Oh, podcasting 2.0 for October 2 2020 This is episode five we
are juggling the junkets it's nothing like alliteration junket
Hold on a second. Ladies and gentlemen, please say hello to
my co founder and friend Dave Jones here on podcasting. 2.0
Hello, Hey, you don't want to junk it is
that is that like, I guess it'd be like a trip, like a trip,
right? Like a flight or something?
Yeah, it's actually it's, it's a Hollywood term, where typically
you'd have a movie to promote and you go into a city or a
country sitting in a different country, you set up in the
hotel, and all the camera crews will have their own little room.
And they'll have five minutes. And you go in and you're an
actor or whatever. And you'll answer some kind of very
standard questions. And then you'll have a publicist who will
whisk you away to the next one is and it's and what it winds up
giving you is really canned boring interviews. And very in a
very tired actor.
This was pretty much a normal day for me. Exactly. Your views?
Yeah. Hanging out? Yeah, PR. Yeah, it
looks so glamorous. It really does. Yeah. And I used to do the
the other side of that the interviewing and the junkets and
you're never happy. He's like, You never get the guests long
enough. You know, you can never ask any, you can never build
enough of a rapport that you can ask a question that may be a
little deeper or controversial or thought provoking.
The pre canned like the pre script, where are you? Okay, you
can only ask these things. And you have that
sometimes you'll have that. But also you need for your piece,
you need to get the basic things out which everyone else is
getting the same stuff. You know, what's the movie about?
What's the book about? What was it like working with that
directory and all that kind of stuff? Okay, gotcha. So I've
been on a junket for the cause for the past. I guess week has
been a week.
It's like the the olive garden tour of Italy. Tour podcast.
Let me see. What do we have we had? Was it the international
podcast day?
Yeah, yeah.
That's the first one because I feel like there was something
else before.
There's something else too, but I think that was all it was.
Let me see. Hold on a second. Let me I have a way of looking
at this on a calendar. It should work if I just do the whole
month here. Gosh, I can never get that to work.
Are you a calendar guy? I mean, do you like live and die by your
calendar? No,
no. Well, I know I only have you know, my my junket stuff in
there. That's why I'm trying to look let's see, I had
international podcast day. There was some Dutch stuff and some
Dutch stuff. Okay, well, Hotep Jesus last Friday, that's what
it is that came after right that came after. After we did episode
four of podcasting. 2.0.
I feel dumb. I didn't know. I had never heard of Hotep. Jay,
everybody seems like they know exactly what Hotep Jesus is best
never even heard of it.
Well, Rogan mentioned or I think that he might have had Hotep on
for a second or mentioned him I can't remember exactly. And it's
another version of a DDoS. You know, it's an interesting group.
But he's, he's deep into into crypto just an interesting guy.
He's a, and I liked that I liked I liked speaking with
interesting people. And I guess my point I'm going to bring this
up is I have an opportunity here to make sure I don't stumble on
something that happened the last time we when we the first time
we booted up podcasting. When and I'm positioning myself as
the person to get the word out and to try and get developers in
and try to basically promote the whole concept. It's the cheapest
way to do it is to abuse me for that. What sometimes happens is,
I mess up I say something wrong. I talk about one project more
than the other. So for instance, I felt really bad on
international podcast day when the guys who were doing the show
Todd and Mike who also were on the on podcast, index dot
social, they brought up pod friend and he of course, I'm
lyrical about pod friend and then I couldn't remember cast
coverage. It couldn't get number the name like cast coverage.com.
And you know, and it's disappointing. It's
disappointing for someone who's poured their heart into it, you
know, I could, I'd love to talk about pod news and everything.
There's so many different things that are taking place browser or
browser, it just so much stuff. And so I'm trying to promote it
while also trying to stay interesting. And you know, it's
just it's Sometimes it's just hard. But I thought we got some
great exposure international podcast day got a lot of
incoming emails from people who are interested in. And of
course, I send as many of them as I can over to the, to the
social. And it's quite a few people. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I
think we have like 110 115 people now who are on, at least
registered on the system. Yeah, that's
great. There's a lot of meaning there's a lot of good
discussions going on that are not that are not just about the
index itself. I mean, there's great discussions about future
RSS, RSS namespaces. And we know work being done on other
people's collections of feeds and finish like in and then just
general, like, like James Cridland, he pops in here since
he so he's like, you know, 12, he's, he's 12 hours out of
phase, right? Yeah, he pops in and just like throws a couple of
news bombs in there. And you don't hear about him for the
rest of the year for the rest of the day. Everybody's like,
asleep. Yeah, he's gone to sleep.
Yeah, there's always something cool going on there. Yeah,
there really is. And you're right. It's good thought. And,
gosh, I love Mastodon so much, because it really, it doesn't
have that all of these things could turn into religious
arguments, you know, about technologies, etc. And I really
think that it's this format, and not the threaded format. So you
could when, and I've just, I just recall from my own
experience with collaborative projects like this, when it's
really threaded, like a bulletin board style, it can get pretty
whacked, you know, and then you really fall into a long
discussion thread and you miss all this other stuff. And then
this is much more Twitter style, but without the algo. So the
stuff doesn't, you know, you start you come in like, okay,
oh, here's new stuff. I scroll down. Oh, I saw that already.
I'm done with that column. Okay. There's nothing else to do. It's
like, it's almost
like the neat. It's like the river style. It is reader's
inbox. Yeah. And I think that's very, very beneficial to us,
then we missed off to of course, that yeah, that's always the
problem. Well, but my experience is the stuff that needs to float
back up does eventually.
Yeah, let's say this morning, I was like, Okay, let's, let's
roll this out. And you're in for the beta, the beta site, and you
were like, Oh, I had some stuff that did need fix before we do
that. So I had to scroll back down, like, Oh, I missed this
entire thing from you. So you missed up, but that's fine. You
go back in the like you said, a float to the top, you can go
back and find it.
Exactly, exactly. And now Trent, rightly says, Okay, can you put
this into the GitHub now I'm like, Oh, shit, I gotta figure
out how to do that. And I was like, Oh, my, what am I doing
here?
threw something out there. He's like, can you put it on a
Jabberwocky? or some crap? Like, yeah, some word I've never even
heard. Like,
I don't know what to do either. But I wouldn't have
clicked on it. I'm like, this. This is like four columns of
blank that I don't understand.
My my go to is Hey, Dave, can you put that up there in the
Jabberwocky for me? Like, that'll be easy. Damn. Anyway,
so international podcast, I thought that was a good
appearance. And of course, I had ringers because it had you know,
Todd and Mike and, and are involved in the project. So
yeah, listen to it. That's a great show. Yeah, I
thought I thought I thought they did a good job. And I didn't
have much time to see all of it. Because I had a dinner that
night and then I went to I might as well just throw this out
there. Then I got had received an invitation from Wheatstone
group, and there's a mining company out there right in the
middle between College Station, which were Texas a&m is and and
Austin, and they've got Houston. Not far. But anyway,
otherwise known as the the third level of hell.
Yes. Oh, yeah.
It's about 1000 degrees. Yeah, so
now it's still nice weather or it's becoming nice weather here.
But they're right. At the switch point of the Texas grid. We have
our own grid between East and West Texas. And if I understood
it, right, I think they said they had 750 megawatts coming
out of the station which is just a huge pipe, but they're running
60,000 bitmain mining machines and it was unbelievable to see
and these these guys were further like crypto cowboys out
there in the desert. Really, really interesting. And yeah,
I had a bit main I had a bit main unit it was an ant, ant
minor, gosh, like an S nine or s eight some some mom is a few
years ago when you could actually you know when you can
actually do it on a small scale and mind some stuff and actually
make some money and make a little bit of profit. And but
then you know, I had to I had two of those. And I had mine
some stuff, some bitcoin on my CPU. And then before when that
was feasible, and it was it outgrew that Then I bought like
a video card. I did the normal progression regression, using my
profits from the previous stuff to buy new hardware. Right. So
then I bought the hand miners, the bitmain AntMiner. And about
two of those units like by the time that those pay themselves
back and I got some profit, I was like, You know what this is
this?
Is exponent exponential the growth out Yeah. Now, so. So you
also know then that it's all about your power management. Yo,
yeah, totally those things pump out some sear. Yeah. So they
would just show me how some of that works and how they can turn
machines on and off. But the thing that tripped me out. Yeah,
and they have L nines. And I think a couple M threes like
20,000 M threes, which is the next level for anyone who knows
what that means. But these are, you know, specific machines that
just that's what they do is mine mine crypto. But the way they
you think they have a data center. But nothing could be
further from the truth. They've come up with this gene ingenious
concept, where they just have a big shed, I mean, it's it was it
was open, big, big open door on the side, because they're moving
stuff in and out. And they have two walls parallel to each
other, of just nothing but these bitmain machines shoved in
against the wall with the machines, it has a fan on the
back one of those kind of standard big square fans, that
is pushed through a hole in the wall. And so in between those
two walls, and they've covered the sides, you basically have
now a big funnel, where all the hot air from these machines is
blowing, blowing in and it blows up and the roof is open. And all
the heat dissipates through the roof.
What the sounds like what they did is they created a gigantic
tower PC case. Yes,
yes, that's exactly what it is. And we went in the middle, you
know, the open up this door, the pressure difference? He said no,
don't don't worry when you go in and equalize them. Like I'm
either going into the furnace, and I'm gonna die and how it
goes. That's awesome. And yeah, it was warm in there, of course,
but just ingenious, really, really fun to see what they were
doing. That's cool. Anyway, so I just thought I'd throw that out
there. We hadn't actually talked about it.
You sent you sent, you sent me a message. You're like, you know,
this, this thing's crazy. I gotta tell you about it. Like
that. Yeah, that whole idea of trying to manage that much. But
the crazy thing about crypto now, let's see, that's like the
only way you can make money. I mean, you can't, you can't mind
on anything like a small scale. And now it's just not, it's just
not feasible. There's too much horsepower out there.
Yeah, all these these guys definitely have quite the
operation. There's a lot going on in Austin. So I'd like
connecting that community because I have a feeling we'll
be interacting with them one way or the other someday. Speaking
of which, and I just finished an interview today with Max Keiser
for his orange pill podcast with him and Stacy together. And it
was a ruse, mainly about podcast index and the philosophy behind
it. And you know, just where we're going, what the different
mission statements are. And that's really, they really
wanted me on because of that. And we also talked about my
controversial statements about Bitcoin on the Joe Rogan show.
That was controversial and didn't follow the religious.
Exactly,
exactly. But I also said, I said, Hey, you know what? I'm
not butthurt by it, I first of all, I find it incredibly
entertaining. I like seeing that people give a shit about
something, you know, the reasons why is okay, whatever. But
there's a tension now. And I'm learning and I'm, I really like
it. And I don't know, I think it takes guys like us to come in
and say, Hey, why don't we do something this way. And so I
mean, I've got all kinds of incoming emails from people have
a lot of different ideas.
There's a lot of value to be had from anybody who's on the
outside of something to come in and say, and just ask a simple
sort of simplistic questions. Because, yeah, you know, of
that, because a lot of times that you get so focused, I found
myself doing this too, you know, you're writing code, you're
trying to get this stuff to work, and, or you're involved in
whatever, you know, whatever your project is, and then you
just kind of get in the tunnel, and you don't see what's going
on what's going on outside of your outside of your tunnel. And
then you have somebody comes in and just hey, what about so and
so, you're like, damn, I didn't think about that. You know? Yes,
it's very helpful to have somebody come in who's not who's
not married to it.
And I think that's kind of what happened with podcasting when
because the technology the enclosure in RSS that was done
two years three years before I saw the iPod that's what
happened I saw the iPod and went is not a jukebox is a radio this
is radio receivers, elite radio, little transistor radio.
Yeah, and that's those cool with digital talked about that on The
International podcast day. All right, yeah, y'all spend a lot
of time talking about just this whole idea of these receipts,
you know, just these things are basically just radios. And I
thought that was a good analogy.
And it's the right one. And well, let me just finish this
up. And then I want to get into first I wanna know how your week
was, because I've been, we haven't really caught up. So
Max, and that airs, I think, Sunday. And it was fun, because
they had a viewer question. And the viewer question was from our
very own Maj. Weinstein, match one matches. Match is on podcast
index dot social, matches the original bloated lesbian from
the pod show days, she had a show on our, on our network, and
the match is having a lot of problem with indexes with a with
a show on Google. And then we followed I mean, we've, we've
continued to follow each other on on Twitter, I think for
bogash forever. And so she naturally came over. And she's
technical. So she knows a lot of stuff. And it's also a user,
which is nice, you know, as a frustrated user with shit
doesn't want not working. Yeah. And the question was, No, and
it's valid once I just want to address our missions. Again,
what we really can add on really assure us that this index is
going to be independent, and it's not just some ploy to make
some money off with millions. And and and it's a valid
question. I want to make sure we continue to address that. I will
hang with busted. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oops, we're done for the
mission is first of all, preserving podcasting as a
platform for free speech. And we're in the middle of that
right now. I mean, that is the entire idea is to have a
functioning Mothership Core. And if we can replicate this
distributed IPFS it blockchain it, I don't care what we come up
with that takes the the single point of failure out of it. That
I mean, we are we're doing our archiving as promised. That is
by its has that has to remain in that state, otherwise, no one
will benefit and it all just fall apart. So that that promise
is there. And I think anybody can take the you know, pretty
much every bit of code that they would need to set it up and and
replicate it. Am I correct?
Yeah. Well, the core API code is not we're not done with it.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm not gonna put it up until I'm fair, but it
I mean, it'll go up all of it'll go,
please, please, I'd like you to talk about that, specifically,
because that is an important piece, but you have not put it
up on a GitHub or anything for public view, feedback, etc.
Explain your methodology.
But yeah, yeah, I mean, like, so what we did with freedom
controller and what another open sourced a few things over the
years. In addition to that, and you've run into an issue, when
you open source something very quickly, I mean, open sourcing
some piece, a significantly large code base is not a small
endeavor. You know, when, if it's large enough, certain
companies that decide to open source something, they may spend
months, with a with a team dedicated to just going through
and getting it ready to open source. Now this, obviously,
podcast index API is not to that level. But it doesn't, it
doesn't have to get very big before you run into a lot of
work to make something that's ready to open source, you have
to go through there and make sure that everything's
documented correctly. Otherwise, you're just dumping a bunch of
garbage on people. And they, I mean, nobody's gonna sit there
and run through every line of have, you know, 100,000 lines of
code and try to figure out what's going on, it has to be
documented, and commented, it also has, you have to get
through there and make sure that you didn't leave any static
passwords, or configuration parameters that may be sensitive
to your system that you're running, you gotta go through
there and really just kind of go line by line through through all
your configuration files, you gotta go, like, at least another
example would be I leave to do markers all over my code, I'll
just use JetBrains IDE. And if you just do slash slash to do,
it recognizes that as a keyword, and you can filter when you get
ready to do a commit or something like that. It'll say,
Hey, these are some outstanding to do items. So it's like,
there's those things are just kind of like scattered
throughout the code, and you gotta go, sometimes those can be
things you don't want the public to see. Yeah, hey, remember to
go do this thing because it'll, you know, have this crazy
effect, you know, and so, it's kind of a big process to go
through open sourcing a project. So I'm just not ready to do that
yet. that when I feel like it's stable enough to where I can
just sit back and let it run out on its own, without, without
having to do a lot of bug fixes and putting out fires, yeah,
then then that'll be the time that I'll say, I'll switch gears
and say, Okay, now I'm gonna go through here and go line by line
and look at everything and get it ready to go. Because that
it's not even going to be the same repository, I'll create a
new repository and begin to manually move code over to that
repository. So that it's just, it's too big of a project right
now. Right? Yeah, she can't do it.
And, again, reiterating, this is this is a community project.
Yeah. We funded out of our pocket initially. And now
immediately, I need to thank everybody who, who has helped us
you know, the mantra of value for value is time, talent,
treasure. I have I have, we need to track this because I really
want to thank people. And I got a list. Oh, thank you. Gosh, I
knew you would do it. Dave. I was afraid to ask but I'm just
I'm just to strap for it. And so let's do that right now. Let's
just thank you. thank people for the for the supporting
everything.
Yeah, I'm just gonna get through here. And I went through and
wrote everybody down. It's
their amount of hours. Well,
I'll get it all. Yeah, yeah. Good, Martin. And I'm gonna hope
I don't butcher names too bad. But Martin Mouritsen? Was that
how you would say that? Yeah, I
think that's isn't that Martin pod friend Martin pod friend?
Yeah. Gosh,
Martin gave us $100 donation I think yesterday from pod friend.
He's also on podcast index dot social. Scott. Jalbert or
Halbert? I'm not sure what the J. He gave us 50 cent double
nickels on the dollar 55 to a single donation. See, he had a
note.
My gosh, Dave, can I just make a comment? But you're a natural
podcaster. Man, you're a natural born podcast. Look at you hold
on me to get my note here
or I get the terrible room noise and everything.
Right there, brother.
Okay, Scott Jalbert. I'm sorry, Scott, if that's not your last
name. Hey, guys, I want to thank you for creating podcasts and
index.org as proponent of freedom. I believe this an
important project. As I look around to see parts of
podcasting getting picked up and privatized. I agree once that
happens and money's involved, the leverage is in place to
censure and remove perceived offenders as we have seen time
and again, like most good infrastructure, it will slowly
fade into the background. So the short term donations will fade
out, as was mentioned in the latest podcast, the only way I
see this working is some partnership maybe with players
or CD ends are used to service are you putting yourself on the
market waiting for something to swipe, swipe you with the right
partner that goes into kind of right into what you were talking
about a second ago? If you if you're doing jingles I'd love to
hear just in your cash. Okay, hold on a second. I don't know
if that's appropriate. But
I think it's actually super appropriate. Let's see. Okay,
here we go. I know a lot of people want to send blankets or
water. Just send your cash.
We're crunching on sacred territory there. Yeah. Thanks,
God. Appreciate and Larry. Hey, he says that he is, sir. Hey,
moose. Oh, yes. A moose. Yeah, yeah. Larry hasent 50 bucks. We
can read his note. He said, listening to Pa 2.0 Episode
Four. I realized, as I do not offer any dev or hosting skills,
I do have a side gig that pays me enough walk around money to
assist in this effort for at least $50 A month moving
forward.
That's really cool, man. I'd say that's it time talent treasure.
It's those three. It's that simple. And whatever it's worth
to you. Then we love that. Thank you. And I that's that's
appreciated.
It says, Am I a dev? No. Can I listen and share? Yes, yeah. We
cannot beta test and rev point nine nine or 1.0 software? Yep.
Can I listen and learn? Yes. Okay. I have been a says I have
been in infrastructure for 30 years. I understand the nerd
speak and have been director of network infrastructure for two
years now to one and a half billion dollar global retail
grocer.
Wow. That's big. Yeah.
I'm donating this financial support because as I may not
understand everything I do understand that infrastructure
is not free. I'm proud to be able to enter at the ground
level for supporting your efforts and hope someday, we
will all have our names on a placard on Mars for keeping free
speech free. Mere corporate silencing of a single voice in
the name of anti fascism or political correctness is one to
many I'm proud to be part of something so important and look
forward to seeing it mature into something far greater than any
of us can imagine. My kids are young and won't appreciate what
you're doing here until possibly well after I'm gone, but it is
well worth the investment. He says Adam, I was joking about
the grandfather bombshell email. Hope you forgive me. It's all
good. He said read it. So read it. Yeah.
That's very nice. That's very, very kind. I like that. I really
like hearing that.
See, he just had no name here. It's just email address CS
Bowden. $25. single donation. Thank you. Droid works, LLC. Do
you know what that is? No, no, no idea. Droid works. LLC has a
$20 a month subscription.
Great. Thank you. And that's that's like 10% of our, almost
of our monthly servers.
Yet long that I'm gonna name this are you gonna name the
server name the web server works LLC.
This is great. You can sponsor a server
sponsor a server with a monthly donation and a button. I mean,
like if you come in afterwards, with like, $1 more, you just get
bumped. The other guy gets the other guy gets thrown to the
curb.
I love these levels. That's great. server names.
Jonathan's stutter or Studer $15 and monthly subscription. Let's
see he, he we can we can give him an aggregator. You get
aggregator three.
Okay. You're gonna rename them?
Yeah, I'm gonna put a screenshot out.
Dave, Dave, I love it.
Jason Miller $10 single one time donation. None of these guests
and no snack can find. Terry Keller a 4.11. of subscription.
I don't. I guess it means like info. For one one. For one, one.
Yeah. Our cheapest servers is is five bucks for the beta www
server. Sorry, you don't get a server?
You just missed the server level.
Alex, Alex gates $10 month subscription. Alex, you're gonna
get aggregator aggregator too. And Aaron Renaud I know that
name. And I don't know how on how to spell the last name. r e
n n o w?
Wow. It's I don't know.
It sounds so familiar. But I don't know why. But anyway, $5
month subscription. Thank and you will, you'll get the back.
We don't have another server. So you get a backup. Okay. You get
the bigger you get the backup. That was donated in the last
couple of weeks.
Well, thank you all so much. And if anyone wants to jump in and
help, there's so many different ways to do it. API dot podcast
index.org. If you haven't signed up as a Dev, I can also sign up
no does a search for sorry, podcasts index dot social. And
we have a donate button at podcast index. Ne also on the on
the dev site, which I learned, you know, my wife Tina is a
marketing professional. And I said now Donna, would you please
choose? Yes, of course. I'm going to review this. You can't
have this go out without my approval. So nice. She's real.
She didn't she's really smart. She catches typos. like a crazy
person too.
And I'm so bad about that. Oh, yeah, me too.
Although if I'm reviewing someone else's work, it's much
easier that's that's actually the way it works. Fresh elbows.
Yeah. And and she said she said can you make the donation button
read? I'm like, I don't know. I said I think it's I wonder is
that a Pay Pal standard and I look at the button like nah,
that looks like that was me which way I said now? I don't
know. She said red is Miss like every nonprofit knows this. So
we're not really a nonprofits. It's a bigger, bigger and redder
Yeah, red and so uova red is our color so we might as well we got
our logo.
I wonder what the magic is with red that's weird. And it's like
this like them when you're selling your house they tell you
to paint your door like yellow it's dice like David Daley the
magic that
is so interesting because we were looking for our for our
house in Austin. And this Tina had seen this one on line or
whatever. And it had a yellow door and she said how guy that
has that and I also really I was repelled by it. But I decided
when it let me just go take a look. And it really it ticked
all the boxes but it had this horrible yellow door. So you
know we sat down with the builder like hey, you want to
listen negotiate. We say well, we need to we need to get rid of
the door has to be painted a different color. And it's a
father son drew homes in Dallas. And the father says to the Son
he has seen He, I told you it was a dumb idea. Apparently
they've been trying to sell the place and they put the yellow
door on as like this. We'll get this we'll sell it for sure. We
like that's the worst. It was such a detractor. We almost
didn't even come view it
because of the door. Yeah, that's the one thing everybody's
like yellow door instant sale? No like, no gross.
Yeah did not work with us it was really funny. Anyway, so yes,
the donation button for support and for supporting the index
have a server named after yet. This is a great promotion. I
love the I love this. This is so fun. And you know who's gonna
laugh her ass off his tea. Now she's gonna laugh when I tell
her this. We came up with a level you can even you're
sponsoring a server?
Yes. Sorry, you may get a backup. Sorry. Yeah.
Well, I'm sure there'll be more aggregators and stuff in our
life in our future. Okay, so, so much for the PR part of the
show. Gosh, tell me, how was the rest of your week? Dave? It's
been crazy.
Yes, it's been. It's been busy, I had a little bit of a, of a
code disaster. And I don't think that anybody noticed that much.
Although I did. Somebody did make a pull request on the on
the documentation repo today to fix something I think was
related. But here's, here's just a word to the wise, do not keep
your code, no matter how attractive this may sound, do
not keep your code in a folder tied to a sync service, like
Dropbox
or sync.com are a good way for something to get deleted it.
So I use sync.com and a half for a long time. And just to keep,
so I can work on multiple machines. And I have no idea
what happened. But it didn't lose anything. But it just
started creating new how Dropbox or OneDrive does where it'll
create those conflict files. It just started creating that crap
all over the place. Me it proved to me probably a day to dig out
and figure out what what the pattern was. I think I got
everything put back together. I mean, it wasn't like it was
awful. But it mostly affected the documentation repo and a
little bit of the main API stuff. I think I've dug out of
the hole right now. But man, it was a brain tumor. So
you had to rebuild stuff. No, I
didn't have to rebuild anything, I just basically had to take it
out, figure out what files that it affected and take. then
figure out what it had done, like when it renamed to a
conflict file was old one or the new brother just painted.
Anyway, I think I'd dug out of that hole. But most of the code
work this week has been back in the in the parser. Now, I've
been trying, I've been finding some SQL issues with the recent
episode with the recent episodes, call. And that's a
really important call. A lot of people use that. And so I'm
gonna trying to go very slow, and try to make sure that we've
been putting all the filtering into it. So you can filter by
language and categories and all that jazz. And so it's take, I'm
having to go really slow and make sure that that call is rock
solid, because that's one of the things that people use the most.
It's
a fun call. Yeah, it's really fun because and I see people
doing a lot of calls with this, particularly language, I see a
lot of,
it'd be so much better, and it's gonna be so much better when all
the filtering is put in. But there's, there's just some
issues with the table design, I believe it's causing, if I put a
lower boundary, if I put a lower boundary on the time, then the
call is very quick. If I don't on the published date for the
item, if I know sort of put a sane starting limit, it wants to
do a full table scan, and I still have not figured out Oh, I
could take that could take it could be like a five minute
Yeah, that's kind of weird. That's not possible now. So I'm
still kind of re of it. It's a big complicated SQL statement.
But I'm getting I'm trying to avoid things like sub selects in
that sub sequels and that kind of stuff. So I'm just kind of
been going around about with that. But the other work has
been mainly in the parser. Again, where I think it was
Todd, from blueberry. He typed into the to the to the mastodon
and said that one of his engineers noticed that when he
submitted to the feet and submitted a new feed that if you
put in query a query string at the end of the URL, it did not
get flagged as a duplicate.
bah bah, yes, yeah, I saw that thread. But that's something
happens later, I guess.
Yeah. Okay. And so that's worth talking about for a minute, if
we're going to do some techie stuff, like, with the way that
we've, or the way with the way that system works is that when
you submit a feed, it tries to do everything possible not to
not to be slow or blocked. And so one of the things that what
you will, okay, here's what you would like, let me let me
rephrase this, what you would want to happen is, when somebody
submits a feed URL, is at the moment they submit it, you would
want to go through and do a whole bunch of checks, you'd
want to say, even want to check in, make sure the URL is sane,
make sure it doesn't produce a 404 or something like that, when
you try to pull it, you would want to parse it out and make
sure that the XML is not broken, make sure that it has mp3 ease,
and instead errors or enclosures in it. And it's not just some
random RSS feed, you want to go through and do a whole lot of
that kind of thing. But you can't really do that and make
the call fast. Because you're gonna block while you're sitting
here waiting on the server to pull the feed and do all these
crazy checks. So what we do is we just take the feed, like
whatever some, you know, we have permissions levels for the Read
Write keys and publisher keys. So we say, Okay, we've trusted
you enough to give you this key because we, you know, we've sort
of vetted you so to speak, we trust you enough to give you a
raid right key. So we're just going to trust that you're not
going to give us intentionally give us crap, right? So we say
we'll just take the feed, and then a process comes along
later, and pulls it as part of the note the normal polar, and
then the parser. And all this stuff. It just happens in the
normal flow. But one thing that has that I've never been
satisfied with is the the say what I'm trying to say is the
duplication checks and all that jazz come later.
Yeah. Do we just quickly do we place a flag if it's a dupe so
that the the AP, the person who submitted through the API can
check,
there is not exposed? Okay. And that's the part of the problem
that that's what I don't like, okay. And there's a there's a
record, excuse me a field in the feeds added table, where, and it
says duplicate. So it just links over to the ID that it thinks
it's a duplicate of, but it's always it's only, it's only
checking on a hash of the raw content of the feed. Which is a
problem because it's a literal copy. Yeah, it's it only picks
up as literal copy. And this No, no, when I say Duplicate, I'm,
this is not trying to detect fraud phases are just pure
accidental duplication. So it, it just pulls a copy of the feed
and looks to see if anything else matches the hash. Right? If
it does, it flags it, but there's a lot of fees like we've
talked about before that auto refresh their pub date. And last
build date every time you write,
which would give you a different MD five or hash. Check.
checksum.
There you go. Exactly. Yeah, give you a different hash value
every time which is no good, right? So some of this stuff is
just was in place, like we got into we need to put some out
there.
Can you do all three? Can you do a free snapshot? No, I guess
that doesn't work. If it changes now. Okay. Don't ask me about
any technical stuff. I need to shut up.
So what what I came up with, and I'll just say, there's a note,
man, what I came up with is a date instead of there's now
there's there's two hashes. One hash is the raw hash, which
determines whether or not the feed gets pulled. And there's
another hash, which is just a subset of the content, and that
is probably going to be stable. And that is, the way it's
working now is it's like a concatenation of a bunch of
different values, the title of the feed, the description, the
generator, a few different other text values. And then it's also
the last 15 characters of every enclosure element URL within the
feed of the first 20 items, pulls the first 20 items, gets
the last 15 characters out of age and then puts it together in
one big long string, adds it to those other stay to those other
text values, like the title and such, and then hashes that. So
we say well, this value is probably going to be as stable
as you can get. Because you're going to have the title, the
description, all that stuff that rarely changes, right? And if
you happen to hit it between episodes, every now and then,
then it will, it'll pick it up again on the next round. So
you're not penalized, right? Not right away. Okay. Yeah, yeah.
Because because the way this is going to happen is it's going to
be running. The existing one is running now on on one of the
aggregators, but this is going to run on its own small server,
and along with some other
Donate now to have your name on this server,
the Duke checker.
Well, that's an expensive one. That's an important piece of
machinery. Right? Yes.
dollars a month do checker. So anyway, that that's what I've
been working on. So they did add it required adding some extra
columns to the to the news feed table now.
Did I see a lot of discord, some discussion about fraud feeds?
And at least there was something I think the beginning of the
week that was going back and forth, and I, I kind of lost
track of that one.
Yeah. This the account, sphinx underscore chat. Yeah. Yeah. In
the podcast, and did you look at that and see the video that they
send unofficial girl or boy, but what they sent?
No, no, I didn't see it.
Yeah, they posted, you should go check that out. Because they
posted this thing that they put together, where they're
basically calling they're, they're looking at the recent
feeds, recently added feeds API. And whenever they, they take the
fee.
Okay, how much like can I play this? Is it worth listening to
the audio? Or is it just
your audio? I don't know if there's audio? Oh, let me say
they can make the video. Oh,
it was the YouTube YouTube video database. That's, that's the
link of me. Oh, boy, that was scary. Oh, this back, here we
go. Yeah, we're catching fraudulent feeds,
is the thing. They just put they're doing it with like human
HR, human intelligence. They're just showing you the fraud
phase. And then they make another call. They look at the
new feeds, then make another call afterwards to the search on
the database, and try to find something that has similar
naming and they show and all and you just manually tap it to say,
Yeah, this, we think this is fraud.
But check this out. No, look at this. I'll just read it. This is
fascinating. Yeah, we created a proof of concept for catching
fraudulent feeds, we make an API call to recents, one times a
day. Then for each new feed, we call search, we show up to the
top 10 results, we show up to the top 10 results to human if
they find a duplicate, we can flag that ID for further review.
The human tasks worker gets a few cents of Bitcoin for their
time. Yes. Yes to that. How do we integrate this? How do we
integrate this?
I'm not sure he, he she said that they were going to leave it
running for about a week just to see if they just see how it
worked. And
what a great Oh, my God, this is this is the stuff man, this is
it. I love this.
Because, you know, I was thinking like, we need to give
API endpoints for a and all this kind of stuff. And they're like,
Well, no interest do this. Well, why didn't I think about that?
That's cool.
Fanta, I you know, it's interesting. And I just asked
the question, I ran into sphinx chat, really, in some of my
research, you know, people pitching me ideas about payments
and stuff. And, and I think they're the ones that did this.
To do like a chat was pretty impressive little demo. I have
to delve into that some more. I've just been, I've been too
busy whoring out our project. I want to get back into this. I
don't want to be doing this all day.
I know, ya know, they have their they do definitely do some
crypto stuff and distributed and decentralized. I mean, they're
definitely all in on that camp. And so cool. Yeah, that kind of
stuff can be I'm really excited to see if this works out. And
I'd love to make that super cool. Something that sticks, you
know?
Well, and I definitely am. Oh my gosh, my head is spinning. So
cool when I think about this stuff. Okay, good. Excellent. So
that's
existing API calls and they're like, videos super simple. But
they're added the added the sort of like the Mechanical Turk
mechanism. Right,
right. Right. I think I think they've made some other
distributed AP examples that I've seen. Yeah. Okay. i I'm
going to reach out to them. Okay. Yeah, I mean, beyond just
the Macedon just talk to human. I'm old school that way. Yeah,
totally. Something else that popped up the Pub Sub. And it
was an interesting question for me per Recently, I forgot who
posed it saying, I wish that Adam could trigger the Pub Sub
so that it would aggregate immediately. And it would show
up in the most recent news feed. And to me that was like, hell
can you Is there a button I can push? Is there something I can
do? That's kind of fun. As you know, I have a whole routine
after I publish the show anyway, I'm doing something to Twitter.
And now we've made it much easier with a freedom
controller. But that would be my obvious question. Can you put a
call into the freedom controller just like I click Twitter, I
click mastodon. And now I click Pub Sub, or the index.
Yeah. Oh, yeah, till we can totally put that in there. But
you could do it now just manually with a bookmark in your
browser tab in your browser.
Well, you say that Dave Jones, but you're gonna have to give me
you have to give me some code and show me what to do.
Yeah, yeah, I'll do that. Yeah. Now that's that's that's dead
simple. I'm a you're a dad, if you've got keys. And so you can
you can trigger anytime I got to
use that jingle. jangles can go yes. I'm that guy. I was I'm
home monitor. I got key. keychain safety retro. Yeah. So
watch out. devs.
Do you Do you remember? Gosh, this has been forever ago.
Again, I think I think it was daily source code. Do you
remember how you used to do the thing where you'd get like the
first? Like six seconds of a song and you had like, Oh, yum.
Paulette Snipper hit? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah.
Every time you start singing a little ditty, I always remember
reminds me that.
I love that because what did we call it the hit Test? I think we
call it the hit. That's it young young poet who I haven't I kind
of lost touch with him. He's blind or legally blind. So he
had this really uncanny knack for, for identifying stuff with
sound. And so he started doing this little game where he have a
little quick, he'd sent me two files, one with this intro and
had everybody jump out here with Adam curry sent to us. And they
put like a little snippet of a song. And then I would have to
guess what it was. Now if it's anything within the ad, well,
actually 60s 70s 80s and half of the 90s I can definitely get it
and then have your all over it. I
never heard you miss one. Then he,
but then he had the payoff where he would, you know, I would
never listen to that. I just, in fact that Melissa either want to
just do it live and just. Yeah. And just grab it. Yeah, that was
fine. It's good. To have a good times.
Yeah, that's, let's see. Yeah. So the other thing, what we want
to do tech stuff, we're gonna talk about some other stuff,
whatever you want to talk about, you know, I think yes, please
tell us we should talk about textiles. Good. The other
thing that I was really thinking about this, or looking at this
week was how to get rid of old items. And that's probably not
even the right way to describe it. So phone boy in the mastodon
said, No, I deleted an item out of my feed, and it's still
there. And
oh, yeah. Okay, this is yeah, that's donors
next. And this goes back to another issue that we've been
talking about is, is how to help. I'm trying to find the
right way to word it, actually. Because it's not just a matter
of rolling off fees that are no longer in rolling off items that
are no longer in the feed. It's sort of a bigger question about
do you take items away? Well, let me come at this from a
different angle. The New York Times I don't know if you
followed that story with their caliphate.
No, no, no, no. What's going on? Yeah.
Okay. So their podcast, never podcast called caliphate.
Yeah, hi, everybody. It's the Nazi podcast. All right,
caliphate. Yeah. So you so you haven't heard any of this? No, I
don't. I have no idea what's going on. Okay.
To get a sense of what is PLAY CLIP one New York Times
caliphate.
The blood was just it was one and it sprayed everywhere. And
the guy cried was crying and screaming. He did not die after
the first time. The second time or so he probably crunched over
those it's hard. I had to stab him multiple times. And then can
we put him up on a cross
and I had to leave a dagger in his heart. And then there's a
sign that said it had Hold on it. And, like 166 and drugs and
alcohol. offense. All right. Okay.
So this is a podcast about this guy who's Canadian who
supposedly left and went over to Syria to join the jihad. Okay.
Well, he got. And this is like a 10 part series from New York
Times he got arrested last week, I think and comes out and the
whole thing was fraud. The whole thing was made up. None of it
ever happened. And so then
that who was the whole podcast was fraud, or just this guy's
story was fraud.
This guy's story was fraud. But the whole podcast is based on
this.
It's a problem. Yeah, I can see the issue.
And so they, they, evidently, the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police arrested this guy, because they were like, This is
scary. Nobody wants it like a terrorist living right next to
him. So they arrest this guy start digging into it. And it
turns out, it's all fake. He did. None of this stuff ever
happened. And so then the New York Times says, and I was
reading this and Matt to a Matt Taibbi article. He said, The New
York Times basically said, Well, we were just saying that we were
exploring the topic. It wasn't we never certified that it was
that it was actually true.
Like the rest of the republication.
So he says he was going, he came to them. And they were just
like, they were just saying his story that they never claimed
that it was true. Always was possible that it had an element
of fiction, actually playing it off. Like they were like, look,
this is
just a podcast, man.
That that's what I wanted to ask you. Yeah. You've always said
that there's this element of podcasting, where people sort of
let their guard down, that anything goes. Okay, that ties
back into the getting rid of stuff that's not there. Now,
they left there, they left this up, and they've they've doubled
down on it. They said, We We stand by this podcast, as a
storytelling device. Right.
Right. It's a total work of fiction.
Yeah, exactly. And even though you can, you know, listening
that clip, nobody thinks that that sounds like a work of
fiction.
But no, sounded quite real.
What if, what if they did take it down? That makes me wonder,
just because they take the episodes offline? Should we?
Because the main, this happens sometimes in the freedom
controller, haha, I gotcha. You'll have thing. This happens.
Actually, quite often, I'll see something pop up in my in my new
in my feed. And then like maybe three or four items up the line,
I'll see this what looks like the same headline. It was
because they post they posted something to their RSS feed, and
then made a correction to it and report in in fixed it. And the
RN frame controller picked it up as two separate items. Yeah,
this is the GU ID issue. And, and it's very, very tricky
stuff.
And you'll see it a lot of times, because what happens is
you click on the face, you click on that on the title to go to
it. And the link is for a Ford. Right. And there have been times
I don't know if you've ever experienced this. But there's
there's been a handful of times where I've seen something in the
river. And I've thought whoa, that's actually a big deal. And
I click on it, it's gone. And it's gone.
But you haven't we have the aggregated copy in the
aggregator?
Yes. It never shows back up. And I'm so glad at those times that
I that I have that?
Well, that's actually how a lot of things, how people, I mean,
they used to catch a lot of that back in the Google Reader days
when RSS reading was still a thing. And remember, we let it
get centralized. And we all fell in love with it. And then they
blew it up. Remember that people? It's lesson? Yeah,
there'll be all looked at New York. And in fact, there is
there's a couple of Twitter bots out there who are continuously
checking the New York Times. And the end it says shows different.
It shows changes over time to a story as they're made. So you
can get into that just I guess they're just trolling it all day
long. I'm not quite sure how they, how they know how they
know when to check for a change. Same with Wikipedia essentially.
There's a lot of that going on. But I think your question is,
what do we do? What does the index do?
Exactly what is theirs? There's this technical question of, you
can't keep everything forever,
here's how I think it should go. Okay, because, well, here's my
experience. And then let's, this will be a jumping off point. So
first of all I've had many times in my life, the issue of Oh
crap, I screwed that up, I've got to go in, I've got to fix
the RSS feed. Now, I don't have to tell you what happens when
our RSS feed goes up. I mean, the amount of bandwidth and
connections is just it's it's quite absurd, and the amount of
the data we're pushing. And if I need, so usually, it's like, I
mess something up by screw the title up, I need to fix it. So
that shows up properly in people's apps. changing that, if
I do it quickly, then I can, you know, the change the GU ID,
which will then hopefully make most apps realize, ah, this is a
change. And it just reflects that change, and but it will
show it as new. And in the worst case scenario, which happens
with a lot of apps, there's another download, which may not
seem like a big deal. And it's not to me, from a statistical
standpoint, I don't need to know the numbers. But it's really a
waste of resources. It's a human, you're telling everybody
Oh, on here is that 150 megabyte file, go ahead, download it.
Again, it's just a stupid waste of resources. On both sides, by
the way, it gets trickier. This is a very actual problem. Amidst
all of Dave's week, I also threw out there Hey, man, well
actually just happened a couple of weeks ago, we talked about on
the show. My AWS Bill was hosting show notes and images,
basically, for the show notes and assets. It was up to like,
was it 13 1400 bucks a month? It was it was?
No, it was like 17? Yeah, it was it was grown
out of control. And we were just busy and like, okay, yeah, I
didn't want to bug day. But of course, he he found out and then
you immediately start to change stuff. And then we decide on,
we'd have to go through the whole setup. But basically,
thank you Cloudflare. But we set up a whole bunch of things and
read rejiggered things. And so the URL changed. And anyone
who's been testing our index, and has looked at no agenda,
like the images are broken, they're gone, whatever, even
though I had changed them in the RSS feed. It really that never
refreshes for most podcast apps, even if you change the geo ID,
but then again, you know, I try to keep 10 or 15 episodes in our
feed, not too much, because you have no idea how inefficient
polling is. I mean, it's really inefficient. And you can't, we
can't be serving up megabytes of time, every single time someone
wants to look at the whole feed, which happens a lot more than
you'd think. So the way I would prefer it to be, and whatever,
you know, whatever system and I think it's a more universal
problem of people implementing it. I just want a mirror of my
feed in the system. Okay. I think it's great if you catch
something, but if you delete it, it's just a wasted resource and
go to archive.org. I don't think that's the core business of the
index. And I'm not stating any any policy. I'm just thinking
out loud. It seems like we just we're just there to help you
with whatever's there. If people Yeah, because I can just see
people like, oh, I want that. I don't want to we can deal with
that. If you if we should replicate the feed, I think
that's the easiest way the owner of the feed determines what they
expose in the database. Is that fair?
Yeah, I think it's fair, because there's two, there's kind of
two, two questions. There's the philosophical question, which
your be No. I mean, well, you're kind of going both technical and
philosophical. But there's, there's kind of that that
philosophical question of, you know, if somebody deletes
something out of their feed, you don't, they don't want it,
they've determined is not valuable, right? Or, or they
don't want it there. And you want to honor that. And so but
then there's the other question of just a purely technical
question, where it's like, we can't, we can't keep everything
and you also want to be, you know, this is the funny thing
is, you know, deleting things out of a database is expensive,
too. Yeah, it's not free. It's not free. Yeah. Especially at
the scale of, you know, million and a half feeds. Because you're
talking about, you know, there's, you know, 40 million
episodes listed in, in the index now. And so, if you start
potentially hundreds and hundreds of database calls, you
know, every, every couple of minutes to delete old stuff,
right? So it has to be done in sort of like a methodical way
where you're not just hammering the database and trying to clean
up after itself every second, right. And so, you know, think
what I've settled on is one of the fields I added this week
was, there's always been a field called newest, newest item, pub
date, which is just the, you know, the most latest item
timestamp. And and then now there's an oldest item, pub
date, think that an egg is populated when it's parsed. And
then I think the way I'm going to do it, it's just anything
older than that in the database, there's going to be a cron job,
that just that all it does is just walks through the database
all the time just cleans up stuff right? Now that if you if
you delete, that, what that means in practice is if you
delete an item out of your feed, it's not necessarily going to
disappear on the next aggregator run. Right could take a while,
but it will eventually. And I think that's about the only I
think that's about the best sort of balancing. Yeah, I
like it. And I think there's a lot of validity to someone
making an archive of everything if you feel like it. Yeah, you
know, there's nothing I have nothing against that. But you
know, you're right. Eventually, it gets expensive, just to have
everything,
instead of in terms of money. And in terms of just
performance. Yeah.
And, you know, the index is mission is just to serve on
demand. Yeah. So yeah, that's what I think we see eye to eye
on that.
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, that makes that makes sense. If
anybody has a better idea, we've thrown this around in the in the
mastodon a few times about sort of the best strategy for
deleting kind of cleaning up after a feed. And I think that's
kind of what I settled on. But if anybody else has, has better
ideas, I'll wait a little while before I implement it. Because
right now, we're not doing any cleanup. If it's if it's in the
attorney, I wasn't happy with what we were doing before
because it was hitting the database too hard. So I kind of
just turned it off. So we're just accumulating stuff right
now. Which is not a big deal. I mean, it would take a while
before it became a problem. But I would like to get some in
place within the next couple of weeks.
what else what else?
Michelle Obama opens, they opened her podcast. Yeah, this
was very interesting. And I had heard from a reliable source
that there were definitely issues with the audience size.
Now, I when I heard deal was before, Joe, I think. And so,
you know, I checked out the podcast, and I've listened a
couple times. And I'll just start by saying it's a very
unimpressive product, because it's not necessarily, I'm not
quite sure who it's for. It feels very in crowd. I think she
lacks an element when she doesn't have Baroque. You know,
I just the order is not surrounding the political
Obama's. So I can understand, it's possible that it's just not
a draw. But when you're Spotify, the idea is that you can deliver
the audience and if you can't deliver it on and I have to say
that this podcast, it's not known what the deal was, the
Obamas have higher ground productions. You know, they have
a deal with Netflix a deal with Spotify, which is, I'm sure,
mainly based on name, but there's deliverables. Then they
sold the Michelle Obama podcast to their launch sponsor, which I
believe is Procter and Gamble, specifically Don and tied as the
two products. And I know enough about the advertising business
because I've been in it and I created a lot of the online
advertising business, that was a part of the creation of it. That
you, they don't really even care that much about the content or
any of that. It's just hey, you do have to get our message. As
many times as you promised in front of the audience we
anticipate to show up, and if they can't do it, then it's a
problem with their audience management system. So the
recommendations are however, they intend to get people to
shuttle people over there. So they at least catch two ads
before the podcast starts. And then you know, then almost the
end. I know they're gonna do mid rolls as well. Oh, they are. Oh,
yeah, they're gonna do Oh, yeah,
they're gonna do play clip to Michelle Obama.
Oh, hold on a second. By the way. I really appreciate that.
You show up with clips. That's very nice. Okay, here she is.
This episode
of The Michelle Obama podcast is brought to you by Salesforce.
Yeah. Let's see now that's a misplace that in my book.
That that's that ran at the beginning. Like they had to
intro and they did. By the way, it's a very boring podcast.
Yeah, I
told you unimpressive. It's not really great
trend. ain't even listening to it to get these ads clips was
was painful. But they did that at the beginning. And then they
do a mid roll halfway through where it's a little sort of like
an extended spot for hats for Salesforce. Oh, no. Yeah. So
it's it's double. It's double Salesforce one at the beginning
and a longer one in the middle. So they go to sort of like a
let's take a break. Yeah.
They do that they do. We'll be right back.
Yeah. And it's like a minute long, and then they come back.
So. So this show and so the announcement came out today, I
think. And the announcement was, Oh, we're going to launch it on
other platforms, which, by the way, very interesting
terminology. So they're now a platform. So just so we all
understand. They've taken core podcasting, and they're calling
it their platform, which is okay, but I just want us all to
recognize it. And what was mentioned in the in the press
release, was I heart Stitcher, all these other platforms, which
are Whoa, the company take you away now. All day long. And
those, as far as I know, are also closed, you need to submit
platforms. But it also showed up in the index. So pretty quick.
Yeah. So and so it's everywhere. And this is this is a seminal
moment, I'm watching it very closely. If they can't take a
name, like Michelle Obama and fulfill on their commitment for
the ads that were promised, they have a much bigger problem than
they think. And you'll see it turns out that podcasting is
kind of pretty big outside of the silos. Kind of pretty big.
It'd be very, it's going to be very interesting to watch how
this unfolds.
Tell me, tell me if this sort of hunch or understanding jazz was
what you think, is that they made the commitments for the
ads. Like you said, they couldn't fulfill the audience
commitment. Maybe that now James Cridland said, this, it was hard
to make this jive with the numbers they released earlier.
Well, it wasn't really a numbers. They said, Hey, here's
the top 10 Oh, it's millions. Yeah. Michelle's number one,
number one. Yeah, that's how you do it. It? I mean, they lie. Of
course, they lie. Did they show the numbers? They actually have
a log to look at? No, of course not. They lie. And that's what
you do. That's how you promote you lie.
So you can't fulfill the numbers. And then you? And then
you say, Okay, well, if I can't fulfill the numbers, let's open
it up, and then sell ads the traditional way?
Well, this is where it gets interesting. Okay, I certainly
believe that they have the mechanism, they have the ad
network. You know, they've shown off all this Wookiee Dookie
technology where they can, they did this back in January, where
they can target exactly the right because I know a lot about
you. So they can target you completely down to whatever it
is, they may just have to continue the ad business and can
open the in a weird perverted way. It would be a huge defeat,
but it's very possible that they just can't get the numbers with
Rogan without it being open. And they may just have to open that
back up. They'll still I mean, if Spotify had from the
beginning, had said, Hey, we're the ad making guys. You come
over here, we'll shove ads everywhere up your button, the
front and the middle, and wherever you want one. And we'll
give you a piece of the action. And we can do a lot of great
stuff. If we get people over here. And we'd like you know,
maybe you say, hey, promote promote only Spotify as the
podcast app. But you know, the other people are just as valid.
As lots of once you have a sample of the Spotify audience
you can, it would be worth less. So let's say if you got a $50
CPM, so for every 1000 listens, you got $50 on Spotify may be
something that was listened to off of Spotify would be worth
$30 Because you know you're going to be reasonably in the
target demo or whatever. Okay, they could become a great
advertising come if they'd started like that, I wouldn't be
like, oh, yeah, and it's not abnormal for for that kind of
operation to buy content and control the advertising and
possibly the content itself because that's ultimately always
what happens
Wasn't she one of their first exclusives? I mean, yes, she
was that's Yeah, I think she would she was once you may have
been the first probably
because I remember see it popped up all you know, opened up
Spotify one day and it popped up all over the place. Please
listen to this.
But you know, there's this thing. Yeah, there's things in
the industry and this has been going around for a long time.
This is information. And they got kind of more confirmed for
me recently before this came out. But I was like, Oh, that's
interesting. didn't think much of it, but I never considered,
they would have to open it up. And by the way, happy to have
you, Michelle. Welcome to podcast. index.org. Yeah, it's
fantastic. And I hope you have ads. And if people want to
listen to them, that's great. No problem. This could be a great
moment. If Spotify, they should really consider what they're
doing that because they could they, they have everything you
need. They could make they could be everybody's friend, it would
be fantastic.
Do you think that would be I mean, if they, if they just
basically declare on me, they won't declare failure. But if
they just say, you know, basically, if they say this is
not working, we're just going to open everything up and do to do
it and do traditional ad sales, and then they just let their RSS
feeds out into the public again, what does that say for the rest
of the day? The rest of the players out there, they're
attempting silos?
Well, we're gonna have a very interesting Reversal of Fortune
now, aren't we? Yeah. So now now, you know, now it's not for
the index. I have there. Okay. Can I go a little Theramin on
Yeah, I won't actually play the theremin. But
please, I've seen it I've gotten most are in right here.
Doo doo. A lot of things are changing because of the
Coronavirus, the shutdown the lockdown the the communication,
just a lot of things are changing in media. I believe
celebrities are in trouble. They have become annoying pieces of
crap who are spoiled and you know, people have turned on many
of them like your yammering and your mansion Shut up. You know,
people get caught going out not playing by the same rules. We've
seen entire television. legacies like the tonight show completely
fall apart. And the most noticeable is audience based
programming, NFL NBA Academy of Country Music Awards, Emmy
Awards, ratings, never this low in the toilet, even though
everybody's apparent you know, I hypothetically is home and ready
for great sports, etc. But it turns out all of the when you
remove the fans, I can speak for the Emmy Awards, you remove the
fans and the red carpet. And with that comes the fashion
industry in the gossip industry in the paparazzi. When you
remove all that it's just a shell of a bunch of Hollywood
douchebags who are congratulating each other, and
you're missing the audience, I have a feeling that if some if
not all, there is a moment in time where we can say hey, NFL
or NBA maybe even better, you should pay us to sit there.
We're a big part of your system, you lose money if we don't show
up and come to your game and we dance like monkey boys and
girls. Maybe we need to reevaluate our relationship with
some of these companies. So if Spotify has issue and they need
to distribute their podcasts on the open on the open system. I I
think that it's entirely possible that very popular apps
that can you know that's provable to a degree could say
sure. But I need a piece of the action.
Oh, it's gonna eat reverse. Why not? What? So like an app. Let's
just say an app. Well, okay, take take blueberry, blueberry
could could do a deal with Spotify, where they're like,
where they feature some of Spotify is now open content.
Yeah. And not not silo it, but just feature it. Yep. Just
featuring. And then while and they get a cut? Sure. Is that
short? Yes, of course it is. Your immediate outlet?
Absolutely. If they if it turns out they need it. Oh, my
goodness. Happy days are here again short.
How much of this is just pure, not good content. Because I
listened to I tried to listen to it and I got about halfway
through it. And Michelle Obama podcast, I was trying to find
ISO it was because I wanted to celebrate this and it was like,
impossible to find even a decent ISO in this in this thing. And I
would love to see the numbers were who they were somebody they
said, Okay, we had 5 million listens, let's just say. And I
would love to see the number breakdown of how many of those 5
million started listening to the podcast and turned it off after
like 10 minutes,
right? Well, that is also an interesting number. And the way
I see it shaking out is you are going to be forced to listen to
the pre rolls, everyone to listen to it because you can't
fast forward it on Spotify. So you can so those are guaranteed
You're gonna get the right person showing up, they're gonna
listen to two ads. And if they bail, they bail, who cares if
they make it to the mid roll, because that's why it's a mid
roll. That'll be in the middle will be cheaper. But that's a
really good indicator, the average view time for Joe Rogan
45 minutes, that's very long in the industry,
that that does seem long. And I mean, I don't know, I'm not some
kind of, he knew, I don't know as much as y'all do. But like,
that does seem long.
So it's hard to say, you know, I recently participated as a, on a
panel of judges for a Dutch Podcast Awards. And I said, This
really makes no sense. We really can't have an awards for this.
And I just want that to be noted. You can't have an award
anymore, it was just so many categories, and, you know, the
their entire sections that entire things that no one will
know about. It's just it makes no sense. But it came. The
reason I say this, there was a long conversation about two
podcasts, and one was slick and produce a little yuck, yuck, but
really nice. And they were self funding and they had a whole
bunch of great stuff. And the other one was to get it was
called it's Duchess called quote, homo, just gay is two
guys kind of talking, like Mo and I do mo facts about being
gay and life being gay. And it was really crappy quality. It
was like they had face masks on, we're talking through the face
mask. But the content was so good and so compelling. So what
is a good podcast? Does it have to also sound good? Does it have
to have a celebrity's hat? You know, I don't judge that they
will, you can, I will never do that. Again, you can't. And I
think Podcast Awards need to come up with a different idea. I
love an industry group that stimulates the industry, and
that where people can connect and meet and do stuff. But
that's about it. I mean, awards is really kind of an elitist
thing that just really shouldn't exist anymore. I don't think
it's very limited podcast index doesn't do awards, maybe we do.
Maybe, maybe we have votes, that we have a way to pay for people
to vote with stuff on the internet.
And you know, I just got an email. And I sent him over to
gave him the URLs. Let me just see if I can find this. This is
from James Potter, I think has he is he on the index? I've been
following the podcast index pretty closely. Do you have any
plans to collect your aggregate ratings reviews as part of the
index? I have a huge database of these spanning all podcast and
multiple apps. Let me know if I can be helpful somehow. But
yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. Okay. And that's what I said. Okay,
man, yeah, hook in
exclamation point. Yeah. What? What does? I mean, like that.
That's something that I've thought about before, but I
hadn't done much thinking about it. And it was, mean, as far as
ratings and that kind of thing there. There's no open source. I
mean, and all that stuff is so game bubble, and I've just, it
all just feels it just makes me You know,
I don't know, it's very, it's very cringy. But if someone
wants to use the index to create it, of course.
Yeah. I mean, I could think I could think that we could open
up an API endpoint for some sort of rating. I don't know, if
somebody can think of something good. I mean, yeah, yeah, open
for anything.
But that last thing we want to be doing is providing, you know,
rating statistics. Yeah, we really see.
It's really gotta be binary, I would think it's got the ratings
like, on these rating systems, where you have like, one to five
stars and stuff like this all decimal crap. Yeah. Like, was,
you really need just kind of one thing? Was this podcast. Good.
Did you like it? Yes. No.
Yeah. I mean, again, it I think it's subjective. What I always
find interesting is I do want to follow people. So so if someone
says, Hey, I like this, or I like this, I like that. And I'd
like to follow that person. Because I'd like their
recommendations. That feels good to me. I can see that it's just
a general like, oh, a lot of people clicked like, I don't
find a lot of value in that. But and hey, we're not the experts.
So someone else will show up and, and we'll see what comes
out of it.
Yeah, let's do we want to get an email from Chris, who is a dude
named Dan for a small church in West Virginia. And did you see
that email?
And I don't maybe
I wondered if we he's he talked about the sermon keyword spam
that we
talked about. Yes. Chris Paul can Okay. I think we can read
that. I don't see why not.
Yeah, he says I won't read the whole thing I'll just kind of
skim through he just basically says, I have no doubt your
keyword problem comes from some Well, meaning maybe cricket
church consultants. Nailed it. Yeah, I guess that it's possible
that they figured out how to duplicate these fields and made
it look like a magic trick. Look how cool our setup is. He says,
but this was kind of interesting to me though. He said, I love
the fact that services like Squarespace make podcasting for
Dummies easy. But I don't like being captive captive, because I
can't do the code myself. If I offend the gatekeepers on the
platform with no way of rec reconnecting with my audience.
And the reason I printed that out, is because you were talking
about that on your show with Mike and Todd. And talking about
just being D platformed. And you know, that kind of jazz but
Right. And they, it's not just, when I saw that I started
thinking about, it's not just the Alex Jones type guys that
you have to worry about. It's kind of it's kind of flipped.
And we talked about this, I think was before where if you go
back maybe 20 years ago, and you thought about people being D
platformed. So to speak, quote, unquote, that wasn't a thing
then if you go back sort of even pre internet and talk about
people being silenced or D platformed. It was atheists you
know, that sort of thing. Now it's is there's been this flip.
So now the people that are worried about D being D
platformed, or not the atheist now the people worried about it
or the religious Yes. And that's just a good I think that's a
good indicator that you can't pick a moment in time and say,
Okay, this is what the battle is going to be forever. Because it
things change and social movements change and things what
is now considered the oppressed and the oppressor easily flip
flop
easily flip it up a lot of it's taking place.
Yeah. So we may not be you know, 1520 years from now, we may not
be talking about, about the the the conspiracy theorist quote
unquote, crowd that are getting D platformed. We may be talking,
they may be in charge, and they may be D platforming. Everybody
else.
It was interesting. I was talking with Max and Stacy about
this today. He said, You know, we really want to retool our
next phase retooling podcasting as a as a platform of value. And
I said the reason why is if we just sit and wait and say, Oh,
it's just a guy doing CBD sales online that he got financially D
platform. Oh, you know, it's just this particular crazy
Handmaid's Tale cult religion, it's okay that MasterCard
doesn't want to process for them. You can't do that. Because
being on the lowest rung of the show business ladder, podcasters
do were on the list. Yeah. So it comes in different forms. And
this is really what we're talking about is some kind of
sovereignty, you know. So just just to circle back to Chris's
note, the number one thing is to, in general on the internet
is to have your and own your domain name. That will save you
so much aggravation, and sadness down the road. Own that, make
sure you own it, make sure you you keep it up to date that is
registered. And whatever you do, no matter where you do it. If
it's Squarespace, as long as it's your domain name,
no.com.org, whatever it is, if you decide you need to change,
then you can always then it will be reasonably transparent for
the entire Internet. That said, Education is key. And I would
love to see every parent and Hey, old people and parents, you
could do this yourself. Grab an old laptop you threw out, find a
Linux CD or learn how to download one and just wipe that
laptop and install Linux and just see if you can get it
running. You will learn so much about the internet, that you
never understood how that worked. And it's kind of a fun
process and you certainly shouldn't make your kids do it.
When it comes to the RSS feed. I'd recommend anybody who can
read and can can sit still for five minutes can look at an RSS
feed. So you know if you see an RSS feed, click on it. In some
browsers, it may try to open something else up but see if you
can do a view source just see if you can see the actual file
itself. And just very slowly look at it and see if you see
some patterns. Because when we started 16 years ago, there were
a lot of people making their RSS feed and notepad by hand. Yeah,
just a copy, paste, you know, here's an element, okay, I have
to change these little things to timestamp. Now, this is all
automated Of course, which is why you have WordPress and
blueberry and Squarespace. But it behooves you to learn it,
just just look at it five minutes, and you're like, oh,
okay, I see it. Here's the opening, it describes the show
what's in here? And then here's each episode, it's Oh, okay, I
see it has a title, it has a link, it has a description, and
you see that pattern. And man, it's going to benefit you big
time. Just understanding how it works. Or when you need to move
or do something else, you don't have to lose your audience.
Totally, totally agree it, may you still you still curate your
RSS feed by hand, you do write it and I do. Stick it in an
editor and you clean it up by hand, right?
Well, so I use the freedom. It's basically a freedom controller
RSS outline. But for each new episode, I copy the previous
one. So I'm incrementing everything by one, you know, I'm
a human AI on this. And I go very carefully, and I make sure
everything's in there. And you know, I need to include show
notes. And I have a process, which is a checklist, which I
cannot do by memory. Yeah. And I like it. I like seeing I
actually see, it's almost an exact representation of the code
that your app is going to see. I like looking at it. This make
sense? Okay, this is good. And then yeah, I hit Save. And then
then I drop it on the server.
And that's an interesting thing for people who are not, like
super techy, or that kind of thing, like you were talking
about would be to make a make a feed, like in Notepad, that kind
of thing. And then drop submitted to the podcast and
watch what happens. And make a change to it and then see it
update. Like that's, that's an interesting thing, or see it not
update and then wonder what you did wrong. Big thought
experiment, the
topic, how are we doing on submissions, adding feeds,
it's just a steady stream coming in is still roughly 60 to 100.
Today,
do you have any overview of who's connected to us now? I
mean, I know that drunk playdough was working on the
website, and we're gonna get a whole page, kind of a developer
page, but developers slash who's who's doing what page? So we can
feature everybody.
Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna have to do that. Because it's, I
know, we're still the same guys that we talked about last week.
And I think, if I'm not mistaken, blueberry is moving.
Yeah. I don't know if they're doing it yet. But I know that
their developers are working on it. Yes. Mike. Dell has that
name. Yeah, he was he was in in there. And then Todd was was
telling me when he gave me that feedback about duplication. He
was saying that he had his guys working on on doing that. That
submission process. Nice. Nice coming up soon. That's yeah,
that's all automated. We can pull once that page gets up.
When drunk. Playdough finishes the redesign. Cool. It should
shouldn't be hard. Cool. Very cool. That's about all I got
today, man.
Yeah, I'm trying to think if I had anything else on my list
here. We'll get
into clip five Michelle Obama.
Okay, baller Yes, indeed. That's me.
scraping the bottom with Wow clips Evans pretty good track
clip seven. I'm not dead. I'm just doing a podcast.
I may keep that that's a good end of show. I so that's right,
everybody. Hey, not dead. I'm just doing a podcast. See that?
It's funny. But at the same time, why? Michelle? Why? Why do
you make Why do you take us down to such a low level? That is so
unfair. We feel very professional here. We feel like
we're doing good stuff. And we're very alive.
Yeah, no, absolutely not dead yet. But we felt like that
sometimes. Dave
good to catch up, man. And anything you need to look
forward to? It's just heads down keeping them moving.
Yeah, I guess so. There's just some one thing I'm going to, you
know, always tell you exactly what I'm going to do and then
don't do any of course. The thing I'm not going to do this
week, right is the search non English language search.
Oh, that's gonna be fun. No, no, it's not. Yeah, I seen the
Arabic come through. I've seen some kanji, some Chinese all
kinds of Oh, yeah. This is where it gets really fun. Yeah,
Unicode search is Is it I mean, very doable clearly, but it's
not the easiest thing in the world to get get set up. So I've
cloned, I've cloned the search server over to a separate box.
And I'm going to start playing with it and get that, get that
working properly, you got to define all your unit code ranges
and all this kind of jazz. So I'm going to tinker around with
it, get that work. And then once it's solid, then I'll pull it
back in and replace the current server with that one that's in
the mix.
Excellent. Please consider supporting the podcast index the
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Donate button at podcast index.org Or if you're developer
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joining up, get them to API dot podcast index.org or podcast
index dot social, Dave. We'll catch up again
next Friday. Man sounds good.
Alright, everybody. Have a great weekend. We are reinventing
podcasts.