Episode 255: Snark Week

Podcasting 2.0 for March 27th, 2026, episode 255, Snark Week. Hello, everybody. Once again, it is Friday. It is a overcast day here in the Texas Hill Country, but it's bright and shiny in your podcast app because it's time for Podcasting 2.0. Yes, the official board meeting of the group. We are, in fact, the only boardroom that doesn't pay salaries or dividends.

I'm Adam Currie here in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and in Alabama, the man who worked for 20 hours on Podping only to get snarked at. Say hello to my friend on the other end, the one, the only, Mr. Dave Jones. I've been snarked. You know, I've been snarked. It's been one of those weeks for me. For me too. Yes. Like for a lot of reasons, like a lot of personal reasons having to do with, you know, people I interact with at work and stuff. It's just been snark week.

It's like shark week, but not entertaining. Oh, we already have a title right off the bat, snark week. But there's something, I think it has something to do with podcasts themselves. You know, I do a lot of podcasts and I've noticed over the past couple of months, maybe six months to a year, but increasingly so in the past few months, that people who interact with me and I'm pretty reachable, you know, email X, that would really be it. Email and X. I don't look at much else.

But people think they can say the most obnoxious, annoying, sometimes hateful and mean things. And it has increased and it has something to do with podcasting, I think, in particular. And I think it's that people want, really want to be a part of the podcast or they feel that they're, they're so connected to the podcast and that when they're talking to you, they're on the podcast.

Seriously, I mean, and this has been a difficult couple of weeks for me, like very difficult with Dvorak being out and, you know, trying to keep the ship afloat with Mimi. It's not easy. You know, you got someone who's never done it before. John's back. He's clearly not 100%. I mean, it's obvious to me, not to everybody, but I can tell, you know, so, you know, there's like more energy for me is going into it. But then, you know, the things people will say, you know, just rude and mean things.

And like, where do you, where do you think you, I mean, who gave you permission to be like that? I'm not sure what exactly. I'll give you an example. C11 Brooklyn just said something shitty on the Mastodon. Like, are you going to talk about AI today or be about podcasting? This is the voice I hear in my head when I read it, you see. And I'm like, who are you? Who are you?

You're on the Mastodon I pay for, listening on the live stream I pay for, with a project that Dave has poured his entire life into. Who are you? Without this podcast, without this podcast, without the board meeting, would it be as successful? With everyone just jacking off on a GitHub? Probably not. There's another show title jacking off on a GitHub. They're just falling out. This is what a little bit of aggravation will do. It'll just show title engines.

And it's just, and, you know, I really try to have patience and self-control and, and it's hard. It's been very, very hard. I'm losing my shit over stuff. And, and of course, you know, people in the, you know, if I, and I'm trying not to comment, if I comment, then it's like, oh yeah, I got them now. But the same people show up in my life all over the place. And probably the worst is like, I consider podcastindex.social to be kind of a safe place for us, X, you know, whatever.

But it's the, it's the boardroom and the troll room. I know it's called the troll room. People just, they say things and I mean, I pay attention. I'm, I've trained myself over years to have this third eye peripheral vision to be looking at what's going on. I think it makes the podcast really exciting and interactive, but all kinds of people, even people who are friends will just say shit. I'm like, don't do that. Do you realize I'm reading it?

And in real time, I think they do, but it's just like, it's your own podcast. It makes me not want to even look at the, the boardroom or the, or the troll room or anything. Something has changed and I'm going to blow my shofar for these people. If I can get it to work. Yeah. This sounds more like a Vuvuzela. I can get it. Hold on. It takes a second. I get, it's like a trumpet. I can't do it with headphones. I can't do it with headphones. Hold on. Let me take the headphones off.

There's something about that. Almost. The headphones didn't matter. Close enough. You're not going to be able to finish the show. You're going to be so. Tina's like, that was bad. I can't blow it with my headphones on for some reason. It's very hard to blow it with the headphones. Your face is probably purple right now from this. That's about how I feel actually, the way that sounds. It's like a, it's like a bird. It's like a kid's birthday party. When all the, with the balloon just fly.

If you were, if you were hoping to inspire people and call them to the mountain. Yeah, we're still, we're still in the desert. We're not at the mountain. It made me feel better. Okay, good. Well, that's, that does count for something. Yeah, it does. No, I mean, I see, I know what you, I think it's more than just, I think it's more than just podcasting. I think there's a general, I don't know, fatigue and frustration with lots of things going on in the world.

I know lots of people checking out from like news and stuff in general. Sure. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's like, they can't talk and you can't really tolerate that, that sort of thing right now for some reason. And, and I, I don't really, I don't really know, but I feel like there is a, a vibe that's going through just society in general. There's also, there's always these like lulls that happen too. And well, James, you know, James and Sam were talking about on power.

They were talking about how there's some big changes coming for Spotify and they, they're not exactly sure what they are yet or anything like that. Oh, I didn't listen today. So I missed it. What do you, any, any word, you have any idea? Uh, they were just, well, James was saying that he thinks some stuff's going to happen with their video, you know, product and that kind of thing, video podcasting product.

And of course it will, it would probably have to, and they laid off people and then, um, who was it? Some, uh, Epic games also laid off a thousand employees out of 3000. There's these, these, I think, I think these row, the, the economy is pretty, is we all, we know it's sort of rotten from the under, from underneath. And that's been taking its toll on a lot of tech, you know, tech people, tech, tech in general is protected from economic downturns for, for many, many, many years for decades.

But it's kind of caught up at this point. And I don't know, I just think there's a general, um, malaise that's happening. Yeah, that could be it. I mean, yeah, people are definitely spinning up, spinning out and has people on edge. Yeah. It has me on edge too. I mean, I, I, I have, I've been unable to sleep beyond like four 30 every single night for the weeks for weeks. Exactly. It is Rick. I can't believe you said that because I suddenly, um, the same thing is happening to me.

I've always been a six o'clock, six 30 guy. Yeah. Me too. Six 36. I'm gonna say we're six 30 guys, ladies. It's a six 30 club. And then suddenly about two or three weeks ago, I cannot sleep past about five, five 30 at the most. It's usually four 30 or five. And I don't know why. Yeah. And it's not, it's not like I'm tired when I wake up. Like I'm not tired. Yeah. I'm okay.

But then, and even, you know, we go to bed 10 o'clock and I'm not, I'm not really saying, yeah, I'm not like, Oh boy, what a long, I mean, show day sometimes are long, but I'm like, what a long day.

Hmm. Okay. Well, that's interesting. So there's definitely something in the air. Well, you know, my, my theory, so my, my theory with vibe coding is, was, is that it has the same dopamine dynamics as video games.

Hmm. And in the past, I haven't been much of a gamer really at all for, for many, many years, but I was, when I was young and what I remember from my teens and, or, you know, uh, in twenties was that when you have, when you get super involved in a game, in a video game, like some, something that's pretty intense. And this, this can happen with TV shows too. Um, but, but video games, I noticed it more.

You're, um, what you end up, sometimes you end up having dreaming about the game because especially if you, if you play the game right up to the point when you go to sleep, but, but it also can happen just, just because you're, you're, I think it's because your brain is so, um, focused on this one thing that those patterns just begin to play over and over and over in your mind. And then you'll go to sleep and you'll dream about this and it will definitely affect your sleep.

And I think it, and so I turned a buddy of mine on to where we talk, uh, he's a tech guy and I taught, I was telling him to give cloud code a shot. And so I got him into the cloud code, you know, vibe coding world. And so then he's, he's, he put messages in me not too long ago and he's like, uh, man, this thing is awesome. I'm already knocking out stuff. I'm, I'm creating apps, I'm doing all this kind of stuff. And he was like, and you're dead.

And he, this guy's a heavy gamer, daily video game user. And he was like, he was like, I'm on like day five of, of hammering out apps with cloud code. And I haven't played a video game in five days. Okay. I think you're onto something here. Um, and, and as an aside, thank you for helping me understand the difference between using, and yeah, it's a little bit of AI chat just a little bit, but I've been building podcast applications. So maybe I can sweep by with that. Um, I was using open code.

Uh, I hit my Zen big pickle limit and so, okay, I'll try a Claude sonnet four dot five, six, whatever it is. Well, that, that ate like a hundred dollars in two hours, like a pack, just ate it up. And then you said, no, no, no, you've, you've got to use Claude code or use the, the CLI. So I didn't realize that you, and I haven't really use it that, I mean, I've been just been using for today, um, using Claude code.

I don't know if it has, if it's exactly the same as open code, but it's, you can certainly go into a directory and say, fix this. And it's been fixing things. And so that apparently will cost less if you get like the max subscription. That's, that's what I'm led to believe. Yes. Okay. Um, it's yeah, you, you just, you just have a limit, but I can promise you you'll never hit it. Okay. That's a big promise because I am that guy you just described. I am that guy.

And the first thing I built, there's been two, two things in my podcasting life that have been an issue. One is, and if you're doing value for value, I don't know how people do it. Um, but if you have a spreadsheet, spreadsheet, spreadsheet applications are the worst for a smooth donation read, because it's all, you know, cause you have, you have notes and you got different things and then it'll snap and then, and you, you can say word wrap all you want. It never does it right.

So it's very difficult to just have a smooth scroll on the spreadsheet. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, totally. So it's not snapping to cells. So I, so I vibe coded a donation, uh, spreadsheet reader, which really, really is amazing because it, I run it through my local model here through the note to extract the jingle requests because people are always requesting all these wacky jingles and I'm always searching around for them.

And it takes me, you know, 25 minutes before the show just to find them and put them in a folder and have them ready. And you know, you're reading and you're searching for the jingles and setting them up at the same time. So now it, it scans the note and it does it on my, on my local Raspberry Pi setup. It extracts the jingle request, pretty good at that. And then, um, I, I built a little server into my play out system, the curry caster available on the GitHub.

Um, and so it searches for the jingle and it sets it up and all you have to do is hit the, hit the cell on the spreadsheet and it lines up the jingles. Yeah, it's nice. Dude, perfect. Dude, this, this is like, this is what I'm talking about. This is functional for me. And then I also, and I'm, I also, I'm, I've been working on a, uh, an O an outliner standalone. Yeah. Yeah. Standalone outliner because browser stuff just has its drawbacks.

Uh, in, uh, in my life, it has a lot of drawbacks and a man you want to talk about recursion issues. Try and include node. Oh man. And include node rendering HTML. We've got recursion. Yeah. This, yeah. We're you're, you're, you're coding OPML like it's a 1999. Yeah. Anyway, but it's interesting because open code could not figure it out with big pickle, with, uh, GPT five, you know, code X five, two, or with Claude sonnet. But then I fire up, go open. Yeah. But I fire up Claude code.

Boom. Fixes everything within 10 minutes. Amazing. They, they just have some sort of magic that nobody else has figured out yet. And I don't know what it is. Now can Claude code also like do stuff like SSH to, into a different server and do stuff or do you have to kind of set it up on that server individually? No, it's fully agentic. You just have to give it those permissions. Oh, okay. Um, the, the thing, like, I just feel like we're paying a price that we don't understand yet. Oh yeah.

Well, no kidding. You know what I mean? Like this, this, these things are, um, these things are making truly they're enabling us to do truly important things that are, that we would not have been able to do before. But, but there is a cost. It's sort of like, what's the old out the alchemy thing. It's like, whatever you can create gold out of lead, but you have to pay this cost for, you know, there's a cost that has to be paid. And this, I feel like we're paying the cost collectively.

There's a, there's a mental health cost that I do not understand fully yet. And I will admit that all day long. This is where, this is where I was going. You're absolutely right. I think it's a part of it because I wake up and I always, the first thing I always do good morning, Holy spirit, Lord's prayer. If I, if I, if I don't get it right, I do it again. Then I get up and then in my head is, oh, how about that? So OPML project. I wonder if I could approach it this way.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. That I think, I think it's, I think it's tapping into, into the nervous system. It's doing something that's not good. And it doesn't mean that it doesn't mean that there's anything inherently bad or that we have to stop using the tools or anything like that necessarily. It's just that we don't, this is new. This is all very new and we just don't understand how to deal with this stuff yet.

But that, but you have to go through these growing pains in order to learn how to have a healthy relationship with these, with things that are new this way. How, how does, how is it different from just regular coding? Well, because it's gamified.

I think that's really the issue because you, you feel they, the speed at which you're able to do things makes, well, see, that's what, okay, I'm trying, I'm trying to figure out where to start because that was, that's the issue with video games and why they become very addictive is because they allow you to short circuit the normal payment cost, the normal cost, the cost is your time and your, and your mental attention. They allow you to make, to sort of circumvent that and go in the back door.

And so it makes the, it makes the effort reward cycle very, very short and it makes it very fast. So you're just like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Right. And then when it slows down, it's sort of like listening to podcasts in 2X. When you slow the pace down and you're not doing it anymore, your mind's like, wait, wait, wait, no, but keep, keep going, keep going, keep going. You can't, why are you stopping? Yeah. I need this. I need you to keep doing this.

But because it's a, because it's sort of like a vague goal, the goal is just produce features. It's not like this one particular thing. Then I feel like you just have this sort of vague anxiety and you don't really know what it is. I don't even know if it's that vague. It's pretty real, man. It's pretty real. Like I had this, uh, you can bring a, you can bring a, yeah, this is a good idea because I'm sure he has some contributions.

Welcome to the board meeting, uh, here at the big table, the one and only Nathan G as we know him, Nathan Gathright. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. What's up brother. Are you still not working for Spotify? I'm still not working for Spotify. I work over the link tree these days. The only guy I know who sells something gets paid, gets it back and then gets the name back and then somehow didn't have to give the money back. It's always nice when it works out like that. That is fabulous.

I am, I am in awe of, uh, of this, uh, of what you've done here. Do you have good lawyers or is it just Spotify stupid? Uh, I, I think they just realized it wasn't really a thing they needed when they acquired pod sites and they acquired charitable, they essentially got two different versions of the same thing and didn't really need, uh, the one that was not as deeply hooked into like charitable system. So mine could very easily be cut loose.

And I had friends on the inside who were, uh, you know, maybe felt bad that I got laid off and were willing to put in the time and energy to convince their lawyers that it would be a, uh, you know, an, a gesture of goodwill to the open podcasting ecosystem to have this be out in the public again. And, you know, they wanted that, that headline out there. And I was, uh, just the lucky recipient of all those circumstances. Well, amen to that, man. That's fantastic. I'm real happy for you.

I love pod, pod.link. I use it for everything for all my podcasts. Yeah. People love it. They love it. You know, if I don't, if I, I forgot what was something, maybe it was like a couple of months ago, it wasn't working. I was like, I'll just do my regular link. And right away I get, Hey man, where's the pod.link? This is no good. That I've got you see, you wrote, you wrote this article and you, and you, uh, you wrote this blog posts, I guess, uh, you released it this morning, I think.

Um, but, but before I don't, I don't want to talk about that yet. I want to talk about, cause something else kind of jumped in the way of that, uh, discussion. Uh, and I've got other things that are the whole, I'm afraid we're not even going to talk about the whole reason I asked you, uh, into the boardroom today, but we'll try to get there.

But, uh, Dustin Block from cast the Castro app developer, he responded to you, you made this post and you're, you were talking about the, uh, you know, so open, open, open discovery for podcasts, uh, uh, for RSS and that kind of thing. And so Dustin jumped in and he said, and I'm, this is not really necessarily about him. It's just about what he said.

He said, um, why don't he said podcast apps have spent far too time optimizing for open web standards and far too little time on features that users actually care about. And that, that phrase at the end there, just the snippet that use the features that users actually care about that. It kind of jumped out at me because we've heard that for a very long time. That phrase comes up a lot when it's things like, uh, the podcast person tag or, you know, podcast scheduling tag.

And these there's all, there's a lot of times that we do something in the namespace or 2.0 where we hear that phrase. And the, I mean, I don't really want to lock in on any particular wording that he used there, because I think if he was, if he was here with us having this discussion, then, um, I think he may like phrase it different and that kind of thing. So I don't want to get hung up on that, but like we had a topic that we discussed heavily internally with Godcaster over the past week.

And it was like a similar nature. It's like, on the one hand, you have customers telling you they want a thing. And then on the other hand, you have this vision for what the product is, is, or could be that you, that conflicts with that, at least in your mind. And this is a longstanding like debate. You have this Steve Jobs idea that users, you know, users don't know what they actually want and you have to figure it out and design it and give it to them.

And then they see it fully formed in like, oh, I never even knew I wanted that. It's beautiful. But, but now I can't live without it. You have that on one side, you know, and then you have on the other side, this idea of like building your product based on market research and customer feedback and these things that you're, you're building what the customer tells you they want. And it was kind of like this juxtaposition of those two ideas that got me thinking about this.

And like, I've got some ideas, but I want to know like, what, what are, what's your initial thoughts on that whole idea as related to like what, what Dustin was talking about? For sure. I absolutely am like in complete agreement with Dustin, honestly, that yes, they should prioritize what users want or what users need or what's good for users. You know, find the right phrasing, whatever, whatever you think works there.

But it really comes down to a strong, like ownership of the vision of your product. Podlink has always faced people who said like, yeah, I'd really love Podlink, but can you like just show Apple, Spotify, and Google, and then swapped out Google for YouTube, you know, when, when that deprecated. And I'm like, no, that's not my vision for this product. A, I use, you know, Pocket Cast most of the time.

And the whole reason I made Podlink was because I wanted, you know, the eighth place podcast app to be included as something that every major podcaster linked out to. Right. And so I've always sort of had a strong vision. And at first part of that was that I limited the list to basically only people who were in the top 1% of all podcast apps, which was, you know, less than a dozen.

And when I did the like episodes.fm relaunch, and then was able to, you know, rebrand that back into Podlink, expanded that to every single link that I could support. That was an expansion of that vision to say, no, I think actually listeners are willing to, you know, not be overwhelmed by a list and pick something and set a cookie and a default so that they don't have to browse the list every time, things like that. Here's a question.

Yeah. If every single one of your customers was paying, if they were paying for your product, would that change how you listen to them? Definitely. I think there's, but I would, you know, find a way to make sure that I'm like, still achieving the mission that I wanted to accomplish, which was to make an open, you know, listing that anybody could use.

That doesn't mean that if somebody is paying me that I couldn't also give them, you know, additional bespoke URLs, but it doesn't necessarily mean that that's the URL anybody who visits the homepage, you know, would see. So I'd like find ways to make my customers happy. I've, you know, explored like, can customers make a custom sort order of this list? Can they, you know, hide certain links? I've thought about it.

But I don't think, you know, I think that was one of the advantages that Chartable had over me is that basically all their links were private links. So every single podcaster could make a bespoke list of apps they wanted for any given marketing campaign and send out a link to their SmartLinks product.

But Podlink, you know, it was open first, but that also came with the benefits that any listener could share a Podlink to their favorite show and not wait for the podcaster to set it up first in any way. And so then it could grow just by the virtuous cycle of listeners sharing it with other listeners, podcasters seeing that, podcasters using it to promote their own show, other podcasters seeing that, and the cycle repeats, right? And so I never wanted to lose that.

And I like recognize if I allowed podcasters to hide the apps that they didn't care for off the list, that would be breaking that core growth mechanic for my product. So I'm like, all right, I can find a way to, you know, satiate, you know, my paying customers with something, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I have to break the other things I believe in.

Do you think that would you, would it be fair to say that you think open was an open standards and sort of adhering to that open mindset was a negative for you as far as growth and your business and stuff like that? Or is that going too far? No, I think that's going too far. Like, I think I really only ever sold Podlink as, you know, for the paying customers. They basically got a vanity URL and they got the tiny little 120 pixel by 60 pixel banner ad off the sidebar.

They never really got more than that. And it was cheap enough that they couldn't really complain that they weren't getting a ton more features for that price. So I was never under that much pressure. And then we made it free and we gave those features away and added even more. And, you know, I'd like to add a paid tier back to Podlink at some point, but, you know, life's been just too busy to make that happen. That's very helpful. Thank you.

Yeah. I think that like, it sounds like to me, and this is kind of where I've, my mind has been heading this morning, sort of thinking through these things after I read that from Dustin, I was, I was thinking that, you know, there's not really, as, as is often the case, there's not really a, there's not a right answer to these kinds of questions because the answer is really, I mean, the answer is both.

I mean, the answer is you, you know, you have, you have list, you know, customers, listeners, whatever you want to phrase that for your, for a podcast app, you have, you have these customers, but, and they tell you they want things and you can't ignore that. You have to do it to, in some degree, but then you also have a vision and the, the difficulty is sort of, is trying to meld those two things together so that they, so that you don't lose the integrity of either one, you know?

And like, cause I was thinking to myself, what, what is the point of an open standard? So like, if you just ask yourself that question, what, what is, when you write a standard, if you're, if you're doing that work, what are you actually trying to achieve? Works anywhere with anything. Yeah. When people, yeah. Interop. Yeah. Interop. That's it. Yeah. I think, but also there is this aspect that lock-in is part of the goal, you know?

Like, do you remember that article or blog post that the guy that used to be the CEO of Spotify wrote a few years ago where he said that the reason podcasting had not advanced is because of RSS had people locked into a particular standard? Yeah. Yes. I remember this. Yeah. And so I don't remember what his name was, but- Mike Mignano. Yes. Yes. Thank you, Mike Mignano. But he, he wrote this and the thing about it was he wasn't completely wrong. I mean, he wasn't completely wrong.

The RSS did lock people in. I mean, now it was, it's a closed spec in that sense, but the podcast, you know, the podcast namespace obviously made that idea not really hold up over time, but he wasn't long, he wasn't wrong in the larger sense. I mean, so like we, to the point that, well, like lock-in is part of the goal as developers, we want to, we want there to be one standard we can follow because that makes interop work.

But, you know, and then, and having to support a half dozen protocols and standards just make us, just makes us crazy. And we slowed it and it slows everything down. So, but, but then we also have this idea of wanting to be open. So there's, again, there's this like tension, this paradox. And so we do things like we try to bake in the idea of extensibility to the spec.

So RSS 2.0 did this by like writing on top of the XML namespace feature and ActivityPub, like for example, has extensibility baked in where you can define new actors and actions and object types over time. But, but then again, in practice, as is so often the case, people don't, people don't do that very often because you'll have this thing, you have like, for example, ActivityPub, you have Mastodon. It's the dominant application in the ecosystem.

And it's going to always just display your fancy new actors and objects and events. It's just going to cast them to types that already understands and all your, all your new fancy stuff is just going to kind of get, get munged into these existing object types. And so you just lose, and it makes every, it makes the developers that would do cool things kind of like not want to do it because they don't want to see it.

Like, I don't know, I feel like there's this constant tension between those two things. And when, and when Dustin is saying that, I feel like he's expressing the, the thoughts of a lot of developers in podcasting, where there is this constant tension between doing something new and maintaining adherence to some, to some kind of standard. Do you, do you feel that all the time as well?

Yeah, I think ultimately everybody's really in trying to pursue the same goal, which is the sustainability of the project, either the sustainability of the open ecosystem or the sustainability of their own app. And so they're not going to waste time and dev hours on things that are going to actually increase their support burden. So I linked his blog post in the boardroom.

And one of the things he was talking about is getting hundreds of podcast listening apps out there to adopt a comment section for podcast episodes, back when he was just running Anchor and not part of Spotify. And so he didn't control a app side UX, and so he couldn't do a listener experience. But there's nothing stopping Apple for making a comment section and saying, yep, everybody with an Apple ID can comment on this and it's not in an open way.

And really, I think in podcasting, sort of that burden is, if you try to, you know, maybe a little bit of like tall poppy syndrome or something like that, where if you try to jump ahead, you're actually inviting a huge support burden of like, well, all my listeners in Apple podcasts are going to complain, all my listeners in XYZ app are going to complain because it only works over here.

But that's, you know, that's a little bit running with scissors, like you got to accept that burden if you are trying to push the medium forward in some way. When I built Steno.fm, I was basically treating, I was like, I'm going to design as if the podcast standards or as if the podcast transcript tag is universal.

I'm going to make a transcript to be the default tab instead of the show notes and show a little error message if you don't have it, but basically put the blame on the podcaster for not getting with the times. And I knew that this was not going to be an enormous success, but I was like, I just wanted to design under that premise and see what comes out of that.

And then, you know, you say like, yeah, I'd build this feature and this feature and this feature and just say, sorry folks, you know, for the ones who didn't have the transcript. And you can see other apps taking different approaches to that, Overcast buying 48 Mac minis and deciding that they need to compete with Apple podcasts by doing all the transcription themselves. If I can just say, I think Franco nailed it. It was so obvious what he did with Castamatic that I'm kicking myself.

We had this whole conversation, never actually came up with it. And he said, just doing it on device. Different though. He said, if you want a transcript, hit this button. If you want a, if you want chapters, hit this button. He's not doing it. He's giving the user the same option as skip ahead, listen quicker, double speed, all this stuff, optional. I think that's a brilliant way of doing it. Yeah. I think Fountain basically was also doing that, but charging sats for it.

Trying to see if that was a monetization lever for the app itself. If it's using your own devices processing, then you can. Well, also then you, this is what Dave has always wanted for this one podcast that he listens to that has no chapters. It was Windows Weekly. Security Now. Security Now. Eh, whatever. It's all from the same, it's all from Petaluma. Yeah, right. So, security now, and all you have to do is now you, you, you have the podcast, it's on your podcast app.

And then you can say, oh, I want magic chapters from Castamatic. You hit the button, it gives you chapters. And I feel there's no violation of what the RSS feed had. There's no violation. I mean, you've got the podcast, whether you decide to burn that to a disc, to throw your phone in the trash. I mean, it's all up to you. I think that is a, that was so obvious and so elegant. I mean, that's essentially what steno.fm did, except you just did it off device.

You, you did it like it wasn't in an app form necessarily. I, I never actually offered transcription. I mean, I, I built transcribe.fm as well with, and I was going to sort of merge the two at some point. Um, but steno.fm basically was just like, sorry, you are SOL if this podcaster did not provide their own transcript. And I had some feature branches along the way that were like, yeah, you can maybe upload your own, um, or other things like that. But you used L402 at some point, right?

Yeah. Yeah. The transcribe.fm was, is essentially transcription as a service, but I didn't actually tie it back into the like podcaster, uh, or like the listener facing UI. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. I mean, I think there's this trade, like there's this, I think maybe it's helpful sometimes to think about what, not what users want. Um, I know Dave Weiner used to kind of bristle at the, at calling people users. And that's, that's the thing that I always admired about him.

I think, uh, users, the way developers and it people talk about, about people as quote users, I think it can be sort of, um, uh, not fair sometimes, or it's sort of like, you know, looking down on, on them, but like not what users want, but, but like, what P what do people want? You know? I mean, and that includes developers. That's, you know, so what do we all want? We want new, well, we want new experiences that in my opinion, we want ice cream. We just want ice cream day.

If that's all we really want is ice cream, ice cream for the boardroom, beef milkshakes for everybody involved. We want, we want, I think we want new experiences that make things either novel or convenient, meaning like they like less friction in our life. Um, you know, and like I said, that's not just, that's not just something that look like users and customers want. That's what we all want. And I think it's human nature.

It's that, that experience of, uh, that's the experience of marginal utility. I mean, this is just the thing that we, that how we assign value to something. If it, if it, if it introduces a novel experience to our life or it makes things more convenient in some way, but, but that trade-off there's like this fundamental paradox as there is so often, it's just, it's just almost baked into realities.

There's this fundamental paradox where you have an, where a novel experience means more friction, you know, because it's, it's a new thing that you haven't, that you haven't encountered before. And there's, there's a spin up period, a warmup period where you have to get used to this new thing, like whatever this thing is and get some sort of adaptation into your life of to make it fit. And there's so many examples of this. Like, I mean, video podcasting is a perfect example.

There, there is this new novel thing, this HLS video in, in, in the app thing. But man, is it a, that's some friction right there. It's, it's hard to get that up and running. And like, when you think about things like Windows 8, I mean, there's completely a new novel experience, but man, was there a ton of friction. Because I think the truth probably of all this stuff, it probably falls somewhere in the middle as it usually does.

Like these new, new features, if they're not too disruptive and frictiony, they touch that desire for novelty. You know, and having a standard, like an open standard at that point is not even really like, you don't think about it. It's, it's not even a consideration, but like, so you always, there's always this weird trade -off where, and I think that's, that's probably podcasting is always existing right there in that weird area.

So like in your, in your article, when you introduced, you know, you're like, Hey, why don't we use, you know, why don't we use schema.org snippets? Why don't we use that for discovery? I think you're just, this, the sense I get is that you're embracing that this is going to, there's going to be a friction that's going to be encountered, but it's also a way that can move things forward.

If we just sort of ignore that part and do it, like you said, you did with, you know, with, with your product, we just move forward and act like everybody's already doing it. Let's just build in, build it with our head down almost. Yeah. I think in general, there's not one right answer. That's why there's not only a single email client out there. That's why there's not only a single task management, you know, to-do list app.

Everybody has a different theory of the case and everybody's partially right because everyone's brains are different and are more suited towards one UX or another UX. And this, everybody's just trying to build something that actually feels right to And this is what is so exciting to me. As a complete user, dangerous in every way, I am building the things I want. I don't need your Excel spreadsheet. I don't need Libra office. I just need to be able to read my donation sheet. So I built it myself.

Now this is, this is the revolution if you ask me. Yeah. I think like the live item tag is something that works, you know, for the shows that care about it and they don't need for it to be universally adopted. They just need a sustainable amount of audience that they find it fulfilling. Right? Yeah. And then, and in, in a, in that world that you described, you always have the option for something to later take off and become more broadly adopted.

You have, you have this, I think maybe that's, you know, maybe that's the thing that we haven't really understood about what's been, what's gone on over maybe the last few years is that, and I think AI, that whole AI stuff just kind of really threw gas on this fire, but it was already burning. Is this idea that scale and massive adoption is just not as important as it used to be?

Amen. Like, you know, and, and, and it's, you can have, you can have a feature or something that is really only used by a small subset of people. And then later it, it can just exist. And it has, I mean, look at Nostra. I mean, there's what, 10,000 people on Nostra, maybe, I don't know. It's not very many active people that are on it, but that thing just keeps on ticking. It just keeps on going.

And because the people who are over there and are, and are like locked in and engaged with it, they just, they just like it and want to be there at this point. Right. I don't think it's any more complicated than that. You know? Yeah. I wrote a post at some point when people were sort of talking about like the lightning address versus, you know, putting the node right in the value tag, things like that. And, you know, seeing the donations fall off.

I think there is just some amount of confusion about like, okay, what is the, who are the constituents that are in your, you know, your early adopter group? Are they all people who love living at the bleeding edge? There's some amount of people that just love getting in the door early. They love just being first. I like claiming my username on brand new social media sites. It doesn't mean I'm going to become a heavy adopter of that platform, but I just like being in the door first. Right.

And as a runway runs out and you realize, oh, this thing isn't taking off. There's not hockey stick velocity here. I thought there would be, but there's not, you know what, I'm just going to Irish exit and say, say goodbye. And you see some people drift away from the community and you thought they were on board with you because they were also like an innovator in the very, like, you know, far end of the bell curve. But they're like, no, I was here expecting this party would get bigger.

And if the party's not going to get bigger, I'm going to go put my efforts elsewhere. So sometimes that 10,000 is all 10 ,000 that are happy to just be the 10,000. It's, it's your secret club. But sometimes you need to realize, oh, some amount of people here were like waiting for the big acts to show up and there's no headliner. Interesting. That, wow. That gives me a lot to think about. That description is, is so true in so many ways. What does the term Irish exit mean?

That just means like leaving without saying goodbye. Like they don't necessarily make a big, big to do of it. You know, they don't say goodbye to the host. They just disappear quietly and say, oh, when did, when did Nathan leave? Okay. I guess. Podcast. So the, the re let's go ahead.

Before we talk about your article thing, I want to, the reason I asked you here is to get your thoughts on, on this, the, the styling stuff that we talked about recently that we've talked about recently, specifically around the publisher page, but also just in asset, asset delivery in general.

And you, you really, uh, designed the podcast images, uh, podcast image tag to, to sort of fit this, this idea of, um, allowing a tag to specify the format of a thing so that, uh, so that you can deliver assets other than just, you know, standard stuff. What I guess my general question is, I just think I want to push this forward because I have a need for it with the product that we build.

And I just feel like there's such a huge opportunity here for publisher, like a not publisher, but platforms to design their own spec and then have it delivered through a tag like this. From a design standpoint, you're, you're just, you're an amazing designer. Like, what do you, what do you see as the perfect, um, what do you see as the perfect, uh, delivery mechanism to give you all the stuff you need as a designer to have this sort of brand kit experience from the creator?

Yeah. I think, you know, if you're the designer slash developer of your own user experience, like you are responsible to your users, right? And so you have to say, all right, uh, if I had all the assets I absolutely wanted, uh, you know, here's the, if I had the perfect assets, here's what I would design exactly. But now I also have to handle all these edge cases.

And I'm also taking on the support burden of, all right, if I don't get one or more of these assets, uh, what's the fallback scenario? And is that fallback scenario something that I would be proud to show to people? And is that going to be the experience? Actually, it's, I'm going to call it the fallback, but is it the experience that actually 99% of my, uh, my listeners will, will get?

And so you have to say like, oh yeah, am I comfortable shipping that as my, really my default experience and everybody else, you know, and a small, small number of people get a like progressive enhanced version. What am I willing to do there? So like I launched episodes FM with, all right, I'll do background color pulled, you know, from the dom, the dominant color of the artwork. And then I will set the text color to black or white, depending on what is the more accessible contrasting color.

But they don't get like the text as the secondary dominant color of the artwork. Like I'm not letting, you know, I'm not going to listen for some tag for the podcaster to provide a whole little, you know, color, color palette and fully inherit all of that because I care about my listener's experience more than I care about the podcaster's opinions on like, oh, I know I really like this, uh, like middle gray on this soft gray background. I'm like, that's not accessible.

I'm not going to respect your, your style guide over the accessibility that I care about for my own users. I, I want to, I take pride in the experience I'm delivering. And I, I think I just fundamentally don't think that podcasters get to dictate that to apps.

And I think some of my tags, uh, have confused people around that because they may be disagree with that premise where podcasters really get to provide content and every podcast app developer on the sun has their own opinion of the good UX and they can use that content. And, you know, there's the people who are thinking that like transcripts themselves are, uh, you know, altering the content and things like that, but it won't get into that.

But I think, isn't it true that, uh, at least I think that's what I'm seeing is when a podcast app has additional features that you pay for premium edition, isn't that kind of all the extra stuff that people want? Like if only you did this, if only you did that, if only you could do this, is it, or am I mistaken? Is that, I mean, and I really don't know. I mean, because we have a lot of podcast app developers. I'm just curious, like where, what are you putting the premium on?

Is it stuff that if it's resource intensive, I get it. But is it also just edge cases that we, that we throw in there? I think it ends up being what they can get away with. Right. I think, um, you know, uh, Overcast has had like their smart speed feature and that was initially a paywalled thing. And as time went on, that became a free feature because Marco didn't want to, you know, to have the, the normal experience, um, smart speed and voice boost, both of them.

Um, but that was our initially paywalled and then eventually he made it free and it's just what's table stakes among your competition. So, you know, I think anybody who is putting anything behind their premium paywall is trying to make sure that their project is sustainable. Um, and I don't begrudge them that. Um, so they can put normal, you know, Hey, I'll put the sleep timer behind the paywall. Sure. Whatever you want.

Um, and I think, you know, developers may be CEO of like, Oh no, that would be hard to write. Yeah. I can see why that's behind the paywall. Oh, that's resource intensive, but really customers are absolutely willing to pay for, you know, to support your project and whatever sort of fig leaf you put over it of like, yeah, I'll put this behind the paywall just because enough users who care enough about it are willing to pay for it.

Okay. Yeah. I think I remember it, uh, when I was working at Spotify, um, I was, you know, talking with the team that actually cares about the podcast listener experience and was talking about, you know, features that are available in other apps that were lacking in Spotify. And, you know, I'm just in some public channel on Slack and somebody else who's from the super premium team said like, Oh, that would be a great thing for the super premium bundle.

I'm like, it's free in literally every other podcast app. And they're like, yeah, but we could put it in our $20 a month tier. I'm like, or we could give it away for free. I don't know why you think that this is going to be a differentiator that people will pay for. Yeah. Podcast artwork, 20 bucks a month.

Yeah. I just, I wonder about, um, it's interesting because you, what you're saying really, I think lines up with what, um, Brendan from pod page was saying as well, there is this synthesis that you have to achieve between what the creator is, what the creator is presenting to the world, because it's not just the podcast, it's also the art, um, and their brand to a certain degree.

But then there's also like, you can't just take, you can't just take it because so many times those, those creators, you can't just take it as is all the time because the creators, they, they, they F it up. You know, they just, they, they make a really bad choice. Do they? Yes. You know, they make really bad choices. So you have to like, you have to massage this thing you're given into a thing that you can present to your customers that makes sense. Um, you know, that, yeah, go ahead.

If you look at Apple's, uh, specs for all their additional images, they actually request lay layered PSD files, and I'm a hundred percent sure that they go in there and tweak things, uh, to their heart's content before actually pushing it into the, you know, CMS or whatever. Okay. That's it. So, okay. So in light of that, is like, maybe I should ask it this way. Do we already have what a sufficient set of tags that we can deliver these things? Do we need anything else? I think we're sufficient.

Um, we need the booking tag. We need the booking tag. Well, yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, that, that, that, but for, for style guide, you know, for the equivalent of like a style guide, style guide or a theme color, I think it will come down to, all right, is if we were to add one more tag for the, all the shows that don't have it, they're going to get some fallback experience. Who is going to be blamed for how poor that fallback experiences? Is it going to be the podcaster or the app developer?

If a show is missing its primary image, I don't even think Apple like lets it into the directory. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Um, and so you don't blame Apple for that. You blame the feed for not knowing what the bare minimum is. And I just don't think any new tag can, uh, any developer like feels like the burden wouldn't be on them to handle the fallback thing. They wouldn't just be able to say the podcast is not me. And they're like, no, this is your UX. You own it.

You own, you know, the visitors are coming to your website or your app. You need to handle, you know, that the very dominant edge case of nobody's supporting this brand new tag that was invented two months ago. So in the case of like a publisher page, which is pretty net new anybody, you know, you can build your own hosted Godcaster publisher pages with or without a tag in the feed.

And you could make it required for your, to even publish the, the, the fee, the publisher feed in the first place to actually fill in all these values on some, you know, webpage. Uh, but it doesn't necessarily mean that anybody else is going to launch publisher page support that uses all those values if they can't build a good fallback experience as well.

Yeah. I was thinking about like, I guess in my mind, I just see this, this, I have this vision of, of, of, of, uh, of a way that somebody can specify that, uh, let's say pod news weekly review could specify all these different assets. And then whether it shows up in true fans or, uh, Castamatic or Apple podcasts that, that all the, the look and feel is generally the same. They have now, I mean, each app is going to have its own flair and its own design.

You know, that's not going to change, but that, but that your, your brand is right for the, for the brands that truly care, like, you know, that actually have a team of people working or, or at least one really good designer that spent a lot of time trying to get these things right. Then that they could deliver to the app, something that would let the app like faithfully represent what the creator was trying to do. I know that, I know that's, I know that's probably not.

You have, you have so, so much faith, more than a mustard seed, David, more than a mustard seed. Yes. Okay. Yeah. You're going to get five. I think to some extent that's interfering with, um, the relationship between the app developer and their consumer base, their user base, their whatever, you know, keyword you want to call everybody who uses a given app. Is it though? Because we have the, like, because the, the, like the episode artwork is essentially that contractor already.

This just extends it a little further. But who receives the support requests? Yeah. Yeah, no, I get you. Like, who has the support burden? I get you. I think if the podcast wants a fully branded experience, buildyourown.com. Like, there's, there's nothing stopping any podcast from building the perfect UX. I know several design podcasts that they're, they have some very bespoke UX exactly for their thing.

I was, I was listening to a designer focus show that was publishing on SoundCloud, but years ago supported transcripts that jumped the player. Like you could tap the keyword and jump the player forward and back. It's always been possible if you own the listener experience, but if you don't own the listener experience, you're, you know, you're shouting through, you know, two cans over a wire to try to communicate the experience you want those listeners to get.

But that's not even really up to you because the, the app developer has their own theory of what makes the best listener experience. I feel like we, I feel like we just talking from the Godcaster standpoint, and I think, and I think this is true for other podcast products too. I feel like we also just, we also get a lot of support requests that are coming from just simply the podcaster, like the podcaster not putting the right kind of image and that kind of thing in there.

You know, it's, I feel like it kind of cuts both, it cuts both ways a little bit. It's like, well, the podcaster is telling you, Hey, I wish my podcast looked better on your platform. And then you have the listener saying, Hey, this doesn't look right. And it's really, it's like both you're in the middle and both sides have a problem with something.

And I think I'm probably just being naive and thinking that if we had better specs, that it would be that all that would smooth itself out, which it probably won't. Yeah. I think it's just down to, there's not one universal right answer of what the best listener experience is. And everybody is, it's essentially, you know, the marketplace of ideas in the early App Store days, you know, pull to refresh was not, you know, ever present across every feed-based thing.

And then, you know, Tweedy discovered that and then everybody else decided to get on board and follow that UX, right? Yeah. Okay. So your blog post touched on a thing, the podcast missing link. It touched, it touched on this, this thing that, that I had thought about a while back, which was the, the, the, the reason why there is no sort of like Google for podcasts where you can find, because there's no, there's no good source of SEO backlink like type material from one show to another.

If nobody's, if there's nothing to rank. Yeah. And so you, you kind of flesh that out into some real thoughts. Do you want to like generalize that? Yeah. I think podcasting has not actually faced the same evolutionary press pressure as the web. So that's why I'm calling it the missing link.

And why the graphic was that the evolutionary March, the like, there's no search engines, there's no social feeds, very little algorithmic type things that force the content to adapt to, you know, find, you know, to, to match with whatever the algorithm is prioritizing, whether length or punchiness or how many people, you know, do three or three minutes of pre-rolls and don't expect their audience is going to click away, right? Because it's not a YouTube video.

It's not something that exists in these other environments. So I think, you know, this in some way ties back to the YouTube conversation about, oh, why are these podcasts doing poorly on YouTube? Why aren't they seeing the numbers that they see elsewhere? It's like, well, because the, you know, it's not evolutionarily fit for the environment. It has not evolved under the same pressures.

It's, it's had the stability of just being subscribed once and Apple podcasts will keep auto downloading it forevermore, you know, up until relatively recently. Right. And so I was just sort of saying like, all right, if it's basically, if you treat podcasting like it's not the web, it has its own separate browsers, shows, our websites, episodes or articles, why don't we have links between things?

And some of this was really inspired by the Apple timed link feature where they're supporting timed links for books and TV shows and movies into Apple owned apps. Not, you know, if an overcast link is in the show notes, they're not surfacing that in the same way. And I said, okay, what's the open version of this? And I think there's, there's ways into Apple's systems. I, I think I understand a little bit. I can release something with pod link that will work with Apple's time links at some point.

But I was really just saying like, you know, it's really just this sort of the shame that we have not really supported podcast episode sharing or even podcast show level sharing inside our own little siloed ecosystem. We have not deep into people's relationship with the entire podcasting community as well as we could have over the years. Because I think, you know, hey, we don't have this fundamental link that keeps you inside the podcast app.

And every decentralized ecosystem sort of has this problem. But a bunch of the other ones that, you know, grew up after the age of Twitter realized, you know, it's really nice being able to click a link inside this thing and we're just staying inside our app or we're staying on platform. You know, any, any news article out on the web can put a bunch of share buttons on next to their article to try to get some viral attention in these feeds.

But the Mastodon one is, you know, all right, like here's three steps. I know they recently announced some things to simplify that UX. So at the end of the day, it's really about, okay, what could we do to improve linking between shows so that this ecosystem could maybe mature a little bit in terms of deepening people's interest in other shows? I mean, Podlink sort of fills this niche, but not everybody knows Podlink and it's, you know, a huge burden to ask everybody to, all right, go.

I know you just want to link to this show that you have right here, but you don't want to share your pocketcast link because, you know, you're going to have to feel the support burden of half your listeners or half the people who click on it, not really being able to do anything with it. So they just end up saying, find it wherever you download your podcasts. And that may be, that call may be a radical statement according to Anil Dash.

And I think so I've come around to thinking that it actually is something important for us that we can still say something like that. It's huge. Yeah. And so I was like, all right, well, how do we solve this? And so I think the schema tag would allow basically if anybody links to Podnews or Podlink or Apple or Spotify or anything in a show note, that that app could give that listener the option to just open that link right inside the app.

So how, so this would start by being able to, this will start by maybe some, an app or multiple apps crawling through, maybe the podcast index can do this as well, like crawling through show notes, links, any, any link it can find in the, in the RSS feed and trying and then trying to do a deeper discovery on what, on this, the content of that link, trying to find an RSS feed that may, that may be embedded in there in the alternate or trying to find the JSON-LD metadata tags, that kind of thing.

Is that kind of how you envision that working? Yeah. And there are ways you can, Cloudflare recently announced that they were doing the, you can pass an accept header asking for text slash markdown, and they'll deliver the whole site just as markdown. There's similar mechanisms for just saying pass like an accept profile schema.org header, and I'll just return the JSON.

So if websites really wanted to get on board with this more than just, oh, we put the schema in there because it helps our SEO, they could. And the, the apps could make, you know, special requests specifically for this data against a given link. So is that, is the markdown accept header, is that to be more agent, like you, AI agent friendly, I guess? Yeah, yeah.

They're, they're pushing that so that models don't have to tokenize, you know, you know, multi -megabyte pages when instead they just want like the text content of something. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Well, I mean, it would be an interesting, so if nothing else, as a start, to me, it would be interesting just to do a crawl of all that content. God knows how long it would take.

It may take many days to do all that crawling, but it would be an interesting experiment just to find out how much of those, how many of those metadata tags of what formats actually exist. For sure. You know, because I think that's a question that none of us can answer. Is it, is it? Yeah. And I think I have a lot of the, the data that would be interesting to actually like maybe provide a backfill API.

Like if I know, you know, what, from what I know about all these various platforms, if some of these links aren't just, you know, the podcasterzone.com, how can I actually provide the context that actually isn't on that web page as an API? So in the same way that there was the shim for the value tag providing some endpoint that says like, yeah, you could go crawl it yourself and it may not be there, but if it's not there, I'm gonna maybe have an alternate value.

I mean, have you done any of that kind of crawling at all? Yeah. Yeah. I've done it. I've done a bit of that work, but this came up a little bit more suddenly. So I was like, oh, you know what? I'll just, I'll just tease what I think could be built here. Oh, okay. All right. So you have, you have a, you have more than just an idea. You have actual code.

Yeah. Yeah. This is in general, I'm you know, I'm primarily a designer, so I'm not actually somebody who ends up caching a bunch of things in databases and saying like, yeah, I'm building my own database of all these things, but I am building a, you know, sort of like a stateless version that would, you know, go make that request on your behalf, but then use the information that I have collected over over my time running Podlink to figure out, you know, go hit other API endpoints

or things like that to figure out if this episode actually is a podcast episode in some way. Watch out when you start building something, you're going to end up on deathbyclaw.com. I visited that for Podlink and what is its cutting summary? A podcast link aggregator so simple it couldn't even load its own homepage without Vercel's security checkpoint asking if you're a bot. Ironic since it replaced the entire product. But it totally missed, it totally missed the undefined in the title.

Well, I mean, you just visit the homepage. You don't run into that issue, but yeah. Yeah, that's, that's to me, to me, every, every product that you ever build, it must say undefined in the, in the tab of the, that's how I know you built it. No, I think this, it's an, it's an interesting idea and I think that, I feel like probably some of the comments you got on there are also right, that in some ways this did protect podcasting from becoming just like a junk drawer, you know, SEO junk drawer.

But that doesn't mean that it's, that doesn't mean that it's not useful. You know, cause the, the thing about Google and that I've thought about for a long time is that they, it's not just that they built a better search engine. Yes. Initially, initially the ideas of page rank and backlink ranking, yes, that was the better mousetrap, but it did, that's not, that's not why they became what they are, what they did later.

You know, that, to me, the primary reason they became the dominant force in search that they did, because everybody could have taken that approach, was they did, rapidly they came out with the webmaster tools and what they ended up doing was getting people to go in and give them the metadata for their site, for their website structure. And those became signals as well. They, they got, they got the actual producers of the websites themselves to get involved in the process.

So they just ended up with more initially, at least they ended up with so much more metadata about a site than anybody else had. And I think that also had a lot to do with their dominance. And so those, like what I'm saying is the metadata, just the existence of it has the chance to become a very strong signal that somebody cares, you know, and if somebody cares, then it's probably at least partially a signal of the quality of the content. I don't know if any of that made sense, but.

Yeah, no, I think, I think the stability angle, like I absolutely agree with some of the comments I got basically saying like, yeah, it protected it. It was, it's, it was its own little Galapagos islands of isolated development where podcasting could flourish without facing some of the, you know, JavaScript ad ecosystem pressures of the rest of the web.

And, you know, we can be grateful to people like Apple for holding firm on, you know, supporting this product at all and not bowing out, you know, whenever the rest of their business, you know, ballooned massively and said, yeah, podcasting, that was a fun side project. We're going to deprecate that. And there's enough third-party apps out there.

Like their presence stopped a bunch of VC money from coming in, you know, taking it over and turning it into a complete, you know, ad infested, you know, user experience where they say like, well, really, you know, only if you're paying $20 a month at minimum, you know, will anybody have a, as pleasant of user experiences they can have today.

Yeah. I feel like that just, that's a whole different discussion that I don't really, but at least the ad part of, of what podcast that's becoming bad on its own. You're, you know, regardless of what, of, of whether of the discoverability issue, the ad load in the ad, my wife sent me a podcast the other day and gosh, man, I don't listen to podcasts with, with many dynamic, with dynamic ads and I'm very often, it's pretty rare.

And every time I do, it is such a jarring experience and it's the same ad four or five times. This was an, this was a podcast about, uh, like Jeffrey Epstein. And it was like about, they were talking about his victims and all this kind of stuff. And then out of nowhere, I wish I had clipped it. It was like this crunching sound. And then a woman crying. I was like, what the hell am I listening to? What? It was so jarring and frankly kind of upsetting.

And then it was like, it was an ad for like a, some kind of for like snack chips. What are we guys, what are we doing here? This, this is just, yeah, it's horrible. So I don't think at this point it's going to be anything to do with podcast discovery metadata that makes or breaks whether podcasting becomes ad infested garbage. I think that's happening well enough on its own, you know? Oh, for sure.

Yeah. All right, Dave, shall we thank a few people since we are, I gotta get you back to the day job on time. Yeah, sure. Yeah, let's do it. Uh, I have nothing because I still haven't even had time to open up a channel. Oh, okay. In fact, I tried to open a channel, but the, um, you know, with, with several different wallets, I was trying to connect to our node with, um, uh, what is it? Uh, what's the connect? Um, no, no, no. You're supposed to be able to just scan a QR code.

It kept telling me macaroon invalid, macaroon invalid. I'm like, ah. So, you know, I tried going in setting up, uh, cause I know how to open channels with other programs. Oh no, no, no. That node is so humongous. Everything crashes. Every helper apps like, nah, you're too big. I can't do anything. Some of this lightning stuff is really still kind of buggy. So, um, let me see maybe if I'm lucky, let me just see.

Uh, I might be able to, let me just see if I can get the, um, maybe I can get it from run runway. Let me see. Can you, otherwise, can you, can you run your, your bot? Yeah, I've got stuff. I extracted a bunch of stuff out of, uh, I've got some software now that'll take everything out of the boost, like the messages and stuff that we get from the Albi hub. Uh, let me see if I can, cause here's what I have. I have, I got a lot of manual. I got, let me see. This is odd. Oh, here we go.

Oh, actually kind of worked, I guess. That's strange. Why is it? So I got three, three, three, three from Hay Citizen with Castamatic. Okay. And he says, hello, fellow fellow computer scientists. If I want to use pod ping.alpha to replay pod pings from its archive.db for my app, should I just read from the DB directly or should I change something in pod ping.alpha's code? Read that again, please. Okay. I was not expecting a technical question.

Right. If I want to use pod ping.alpha to replay pod pings from its archive.db for my app, should I just read from the DB directly or should I change something in pod ping.alpha's code? Well, I'm not clear on if he's talking about he's archiving or he's getting the archive from another node.

So the way it works is the way it works is you, if you start the pod ping gossip listener, but with an environment variable enable, enable catch up equals true, then your listener is going to go pull the rest of the swarm and find a peer that has archiving enabled and it will grab all the stuff you missed. And the assumption is that when you're doing this, that you're piping this output, this standard out output to some other process. So you're going to get them.

I mean, you're not, I mean, you, you could be storing them too if you had archiving enabled. Right, right, right, right. And so, so at that point you could go do whatever you want. I mean, but you know, you can get, you can hit, if you're archiving them to have them and then you want to just access, access them out of your database. Yeah, that's fine. I mean, yeah, that's fine. You can use that. See, but, but that's not going to be the way this goes in the future.

And the, what the, the goal we're going to hit is we're going to be creating a, is that the listener will open up a socket that you can hook into and you can just read it out. You can read it out and from some other app. So there will be a way to pump this stuff out into, into a different place programmatically rather than just necessarily like screen scraping the standard output. I hope that answers the question caller. I hope that helps caller.

Caller 1000. So I'm, I'm, I'm using the, I'm using the runway from podnews.net. I see that. That's, I don't know if we got any more boosts. I got manual payment from Seth colon. I agree. All the best, Martin. Another manual payment. Great conversations. I don't know where these are coming from. And then I hit the, Oh wait, here's a Chris, you know, using Castamatic. Okay, here we go. Huge. More than 20 different wallets can now be connected to Castamatic by Nostra Wallet Connect.

Pick whatever works best for you. iOS wallet apps, Android apps, PWAs, command line wallets, non-custodial options, custodial options, most requiring zero sign up. There you go. And then I have a, this is a super comment using the newly refactored TrueFans API, which supports both keysend and LN address. Test super comment 555. So there's all kinds of stuff in here. I am sure I'm missing something, but that's what I got. Cause now I hit the delimiter of comics for blogger.

I have so many windows open. I'm going to try and make sense of this. Wait, are you using Linux again? Are you still on a windows windows? No, I'm on Linux. Yeah, this is a, yeah, I'm on Linux. Are you using your Hyperland? No, no, I'm, I'm just still on Ubuntu on this machine, on this machine. Wait until you start using Hyperland. You're going to love it so much. Coming soon. Yeah. Cause it's, it's for OCD guys like you and me. Yeah. Window fiddlers. Yes. We got some, we got PayPal's.

Let me see here. We've got Michael Goggin, $5. Thank you, Michael. Jorge Hernandez, $5. Cohen Glotzfog, $5. Christopher Reamer, $10. James Sullivan, $10. John's Creek Studios, $5. Thank you. John's Creek Studios. Dreb Scott, $15. Very nice. Dreb in the boardroom earlier said he also has been having sleep issues. Ah, boost, boost, boost. It happens. Chris Bernardik, $5. Michael Kimmerer, $5.33. And that's our monthlies. Okay. Thank you monthlies. We do have some boosts.

Let me do, let me try to do this spreadsheet first. I hate this. I'm going to have to use your spreadsheet. I'm going to put it on the GitHub. I'll put it on the GitHub. Oh, this is terrible. Libra office blows. Yeah. Yes. So does Excel. They all blow. You want the Adam Curry donation tracker. Yes, I do need the donation tracker. Let's see. There is, Dave, you've gotten so close to the solution in describing your security now issue.

Crowdsourced chapters are a thing on YouTube with the sponsor block extension. I pay for YouTube premium, but still always use it. If something like this were implemented in podcasting 2.0, apps incentivize the chapter making with the feeds that encourage it. And for the feeds that don't, someone will likely take care of it out of spite. That's from Jay Moon through Fountain. And this spreadsheet is so bad. I cannot even tell how much stats they sent. Wow. That's a very bad spreadsheet.

Wait, no, I'm sorry. 1422. There you go. I figured it out on the fly. Let's see. Oh, I'm getting things for stuff that is not our podcast. There it is. Oh, that's it. That's all we got. So now I have, this is, this is horrible. Okay. More work, more work needs to be doing, but at least we, that is one we would have missed though. So I feel better about this already. Circus media, 3333. Through Podverse, another productive meeting. Thanks, Adam and Dave. Circus media. Yes. Thank you.

Happy, happy, happy, happy. 2222. That's Bruce, the ugly quacking duck through podcast guru. A new body is on the list of many people. Open source that. LOL. Thanks for the episode. 73. 73s. Not sure I understand what you're talking about, Bruce, but... It doesn't matter. 73s. That's, you just said 73s. You're good to go. 5170 from Anonymous on True Fans. Thank you for episode popping a termie. Yeah, baby. We popped that termie. And a delimiter. Commissary blogger, 23,000 sets through Fountain.

He says, Howdy, Dave and Adam. Today, I want to recommend a micro podcast. Quote, The Credibility Minute is a micro podcast for consultants, coaches, and professional services providers who want to build authority online without becoming full -time content creators. End quote. Get it at stereoforest.com slash minute. Thanks to Martin Lindeskog for proposing it. Yo, CSB, the AI arch wizard. He is the AI arch wizard. I still owe him an interview. Sorry, CSB. He's getting all puffy now.

Now he's pumping, now he's hitting me up for it. I know, I know, I know. Because you're not responding to him. Well, no, because I'm just, it's been crazy. And, you know, and he doesn't understand that. And so he'd be like, Since Adam refuses to do interview with me. Delay is... Maybe Nathan can do it and pretend to be you. Delay is not denial. Just get 11 labs to CSB. Just ignore real Adam and have AI Adam. If only that were true. If only it actually worked, it will be dynamic.

Was there a 12 second delay between the question and every answer? Yeah, exactly. Is that it? That's all of our, that's everything? That is it. All right. Well, thank you all very much for supporting this value for value project. Everything that you support, support us with, go straight into the podcastindex.org bank account slash PayPal. You keep stuff in the PayPal, move it back and forth so we can pay things. And that's what we pay the bills with. That's what everything is used for that.

And that allows everybody to enjoy the API and everything else at no charge, which is part of our mission. We don't have a mission statement, but the mission statement is kind of like use it at no charge. Don't, don't, don't scrape, don't scrape. You don't bother us and we won't charge you. Exactly. Hey, Nathan, thank you so much for joining us in the boardroom today. Really appreciate you, brother. Thank you for having me. And thank you everybody. And thank you for, for writing.

That was very helpful. I'm glad that Dave invited you so we could talk about that today. Actually, you guys were talking more. I was just sitting back and relaxing. I'm like, this is interesting. I kind of like this podcast. Wait, I'm on the podcast. What am I talking about? Thank you very much, boardroom. Everybody have yourselves a great weekend. We'll be back next Friday with another board meeting of the Misfits here at Podcasting 2 .0. Go podcasting. We want ice cream.