hmm, so. Oh, yeah, yeah, your Bitcoin miner expedition. So it happened to three machines before I could batten down the hatches, and then somehow one of the machines I thought I had closed up, I guess that somebody left something in there, and it may not have been a Bitcoin miner because I got a Linode strike. Linode, so you get like, I guess, Akamai complained that my server was abusive. I'm like, bad server, bad server. Oh, your server was trying to hack other servers.

Pwned for something else, yeah, but it was still the same kaudit zero process that was running, but it was hidden in all kinds of places. It had all kinds of scripts that would restart it, reinstall it. It was fun to track down. Well, I mean, just, I would never, if a server, if any machine ever gets popped like that. Oh, no, I- Never trust you, you have to rebuild from scratch. I did, I did.

I rebuilt from scratch, which gave me the opportunity to rebuild it on a smaller Linode, which is kind of fun, but yeah. Linode give you a strike against your VIA or against your account. Well, no, not a strike, but they lock down your networking, so you can't get into it. So they just lock you down. Well, that's kind of cool, though. Yeah, well, you can get into it with Lish. Lish. Yeah, Lish, but you can't remote into it, right?

You can't, no, no, no, no. Lish or Glish, your choice, Lish or Glish. It is, your choice, whatever you want, or fish. Hey, Daniel J. Lewis, it's good to have you in the board meeting. It's been a hot minute. Yeah, been busy building things, talking to people, trying to still spread the gospel of Podcasting 2.0 as well. Well, let's talk about your pod chapters, because I got an early beta test, which I thought was really phenomenal.

I went back to use it again, and then it said, well, you have to become a beta tester, and it was all kinds of confusion, so I figured I'd just wait until I can pay for it, because I want to pay for it, because it is that good. And it's a sneaky way, kind of, of you trying to build your super chapters idea. I see what you're doing. Yeah. Why don't you just call it super chapters? You had to throw a pod in front of it. Unnecessary roughness on the field.

So tell us about it, because I saw this, I'm like, yeah, this is good. This is exactly what we need. Tell me, tell us what it is, and I want to know how the adoption rate is. Yeah, I have been using chapters for a long time, and I followed the legacy chapters for years, and also used Podcasting 2.0 chapters. You mean heritage chapters? I prefer legacy. Vintage. Vintage, ooh, that's a good one, yeah. Although vintage implies something of high value.

But anyway, I like supporting the many different formats, because I still use a podcast app, Overcast, that does not support Podcasting 2.0 features, unfortunately, and I know many other apps still support the legacy, vintage, whatever, old-style chapters. And the chapter experience was so frustrating, because for one thing, there's just not a good cross-platform solution to be able to recommend.

There's almost no way to make chapters on Windows, and the best app that was available for Mac that did support Podcasting 2.0 had all kinds of weird issues, and it was just a pain to work with. What app was that? It's called Podcast Chapters. Oh, gosh, that's been around forever, hasn't it? Yeah, I used to use that. I think maybe 15 years ago, I was still using that. Maybe I'm wrong. Yeah, that was the initial JSON format that we used.

We kind of merged what we were working on with what he was working, with what he had, and came to this sort of amalgam. And so, yeah, he was one of the first people to support it. Yeah, and it worked. It just was so cumbersome to work with. And then, as I started getting into certain things, there were several companies that I talked to that use AI and can add chapters, but most of those chapter-adding AI models just create way too many chapters.

Like, by now, we probably would have created 10 chapters with some of these tools, because of how many topics we've talked about. And I wanted to use AI to place my own chapters, because when I record, I'm talking from an outline, so I know exactly what I want my chapters to be. I just don't know where I want them to be.

And so, this workflow that I had was using three or four different apps and taking 15 to 30 minutes for every episode just to add the chapters and transcript and do some of this stuff. So I just decided, I just want to make a tool that works better for me to do all of this. And as I'm making it, I realized someone else might like this too. I'm going to turn this into a product. And thus, PodChapters was born and launched in about two months.

All right, so tell us exactly what it does, because it does a lot of things, and it's actually quite impressive. You could almost have a basic podcast host and add PodChapters and have a whole bunch of extra features. Oh, yeah. So some of this ties into the difference between chapters and what we're calling super chapters. I like that Dovi Das calls them super chapters, so I call that something else. So this does kind of tie in and bridge with that.

But a chapter, just in case anyone's not familiar, a chapter, whether that's legacy chapters or Podcasting 2.0 chapters, they're functionally the same. They are a time within the audio with a title and an optional link and an optional image. Podcasting 2.0 chapters add on the location to that and the ability to hide something from the table of contents. But still, they're functionally the same.

And so what PodChapters does is you upload your audio to it, and there will be an option in the future that you'll be able to upload video to chapter your videos. But for now, it's just MP3 audio. You upload your audio to it, and you can either BYOT, bring your own transcript, or you can have it generate a transcript for you. And the transcript generation is blazingly fast.

And I've built in some things that really help it too, where you can tell it a list of proper nouns or key terms so that when it finds something that is close to that, it can transcribe it properly, like John C. Dvorak. It can finally get that correct. And you can also give it- Wait, how did you do that? How did you get, I have found very few AIs that can consistently recognize the name, the spoken name Dvorak, and get it right?

It's part of the AI protocol that I'm working with, which is DeepGram. They have a really good model for transcription. And in their code that you can work with, you can send it these key terms so that when it gets to something that it thinks is close enough, and it's not always 100% accurate, but it is very accurate and very good at this. And it can even do find and replace options on top of that.

Like for example, frequently when I speak a URL in my own podcast, like slash give back is my own value for value page. It sometimes transcribes it as slash give space back. So I just put in there a find and replace. So anytimes it sees slash give space back, replace that with slash give back, no space in there. And that kind of thing saves a whole lot of time too.

So when it uses the transcript, the whole reason why it needs a transcript, you either bring your own SRT or VTT, or it generates one for you, is so that then it can find where chapters could be. Then you have the choice of, do you want to either give it your own outline to create chapters from your outline, or do you want it to suggest chapters for you? Both ways work with the transcripts so it finds where that information should be.

And it does a really good job of even suggesting the outline that you already speak into it. I've fine-tuned this thing like crazy to make it do that.

And then it adds those chapters both to the MP3 file, as well as gives them to you in multiple formats, the JSON format for Podcasting 2.0, Podlove simple chapters format, it gives you YouTube timestamps, it gives you an outline with timestamps, and it can even, if you're on a hosting provider that you can't upload or work with their own chapters, it can even host the chapters for you at a predictable URL based on the file name of your episode.

So you could know, like in your case, Adam, I was thinking specifically about what you do with NoAgenda in this case, and Dreb Scott does for the chapters where you don't have the chapters ready when you publish the episode, but you want to have a predictable URL. So that's what this can do is that it can create that URL that has a unique stream in it, but it doesn't change per episode. The only thing that changes per episode is the episode file name.

So then it can host the chapters for you, and by hosting the chapters for you in the future, when chapters can start doing some cooler, smarter things, I'll be able to build that into the system by providing chapter hosting as a service, or people can download it and host them themselves if they want. So what's the uptake? How long has it officially been open and available? It's only been out for a week. I launched it on International Podcast Day, September 30th. Oh, damn, I miss it again.

International Podcast Day. What day is that? I need to put that in my calendar. September 30th. September, who came up with that? Why is that a? I was one of the co-founders of that. It was Steve Lee, Dave Lee. That's why you remember. Okay, I got it, yeah. Yeah, I celebrate it more than I celebrate my own birthday. Okay, and so I did hear about it in pod news, but can we get a presidential proclamation or something so it's a little more solidified in the books?

At this point, it's pretty close to that because it was 2014, I believe, or 2013, that Steve Lee, Dave Lee approached me and Dave Jackson and a couple others to say, hey, how about we try and start this? And one of the reasons why we picked September 30th, it's easy to remember, last day of the month of September, but also there are a lot of significant things about podcasting that happen around September, including your birthday, Adam. Wow. It was one of the things in consideration.

The beginning of the month, but okay, yeah. But also certain things like the history of podcasting where the first podcast, at that time, our understanding of the first podcast was published around September and also certain other significant things. So there were a lot of, it's kind of like President's Day. There isn't one single president that was born on President's Day. It's representing multiple things around the same time. But can we get a mattress sale on International Podcast Day?

That's what we need. Sheets, sheets and linens. Linens, yeah. The YSL. Fireworks would be great. Yeah. Make them all in the RSS icon. So what are you using for the AI stuff? And this is, they were talking about this on Pod News Weekly Review with the guy who's doing a video-first hosting company. He has a lot of AI stuff in there. I mean, how do you budget, basically? How do you budget for the usage, for the credits, all that stuff? It seems like it's kind of a crapshoot.

Yeah, that was a real challenge. And for anyone doing anything with AI, that is going to be the biggest thing that you'll have to think about because you really don't want to offer unlimited unless you can completely predict what your output sizes will be and how the models will work. But you really, I think you have to make it some kind of credit system.

And that's what I went with is charging based on AI credits where each level that you subscribe to, you get a certain number of AI credits per month. I originally played with calling them transcription minutes as a type of currency within the app. But then I realized not only is that kind of hard to understand in certain contexts, but it's also very long, a lot of letters, transcription minutes. So I just went with AI credits.

And people have to sometimes just look at how much is it costing to generate this, do a lot of tests, figure out what are the edge cases, see how much it actually costs you depending on the models that you want to use. Like, for example, CloudSummit is one of the most expensive models. I would say it's the most expensive popular model. There are cheaper models like GPT-5 is cheaper and GROK-4 is cheaper. Gemini 2.5 is close to the same price as GROK or as a GPT-5.

But some of these have different versions of the model too. Like you might have a GPT-5 regular, GPT-5 chat, GPT-5 mini, GPT-5 nano. And for each of these, they come at different costs and produce different results, different qualities. And that's where you have to just test it, figure out what works. I made a spreadsheet to help me figure out what can I afford? How can this be profitable to me as well as affordable to others? CloudMax, let's see. CloudMax from $100.

Wow, you started a hundred bucks? That's from Max. Oh, that's, you're looking at directly the subscription from the AI provider. Yeah, like the individual pricing. Yeah, I'm just looking at this. API pricing, I'm sure is way more complicated. If you're looking at integrating AI into an app, look at OpenRouter. OpenRouter, oh, I've heard of OpenRouter. Yeah, OpenRouter.com has all of these models.

And so you pay based on usage and the usage pricing is the same as if you were using the API directly from the companies. But what's great is sometimes you can get faster service because they negotiate with other providers and such. But you can also very easily switch different AI models completely without having to go and change API keys and sign up for somewhere else and add all of your building. You can just switch which model you're using right with your OpenRouter calls.

It's fantastic for you working with AI. A million free BYO key request. Okay, so when you use this platform, you're generating keys on all the other APIs and then you're just sticking your keys in here and then you're calling this and it calls them for you. Not quite, their BYOK is a special promotion right now for bring your own key.

The default way that it works is they give you one API key and you send your requests to them and each of your requests include what model that you want to use like OpenAI slash GPT-5 if you want to use GPT-5. And then it responds back in a same format for all of their models respond back in the same format. They accept the same input format.

So it's really great for, this is what a lot of the multi LLM chat platforms like Magi or T3 chat and other things like that that make it so easy to be able to switch between different LLMs so you can see which one really works the best. And like, that's what I do with pod chapters where I've tested a bunch of the chapter placement and suggestion on different models and found that this one works really good.

This one works a little bit better and this one seems to work the best and they tend to line up with the cost too. So in pod chapters, I have a good, better, best selection where most of the time people can be served just great with the good option, but they can bump it up higher. That does cost them more credits but it might have the possibility of producing better results. Interesting. This is a, yeah, I don't know what.

You sound exasperated, Dave. No, no, that's, I just finished, I just finished reading the Paul King's North book against the machine. And I'm so just down on where everything is going. I'm one step away from depressed. You're depressed. You need some pharmaceuticals, man. I'm one step away from just like depression about the state of all this. What's the depressing point about it?

It's, I mean, I was reading this, the most recent thing, this most recent, like not defense, but like the most recent thread going through all of the AI talk is stemming a lot from, I think there was an article written about it. And then Jeff Bezos also had this talk in Italy that people are referencing all the time. And it goes something like this. The AI boom, so the narrative has changed completely. So it's like, now it's not that there's no AI boom bubble. I'm sorry, there's no AI bubble.

It's now, yes, there is an AI bubble and it's going to pop, but it's not an economic bubble. It's an industrial bubble. So the new way that it's being explained is, and you will hear this if you haven't already, is remember the railroad bubble of the 1870s. Oh, I remember it well. I remember me and Tina were hanging out. Yes, just yesterday, yes. And then remember, and how, yes, it was a bubble and yes, it blew up and caused economic harm.

But after it was over, we were left with all these rail lines and that's great. And so later these rail lines got picked up and used and this kind of, we were left with usable infrastructure after the fact. But we'll be left with lots of data centers to mine Bitcoin with. I'm totally okay with that. And then the next example is that it was the same, now they're rewriting history that it was the .com, same with the .com

boom, the same with the .com bubble, that yeah, it was a bubble and yes, it hurt us economically. But at the end of it, we were left with all this dark fiber. Yeah, that's true. And that's great, and that's great. And now people are picking up this dark fiber and lighting it up. And now look at all the benefit. So this economic argument goes something like this.

Don't worry about the trillions of dollars of economic waste, of setting trillions of dollars on fire, because at the end of it, we'll get a few billion of usable infrastructure. I mean, that is the broken window fallacy taken to the largest extreme possible. And I was reading an article this morning that said that the amount of money being spent on AI infrastructure right now is equal to, on an annual basis, is equal to the GDP of Singapore.

And the amount of revenue coming in is equal to the GDP of Somalia. And do the delta between those two countries. And let's see. Yeah, that's a problem. Yeah, that's a real problem. I mean, there's other reasons that I'm semi -depressed. I'm not depressed about pod chapters. I love your product, Daniel. I wanna be clear. It's cool. I'm just like, I love the chapters.

I'm just like, AI, I'm so afraid that this AI thing is going to be, I'm afraid that it's going to be a collapse of monumental proportion. Well, there are two basic camps of AI usage. There's analysis and there's creation. We can put quotation marks around that, really big quotation marks around that. Where like what I'm doing with AI is analysis.

And that's what I love so much because there are certain things I've wanted to do for years with my software products that I couldn't do because it meant trying to build my own machine learning algorithms and all of this stuff. Now, AI can make that so much better where I just tell it, this is the input. Make sure you give me this structured output back. And yes, it gives me JSON back. I tell it, speak to me in JSON, baby. And it does. And that is great.

I think that will continue and it opens up all new kinds of possibilities for development. What I don't like is the creation aspect. And I think that's what you're talking about. The implosion, the bubble is people creating content, creating slop with AI. That, yes, I'd love to see that bubble burst. That's the only product. That's the only product that people actually want. Yeah, everything's chatbots.

You know, like the most recent episode of Pod News, the guy that was from the video hosting company, he's like, Sam's like, what do you, what'd you put, how are you using AI? And he's like, well, we made a chatbot that you can ask it about your stats. You know, hey, which episode got the most hit, you know, got the most views or whatever. Like, why do you need a chatbot for that? It's like every hosting company shows you that data. You don't need a chatbot for that.

This is the amount, like at least three times this week, I have asked, I have asked, and not on purpose, because now these search results, you know, they just give you the AI summary, but I've asked three different questions and it's been blatantly wrong in all three. What kind of questions? And I had to go- What kind of questions? Well, the one that's the most recent, the one from yesterday was, what's the, I'm building a truck in my backyard. Oh, okay. No, I am.

I'm building a truck in my backyard, where do I start? That wasn't the question, but that's just a statement of fact I am building a truck in my backyard. So I bought a 76 Ford F-250 four-wheel drive frame a couple of months ago. Wow. And then I bought a, I sold my 65. So I sold the 65 and I'm using the money that I got from the 65 to fund the building of this new truck. And so I bought the 76 four-wheel drive frame with a drive train and everything.

So then I bought a 72 truck that I'm going to take the body off of and do a body swap onto that 76. So in the end of it, it's going to be a 76 factory four-wheel drive. So I'm building this. This has been, this is an ongoing project. So I'm building this. And so what I needed to know was, is the engine that's in the four by four frame, is it a 390 or a 360? And so the Ford three, the Ford FE engine came in multiple displacements from 352 all the way up to a 428.

And the 360 and the 390 were the two most popular ones. Now the 390 was an option. And the only way to tell the difference, because you can't tell from casting numbers, you can't tell from any sort of external indicator. The only way to tell the difference between a 360 and a 390 is by the stroke. So you have to put a dowel rod down into the cylinder, rotate the crank to where the piston is all the way at the bottom of its travel. This is great. Mark the, yeah, yeah.

Mark the dowel rod, then turn the crank to where it's all the way at the top of its travel, then do another mark and then measure. Mark the dowel rod, Mr. Cawson. So a 360 has a three and a half inch stroke and a 390 has a 3.78 inch stroke. And I knew that they were different. I just didn't remember which were the two numbers. This is a pretty esoteric question, though, that you, I mean, this is, this is. But for Ford guys, it's common. It's very, everybody knows this.

Everybody, you know, you just may not have the numbers at the top of your head, but you know that the only, because the cylinder diameters are the same. Everything's the same, it's just got a different crank. So it has a different stroke length. And that gives you the extra 30 CCs of displacement. So when you, so I just, I'm like, okay, Ford 360, 390 stroke length difference. I stuck that into Google.

And I'm gonna, I'm looking, I'm expecting to go and like, you know, hit a Ford forum, click through, and somebody has the information there. Well, I get an AI summary at the top that says, the Ford 360 and 390 engines share the same stroke length. And I'm like, no, they don't. And it gives references there to articles. And you click on those articles and they both don't say that. They both say, they give you the correct information if you click through to something a human actually wrote.

But if you read the summary, it just, it just lies. And I'm like, we're paying billions and billions of dollars for this thing. And it is worse than the thing we had before. This is, it's hard not to be- Skeptical? I'm saying depressed, honestly. It's hard not to be depressed about the amount of, the amount of like energy that's being put into pumping this stuff into every single aspect of our life. And it's not, whether the accuracy of it is almost like, okay, here's my sense, all right.

We've gotten to a culture now, I'm sorry, I've gone into full blown rant mode. Yeah, you, yeah, it's okay though. Let it all out, let it all out. Just let it come out, it's fine. We're here for you. It's gonna be okay. Part of this is my simmering back pain here. But like, I have to channel this into the microphone.

But the, so the problem that we've, that we are encountering across the software industry in general is that everybody, everyone has adopted, one of the side effects, one of the many negative side effects of internet delivery has been that nobody cares about getting their software right before they ship it. So you say, okay, we're gonna get it close. You're talking about me? I'm not, I'm leaving you off the table for now. I fit the category. No, I'm not talking about mistakes.

I'm talking about, you know it's broke and you ship it anyway. You know, that's what I'm talking about. Like bugs are always a thing and they've always existed. That's just software. Software has bugs and you gotta, and sometimes you have to ship a fix or a patch. That's always been the case and that's not a problem.

The mindset has shifted now to where instead of shipping a product that you think doesn't have any bugs and finding out later that it does and having to fix it, now you say, oh, well, we know, we have quote known issues. Yeah, exactly. You know that this thing is broken and you ship it anyway and you're like, because you need to hit a ship date. And so then you say, well, we'll just fix it later. We'll ship a patch later because it's so easy.

You know, all we gotta do is just push this code and everybody just refreshes their browser and it's great. And so that mindset has leaked into, I think that has leaked into AI. I think the whole mindset of AI is we know that it's broken. We know that it gives you false information a large percentage of the time. Now, we don't know what that percentage is. It could be 15% or it could be 40%. We don't know.

And it's probably always changing because every time these models are retrained, they get new things right and old things wrong. And so there is a widespread knowledge. Everyone understands that this stuff is giving bad information a large percentage of the time. But it's like, well, we just don't care. We'll just fix it later somehow, I think, maybe, perhaps. And all we need is just a few more billion dollars. Now, I think it's a trillion is the latest I've heard. Yeah, a few more trillion.

Yeah. I didn't, this- I'm just worried that, I'm worried that everybody's building things, and this will be for you, Dan, but also for myself, that people are building things that rely on AI credits. And one day someone's going to say, okay, it works, but now you really got to pay the cost. And it's going to be significantly higher than what we're paying now. Yeah, I've thought about that and have been concerned as well.

But I think that as the models are developing more, the possibility to run them on your own hardware is also developing more. So even if the cost goes up to using an API from a place like OpenRouter or something, I might be able to lease my own server with my own GPU in it that could run the model for me. And then I have that own cost, but then I have to manage things like queuing the requests and handling simultaneous things. But I think it's possible.

Can you set OpenRouter to redirect to something that you host yourself? No, but it does use different providers based on whoever is providing the service the fastest. So like Gemini, for example, it's not going to only use Google as the provider, but there might be some other server farm out there. Maybe it's Adam's server, Linode server is helping to process the request, but it's using whatever provides the fastest responses.

Okay, so you're telling it, you can put it into a mode that says, I want you to use just whatever is currently the quickest, not necessarily the cheapest. Well, it will most available. It's for the model that you want to use. So there are lots of providers for that model. And if you'd look over at OpenRouter.com then, or I'm sorry, .ai and look at their models page, you'll see a bunch of models that they offer. They offer hundreds of models.

And for any one of those models, when you click on it, you can also see the number of providers. Many of these models have multiple providers and they come in at different speeds. So what OpenRouter does is it routes your request for that model to whichever model is performing the fastest. They do have an auto model that will route your request to a model that they think will serve your need the best, but that also comes at unpredictable costs.

It might go to GPT 4.0, or it might go to a nano model or something else. Yeah, right. Well, is there a, so you mentioned the problem and I've seen this before too, where AI creates like way too many chapters. Just a chat, like a chapter every three minutes or something like that. Oh, that happens a lot, yeah. Yeah, I mean, how are you controlling that? That's where my secret sauce comes in, where I have. No, it's okay, you can't use proprietary information.

Really, everything you're doing with an AI system all comes down to the prompt and what information you're doing with it. And that's the thing that when I started building this, I practiced over and over and over just running the same file through the prompts, trying to get it to specific results. And then I would test on other files too, trying to get it to that point. And I think I've gotten it there.

And so the systems that produce a lot of chapters could be using the exact same LLMs I'm using, but their prompt is different because when you work with an AI, simply changing a single word in your prompt could give you potentially very different results. Even running the same prompt multiple times can give you different results. And some people don't realize that with the AIs, they think that the AI gives you an absolute answer and everyone gets that same answer. And that's just not the case.

Yeah, because in traditional software, we're used to going into a configuration file or something like that and saying, okay, here's the parameters and you have a discrete value that is going into this configuration file. And for that discrete value, you get a predictable output.

And so you say, if this configuration variable is X, then I know that I'm going to get an output that looks like Y. But with LLMs, you have to, what you're saying with the prompts is you have to say, you really don't know what you're gonna get ever until you test it over and over again. You have to say things like, LLM, you are a chatter creator. I'm sorry, can I just interrupt? Yeah, sure. You're not gonna believe this. The recording never started. Oh, crap. Is somebody recording the stream?

Tell me somebody's recording the stream. Dave, you have half of it. You know Cotton Gin's got it. Cotton Gin, are you recording the stream? Please tell me someone's recording the stream. Oh, goodness. Oh, goodness. I mean, I've got part of it. Oh, this is horrible. When is the last time this happened with you? Yeah, Cotton Gin's got it. Oh, okay, Cotton Gin. I'm just gonna, so I'm not even gonna start my, well, I'll start my backup just in case. Thank you, Cotton Gin. Thank you. I'm sorry.

Dave, back to where you were. Woo, that was a scary one right there. No, what I was saying is that you have to, you're basically, you no longer have discrete inputs and discrete outputs. You have suggestions of what outputs may be based on some vague idea of what the input may be. So you have to, like you were saying, you have to go through and say, model, you are a chapter creator master for podcasts. You always are concise. You have to talk to this thing like it's a two-year-old.

Or the way I like to look at it is, you have to talk to it like it's overseas tech support for your ISP. Yes, yeah, exactly. You're not trying to create as many chapters as you can per minute. You're trying to be instead very thoughtful about how many chapters you create because you don't want to waste people's time. Like you have to actually talk and you don't know what the output is going to be. It's again, just sort of like, what? What are we doing?

No, some of the models do have something, it's called temperature, where you can change how much variance that it might give you in a result. If you, I think it's, I never play with the temperature, but I think it's if you put it down to zero, it will, for the same prompt, it will always give you the same result for that prompt every time. Whereas if you have a higher temperature, then it might give you something different for the exact same prompt.

Okay, yeah, see that's, and I think that's where, I think that's where all of this becomes so difficult is, and I mean, bless you for figuring out how to create these things because like. Yeah, really. I think it may just be a personality thing because I can't, I find interacting with models hard to tolerate. Oh yeah, I have that too. Okay. I'll tell you a funny story here briefly. One of the first times I tried using AI to do something in my code base.

So Podgagement, I built Podgagement completely on my own. There was some auto completion for lines of code, but I wasn't doing any kind of vibe coding or prompting or anything like that. But I did want to try and improve a particular feature. And so I started trying to use the AI to improve a feature. And it was a gauge that I display in the dashboard that looks kind of like a speedometer. It shows the global average rating for a podcast.

And I was trying to redesign the gauge because I didn't like the way it looked with the system I was using. So the AI gave me a good looking gauge, but the needle kept going the wrong direction. Like 2.5 is halfway between one and five. And so it should be straight up. But for some reason that would be pointing straight down. But then 4.5 would be where it's supposed to be. And 1.5 would be pointing down below the thing.

So I was fighting with it, felt like I was talking with overseas tech support over and over and over trying to get it to do it right and sending it screenshots and all of this stuff. And then I just decided I need to just look at the code and figure this out myself. And I found the problem was there was a plus sign where there should have been a minus sign. Ugh. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's classic, classic. That's, yeah.

I'm just, I think that a product like PodChapters is, and honestly, the way that AI is being used in podcasting, just if I can be, you know, like positive for a minute, I think that these, what podcasting has done in general and PodChapters is a great example is probably the best case scenario for this stuff. Like it's a great fit. I'll take that. I really can't, yeah.

I can't find any other place in my life where this stuff fits, but for the creation of thing where you have like what you've done where you say, okay, I'm gonna make a transcript and I'm gonna take this transcript and I'm gonna feed, you know, and this transcript is naturally a language corpus and I'm gonna feed that body into the LLM and have it do some things to it. To me, that is like the best case scenario for where AI is useful.

Exactly. You know, and I think because you're operating right in its sweet spot, but you know, other parts of our lives, I think people are trying to jam it in and it's not really gonna fit, but I would say like with PodChapters, I mean, you're giving these other formats besides just the 2.0. So you're giving, I think, PodLove, right? Yeah. As well, yeah. Those kinds of things.

It's like, how are you, so if somebody is hosting at something like, you know, Buzzsprout, RSS.com or Blueberry or whatever, if they take, like, how do they get those things that they generate on PodChapters into their feed? It depends on the platform, of course. And that's one of the things that I'm trying to document some of these behaviors for canipodcast.com.

You've probably seen the site caniuse.com, which is for browsers that shows you like, these are the CSS things that work in these browsers as of these versions. I'm trying to build that for podcasting too, so you can see exactly which podcast apps support what features and how they support it. Like, okay, if they support the description for the show notes, can you use paragraph tags in the description? Can you use headings, bold, italics, hyperlinks? Does that work in the description?

Stuff like that. So I'm doing the same thing for hosting providers and publishing tools to see what do they support as well. Do they publish to this tag or do they support this feature? How do they support it? Do they handle the different title tags the same way? Like, Buzzsprout, right now, at least, doesn't handle them the most optimized way, I'll say.

So some of these providers, like Buzzsprout, for example, if you upload an MP3 that has the chapters embedded into it, so legacy chapters, Buzzsprout will use the chapters that are in the MP3 to then populate their copy of Podcasting 2.0 and Podlove Simple Chapters. So they pull that from the file. A similar thing with rss.com.

Captivate also can pull the chapters from the MP3, but they don't pull, currently, at least, they don't pull images and hyperlinks for those chapters, so you have to go back in and re-add those. Or you look at, like, if you're using PowerPress, I still use PowerPress to generate my own feed for the Audacity podcast. And I've made an add-on plugin for PowerPress that does some more stuff that I want it to do that are specific to my workflow.

And inside of PowerPress, since I'm actually still hosting my media files on Libsyn, but I don't use Libsyn to create the RSS feed, I use PowerPress to create the RSS feed. So in PowerPress, there is a text field where you can drop in a URL for chapters, and that's where I now use PodChapters to host that. I was previously uploading my chapters to my own CDN, as well as my transcript, to my own CDN, and trying to manage that hosting was another headache. But so now I use my own product for that.

I just paste that URL in. And yeah, it's unfortunate that these different providers handle it differently, and that's something that I'm hoping that as PodChapters gets more adoption and more people use it and have certain questions, I can bring that to these hosting providers to say, hey, I've got a customer using PodChapters, and when they upload their file to you, you're breaking the chapters, and that's creating more work for my customer. It's making them not like you very much.

How about we work together and figure out a way that you can improve how you're handling the chapters? I know at least one hosting company is in the middle of building an API, and it would be nice to see hosting companies develop APIs where you could talk directly. For external functionality, that's a great idea.

Yeah, that would be really nice to see, because if you could get an API key just with your account at your hosting provider and then plug it into your own different software tools like PodChapters, and I could think of 100 use cases right now where that would be pretty awesome, not just chapters, but value for value, all kinds of things, where you could just do things after the fact on your own system.

That would let you do pretty complex workflows, like if this, then that type stuff, even where you don't have like no code type things. That's a great idea. I mean, it's a lot of extra work for the hosting companies, but man, think of all, that would actually be cool, all the extra stuff that could be put on the outside. Yeah, and all you'd have to really do is just wrap it in one of those like warnings that says, hey, you could really break your feed, you know, but use it at your own risk.

But it would be really sweet to be able to do that. Because I think, I mean, like even in your case, I guess you're uploading your Audacity to Podcast audio to Ellipse and through their UI? Yeah, see, I mean, if they had an API, you could just, you know, pop it up there. They do actually have some kind of uploading API because Auphonic, the audio processing system, you can publish from Auphonic to certain hosting providers.

So whatever audio you get then from Auphonic then gets uploaded to the other hosting provider. And I'm going to work on integrating some of that stuff for some of the platforms that support that so that people don't have to even download the file from PodChapters.

I'd love to see more podcasting focused tools do that, is integrate with any of the APIs that are out there so that the user doesn't have to manage files and download something that they already uploaded and now they've got two copies of the same file, which one was the latest one, but they could just publish from one system to the other. Now, do I have to, if I'm going to use PodChapters to generate something for my episode, do I have to upload the audio to you? Yeah, the audio file.

Okay, because if you could monitor the RSS feed and have it like publish, if I could publish to my hosting company, have it appear in the feed, and then you watch that feed and then generate stuff based on my wishes for my latest episode, then I could just, after the fact, go pull it off your site and give it to the hosting provider. That'd be pretty cool. Yeah, I might build something like that separate in the future. There is already a service that does something kind of like that, Cast Magic.

Now, they don't do anything in your file or in the RSS feed or any of that, but if you wanted social posts generated from your episode, it can do that, but this is all after you publish. I'm a big fan of getting this stuff together before you publish or, for Adam's sake, very quickly after you publish.

But there are plenty of tools, yes, that can monitor your feed and then generate a transcript or download the file and then suggest things on top of that, like here are some social posts you could use to promote this episode now that it's already published. So how are you, I'm sorry, go ahead.

No, I was just gonna say, I think that'd be another area where the API would be helpful for my hosting provider because I think most hosting providers have a thing where you can upload, it's sort of like stage an episode for release and then publish it later. So you're sort of assembling it, getting ready to go, but it's not in the feed yet. That would be a great little way to integrate and say, oh, there's a sort of a staged audio here.

I can process that and then you can go back and do the full publishing later. Yeah, how are you marketing this? How do you expect to get it deep penetration? Well, so far it is reaching out to my own audience because the Audacity podcast is a podcast about podcasting. So my audience is also my ideal customer. So I did an episode all about why you should use chapters and how to use chapters.

And it flowed very nicely to have native advertising inside of that episode where I could promote pod chapters that way. I have a couple of email lists for everyone who's ever signed up for the Audacity podcast email incentives and little promotions that I've run, as well as podgagement customers, I've promoted it to them. And then just getting the word out there, showing it off to other podcasters, trying to promote it very organically. I do not do advertising.

I might look into that in the future, but right now it's just a cashflow thing. So I'm just trying to grow it organically, making a product that, here's my perspective on things, whether it's a podcast or a product, make it so good that you don't have to advertise it. Yeah, yeah, yes, that is nice. I have to say, I've always been impressed by your entrepreneurial spirit. Thank you. You're always coming up with new, how many different things do you have running now in your life?

The way I put it is I have my hands in many fires. Yeah, tell me how many fires. Tell me about the fires. I have actual SaaS products too, and I'm working on a third one that is actually not podcasting related at all, but I'm partnering with someone else working on a third SaaS. So two SaaS's, I have a WordPress plugin, my podcast about podcasting. I'm a co-host on the future of podcasting with Dave Jackson. I do the consulting, I do promotions here and there for affiliate things.

And he's a dad in his spare time. And homeschooling nonetheless. Oh, goodness gracious, wow, wow. And single too, ladies. The podcasting 2.0 dating services is open and ready for your business. We got hot guys, they develop while you wait. Well, let's hear some hot namespace talk. Oh, okay, all right, easy does it now, easy. The consulting side of podcasting has, what is the health of that look like now? I feel like that kind of fell off a cliff.

Not maybe for you and people who have been around a very long time and are established, but for a while there, like from 2018 to 2022 or so, it was like every, you could throw a rock and hit a podcast consultant. And now I feel like that is kind of going away. Yeah, and it's funny that you made an unintentional pun, fell off the cliff, because one of the first major podcast consultants was Cliff Ravenscraft. He actually lives not far from me. We've been long time friends.

Yeah, and I think that now it's not so much only a few people who really knows how it works, or we don't have to as an, I almost said the naughty word that Adam hates, as a world that podcasts, I'm so hard trying to say not industry, but as a group of people who work in the podcasting space, they don't have to know as much now to be successful as in the early days. Like before it was all this stuff, like you had to know how to work with a mixer.

How do you use an instrument, a thing that's made for musical instruments and live sound? How do you use that for podcasting? And how do you do a mix minus? Now we don't even have to worry about mix minus. You just plug in and play things and it works. And so the need for the super expertise, I think has diminished, as well as there are a lot of people who have either by luck or by hard work have had success and they've been able to serve certain companies.

And it's not like there are only a handful of consultants now that the entire world is looking to these handful of consultants and the, what's that cult group? Not the Gemini, the Illuminati of podcasting doesn't exist anymore. While there are the people who have stayed in the industry and are very familiar with it, I think even just a lot of companies don't even think necessarily of hiring a consultant because it's so many people know enough to get by. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense.

It almost feels like, you remember like from 2000, maybe 2002 to 2006, everybody was a real estate agent. Yeah, that turned out real well. Yeah, you felt like your hairdresser was a real estate agent. They were flipping houses on the side. It's like everybody had a real estate license that you ran into on the street. And it felt like for a brief period of time, for a few years, everybody was a podcast agent or consultant or something like that.

And you really just don't see any of that anymore, I don't think, or at least not to that degree after the great podcast collapse of 2022 or whatever that was. Has it been that long now? I guess it's been 22, 23. And even that collapse is rather misreported because I've tracked the data, podcastindustryinsights.com is my other site that has some of this data that I've been tracking from Apple for a while.

And yes, there was a kind of collapse, but that's because the fire hose of podcast pollution from Anchor was cut off. And so it looked like a collapse of new podcasts when really it was just the junk podcasts weren't being put out into the directories anymore. So it looked like, but if you were to remove Anchor from the equation, everything looks like it's still been fairly consistent. Well, yeah, I think you're talking about raw numbers.

I was more concerned, I was more referencing like this, the economics of it, the big deals and all that. Oh, right, yeah, the Apple Podcasts update. Right, yeah, January of 23 is when Spotify started laying people off. Yes, Nathan would know. Yes, he would be keenly aware of that date. It's burned into his brain. Speaking of Apple, have we seen any movement on their possible chapter? Well, you saw the leak from the- Integration, yeah.

Yeah, where if they put something in the documentation like that, that means they're gonna support it. And I think what probably happened is someone accidentally pressed publish. So that's unacceptable, I tell you. They've been fired, it's not a problem.

Exactly. Now, here's something that I would love to bring up with you guys is to actually talk about super chapters because what a chapter fundamentally is and does has not changed, even though the way we publish them is so much better with Podcasting 2.0 and the way they're published does present other options for other things you can do with chapters. Still, they are functionally the same, a title, an image, a link. How about we make them bigger, make them better, make them do more?

I think the appetite, this is my hot take. I think the appetite for that would probably be bigger if and when Apple does actually support it. If that happens, I think you would see a more desire to start working on that spec again. Because for the longest time we've heard that, oh, why are these 2.0 people doing chapters? Because it's like, we've already got chapters. We got chapters in the MP3 file, but we don't need a whole new chapter spec, blah, blah, blah.

And to be fair to the Germans, the Podlove guys got the same thing for years. They got the same type of verbal dismissal of, well, why are you bothering with that? We've got MP3 chapters in the ID3 tags. We don't need all that. We don't need some new spec and that kind of thing. And the benefits that we've been talking about for so long is that the chapters, you don't put the show notes in the MP3 file. You don't put the, you know, your album. Some people do, believe me.

Some people definitely do. I've seen it. Sane people do not put the show notes in their MP3 file. Like we have all these external repositories for where this structured data goes so that it doesn't have to live in the audio so that you don't have to re-upload your audio every time you want to change something, which is silly. So they, you know, the chapters just fits that same, it fits more, the cloud chapters fits more along with the model of how the feed already looks.

And I'm, again, mad respect to the Podlove guys people, but I feel my personal preference, and maybe I'm biased, I don't know. A personal sort of idea is that the 2.0 chapters fits the feed better than just listing out the timestamps in the feed itself. I don't, I freely admit that I'm not sure that I could explain why that feels that way to me right now, but it feels like it fits more of a sort of a single entity.

So you say like, okay, album art, here's an image that represents this episode or this feed, and here's a link to where that image is. Right. And then you say, okay, here's a set of, here's chapters for this episode, and here's a link to where those are. Yeah, it's a separation of concerns. Yes, separation of concern, thank you. And so like, that is what, that's what the whole idea has been from the beginning.

So I think that if we can sort of get, like that's the, what I'm trying to describe is I think maybe Daniel, that that's the hurdle to overcome. The hurdle there is to get every, is to get more people to think this way where the idea is, okay, we have this thing called chapters and it lives at this location and stop thinking about it as something that is embedded in the media file itself.

And if we can make that sort of mental switch, then I think now, then you have like a lot of people that are on the team that are ready to push forward with adding more stuff to that spec. Yeah, especially when you start to consider things like the technological hurdles of supporting even the legacy thing.

Like here's something interesting is that Buzzsprout, although you can add an image to a podcasting 2.0 chapter on Buzzsprout, they at least currently do not save that image into the MP3 file that they host. So the apps that support the legacy chapters aren't getting any chapter images, but only the podcasting 2.0 apps are getting the chapter images.

But even when you think about just chapter images, if you have a podcast that has just five images in it, depending on how those images are saved, you could be significantly bloating the size of the MP3 file to embed those images in the file. So it makes total sense for people to also keep that in mind that do you really need to be bloating your MP3 file by embedding all of these high resolution images in it?

They would be so much better inside of the external file where then the apps that support it can load those images. And then what do you do when somebody like, what's gonna happen to the integrity of your file also? Like you load up an MP3 with all these different, you know, like images and that kind of stuff and these binary objects, and then you ship that off to Soundstack to do dynamic ad insertion, and it comes back into a CDN. Is that, has that file been molested in any way?

You have no idea. I mean, you don't know what's gonna happen to that file at that point. Yeah, well, thankfully the MP3 chapter information all goes in just a specific section of at least the MP3 file in the headers, but that does start to mess with certain things. Like if you're dealing with streaming, all of that header information has to be downloaded before the audio can even start streaming. Right, right, yeah.

Yeah, I think if we, I think the thing you've been calling super chapters for a long time of just beginning to expand the capabilities of the chapters file in general, I think, yeah, I think that is a good idea, but I think we'll probably have, we'll probably be in a better position to do that once we get something like Apple to support it.

Sure, and that is part of the reason why I built PodChapters is because I thought, well, when you were like, oh, here it comes, they're ready, they're good to go, I'm in, I'm in the pocket. Well, and I didn't start building it because of Apple.

I actually had started building it already and then seeing the Apple leak was perfect timing, but I was thinking that, well, when we can start making chapters do more than they do right now, I'd love to make that possible with my own podcast and love to start leveraging that. And so how about I just make a tool that makes it really easy to do that? Yeah, yeah, that's the daily source code strategy. That's exactly right.

We do have to talk about LN versus a keysend for a moment because we got a note from Oscar. Did you get that, Dave? About the API? Yeah, whatever it was, my eyes glazed over. I replied to him, I think he's got what he needs because he was saying that he needed to be able to put LN addresses into the shim, but I corresponded with him and I think he's good. I think it already supports that. Well, you want to explain what's going on?

Well, so there's lots to talk about with V4V and we're going to have to talk about it in depth at some point. So, but right now, so what Oscar was saying was that, hey, we're fully supporting LN address in Fountain, but we need to make sure that the shim, the Podcaster Wallet shim can also have that data as well. How do we retroactively implement that? Well, so podcasterwallet.com just interacts with the podcast index API to insert that stuff in there.

So podcasterwallet.com will help you create a value block and then it just talks to the podcast index API and sets that value in your feed as a, just a big JSON object. And so then it doesn't really care what's the, the podcast index API doesn't really care what's in that object. It just takes whatever you give it and sticks it into the database with that feed. And so that's, so the part, our quote unquote partner APIs for like Fountain and Sphinx and those guys. Sphinx.

Oh, there's a blast from the past. I know, I know. But the partner API that I built for Fountain just allows a feed, allows that value block to be set. It just bypasses podcasterwallet.com and just allows them to set the shim directly. And so he just needs to, he tested it and it works. He's just setting LN addresses in the block now and just encoding them as JSON and they go straight through. So it's not a problem.

The only thing that would need to change would be, I think on our side, I would need to update the UI for podcasterwallet to be more explicitly accepting of LN address. Eric said, how many people are using the shim? You know, I don't, I think it's very few, Eric. I really think, I think there's very few people that are actually logging into podcasterwallet.com and creating a value block. Well, it's all API stuff, right? It's all coming from the APIs, yeah.

So I don't think, honestly, I'm tempted to get rid of the shim altogether. That's, a lot of people would be happy with that. And now we would still keep the partner APIs, you know, for people, because sometimes these people just don't have, well, often they don't have, yeah, I agree, Eric. I wish you could be retired too. I may just turn it off and see what happens.

Because like Fountain, TrueFans, these are gonna, these apps, they need to be able to talk to the podcast index to be able to say, hey, here's a value block for this feed whose hosting company does not support value blocks. So that functionality still remains, but the Podcaster Wallet website probably doesn't even need to exist anymore. Yes, that's right, Nathan. Everyone who connects a wallet with Fountain is technically using the shim, that's correct.

And that's just so that if Fountain or TrueFans or somebody else sets a wallet on that feed, it's so that everyone else gets to see it because it's not in their actual canonical feed. So that's, and we can't, I don't know, I still don't know any other way to do it. You know, I can't think of another way to do it. I will say that I try, our node is so big. This is where you say, how big is it? How big is it? How big is it? It's so big.

I've been trying to hook up an LN address wallet to it, and it's just big, like everything just- No way. Everything's, all the voltage stuff just falls down. It's like, even if you want to run, what's the dashboard program? Well, it doesn't matter. None of them work. Ride the lightning or something? Yeah, none of that works. All of it goes, sorry, can't connect now. It's no good. And what I don't want to do, I have an Albi hub, but I don't want the index's node to be dependent upon my Albi hub.

So I'm just trying to figure out how to get that done, because we'll switch it. I've switched pretty much everybody's split over. Eric PP gave me a really nice list, so I moved all of those over. I've had a 1% on my own Strike wallet for a while. And it's, I mean, it's pretty good. The stuff from Fountain comes through with a link, you know, like the first few words, and then there's a link for the message.

And so that, you know, that link then takes you to the Boostergram, if there's a Boostergram. Strike really sucks because you can't filter it. So you can't say, show me anything over one sat, you know, so you have to scroll through a ton of stuff. But in principle, it's all kind of working, which is nice to see. Yeah, I think there's a lot to talk about with all that.

And again, after finishing this most recent book that I read, I've got even more, a more complex set of conflicting thoughts about this whole thing, you know, about self-sovereignty and how it's so important. But then also, you know, I don't know. I'm not maybe fully ready to talk about it yet. But I'm hoping to get, hopefully we can get Chad F on the show. And because he's been doing a lot of good work. He's just been pounding- Non-stop, non -stop. Non-stop, yeah. He's just going at it.

Yeah, trying everything, every combination of wallet and connect and all this stuff. I mean, it's- It's so valuable, so valuable. I've learned so much just watching him try different configurations of stuff. And I would say the biggest problem where we're at right now is it all kind of works, but Helipad doesn't. You know, that seems to be the big stumbling block. Everybody wants Helipad. Everybody wants to be able to see, you know, the Boostergrams.

The actual payment part seems to work pretty well. Yeah, and it's going to come down to like, you know, there's, you still have this divide. You still have this divide between the podcasters and the listeners, and they have different needs for the way that, for their setups. And so that's, you know, Nostra Wallet Connect would work fine for somebody who is a podcaster.

It's going to be very limiting for somebody who is a listener, because now they have to go, it's going to require them to set up, you know, to set up their own wallet. They can't just hook in Strike or Cash App or anything. And then, but see, my thinking is, I'm just not, I'm not sure that that's such a bad thing anymore. I don't know. I just need some more time to think about it. And hope, and, you know, the, because there's this thing, like, is it this sort of like growth mindset?

This sort of infatuation with growth. And in order to get mass adoption for this technology, we're going to have to do such and such and such and such. Well, I mean, maybe that's not the right way to think about it. Maybe mass adoption is the same thing that is driving AI off the cliff. The forever infatuation and obsession with growth and getting scale and these sorts of things, maybe. That's a very good point. You know, it may be okay that it just works in a small way. That's what I told Tina.

I said, baby, it's okay that it just works in a small way. And she married me anyway. There we are. I've contributed to the show, finally. I was waiting for my moment. There we go. There it is. We need to thank some people, Dave, because I got to get you out. Are you going back to the office? Are you going to the backyard to work on the truck? No, I'm going back to the office. Okay. Let me thank, we got a few Boostergrams during the show.

Martin Lindeskog, he seems to send the same message twice for some reason. 2222. I like friendly competition. I've been thinking of getting Frederick Bjorman's app podcast chapters. Oh, what is this? Are you familiar with this, Daniel? Frederick? Yeah, that's the same one that we were talking about. Oh, we were talking about? Okay. He's also a podcaster from Gutenberg, Sweden. Daniel J. Lewis, look forward to testing pod chapters. Well, absolutely.

1111 from Hey Citizen, testing keys in a legacy app from NewLegacyApps.com. What is that? NewLegacyApps.com. All right. And we got a 10,000 Satoshi boost from Dreb Scott. He says, please tell Daniel J. Lewis that I'm sorry I never got to test this chapters tool. He did reach out to me. I wanted to test, but with three small kids and living my life on the edge of getting things done, I just couldn't find the time. I'm sorry, DJL says, hashtag go podcasting. You're forgiven.

Yes. And I think, do we, I don't see a delimiter this week. Oh yes, I do. Yes, I do see a delimiter. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it should be in there. All right, you're up, Dave. Oh, let's see. We've got, pardon me. I did not have time to print these out, but so I'm going to read. I'm just going to, I'm reading straight through. Go for it. No prep, Oistein Berha, $5. He's coming up right after the show, right? Yes, I believe he is with his mutton meat and music. Let's see. Oh, we got an interesting note.

Let's see. What is that? It was from the, can't find it. All right, maybe it'll show up here in a second. Kevin Bay, $5. I was looking for a note, because I saw your response and I was looking for the note. Cameron Rose, $25. Thank you, Cameron. Appreciate that. Calaroga Shark Media, LLC sent us $5. Nice. It says, been meaning to say thanks. Thought you'd enjoy my college student homework answers. What's a podcast?

The Revolution Redefined looks at how podcasting began and explains how Adam Curry and Dave Weiner used RSS feeds to share audio directly with listeners. What's it called? Revolution Redefined, I think is what he said. All right, I like that. Mark Graham, $1. Thank you, Mark. New Media, that's Martin Linda Skog, $1. Oh, Brendan over at PodPage, I think they changed their name, right? $25. Isn't PodPage changing their name?

It was Podcast Page changed their name so that thankfully it's no longer confused with PodPage. Oh, good, okay. Thank you, Daniel. Andrew Grumet, look at him. Oh, Andrew, hello, Andrew Grumet. It was there in the beginning, no small contributor. $100. Whoa! Paula, shot caller, 20 inch blades, only in Paula. Thank you, brother. Does he have a note? Yeah, he says, I can't say it enough. Thank you guys for the index. Oh, wow. You're welcome, Andrew. Thank you, brother. Joseph Maraca, $5.

Thank you, Joseph. Oh, Oscar Mary, speak of the devil, $200. Paula, shot caller, 20 inch blades, only in Paula. Paula Ballas, nice. Thank you all so much. Basil Phillip, $25. Thank you, Basil. Lauren Ball, $24.20, always. PodVerse, that's Mitch and Creon over there, 50 bucks. Still waiting on PodVerse next gen. Christopher Harbarick is $10. Thank you, Christopher. Mitch Downey's $10. And that's it. What happened to that? Because the use case. What are you talking about?

I'm not sure I understand what you're referring to here. Let me see if I can find this email. Because we got an email newest. Got an email from somebody saying how they had used the API in a really cool way. Anyway, that's like my little fly. Mm-hmm. Oh, oh, wait, that was the, wasn't that the blind, the accessibility people? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, do you remember the details of that note?

It was more like, I think they create, they have a service for apps that have accessibility features. And so they said it was impossible to get, it was just a nice note. I mean, it was basically just thanking us, I think for, this is a few weeks back. Oh, here it is, I got it, I found it. You found it? Okay, good. Yeah, it said, we just discovered your service and love it. We are a small Australian company that develops products for the blind and print disabled.

Our main product is a repurposed mobile phone, which the user talks to and gains access to. Right, that's what it was, yeah. We provide the same, let's see, content on Alexa speakers. We have our own small podcast database, which we find hard to maintain. We want to use your service, don't want to put too much load. Yeah, so they're using that for, using us for that and that's great. Love that. I love it. Love it. Yeah, that's fantastic. Did they send a donation?

No, they forgot that part, didn't they? Nice, nice guys. Enjoy the service while it lasts. Let's see, Anonymous 5170, that's true fan support. Oh, thank you. From Anonymous, got a few of those. Bruce the Ugly Whacking Duck sent 2222 through Podcast Guru, crazy ride on this episode from Hackers to Keysend. Glad you gave us a chance to hear it. It might be a Hackers 2 movie, 73. Yeah, I don't think so, I don't think so. Oh, look at Dave Jackson, 9861. That's your partner in crime, Daniel.

Nice. Nice. Through Castamatic, he says 9861, the Todd Cochran boost. 9861. He died on September 9th and he was 61 years old. 9861, forever now enshrined as the Todd boost. The Todd boost. Rest in peace, brother. Oh, Eric from R Podcasting, 190,000 sats. What? Baller, shot caller, 20 inch blades on the Impala. Whoa, that's a nice boost. Yikes, hi Dave and Adam. I know I've been away for most of the year but I'm slowly catching back up. This might be the first ever apology boost. Not the first.

Because I saw that the GitHub actions to update the fancy podcast index database dashboard analysis had stopped running for almost a year. Ah, yes. GitHub disables scheduled actions if there are no commits for more than 60 days. You know, I did not know that. Oh, really? Oh, that's important information. It's good to know. I fixed that problem and now the dashboard has the latest and greatest analyses of duplicates and quality checks. I'll do a better job of monitoring, I promise.

And go podcasting. Okay, let's go podcasting. Go podcasting! I'm going to throw out a go podcasting for that boost. Apology boosts are the best, aren't they? All right, I just popped this, yes. I just popped this link from Eric over here into the boardroom. Thank you, brother. Appreciate that, man. Oh, Kyron from Mirimodal's podcast. One, one, one, one. Essential Richard from Fountain. He says, we demand change around here. More beers in the boardroom. Okay. There's your change.

No beer in the boardroom allowed, Kyron. No, no, no. Donuts, yes. Beer, no. Yep. And whiskey. And the Delimiter Comma Street Blogger, 12,450 sats through Fountain. He says, howdy, Dave and Adam. Bros, for your female partners, girlfriends, hoes, or wives, I want to recommend a podcast by ladies for ladies entitled Dumpster Fire with Bridget Fatesi. Quote, Dumpster Fire is a satirical show created and hosted by comedian Bridget Fatesi. I think it's Fatasi. Fatasi.

That takes a look at the weekend news, current events, and politics. We make burgers out of your sacred cows. Delicious, end quote. It's in podcastindex.org or www.fatasi.com. Yo, CSB, the maker of www.trading.toys. It's like the third person who's reached out to me about her. Someone connected me with her. Someone from Glenn Beck Show said, I know I'm overstepping social boundaries, but Bridget's a sister in Christ and I want to make sure you people in the hill country knew about each other.

She lives in Georgetown, which is 100 miles away, but okay. And then someone else sent me a note and said you should listen to what Bridget's doing and help her with value for value. So three times, after three times, that means I got to do something about it. So I'll reach out to her. Speaking of hill country, I found out the other day my wife teaches at a Charlotte Mason school, if you know anything about the Charlotte Mason method. Yeah, but there's a name here, not heritage.

Ambleside. Ambleside, yes, Ambleside, right down the road here. That's right, yep. And so my wife started teaching Charlotte Mason educational philosophy, gosh, many, many years ago. Probably 15 years ago. And she used Ambleside online to do that with our kids. And now she teaches at a Charlotte Mason school. And I just found out the other day that the people that created Ambleside online are from Fredericksburg. Yeah, that's right.

I've actually, they, this is one of those, hey, come on, talk to us about podcasting, because some people go to church, they work at Ambleside. So I met with everybody, met with all the leadership. And after that, pretty much crickets, that's how it goes. Yeah, but that's a huge, I mean, that's a huge deal in that world. Well, we're trying to get them to do some podcasting. What always happens is the leadership wants to do the podcast. I'm like, but you need to get the kids podcasting.

You don't understand this is where it needs to go. I'm like, oh, yeah, I don't really think about that. Hey, Daniel J. Lewis, man, thank you so much for being here. Congratulations with the launch of PodChapters. I'll be praying for Apple to add chapters soon, and that it'll fit seamlessly, that they should create an API for all your stuff to just flow in. Thank you. And thank you to everybody who supported us here at podcastindex.org.

Of course, everything goes into the fund to keep the index running. You can go to podcastindex.org down at the bottom. There's a big red donut button. There's a donut button there. A big red, I want that button. Hit the donut button and support us with your Fiat fund coupons. We always accept the boost, of course. We really appreciate that. Brother Dave, I hope you feel better. And you take it easy on the truck in the backyard. Don't be so mad at the AI. Daniel, any parting words? Go podcasting.

There it is, everybody. Thank you very much, boardroom. Cotton Gin, please give me the link to the recording so we can actually post this. We'll see you next week here on Podcasting 2.0. Podcasts are cool. Do you hope you have been listening to Podcasting 2.0? Visit podcastindex.org for more information. Go podcasting! Player A enters the game.