Episode 239: Fuzzing

Podcasting 2.0 for October 24th, 2025, episode 239. We're fuzzing. Hey, everybody, welcome back to the boardroom. This is where it all happens. The magic takes place right here. It is time for podcasting 2.0, everything going on in podcasting. And there's a lot going on, as always. We are, in fact, the only boardroom that does not have an adoption process. I'm Adam Curry here in the heart of the Texas Hill Country, and in Alabama, the man who will not backfill your stats or mine.

Say hello to my friend on the other end, the one, the only, the illustrious Mr. Dave Jones. I read Justin Jackson's adoption process. I do too. Lots of boxes with connectors. Justin, I love you, man, but that's a lot of stuff. It felt a lot like a corporate process. Yeah. I mean, is that how it felt to you? Maybe it'll work. Yeah, it did. It felt like a PowerPoint at an offsite. We have an away this weekend, and Justin's bringing the PowerPoint. Well, there was a lot of talk about it on Power.

I don't know if you've listened to Power podcast weekly review. It was interesting. Sam is very down. I think he's very down on everything. Oh, man, come on. Sam, I'm sorry, brother. Somehow he feels like adoption of everything is key. Well, not everybody's adopting. These things take so much time that's just waiting. And I think no matter where I look at the super secret WhatsApp group or the Slack group or wherever I look, I've been added to all these. It's all still, well, is Apple doing it?

That is the same thing we've been hearing for over 20 years. And if Apple doesn't adopt it, then it might as well be a tree in the forest that fell. And I just fundamentally disagree. And also there's a little bit and it's cultural. I think the Brits and even though James is in Australia and I don't know if he considers himself to be a Brit, well, it's a penal colony. I'll get there. It's like the complaining about the government. And we come from a different culture.

It's like we, the government is always by the people of the people for the people. And there's like, well, no one's funding the PSP to evangelize. It doesn't work that way. It'll never work that way. And in fact, I think there's a gross misunderstanding about what we're doing. We set up the podcast index to allow for non-censorship. It's right there on the tin, as they say. We do not believe that Apple should be the ruler of the universe as to what is in podcasting, what isn't in podcasting.

That's how it's, that's literally the reason why it started because they started de-platforming people during an era of de-platforming. And at the same time, we created a namespace with the pod love chapters because it was there and the value tag, because it was a thought that at the time made a lot of sense. I think it still makes a lot of sense. And people came in and we set up podcastindex.social as a way to, you know, discuss things.

But I need to push back from time to time, like Adam Curry and Dave Jones aren't here to do anything. We're not the government. We're not your daddy. You know, we're not here to do anything. No, we're not. Well, we do this podcast. I would say the main reason is to ensure that people are reminded that the podcast index is a value for value project and it needs funding. And we accept that funding through booster grams and all those little bits and all the, all the 1% splits that helps.

It really helps over time. Certainly we've never had to dip into the node for any cash for the system. And of course we have a big red donate button at the bottom of the page and that's for PayPal. And I mean, lots of people have supported this, continue to support it with monthlies, with ongoing small bits and pieces. Some of the hosting companies come in big once a month. And that literally, I mean, we're, I look at our cash balance and, you know, we're about the same. We kind of roll on.

We did very well in the beginning and now we're just about self-sustaining. You know, it doesn't really go up. It doesn't really go down. It just stays there. And we have enough for a couple of years should all funding stop. But that was really the idea. And somehow when I hear like, well, you know, what, what does Dave Jones determine? I'm like, hold on a second, you know, and well, you know, the, nothing has happened in phase eight since November, 2024. Hold on a sec.

There's been a lot of things that have gotten into the namespace. It's been, I would say by general consensus. And, uh, I, I liked the idea of the podcast standards project. It doesn't really seem to be functioning. I sat in the last meeting, one of the last meetings, I liked it. And, you know, people were talking about things that were important to them, which of course had nothing to do with the namespace. It was all about HLS video, at least the session for the time that I was there.

And, you know, what do you want? I mean, do you, it's like, it's a fail, you know, it's deemed a failure because these tags have gone nowhere. Well, I disagree. I think these tags are very valuable and people can use them for other projects. If anything, the mindset of podcasting development, both on the app and the hosting side is very stuck in a one track mind of this is what we do, transmitter receiver. And I, I fundamentally don't think that's the future of anything really.

I mean, you know, it's, there's, there's ways to expand and look at things. We did this with Godcast. We've created something completely different based on RSS and the index. And we've done something completely different. And just as a quick aside, the pub, because we were essentially accused of being horrible people. I'm exaggerating because we didn't use the publisher feed in Godcaster. I just need to read you from the publisher tag in the namespace.

This element allows a podcast feed to link to its publisher feed parent. This is useful when a parent publishing entity wants to attest ownership over all the podcast feeds it owns. These feeds are not owned by the people putting the feeds together. Stations don't own those podcasts. Those are not the publishers. So it was kind of like, well, you're not eating your own dog food. I'm like, simmer down, Sparky. It's not, it's not, that's not the use. That's not the correct use case for that.

No, we, we, we, and we do, we actually do have a plan to use the publisher feed because we recently, which is not even released yet, have a publisher feature and we're a, and we're the actual publisher, not the station, but the actual publisher. So somebody like Focus on the Family or whoever can get in and, and we can help, we can set a particular set of podcasts to be owned by them. And then we will produce a publisher feed exactly on their behalf. But that's still not, they have it.

That's just a convenience for them. If they want to use that, they, they should be publishing that themselves. Why would we publish using the example of Focus on the Family? They have like, I don't know, 10 or so podcasts out there in the world. Why would Godcaster publish a publisher feed for them? Exactly. That's their, that, that, who are we? Right. They should be doing that on the, with their own system. Exactly. Exactly.

So it, it was just, it was, and I understand, you know, but actually I don't understand what people just want to listen to podcasts. And if you tell them there's a cool feature in a certain app you can use with your podcast feed, it turns out people probably use that app for that very reason. I do this all the time. I say, use a modern podcast app, podcastapps .com for two, well, three reasons.

One, you get the bat signal when we go live and you can listen to our show as we record it live in your podcast app. Hello, mind-blowing legacy apps. Two, when we publish the show within 90 seconds, thanks to the pod ping technology, you will be alerted. So stop waiting around on your legacy apps. And three, you get chapters in chapter art, which are fun and entertaining. And then of course there's the transcript and other things, but that's what I highlight and people use it for that reason.

You know, and do I expect the whole

world to listen to No Agenda on modern podcast apps? No, it's actually, it's quite a lot when you look at the OP3 stats, but a lot of people listen on the website. To me, for baffling reasons, I would say there's almost 15% of people listen to No Agenda, three and a half hour show at noagendashow.net. Now there's 2.0 features that show up there like chapters and transcript and I'm not sure what else. And that flows through nicely, but you know, it's like, what do you want?

What are you expecting? I mean, what is success? To me, the fact that the index exists and anybody can create any crazy idea they have for podcasting is the success. Open source projects are only successful and let's define successful for a change. And with that definition, there's a better word, sticking around long enough to see meaningful impact. So if your open source projects have success in that way, only in so far as they stay around and staying around is 90 % of the success.

That's an excellent point. Because look at the carnage, look at the litter of open source projects that are just scattered everywhere that just don't exist. They're dead. They're dead projects. They won't ever return. And most of that is because of burnout. People don't, most, I'd say like almost all open source projects do not get funding. They are projects that are built out of love and passion for a particular thing. And passion wanes over time.

If you're not getting paid for it, then it's purely a passion project that fades. It does. And so that's why sticking around is so important. Because if you're not there, then the project has no chance of making impact. So my focus has always been first and foremost on just sticking around. I'm with you. I'm with you on that. I mean, look at, look at how many hosting companies have added podcast index to their lineup of places that they publish.

That to me, I look at that and go, yeah, win right there. That's the decentralization we were always looking for. Right. And, and the, the sticking around means, sticking around looks like life. You know, life, people's actual lives are messy. And you go through phases in your life where you have, where things are, where things are busy, things take your attention away, that kind of thing. And so you have to expect that there's ebbs and flows in the activity of an open source project.

And that's, that's fine. That's to be expected. People become, there's a flurry of activity around the images tag and then things settle down and go quiet for a while. Right. And actually, if you look at what James did with the location tag, I think that's how you drive something. He did a great job on that. For sure. And then there's, so there's, there's these bursts of activity.

And then as there's bursts of activity, as recognition begins to build around the necessity or the attractiveness of a certain set of features. And then a lot of people pour their intensity into that for a period of time and get it across the finish line. And then there's a pullback, there's a rest and that's fine because you can't, the quickest way to burn out an open source project is to expect consistent output on an unrealistic basis.

Amen. And you know, in a funny way, the, the analog of government kind of fits here because the podcast index is the true federal government. It's only job is to protect your right, your right to podcast. That's it. And then over time, just like the United States, but this of course is not a United States project. We have all these States and all these States have different things they want and don't want.

And you can see those as hosting companies as app companies and, and, and groups like value for value, the, the music group, there's all these different groups who have pieces they want and pieces they want to use for different reasons. If we really think that all podcast apps are going to have this, all this set of features and all hosting companies are going to have some standardized set of features. I say, dream on. I don't think that's ever going to happen. And maybe it shouldn't.

Well, Buzzsprout, Buzzsprout is a huge, they've, there's, they're a huge supporter of, of, of us financially. They keep us in the black when we had a couple of big drop-offs and they teach every month. And they're also more than just financially supportive. I hung out with Tom Rossi a couple of weeks ago here in Birmingham. He was up here and we had, you know, we had a beer and are you an advisor? Are you an advisor? You need to disclose if you're an advisor.

I have nothing to disclose anywhere because I'm not any of that. But you know, we hung out and talked for a few hours. We did not even mention podcasting. I think maybe we mentioned it once during the whole evening of spending, we talked, we talked about family and school and kids and and Christianity, sports ball. No, we did not talk about sports ball. We just talked about all kinds of stuff. So they're more than just a financial supporter.

They're also a, you know, just a, a, a motivator and a, and a, just a, a people that help just like, just like RSS.com and, and, and, and Todd and them, they, they, they pour more than just money into these things. They also pour themselves into it. But the example of Buzzsprout, I brought that up for a reason because they have not adopted a ton of podcasting 2.0 tags.

They've got a few, you know, they've got, they've got a handful, but they are going by what they're going by a timetable that makes sense to their business. And when, when they go and make their next plan for their next feature build or whatever that is, everything's available to them. The whole, you know, the whole arsenal of next generation podcasting features is available.

You know, now they, I think they have transcripts, they have a pod role, they support the GUID tag, they support chapters, they support a few of these things, but they do not support all 20 something tags that are, that are developed. But every time they do a new cycle, they have the chance to, and if they determine it makes sense for them at that moment, they will pursue it.

And that, and I was thinking about Apple podcast the other day, took them a long time to adopt their first 2.0 tag, which was a transcript tag. It now looks like they're going to probably adopt the chapters tag as well. Well, they, they also support the TXT record, but they, so they support two, it looks, it looks like they're going to support the chapters tag.

And I think the way that my impression, and I, you know, Ted may laugh when he hears me discuss, talk about this, but my impression is that you have to have transcript first because I feel like what they're going to do with chapters is they are going to do it similar to the way they did transcript. They're going to auto-generate chapters for every podcast based on the transcript. But then if you bring your own chapter URL, they're going to support, they're going to let you override it.

That's the same way they did the transcript tag. They're going to generate a transcript, but if you bring your own, they'll use that instead. As long as they have the override automatic. I don't know if they do that for transcripts yet, because you had to go into Apple connect and tell them explicitly. I don't know if that's still the case or not. I think, yeah, I don't know, but I feel like that's what they're going to do here.

So if that's the case, and there's a reason I'm kind of laying it all out like this, if that's the case and they do, and they auto-generate chapters, you know, using whatever tools, then you can sort of reverse engineer and say, okay, they needed transcripts first because they'll base the chapters on the transcript. They need the transcript in order to generate the chapters. So there's your development cycles progressing there.

You have to build this before you can build this before you can build this. And that's just the way all of this works. So that's why when you've come up with a new feature, it can take 10 years to actually get into production. You know, it, it doesn't, I think, so like, like we can do things, I can do things in the index fast because it's just me. And James can do things in his stuff fast because it's just him.

We're, we're single or small teams and we can move quick and make all kinds of changes to our systems. But the bigger they are, these bigger institutions, they just, it just takes time because they have to, they have to develop based on a strategy. And the strategy is just, they take multiple layers in order to come to, you know, something like a stable usable product that can go out to, you know, millions of people potentially. And I still remain that it doesn't all have to be uniform.

Fountain is what Fountain is because Fountain serves a very specific group currently. And they're great at serving that group. And that group uses Fountain. It's like, that's perfect. There's no reason why every single app should have to support Nostr and Bitcoin value for value. And there's no reason for it. In my mind, it's like, that's, that's their USP. And it's fantastic. You know, Podverse started initially as a, as a clipping tool. That was the focus, clipping.

And I think accessibility was big for them as well, which is highly appreciated with our, with our gunky eyed blind mother, brothers and sisters. Yeah, that's right. They really appreciate it. You know, so, and Overcast, which has, let me count them, zero podcasting 2.0 features is adored by its user group. I think mainly for its sound processing, sound processing, yeah. Sound processing and just the, and the UI or UX or whatever it is. Yeah. And it's developer people like him.

And sometimes you, sometimes you use a product just because you want to support the person that you have some sort of parasocial relationship with. And that's fine too. Exactly. And you know, I, the stats are broken and you know, they're the, we produce stats. I produced two stats files. I say produce, they haven't been actually producing for weeks now. So there's, what happened is there, let me, let me just talk about that. Cause that that's, this is going to tie into this whole thing.

Stats were stopped working, I think sometime maybe in September. So these two, these two JSON files that, that I produce have a lot of baseline stats about things in the index.

So some are just the high level, how many shows have published an episode in the last three days, seven days, 10 days, blah, blah, others are other stats that it, that it puts or how many feeds have soundbites, how many soundbites are there, how many chapters, how many feeds have chapters, how many episodes have chapters on and on and on all the, trying to break down a lot of useful information about what's in the index without having to go and query the database.

So the stats broke, James told me, he said, Hey, you know, heads up, these, the stats have not updated in a long, the stats files haven't updated since sometime in September. So I was like, okay, well, um, I went and looked at it. I ran the stats file generation script by hand and it got to the transcripts tag and just stuck. Barfed. It's, it just hung for half an hour. Bimro says breaking stats. You know, you need the little, uh, you need the little, the red alarm lights, flashing lights.

Yes. Breaking stats. Yes, exactly. That's every other, that's every third post on Twitter breaking with the real life. Exactly. Um, so I ran and I'm like, okay, well this is just, it ran for like 30 minutes and I'm finally, I just control C. I'm like, okay, this thing is frozen. Well, it turns out that the explosion of transcripts in the recent months broke stats. Ha! Killed by our own success. That's right. There you go. Proof.

So, and, and it broke, here's how, here, here is the way that it broke. The stats, the transcripts, the, the NF items transcript table has currently about seven and a half million rows in it, which is a lot. That's as many rows as the entire podcasts table. Wow. And the reason is because some episodes produce multiple transcripts, sometimes as many as five. Is that multiple languages or what is that? Possibly and some, and they're multiple formats. So you'll have VTT, SRT, TXT, HTML.

You'll have, you'll have sometimes five different formats in the same episode. So, you know, if you have a million episodes with podcasts and they all produce at least three formats, well then boom, 3 million rows. So there's seven, there's over seven, there's like 7.3 million rows in the transcripts table. And that happened quick. It went, I mean, it went way up really fast.

Cool. And so the way that my SQL database has what I consider to, it has many flaws, but one of the most annoying is it's seeming inability to count accurately and quickly in a table. It's like an LLM. Exactly. Yeah. How many R's are in the word strawberry? So, um, yes, Eric, the transcript table just tracks the number, you know, like what's in the transcript tag as it comes in. Yeah. Uh, the, the URLs to the transcript file. So going, you know, uh, that's what happened is trying.

So the way that the, that that table is structured and, and yeah, it, it has an index on it, Eric, but let me, I'll tell you what the issue is here. The issue is that this is, there's a trade-off between, between like elegance of design and real world needs. The, the, the elegance part of your, of the development cycle is you don't want to duplicate data in multiple tables.

So you have a newsfeeds table in this, you know, I'll meet, let me speak in regular language and not freedom controller language. You have a podcast table, then you have an episodes table, then you have a transcripts table. Okay. I think we all can understand that layout. The podcast, the, the, the podcast table links to the episode table through a column called feed ID.

And so you've got a link back to this, uh, this episode belongs to this podcast, the transcript table links to the episodes table on an episode ID. So now you have this transcript goes with this episode. Well, you can walk back, right? You can walk back from the train. If you want to know what feed that transcript came from, you can walk back up the chain and say, this transcript came from this episode, which came from this podcast. Well, that's great.

If all you're doing is that sort of work, if you want to actually count how many feeds, how many podcasts are using the transcript tag. Oh, you can't walk at all backwards. That would take forever. But exactly. Wow. I'm a sequel developer. And so you, what you could do this, what I was doing before is I was just grabbing every row out of the transcripts table. And then walking it back and finding out what podcast it belonged to. Right. With a join. Yes. With a join.

And then going through and sorting it all out. Well, as soon as it gets over a particular size, then MySQL begins to have to create a temporary table. Because what you're counting is the number of podcasts that use transcripts, not the number of transcripts. Right. Okay. Got it. And so you can easily solve the how many episodes use transcripts by doing what's called a select distinct. So you can say select, select count distinct ID in the transcripts table.

And that will give you on the distinct on the episode ID row. And that will give you how many episodes quickly, it will quickly give you how many episodes use transcripts. You, there's no, as soon as you do a join, you immediately have to create a temporary table on disk and you're toast. Because the count day you're, I mean, it could take you 45 minutes to complete that query. And that is just, it's just too, it's too costly.

And so there's, there's, you have this elegant design where you're not duplicating data across tables, but that elegance of design harms you because now it, you can't actually in the real world get the data out that you want. Can I ask an Adam Curry question? Sure. Can I fix this with money? It's not worth fixing with money. Okay. You could technically, you could technically scale way up and pay ridiculous amounts of money to get an insane piece of horsepower VM that would make this go faster.

But it does, it would, it would eventually drop as well with scale. You just can't, it's not, that's not the right solution. The right solution is to, as a developer, get over yourself and say, it's not, elegance is not the, is not the most important thing here. What's the most important is to get something that's usable. So you get something that works well and fast for all of the use cases that you need it to be.

And what that means is I'm going to have to put another, another column on the transcripts table that's going to hold, that will hold the podcast ID, the feed ID. Now that it, that's clearly a duplication of data. Now I've got the pod, now I've got the podcast ID in two places, which, you know, it doesn't make any, it shouldn't have to be that way, but it is. And I've been trying to find, you don't do changes like this on a production database without planning.

And so I've been, I've been trying every SQL trick I can think of to make, to avoid having to do this. And I can't, it's just not going to work. So now in the last couple of days, I've decided I'm going to have to make this change. I'm going to have to make this schema change on the database. And which is going to be a, it's going to be a three-step process. It's going to be number one, add a column to the transcripts table.

Now remember, the key to all this is the transcript table has seven and a half million rows. So it's not small. Now it's, it's not gargantuan. It's not like the episodes table, which has 170 million rows. But it is, but it's big enough to where it is a problem. If you lock, if you lock the table, because if you lock the table, everything stops. No API requests, no aggregators, everything halts for the duration of that table lock.

Because there's relation, there's foreign key constraints across these tables. And when you lock, when you lock a table that has a foreign key constraint, it locks it all the way up the chain. So there's going to be, you have to do it, do it in three steps. Step one is going to be adding a column using the instant algorithm with my SQL. I've done this before with other tables. It's, I know how to do it, but it does take planning.

Um, you add it with instant algorithm and with no foreign key constraints initially, and then you add a nullable column. And so everything comes in there, null, stop after that test, make sure nothing is broken. Once you do that, uh, you go in and you, I'll write a script that will backfill all the rows in that transcripts table with the appropriate feed IDs.

Then step three, add the foreign key constraint to connect the, uh, to relate the feed ID column on the transcripts table to the podcasts table. Um, so you, you, you do it in that order because you'll have, because if you try to, if you try to, I have not had very much success trying to add it all at once, even though it should technically work. I don't, I've not, I have seen my SQL eight fall back to an in-place locking table change, even when you give it the instant algorithm.

So if you try to do it for a key constraint that it doesn't, that is not simplistic. Um, so anyway, that's, that's what stats are broken because of that. Wow. So that's, that's great as a part of the conversation. As I said, it's broken because of the success of transcripts. This is kind of good news. You know, I don't know if you remember, we talked about it at the time, but there was a, uh, Lex Friedman did an interview with John Carmack and you know, John Carmack, right?

The developer, they created Doom and Quake. Oh yes. Okay. Sure. Yeah. And he, and he said in that, uh, uh, yes, Eric, there is a lot of exceptions to the instant algorithm. Yeah. It's, it's very hit or miss, but, uh, Carmack at the time, um, in that interview, he said that he was a big fan of hard limits on things. So when you're writing, when he writes software, he'll put in some limit.

Like if he thinks that this thing could probably handle, um, a million, whatever's a million transactions, uh, you know, I don't know, we're making up stuff here. Then he would put in a hard limit of like 750,000 in the code, just a number in the code.

And that way, when he hits that number, the key knows that the code's going to break, but he'll, it'll be, it's like a way point to say, okay, I thought that this could do, I thought this particular metric was achievable and we've gotten there and it's, how did it go? Right. Is it broke or did we never even get there because it broke? And I think that that's kind of similar to what's going on here. We have some, we have some metrics that we're hitting that actually are important.

They, they mean, they mean things. Um, they mean that, you know, the, that the index doesn't just exist on its own. That means that there's a person behind it who's having to actually make changes when this stuff gets popular. And we try to, we're probably a pretty good canary in the coal mine because our, I mean, our directory is bigger than Apple's. It's bigger than, I guess it's bigger than everybody's. It's huge. It's huge.

Um, and so we're, you know, when things break and when they break, it means that we have to stop. That's a good time to stop and say, okay, well, is it, is everything working? Okay. Do we need to change things? And that's the mental process I've been going on going through for the last couple of weeks is trying to sort of figure this out. Um, and these are the, this is what I meant earlier by, you can't expect out of an open source project, consistent, like unreasonable levels of output.

Because when you only, you know, when you have a loose affiliation of people that are working on things, um, it takes time. It takes time to, to, to reason through these things and make, and not just willy nilly push to production, you know, you have to figure this stuff out. And once there's, it's not just, it's not just this as well. I mean, we, I'm hoping to have, um, uh, Archie on the show.

I need to reach back out to him, uh, in email, uh, Archie helps, uh, Podverse a lot with their database stuff and infrastructure. And I want to have him on the show to talk about open sourcing the index even more and maybe redesigning our database. Some who's Archie, uh, he's on a podcast index dot social as SUCD. Oh, okay. Yes. Yeah. Um, yeah, it seems like a nice guy and, uh, I want to get him on the show. He's, uh, to, he's been at, he's been asking for a while.

He's like, Hey, can I help you all? You know, I'd be glad to get in and do some infrastructure work and be glad, you know, glad to help. And so, uh, I just want to see if he wants to get on the show and we, it'd be a good opportunity to just talk out how can we make the index be more, uh, managed by the community.

Um, because rather than trying to kind of figure all this stuff out myself in isolation, it would be helpful to talk this out and in the, you know, in the podcasting 2.0 group and get pull requests and that kind of thing for more than just the website. Excellent. Yeah. So I think it's, all of this wraps up into, you know, the broader discussion of just, you know, we're an open source project and James is part of it. Sam's part of it.

We're, we're all in this together and Justin and I, and the PSP and everything. We're all, we're all a part of this and there's just going to be some, um, there's going to be ebbs and flows of activity. And I, I don't, I don't want to try to push it to be more than that because I think if you try to push the, put the pedal to the floor and expect constant output, I think it that people will just get tired and leave and, and, and move on to other things. And I just don't want that to happen.

I'm with you. And I want to give big props to Chad F who continues tirelessly to work on wallet solutions. And he's, I was blown away. He built this Vercel app for V4V music with the Breeze SDK. And I'm really impressed by all of this. And I'm actually quite impressed with the Breeze SDK because they have a Vercel demo. And I created a wallet within three seconds. And in fact, I changed our, um, our splits because people have been saying, Hey, you guys want LN URL, but you're using keysend.

So I changed our splits and it's currently going into a Breeze just on the web, just a Breeze Vercel app, demo app wallet. And it's working fine. It's just, it's, it's working. Just popped it up. Chad, Chad's going to be on the show next week. Good, good. Now, of course, there's no metadata coming through. So I still have 1% going to my helipad and actually I'll have to send whatever comes in so far, a whopping 1 ,342 sats.

Whatever comes in, I'm going to send to Barry's wallet because somehow I made a copy paste mistake when I released the last episode. And it was, uh, I forgot the T at the end of .NET. So he missed out on some Instagrams. So I'll send this to him. But it's amazing how well this works. And even the, and of course I still have to talk to Graham over at Voltage since we can't seem to set up, uh, um, anything on top of our node, any kind, anything that'll do LN URL.

I can't set it up because it just breaks the minute, uh, the minute I activate it due to our humongous girth, I guess, or whatever we may be running on special. I, I, I always had the feeling he's got like five servers running just to serve the podcast index. I don't know. You know, I don't, I don't know how he, it's always a special case. He's always taken very, very, very good care of us. He has, yes. Downtime zero.

As far as I can tell, we never had down except when we had to reboot the node for an update downtime, seven hours, but okay. Yeah. All night. Minor, minor thing, minor thing. Um, but it is, it's beautiful to see because you, you see that, you know, this type of solution, which can easily be baked into any app. Yeah. You don't have your onboarding. You don't have your buy sats and all this stuff, but they're already doing liquid, which is, I don't even know.

I don't even understand liquid very well, but it's not really even a layer two solution at some mystical other thing. Side chain. I thought it was a side chain between two that I thought it was a side chain that, that exchanges used between themselves. Yeah. But it's not like a settlement on chain is I'm not sure what it is, but I'm sure that breeze will be doing any other type of system that comes along. I just have that general feeling. Did you, did you see that arc launched? What's arc?

That was the, that's the competitor to lightning. That's the other layer two. No, I didn't. I didn't. I didn't. What, what, what are their, what are their benefits? What do they have in arc? Let's see. Arc layer two, the big, I think the, the arc protocol, I think the biggest benefit with it was, um, off chain receive. Oh, I mean, I'm sorry. Not off chain, uh, offline receive. Offline receive. Yeah. Oh, very cool. Um, I wonder how it does that.

Yeah. Arc layer arc is layer two protocol for making off chain Bitcoin transactions. Uh, we talked about it at the time and I remember it actually, it made a lot of sense when we went over it. Uh, the arc, see arc protocols built around shared UTXOs while lightning also uses shared UTXOs. Okay. I got it. They're only shared between two channel catapult and arc UTXOs are shared among a large number of users, potentially hundreds of thousands.

Hmm. Oh, um, sounds a bit like a cashew thing in a way, in an odd kind of way. Yeah. I remember when we went over it on the show, it makes like seeing how they did it made a lot of sense. I was actually pretty. Oh, I remember this is where you could eat. You can basically email somebody. I think so. Yeah. I think so. Interesting. See. Yeah. I don't, I'm sorry. I don't remember much about it, but I did see it launched.

I expected it to just be kind of like a, a failed, you know, like an idea that never You mean like, like podcasting 2.0 basically. PSP. You know, one more thing on that. We, as an open source project that just came out, you know, just kind of grew up out of nowhere. You can't argue that we have not been successful. Exactly. I mean, wow. I mean, we have a self-sustaining open source project, self-sustaining by the users and stakeholders. I don't know if that's ever been done.

It, the, the growth, the growth first mindset, just, I don't know. It, it, it kills, it kills momentum. Oh, this is a, this is the philosopher, Dave. You've been, you've been posting stuff about this. The growth, the growth mindset. I guess I did. Yes, you did. Yes, you did. Yeah. I'm reading Wendell Berry's book called Life is a Miracle. An essay on modern superstition. And this is the book that you will be getting as your Christmas present this year. So don't buy it. You ruined it.

I already have your Christmas present picked out, but I'm not going to tell you what it is. Yes. Because I received something. I'm like, oh, I got to send this to Dave. Oh, nice. Thank you, brother. But that, this is, um, he goes off on... By the way, you're the only other person in my life who I give a Christmas gift to. I mean, besides my, my kids and my wife. Oh, that's, I'm like, I'm in a rarefied air. Yes. Yes. It's very rare up here. You just roasted my chestnuts. Bring...

So the, what, one of the things that he mentions in there is, you know, we didn't see the earth for fully for the first time when, uh, when, when astronauts went to space and started taking the pictures of the big blue orb hanging in the blackness, we, we, we saw the earth, artists saw the earth from the first, you know, centuries before, um, through poetry and through, uh, philosophy.

He quotes Dante and we just, we, we just forget that we have a, we have sort of a, um, a physical, a very physicalist mindset. Physicalist? Yeah. You know, like, like, uh, if it's not, if it's not a, um, if it's not material, we don't, it's not, it's not real. Okay. Yeah. And we forget that we've seen... Science is just one part of the human experience. It's not every, it's not all of it.

And we, we make ourselves poorer, you know, spiritually by taking one aspect of human life and putting it over all else, whether that be economics, you know, uh, philosophy, the, you know, the sciences, the hard sciences. We, we need as, as Westerners, we have a, we, we only use one half of our brain really most of the time. Some people use much less, I found. Some people only use one quadrant. That's right. That's right.

Um, you know, but we really have, um, we really have a, a physicalist growth at all costs mindset, uh, the, the capitalist urge and, you know, capitalism is fine. It's just the worst. It's just the best of, it's the best of all the worst systems. Everything else, capitalism is fine. It's just that everything else sucks worse. It doesn't mean that it's actually perfect in any way, shape, form, or fashion.

And the, the one cost that it comes with is just this perpetual never ending growth at all costs mindset. And the, and it elevates the, you know, the, it elevates the materialist, uh, outcome based model above everything else. And I just think that that has been, and we apply it to everything. We apply it to every aspect of our life. It's an urge within us in the West. And we just can't like, it's an infection. And I think that it comes out in these kinds of ways too. Yes. The number must go up.

It can never go down. Number go up. That is just all we care about. And you know what? I mean, sometimes when the number goes up, your database breaks. Precisely. You break shit. I mean, like it's, it's not, it's sometimes it's not, it's not fun to go for the number to go up, but, but I just think that we, sometimes you build something, you some, sometimes you build something just because it's beautiful or just because it's meaningful or just because it's useful.

And if the rest of the world picks it up, great. If they don't, it's still great. It's fine. It's okay. We, we did, we did that. One of the funnest things we've ever done in podcasting 2.0 is going, is going to the Bitcoin National Conference a couple of years ago and doing that live thing and, and all that stuff. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, maybe there was a couple of thousand people that participated like online and that kind of thing. Those are tiny numbers.

I mean, that's, that's just like. But how fun was it? But it was so fun. And everybody got such a kick out of it. And it showed what was possible. And that, that the, the, the showing of what was possible will stick in somebody's mind and some, at some point in the future, fruit will be born from that. In some other way, maybe in some other way, not even connected to podcasting. I don't know. I'm with you. I'm with you on that. Absolutely.

I plan on being here doing this show five years from now and, and whether we got a single new tag at that point or not, I don't care. Well, we've, we've held onto that for, are we in our sixth year already? Is this our fifth or sixth year? We started in 20, we're in the sixth year now. Let me see. Let me see. Our first 2020, uh, August. August, June. August 28th, 2020. So we're, you know, yeah, we're in our sixth year. Wow. Wow. Think about all the stuff that's happened in those six years.

And you know, all these things, it's like, you know, so on Sunday, Dvorak and I celebrate 18 years of no agenda. Wow. I mean, that's almost as long as my first marriage. Okay. And he's been through all three of them. And the third one is still going strong. I'm happy to report. But you know, the first three years and we was all value for value.

Um, it was not a lot and, you know, it took consistency and, well, that's it really a consistency, just consistently being there every single, initially Sunday, then, or yeah, Sunday, then Thursday and Sunday. And this was amidst the rise of Facebook, Twitter. YouTube, uh, all of this was happening right in those first years and none of it slowed us down. It was a 5% per year gain.

It took a while and it took, it just took just being there, just being there, doing it every single time over and over again. And I remember the first time I was in Texas that really, it wasn't until I was in Texas that, uh, it was like, okay, I can barely live off of this. And I had a very expensive second wife. That was, that sucked, but that's a problem. Yeah. That's I sold my plane. I remember, I completely gobbled it up. Um, but it all works.

It all can work, but yeah, it's not like today's everything's free. Number go up. It's all going to be great. I'm an influencer. No, it's just not the way it goes. And so, and luckily I'm seeing this whole video conversation, except for Rob Greenlee. I'm seeing the whole video conversation finally died down. You know, everyone's okay. Boy, that was really scary. Mainly due to Google PR and marketing. They're good at it. Well, they have, let's put it this way.

They have a lot of money and they have complete, they're putting all they're all in on AI all in. By the way, I saw the numbers. The revenue numbers got broken out somewhere for YouTube. I saw $8 billion was the YouTube revenue. On an annual basis. No, really? That tells me that I think we're right. I think they're losing money on it. I don't see the more I think about it, the more I don't see how they can be making money.

Yeah. Now, you know, of course they, they have all these other, other pieces that are highly profitable, but even that I, I predict before we're done with this podcast, we'll see someone else usurp Google for search because they are literally killing their own business model. In so many ways, one, where are you going to stick your ads in, uh, in your AI search results to, if you, if you stop sending people to websites, there'll be no one to buy ads from you. It's just that simple.

It doesn't make any sense. It really doesn't. It really doesn't. And I'm, I'm sure they're sitting around going, what are we going to do it now? Sure. They're $40 billion a year. I'm sure, but still, I think they're sitting around going, what are we going to do? How are we going to, how are we going to manage this? How are we going to make this happen? Yeah, we're, they, from all, from all I can tell, they get off with just basically a slap on the wrist with all the antitrust stuff.

Um, but that's not, but that doesn't matter because, you know, if you, if you're, if your whole product drives up, well then antitrust is the least of your concerns. By the way, Eric PP is just going back to no agenda. There were episodes. We threatened to quit the show for low, low donations. Yes. How about every episode? Because it's value for value for value goes both ways.

If I don't get enough, the value I need, which is honestly not all that much in return for the, and Hey, if people stop supporting the index, guess what? Dave and Adam will probably dig into our own pockets to keep it running, but there won't be much other activity. No, I mean, like I plan on running this thing in for the rest of my life, but, you know, I mean, uh, if people don't use it or support it financially, I mean, we have a lot of, now we have a lot of use.

I mean, um, usage has steadily usage of the index by apps has steadily gone up over the years and it never, that number does not go down. Number go up. Number go up. Well, it is. It is absolutely beautiful resource. It's so beautiful. There've been so many people have tried to do commercial indexes and while they've certainly had success, you know, with 40 employees, 140 employees, like, no, you don't need that. This just needs to be around.

And I'm sure that the biggest fear I have is you, that's the problem. When you're like, as long as I'm around, when you're not around, it's like cut off his thumb, put it on the iPhone app, get the biometrics, take the imprinted into some clay, please quickly, you know, and then we're going to have to figure out how you did it. The fly out to Alabama and be camping out, you know, your body's still going to be there, you know, laying in state like, Hey Dave, how you doing?

We're going to be thinking. I've got a dead man's switch. No, you don't. No, you don't. You don't. Uh, this, the, uh, yeah, the, yeah, the number just keeps going up and I'm, I tried desperately to keep from having to upsize servers and all that stuff. I mean, I've, I just pull out all every trick I've got to try to keep, because I do not want our expenses to go up any more than they already are. Uh, I just, even though traffic has gone up in the last year and a half, probably 30%.

Um, and most of those people don't, they don't ever pay us a dime. No, no, you know, but the bus, bus route pays us every month. Uh, fountain pays us every month. Mitch at podverse pays us every month. They pitch in stuff, you know, periodically, but that's about it. I mean, we, we have monthly, we have a lot of monthly supporters, you know, the $25, the $5, all of that matters. Believe me, $5 is a Linode server. Uh, a little one gig serve. That's a party time party time.

But all the, uh, Brandon at pod page, but most of the people, like we have, we have a person that people would probably know that their entire product is built on the index, paid a paid product. Um, and they don't ever give, they don't ever donate anything. And w which is fine. That's, that's fine. But I'm saying like this, the only time I ever hear from this, from this guy is when he emails me to say, Hey, this, I'm trying to get this podcast and it's broken and I've got a paid customer.

So I'm like doing tech support for this person for their broken stuff. When they moved to us because they were having trouble with Apple's API, they moved over to ours and they, it's a paid service and they, they don't donate a thing. So we're, we're supporting tons of, of apps that, that make money that don't pay us. So like, and that costs money for us and time, you know, and so like, that's, it's not a, some, some days it's not fun to do this.

But you know, you just keep on, you just keep on doing it. Keep on keeping on baby. Keep on keeping on. We give us some of that AI cash, baby. Yeah. Marco gave us 500 a month for years and I will always be appreciative of that. Certainly in the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he knows, he knows that even at any moment I've corresponded with him before. He knows that at any moment if Apple's, if Apple's API goes down, he can switch over to us. Drop in replacement.

Yeah. Drop in replacement and then when they come back up, he can flip back over. That's always the case. Nobody has to pay us in order to use our service. But it does, but it is expensive and it has real world consequences. So we do actually have to have some money.

Speaking of such, if you feel so moved by the value that the podcast index provides to you, your project, your listening pleasure, the app you use, consider supporting us by sending us a booster gram, which you can do from many of the modern podcast apps. You can even do it on podcastindex.org by connecting your Albi hub. I just did that today. Yeah, I sent a sad puppy boost to This Week in Bitcoin because I've been using the Godcaster to listen. So I'm not streaming sats anymore at the moment.

Down the road, that'll change. But because that app has gotten so good, it has all the podcasts I want and he was low on donations. I'm like, oh no, this is no good. And I just went over there and you do have to hit it multiple times for the because of the splits that the Albi plugin asks you to. I guess if you pre-approve it, then it's OK, but I don't use it that often. But it works really well.

And it went straight from through Albi's, you know, my Adam at AlbiHub.com, I guess, or Albi.com to my node here at home. Worked fine. It's amazing. Any of the stuff works at all. It was quite beautiful. So you can do it that way. And of course, on podcastindex.org, if you scroll down to the bottom, there's a big red donate button. We gleefully accept your Fiat fund coupons through PayPal. There we go. See, Laszlo on Linux comes in with one, two, three, four sats.

He says, can the stats page show other things too? Request amounts or bandwidth or other. What? I guess he's looking more for stats from the index on the stats page. Like how many requests we're getting or how much bandwidth we're using. Oh, oh, like, OK, I see. So like more than just the content of the index, but actually like the performance metrics of the index. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A dashboard. I see a dashboard coming. Dashboard, yeah. Uh, the health, the health dashboard.

That's an interesting idea. If you're in there anyway, if you're doing stuff anyway, you know, you got some spare time. Yeah, I guess there's plenty of that. Yeah, that's an interesting idea. Yeah, I'll think about that. RoaDux from Eric PP. Value! Exclamation mark. Just got two sats from IPFS Podcasting. I still run my IPFSPodcasting.net node. I'm hosting a lot of stuff, which, by the way, what a beautiful thing to see working perfectly when all these, uh, when AWS outage happened.

And I had no idea how many people, how many podcast company hosting companies were dependent on AWS. That was rather interesting. DynamoDB was the culprit, evidently. And I've used it. Well, it's DNS basically, right? Yeah, but I think, yeah, it took every, like DynamoDB, I think, if I'm not mistaken, was the very first AWS service. I think. Oh, really? Other than just VMs. I think DynamoDB was like in their original service launch because they used it. They used that internally.

That's like part of Amazon's core infrastructure. They depend on DynamoDB. Yeah, they depend on it. Yes. So Eric PP sent that from CurioCaster. Class on Linux through Fountain. Salty Crayon sends three, three, three from Podcast Guru. Uh, says backup Boostergram. Howdy, boardroom. It's day 24 here at the DOW. And I'm just here keeping the lights on while everybody is off on vacation in other states. We living in peak clown world, five by five in the pipe.

I would say DOW's Department of War is what I'm thinking. Thank you. Thank you for your service, Salty Crayon. The 1701 from Lyceum. That's Martin Lindeskog. I'm sticking around, but I could be lost in space now and then. Starship Boost with 1701, Satoshi's PS. I like the real money, silver and gold talk at the end of the previous episode. Wait. Yeah. Did we talk about that? Yeah, we did. And then I hit the delimiter. So you're up, Davey. Uh, we, let's see. Oh, I just, of course, I lost my page.

You got Buzzsprout. Speak of the devil. Thousand dollars. Bam. There it is. Baller, shot caller. 20 inch blades, only in baller. Thank you, boys and girls of Buzzsprout so much. That, that makes a huge difference. It really, really does. Yep. It basically pays the bills. Yep. Yep. Thank you guys. And J, uh, see donors. A Jacob Salinas sent us $10. Thank you, Jacob. Thank you, Jacob. Appreciate that. Uh, let's see. We got, uh, oh, oh, Oistein Barra. $5. I guess he's coming up after the show.

Yes. Mutton and Mead, Mutton Mead Music is, uh, always takes over the screen right after the board meeting. Michael Goggin, $5. Thank you, Michael. Jorge Hernandez. That's $5. Thank you, Jorge. James Sullivan, $10. Thank you, James. I hope the, I hope the person or company or whoever is, uh, is making you do tech support for free. I hope they hear this and they, and they understand that these people are actually paying for the support they need.

Although it's not paying you, but they're supporting the service they use. You must tell me offline who this is so I can pray for them. That was what I always appreciated so much about, uh, about Marco's donations is he was funding other, he's funding his competitors. Yeah. Christopher Reimer, $10. Thank you, Christopher. Appreciate that. And, uh, Cohen Glotzbach, $5. Uh, Randall Black. Hey, Randall. Thanks, brother. Uh, $5. And, uh, that's it. We got some Boostergrams.

Let me flip over here to the Boostergrams. Let's see. Someone was asking me the other day, how does Dave get the Boostergrams? And I think the answer is you have a script that runs, um, probably through, what's the command line tool we always like? Uh, you pull it out of the node directly, right?

Yeah, I have a, I have some PHP scripts that run, that pull, uh, boost, that pull all of our, uh, for tax, for, to keep track of taxes for, for us, I have a script that downloads everything, every transaction out of our lightning node, uh, once a minute. Nice. And so then it, and it sticks it into a local database on that machine. And so then at any moment I can go and give it a range of time and say, give me, extract all the Boostergrams out of these donations for this rain time range.

And so what does the, uh, what does the communication with the node? Uh, it's just, it's the REST API, context of the REST API. Huh. That's a cool little widget. Yeah, it's cool. It's just a, uh, it's just a PHP script. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. It's a set of them. Yeah. And then I got another set of them that exports everything at the end of the year so we can do our taxes and all that. Hmm. Um, it's homegrown stuff, you know, uh, let's see, Bruce, the ugly cracking duck, 2222, do podcast guru.

Thank you. It says, uh, what? You mean that video is the zombies platform and audio still shines life into our brains? Wait, you guys probably didn't say that. Haha. I just dreamed it. 73s. 73s. Cole McCormick, Satchel Richards, one, one, one, one through fountain. He says, while you were discussing short form video, my mom sent me five different reels on Instagram and Facebook in a 30 second span. Yeah, we, I'm sorry for that. We set up this, uh, this group.

We had about 14 people over the other night at our house and, uh, it's kind of hokey, but I'll tell you what it is. So we, um, there's a movie by Kirk Cameron called fireproof and this. Yeah, I remember seeing that. Yeah, I don't think I saw it. 15, 20 years ago or something. And, you know, he's going through a marital problems and then his dad gives him this book and it's called the love dare. And for 40 days you do this thing and it's, it's based on scripture and it's, it's kind of fun.

And so, uh, someone said, Hey, let's do this. And we'll, you know, so, and some of us have been married for one year. Some of us have been married for 30 years. So we all got together and, uh, and we, and, and, you know, so we did, you know, we talked about it, did this and we set up the startup. It's basically hang out, you know, everyone brought food, but then they put together a text group and I'm like, okay.

And then the purpose of the text group was supposed to be for the organizers to post at in the evening, post the love dare for the next day. You know, so you don't have to guess it turned into nothing but memes, dude, dude, like pictures, Instagram, little mini reels. I'm like, this is, this is the problem. People I'm out. It's like, please. And of course everyone hates me because I turned the whole group into green bubble with my Android phone. Like who has the Android? Yeah. You're gross.

Chad F. Sasser Richards, one, one, one, one. Thank you, Chad. Great hearing Barry from Noster. He's got a Noster handle there on the show. He's building some cool stuff and I always hear great things about Podhome. And again, Chad will be on the show with us next week. Chad's voice sounds very different than I envisioned it. Oh yeah? Yeah. He posted a video of his, uh, of his, his, uh, test app. I'm like, ah, I never thought that that's how he would sound.

You know how you, you put a, I don't know if you had, you put a voice to a, to someone who you only see online. And somehow I thought he would have this really high pitched whiny voice. I'm sorry, Chad. I can't help it. That's just what I thought. And he doesn't. I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool. I can't wait to talk to him. Okay. I always do the, uh, the reverse. I hear somebody's voice and I picture what they look like. And then I see them and I'm like, whoa, that's not what I thought.

Yes. Um, see, uh, see loss on Linux 2222 through fountain. He says, Dave talking about a second vibe coding pass to check for errors and issues. There's at least one service called code rabbit .ai. You connect it to your GitHub or other. And then on a pull request, it will do things like read the code, make a change, uh, see, make a changes graph, spin up linters and static analysis tools and check your code for all sorts of issues. They have a CLI and plugins for editors too. It's good.

Even if you don't vibe code, well, that's good. I mean, yeah. Fuzzing would be a good thing to do for AI fuzzing fuzzing. Yeah. That's where you take a piece of where you take a piece of code and you just throw all kinds of, let's say that your code expects a particular protocol. You throw every different weird bug and permutation and wrong thing at this code to see how it breaks. That's called marriage. My friend, baby. Stop fuzzing me. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, a marital fuzzer is what it is.

Oh, beautiful. Seals and laces back again. One, two, three, four. Uh, through founding, he says, Dave said no one under 30 or whatever number he said doesn't use eggs and used Instagram. I'm 25. I'm probably addicted to eggs, but not using Instagram. And I see many people similar age and younger use eggs, maybe just nerds, developers, gamers and other weirdos.

We'll see part of CLAs part of one of the, one of the privileges you gain when you get to be, you know, old in your old of any caliber is that you get to just say things like no one under 30 dot, dot, dot. Yeah. You don't have to have justification approved. You just get to say it. It's a right. It's, it's, it's a human right. Exactly. Yeah. And you just have to, and you as an under, as an under 30, you just have to take it. Take it, take it like a man. Yeah. Take it and like it.

CLAs again, four, three, two, one. He says, uh, four, three, two, one sats through found. He says, get to work is actually a good motivation. It's not like I haven't been coding. I just didn't spend a lot of time on bounce pad anymore after realizing most podcast app developers can kind of take back in the costs. And then that's it, which is too small for me. I think I don't need to build Facebook level things, but a thing with barely any users isn't fun either.

I was supposed to build it out a bit more and then get on a call with Todd because he wanted a specific thing built to integrate with, but then his passing was basically stopped me fully for now. What qualifies someone to get on the show? Well, there's no qualification. Let me just product helps. Yeah. Having something to talk about. Yeah. It qualifies when you have something to talk about. So let us know what you want to talk about. We are, we are open and, um, and equitable, equitable.

If you, I mean, if you're, if you're developing stuff and doing stuff with podcasting and two dot oh, come on the show. Yeah, for sure. Doors open, hit us up. DMs are open. Hit me up. Comic strip blogger, delimiter, the perpetual delimiter 14 0 1 5 through fountain. He says, howdy fellow bit corners, Adam and Dave, this promo written by grok based on his website.

Join Martin Lindeskog as he navigates the gig economy, sharing candid stories, triumphs and hacks from podcasting trends to LinkedIn strategies. Get inspired to thrive as a freelancer. Tune in for insights and community vibes. Listen now at gig.elitoo.com or search in podcasting 2.0 apps for swing that gig exclamation point. Yo, CSB AI arch wizard. Of course, he's an arch wizard. He's interesting to see what the vibe coders do. I mean, I think Chad F is basically a vibe coder. I believe he is.

I want to ask you this as, as, as, I mean, I've, I consider you to be a certified vibe coder at this point. I, I, I, I concur. My question is, do you know, no, I know sort of the answer to this already. I know that you are part of what you're going to say is that you do this because you, of the pure enjoyment of it.

But the other side of this question is, would you, do you think that vibe coding this product that you've created, do you think that it has gone any faster than it would have if you would have had a developer to communicate with and build the product per your instructions? I've thought about this a lot. It would not be the product that I wanted you and I now we've worked together for a long time. So I think that what I've spent now, the product has a number of different angles to it.

There's an, there's a bunch of different pieces that you could say is all part of the same product, but it's kind of separate products. Um, because we've done this, we, we built, we built Freedom Controller. And, and of course, what was most beautiful about Freedom Controller is that your creativity went in there. Um, and we had lots of conversations like, how about this? Let's try this. Let's try that.

But ultimately your creativity was what created the end product with my input, what I have built, the end result, which is streaming products, live takeover products, a proxy for metadata and, uh, uh, something else. Um, we could have probably built this in three weeks time together. But because of the vibe coding aspect, the way it came together, I didn't even envision it to be doing what it does. I mean, it's, it's mind blowing what came out of this and I'll give an example.

So as I'm, and this, this was the first time I was really blown away by the vibe coding. And of course it comes from something in the corpus and Lord knows how it got in there or how it, how, how it wound up in my project. Um, so it's a streaming radio station system. Very, very simple. That's intended for really for churches and ministries.

If, if you're managing a YouTube channel and an Instagram thing, and you're doing live streams, you should technically, if you have a little bit of understanding of scheduling, then you should be able to use this product. And, um, and so I gave it to, I don't think you've had time to really mess around with it, but I gave it to Gordon. Gordon's a long time radio guy. And, um, and so I got some valuable feedback from him.

And so there's a, there's a page that, you know, so there's basically production, a scheduling page where you schedule everything, whether you want, you know, your lineup hour to hour, what elements you want in there, your format, as we would say in radio. If you want to see, you know, most recent episode from an RSS feed to play at a certain time. And so that's kind of the, the, the, that's what people are doing most of the time, but then there's also a studio page.

And I built the studio page, um, because not everybody is able to, um, get someone to record a local report. And so it's connected to 11 labs and you just, you know, you, you copy paste or you type it in whatever you want. And, uh, and it spits it out and you can preview it there. And Gordon said, well, okay, I put it in a folder, but what else is in the folder? Can I listen to the other things in that folder? Well, that's actually on a different page.

So I'm like, oh, I need to put a preview section on this studio page so that you can preview other stuff and determine where you want to put your newly created AI voice stuff into.

And without me asking for it, it automatically, um, when you create a new report, let's say, and you want it to be in the local folder, the local bin, as it were, the preview section automatically selects that bin and that file that you just created negating the whole necessity for having a separate player pop up to preview what you just did. It was something that I loved it. I'm like, wow. And actually against all my rules, it went, good job. I was so happy with it.

And that, and that was something that I don't know if that would have come up if you and I were working on it together. And there's, there's a lot of other small little things. Um, but time-wise, dude, I've been working on this for almost eight months and, you know, I started off with liquid soap. I killed that. And I wound up building with the Swiss army knife of all things, audio and video FFmpeg.

I want, and that was actually after podcast movement, talking to Rocky and her husband, like, oh man, you should, you know, you should take a look at FFmpeg. And it's, I mean, it's rock, rock solid. It's, it's unbelievable how, how well that works compared to, I mean, and I don't want to get into a, you know, a religious war about liquid soap versus FFmpeg, uh, but the way it functions, how it works. Um, I don't think it would have, it would have been a great product.

Uh, but it wouldn't have been what I've wound up with now, because I was just jamming with the machine, you know, I'm just like, oh, let me try that. Oh, you give me this. So it was a different kind of jam than you and I would have had, but we would have been done with this in three weeks, guaranteed hands down, instead of six to eight months.

So would you, I think what I hear, I think what I'm hearing you say is that the ability for you to do this yourself, um, you're trading time for sort of inspirational control over the end result. Um, well, you're seeing things as you, since you're, you're doing it and seeing things and getting the feedback that inspires you to do perhaps different things than you thought you intended to.

Yes. It's because it's so wonky and so crazy and so like stuff that, I mean, once I got over the, why did you change something that I liked five hours ago? And I figured out, okay, you can usually stop it from doing that. The things that would come out of it sometimes were incredibly surprising. I'm like, oh, oh, okay. I can use that in this way. So it was a, it's a very creative process because I don't know what I'm doing.

If I just sat down and I, you know, I, I went through the, the Python course and I, and I learned everything and all these bits and bobs, but you know, it'll just pull, it'll pull in, um, a library that I'd never, I'd never even heard of or considered like, oh, that's interesting. Okay. Well, now I see that we can do this in this way or we can add this.

So it is a very creative aspect to it, but it was like, you know, like, uh, you know, like doing, um, pet sounds album, you know, it's Brian Wilson, 15 years to complete or whatever. Um, so, so it is, I find it very creative because I don't really know what I'm doing. And so what came out of it were surprising, surprising things that perhaps someone who was, um, you know, I, I kind of know how you work and you set out a plan, you structured.

And I mean, there's a lot of things I can never achieve that you can do never. I mean, just the beautiful, like how you've done the dashboard in Godcaster is such a work of art. So everything makes sense. My dashboard is like, oh, okay. You know, it feels like someone just threw some spaghetti against the wall and it looks kind of, that looks like art. Yeah. I'll keep it because there's not much I can change because I just don't know what I'm doing.

But aren't there old, successful, very, very successful softwares that have like, I think of things like e-tools and the UI is just a complete disaster, but everybody, but it's like, once you learn it, you can be highly productive. Well, and, and that's kind of where I started because I looked at every single streaming platform. I looked at, you know, liquid soap has a lot of UIs. I want to say CentoCast.

I mean, there's all kinds of UIs that have been on top of it and it's just not how I wanted it to work. I really just wanted it to be something. In fact, the, where I started was, I want you to be able to do this from a Google calendar and that turned out to not be so handy in the end, but the idea was kind of good. I remember that phase of you. Yeah. And, uh, and you know, I built the bridge, the GCAL and all that stuff, but it's just, yeah, it just didn't feel right. That's a mess.

And then, you know, and I felt very dependent upon, upon Google, of course. Um, and, but what, what came out of it is, is pretty close to, to what I want. I just want something very simple that doesn't deal with, you know, format clocks and all this stuff. I want it to feel like a calendar, like, okay, I understand every day at eight, I want this devotional to run. I want, you know, at the top of the hour, I want Salem radio news.

And then I want a live break in for the Sunday sermon, all this stuff. And I, and I, it just came out kind of the way I want it, but to just through constant re-recording, if you will. It's like, this track's no good. Let's do it again. All right. But now, now I've got this mix is good over here, but now it sounds crap with this track in it. So it feels very creative, but I personally would have preferred to have done it with you.

I would, because we've done it before and, and I, and I love how we work together, but you know, you're, you're working on other things. So it was out of necessity that I did this, not because I was so gung ho on becoming a developer. But yeah, I mean, I've been meaning to ask you about that. Cause it's interesting to like from, from a, there are times when trading time for other things makes sense.

Yeah. And I was curious as to if that was the act, sort of an active thing in this case, cause you're, I agree with you. I think you, you, you have to live with a product in a way, like when you, if you're building it, you're just going to see things that, you know, in a way there it's, it's two, there's two sides to it. Like if you're building it, you see things that the user will not see. Right.

And if you're using it, you're going to see things that the developer's not going to see because they're too close to it. Yeah. And so like you're, you're, you don't normally see it from the developer side. And so you're having seen it, like doing it from that side of things is, I think, I think one thing you, one thing about the way you approach things as well is that you tend to look at something visually and kind of, you visualize something and you immediately get like an explosion of ideas.

Yeah. This is true, right? Yes. Yes. You, but you, cause you do this all the time. You're like, Hey, I just saw so-and -so, you know, we could do this and this and this and this and this. I mean, you just, like, there's just like an orgasm of explode. Ah, there it is. An orgasm of ideas. Okay. Yes. Um, that, that happened. And then, but, but when you see it as a developer, you can actually test the idea like immediately. Yes. You don't have to like hope and explain it to somebody.

You can just immediately like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then you feel like, then you find out, ah, that's not going to work. Ah, that's not going to work. Oh, wait, that, that works. You know? Yeah. That's interesting. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm in, I have enjoyed watching you do all this. Well, uh, and I will say for those who are interested, um, I, I actually asked God, why are you putting me through this? That's, that's my prayer. Maybe three or four times a week.

Yes. And, uh, and interesting. And this was a several months ago after I kind of completed the first phase and, and the word I got back was, I wanted you to understand what AI is and what it can and what it can't do. And that was, I was like, wow. Okay. That's very helpful because, and, and also I'm just like, I'm, I'm amazed at this period of time that we can do this for $20 a month. I'm just blown away by it.

And I'm, I'm afraid for the day will come, you know, when it's like, well, the only business model we have is to charge you what it really costs. You know, I, I, I just like what, what an amazing $350 a month, you know, it's, it's an amazing time to be alive, to be able to do this. Um, well, by the time that day comes, we'll have enough or we'll have an enough horsepower to just do it at home because I have actually, I have tried that and it does actually work.

I mean, I've, I've done, I've done a couple of, uh, you know, a couple of small pieces of the coding, um, on my, uh, on my own, uh, start nine that has, uh, you know, was it the web, web, what does that call? WebView, WebGBT, you know, what is it called? Yeah, right. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. You can just load them up and you can, yeah, yeah. You can load the models in there and it spits back code and like, oh, that's pretty cool, but it took forever. Yeah, it's slow.

You have to have some, you have to have a decent GPU. Yeah. So, you know, that, that, that didn't work, but yeah, yeah. That, that day will come. We'll see. Wow. Okay. Brother Dave, uh, what are you doing? You hanging out this weekend, taking some time off? We have a very busy weekend. We're going to a rock climbing competition for my daughter in Atlanta. We'll probably be going all day tomorrow. All right. And then, uh, we're going with them.

My daughter has, um, she's 15. She started, she's, she teaches part-time at, uh, a local, uh, outfit called the, uh, Firehouse Community Arts Center. Oh, wow. And they teach, uh, she teaches kids how to play instruments. And so she, they, yeah, they have a big block party about three times a year. And so all the kids form into bands and play. Oh, that's cool. And they play their favorite tunes.

And so she's playing is she, her band is playing, and then she's playing on about, she's playing bass on one song and drums on another song. So that's a, that's an all day affair too. So I love that the kids are still playing music at all, ma'am, these days. They only play music from the old, they only play old music. They, they, they, nobody plays anything new. They all love the oldies. Like eighties, oldies, seventies, oldies, sixties, oldies. What kind of oldies?

You, you go to this, you go to the block party. On the last one, I heard, uh, War Pigs, uh, the, um, the song that, uh, duet between Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. Islands in the sun. Islands in the sun. Yeah. That, uh, that there was an old, uh, old radio head song. Wow. Uh, there was a David Bowie, uh, star man. It's really old stuff. Holy crap. That's amazing. Probably the newest song I heard was from like 2000. That gives me hope, brother. That gives me a lot of hope. I'm loving that.

Even the kids, the kids may listen to new music, but they don't want to play it. All right. You have a good weekend. Bored room. Thank you very much for being here. Remember to support us. Podcast index.org. We'll be back next Friday with another board meeting of podcasting. 2.0. You have been listening to podcasting 2.0. Visit podcastindex.org for more information. Go podcasting. He just roasted my chestnuts.