Podcasting 2.0 for March 14, 2025, episode
214, Poem Crate.
Oh, yeah, everybody, it's a beautiful day in
the Hill Country because, well, it's Friday.
It's always a beautiful day when it's Friday.
It is time for the official board room
and board meeting of Podcasting 2.0. I'm
Adam Curry here in the heart of the
Texas Hill Country in the only board room
that always observes Pi Day, and in Alabama,
the man who always finds the root cause
of your 429 errors, say hello to my
friend on the other end, Mr. Dave Jones.
Oh, you know what?
What?
You know what the stream deck is good
for?
You mean the one I gave you a
year ago for Christmas?
Yeah.
What is the stream deck good for, Dave?
It's the perfect height to to prop your
phone on.
Your bag of popcorn so that you can
reach into it during the show.
It truly is the gift that keeps on
giving, isn't it?
It does.
You didn't even know that was a feature,
did you?
No, it's fantastic.
I'm so happy for you.
Do you actually use that thing anymore?
I mean, I doubt you do.
Yeah.
You do?
Really?
No, I use it, yeah.
You got macro set up on it and
stuff?
I use it for like mute and unmute.
Of what?
Your microphone?
Yeah.
No, of the audio on the computer.
I use it to launch.
This is weird.
I use it to launch.
Your browser.
Yes.
I have buttons for different things to execute
bash commands.
I have a button to restart Umbral services.
That's a pretty cool one.
That's not bad.
That's good to have.
I got to tell you, in my Umbral,
I'm going to knock on wood.
It is so solid.
It will run approximately two months and it
runs on an old IBM.
What is it?
The Surface?
No, Microsoft Surface 8, I think.
Oh, not the Go?
No, no, no.
The Go died a long time ago.
The Go went.
Yeah, the Go went.
The screen separated from the back and everything.
It got all puffy.
I'm like, I don't know what's going on.
I don't want to see that thing anymore.
No, but it runs Umbral.
It runs on Ubuntu and it'll be fine.
Then once every two months, just the whole
machine, the screen will go black.
Everything's dead and it's just dead as a
doornail.
Then I have to hard shut it down,
long power button press, and then reboot it.
Then it comes back and it's fine.
It's about two months, like clockwork.
I don't know what it is.
You know how I know when my Umbral
needs to be rebooted?
It's when IPFS Podcasting sends me an email.
That's exactly how I know too.
Your node has been offline for 24 hours.
I'm like, yeah, oh, wait a minute.
It must be the Umbral node.
You're so right.
That's exactly.
I need to have some sort of, oh,
you got a glitch.
Now my plug was, I was coming unplugged.
No, don't do that.
I'm good.
I need to have like an email, make
like an IMAP script that'll check once a
day for that email and then just automatically
restart the Umbral.
Now we're talking.
To start nine, however, that thing will run
for many, many months and then, and it'll
just shit the bed.
It'll just, it'll just be done.
And then I have to hard reboot the
whole box.
But I noticed that one pretty quickly because
I use a lot of services on it.
Well, many months is better than two months.
Still, it should be like just forever.
Ever.
Yeah.
I'm not sure why it does that, but
that's You know what does run forever?
Old PHP applications.
No kidding.
You mean like the Freedom Controller?
I haven't.
I have not SSH'd into my Freedom Controller
in like two years.
I think you had to SSH in them.
You had to go into mine because there
was a disk warning, I think, a couple
of weeks ago.
Yeah.
That's the first time I've logged into it.
And years.
Years.
Literally years.
And it just keeps going.
And what was it?
Log files?
Must have been log files.
What was it?
I don't even remember now.
It was an easy fix though.
The first thing I thought is, oh, that's
gotta be log files or something.
Probably it was log files, but I don't.
But in general, the systems you build just
run.
I mean, that's your, that's your, it's in
your DNA.
You know, it's like you build a system.
It's in your DNA.
I haven't played that clip in a long
time.
Tell me about your sexuality.
It's in your DNA.
It's a DNA.
What was it?
Oh, Charlie Rose, right?
Wasn't it Charlie Rose?
Yeah.
That was Charlie.
Tell me about this sexuality.
It's in your DNA.
Creepy guy.
Was that Madonna?
I don't know what that was.
I never even heard that background noise.
I think it was Madonna.
What happened to Charlie Rose?
Oh, you don't know what happened to Charlie
Rose?
Oh, he got canceled, right?
Yeah.
Because he was walking around, had the interns
come over to the house and was like,
oh, my bathrobe fell open.
Boing, oing, oing, oing.
Oh, that's so bad.
It is.
He was like 78, you know, walking around
with a, with his, with a boomer boner.
That's no good, man.
He got Matt Loward.
Yes.
You know?
Yeah.
It was in that time.
Definitely.
It is Pi Day, Dave.
Happy Pi Day.
Oh, yeah, it is.
It is.
Oh, I've got a, no, Boomer Boner cannot
be a show title.
That's not, I reject that outright, immediately, right
now.
No, that's not going to happen.
That's not going to happen.
I do have a, a public, a public
service announcement.
Public service announcement.
State of Alabama.
Oh, what's going on in the state of
Alabama?
It's about, it's about to get nasty here
tomorrow.
Hold on a second.
Bombshell.
Okay, what's happening in the state?
Yeah.
What do you got coming through?
Tornadoes.
Oh, tornadoes, really?
Oh, that sucks.
Tomorrow, tomorrow is about the scariest weather prediction
I've seen in about a decade.
So it's.
Whoa.
It's for real.
Yeah.
No, we're going to have, we're going to
have, it's almost, it's, it's about a sure
thing that we're going to have some violent
long track tornadoes.
And so if you, if you live in
Alabama or Mississippi, you really need to take
this seriously because this is going to be,
this is going to be pretty bad where
people are going to, they will die tomorrow.
So this is, you need to be, you
need to be a weather, weather aware.
Weather aware.
Yeah.
I'm just taking a look at the, at
the aviation weather.
Let's see.
What, what are the conditions that make it
so bad?
Because you have red flag warnings like we
do.
You got high winds, dry.
It's, it's the, the instability, the atmospheric instability.
And then there's updrafts all over the place.
There's these huge streaks of, of updrafts.
And so that you have, it's just the
perfect mixture of, sorry.
It's just a perfect mixture of conditions that
like the, this, the biggest thing you go
in the meteorology models, the biggest one you
go off of is what's called the STP,
the significant tornado parameter.
And a bad tornado, like it's a scale
from one to 10 in a bad one.
A pretty nasty tornado event is probably five
or six.
These numbers are like 10 to 15.
Yeah.
I can, there's like three bands of, of
weird weather that are circling around there.
Yeah.
And I'm, and I'm concerned about Gordon too,
cause this is going to get, there's going
to be two rounds of these storms.
He's driving to Nashville, isn't he?
Uh-huh.
There's going to be two rounds of these
storms.
And the first one, the first round of
it's not going to hit Alabama too bad.
There's still tornado threats, but it's mostly going
to be up into like Kentucky and Tennessee.
That's very concerning because he has all the
bank account information.
Emails, Gordon, send us emails.
Yeah.
Drop, drop us some info.
Yeah.
They're on a 10 day road trip.
Oh, okay.
Well, we, then there's another round of it
coming.
The main, sort of the main event for
Alabama is tomorrow uh, around lunchtime to end
of the night.
And that's, yeah, it's going to be bad.
So does that mean you have to be
standby with the generator at the, at the
office?
Uh, yeah, I'm going to have to go.
I'm actually, I need to get out on
time today from the show, so I can
go make prep for that.
I got to make sure everything's, you know,
taken care of for, for all that kind
of stuff.
Okay.
Great timing too, you know, right during tax.
Yeah.
This corporate tax season could not be better.
Sorry.
It's all right.
Because there's no one at the IRS anyway.
There's no one to receive anything.
They've all been, they've all been, uh, hatcheted.
Yeah.
I wonder what kind of, uh, what is
the, what is the talk around the office
about that?
What are people saying?
I mean, is it, what are the repercussions
going to be?
Just nothing?
Nothing's going to change?
I don't think much is going to change.
Who do they, who did they let go
of?
People who, who investigate stuff, hopefully?
Well, most of who they let go of
so far are all people hired in the
last year anyway.
Um, so I mean, like there's not, I
don't think there's going to be a whole
lot, um, affected by it for most people
because most, 90% of the audits and
stuff that happened, they're all correspondence audits.
Anyway, you get an automated letter and then
there's a follow-up and you, you know,
well, that's not the audit I had.
The audit I had included the IRS agent
checking out my airstream to see if, if
it was why, why I needed that for
my podcast.
Can't just do it on your iPhone like
everybody else.
You, you had a, when was this was
how long ago?
10 years ago.
It's, it's time.
Oh yeah.
It's different.
It's different now.
Yeah.
There, there was actual people doing things back
then.
Now, now most of the IRS is that
most of the IRS interactions now are automated.
They don't want you to call them, you
know, they, they just don't want to deal
with it.
Yeah.
That's funny.
I don't, it's, it's not, Dreb said it's
all the new enforcement people they hired.
They really didn't hire that many people.
No, they had, they had a grand scheme.
Yeah.
They had like 87,000 they wanted to
hire, but they couldn't find that many.
Even they couldn't find a percentage of that
probably.
Yeah.
They said they were going to hire like
80,000 and then they, they ended up
hiring like 7,000.
7,000 is still a lot, bro.
That's a lot of people.
It is a lot, but they're all gone
now.
They got, get hatcheted immediately.
Yeah.
Wow.
So we're going to have Tom Webster on
next week, which I'm excited about.
Was that already scheduled?
Was that scheduled?
This is just Providence that, that we had
him scheduled and we had this back and
forth breakout.
If my middle name is Providence, then it
was Providence.
I did it this morning.
Yeah.
I reached out to him.
Oh, good.
Oh, good, good, good, good.
Yeah.
And you know, I've actually, I've wanted to
have him on quite a few times just
because I thought it would be a fun
thing.
Cause he's, I think he's got a radio
background and that kind of thing.
And so it'd be, I just think it'd
be a good discussion similar to what, you
know, we talked about with James and Dan
Granger had you on his show.
I just, I just think it's a good
discussion.
Cause we, we come like, we all come
at these things from different vantage points.
And it's nice to sort of, I don't
know.
It's nice to talk, to, to hear it
both in real time.
Like we're saying, you know, we, we see
things from this angle and then he sees
sometimes the same things from not really a
different angle, but from just that he's got
a different view of it.
Yeah.
And so it's, I think it's, it's cool.
Like we had, you remember, we had Brian
Barletta on the show years ago and that
was a good discussion.
So yeah, it'll be good.
Well, I listened to his, to his article.
I guess it's exactly the same as he
wrote.
It seems like it's the same, the same
copy.
And of course, you know, the first thing
I look at after my Bible study in
the morning, the first website I will look
at is podcastindex.social just to see what's
going on.
You know, I subscribed to James and his,
his pod news stuff, which is, so it's,
it's, it's kind of cool because I get
to see all the stories that he's talking
about.
Of course, I always have J65.
What's that guy?
J56.
Who's the...
J56?
Who's, yeah.
Who's the...
The Nostar guy?
The Nostar guy.
Yeah.
I follow, I follow him on, yeah, I
follow him on podcastindex.social through the, the
Nostar bridge.
And then I'll listen to pod news, you
know, and so I kind of, you know,
know what's going on.
But this morning I was like, oh, this
is interesting.
And, and it was, it was kind of
interesting to me because I think Matt, who
did a, a response to that article.
I don't know if he took it the
right way.
Because I didn't feel like any of, I
mean, it's kind of, you know, it's clickbaity.
Oh, podcasting 3.0. Okay.
Yeah, fine.
But I don't, I didn't, I didn't take
it anything that he said negative.
I have some, some thoughts about it because,
well, first of all, I always find it
interesting.
We're going to talk about podcasting 3.0,
is it successful?
But remember, we've got branded, branded podcasts coming
up.
And you're like, okay, whatever.
It's, there's money dripping off of the whole
thing.
But there was, he started off by saying
fact.
And I'm always ready for that.
And I can't wait to talk to him
about it.
He said, podcasting hasn't yet cemented into daily
life.
And I'm like, wow.
I don't think that's true.
You don't?
No.
Well, he, he, he based it on a,
on a cadence, a weekly cadence of, of
updates.
And I'm like, you know, I, I'm actually
someone who can kind of speak to that.
I've been doing this for a while and
I have a podcast on Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday,
yes, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
And people are in the cadence of the
shows that they subscribe to.
They, what I find, and this is, I
mean, I don't have actual data to back
this up, but I talked to a lot
of people.
A lot of people listen to my shows
and they get into, they, they adapt to
the schedule of their favorite podcast.
And, you know, there's probably 80% of
the No Agenda audience listens to the Sunday
show on Monday and they listen to it
on their commute mainly.
It's a, it's a big, you know, it's
three hours, three and a half hours.
So it's a big commuter show.
Um, and it comes down to the hour
even for like the Thursday show.
If we don't, if we release that an
hour late, people are antsy.
So, but they, they have this the same
with, um, with all of their weekly shows.
They don't all come out on the same
time.
In fact, the Thursday and Sunday, uh, days
were chosen very specifically as, okay, we think
these are the right days that coincides with
when news comes out, when we can process
it.
So Friday is when people jam everything into
the mainstream to get it out.
And, you know, let's bury this on Friday.
So we have Saturday to process it and
we can talk about it on Sunday.
And then Monday is kind of slow.
And then Tuesday and Wednesday, you got a
little buildup and then, you know, we're kind
of past the middle of the week.
Um, but I, I, I found he was
kind of had this, uh, he was mixing
up different media types and podcasting is something
completely different from radio.
He's like, you know, there's the, you get
in, well, you know, like you get into
the car and you listen to the radio.
It's one button of joy.
Well, yeah, people get into the car and
it's five buttons of joy because you listen
for the time, the traffic and the temperature.
And then when the commercials hit, you hit
the second button of joy.
And if that's in commercials, you hit the
third button of joy.
I mean, it's, it's like bouncing around.
I mean, it's not like, oh, I'm always,
I always get joy from turning on the
radio for those who still do.
And this is a lot of people who
listen to radio in the car.
Um, it felt to me like what he's
looking for is stickiness, people using podcast apps
all the time.
Um, and I can understand that, you know,
uh, you know, when you compare, cause he
did this, he compared podcasting to YouTube and
to Facebook and to Instagram and, and social
media.
Well, those are completely different things.
But if you're someone who, who, whose livelihood
depends on stickiness of people in an app,
so you can insert ads or what, whatever
else.
Yeah.
I understand that it's not working for you.
And, and, but to blame that on the
apps, which he kind of did, he says
that it's, it's the apps.
And I'm like, Hmm, that's interesting because you
know, YouTube, I don't think that brings you
consistent joy.
It's, it's an algorithmic machine that is meant
to suck you in like, oh, look at
that.
Oh, look at that.
I did that last, uh, on Monday, I
just sat down the couch and I'm just
going to look at some YouTube.
And two and a half hours later, I'm
like, what, I had to repent.
What did I just do?
I'm looking at, you know, uh, cop, uh,
body cams in, you know, arresting influencers, you
know, it's like, you know, so yeah, you
know, that, that, that's the, I don't know
if that's consistent joy.
Um, and then it kind of morphed into,
it was, it felt a little disjointed, kind
of morphed into what listeners want.
And I think that's where my takeaway was
that that's, was that I think one of
the, his concept of a listener is, is
I think something that I don't understand.
Like, I think this is probably true for
a lot of, uh, people that have an
advertising focus.
Uh, it, I, it's not that it's wrong.
It's just that I don't, I find it,
I think there's a miss.
I cannot, I can't conceptualize a listener, I
think in the way that he does.
And so because like what, like you're, you're
talking about your, you know, you've got your
show, let's say there's no agenda and you're
like, uh, you know, it's a, it's a
Sunday and a Thursday cadence and you've, I
mean, you've got a huge, massive audience that,
and, and some fraction of that would, I
don't know how much, but some fraction of
that is going to be extremely locked in
on that cadence.
But then that's, but I don't think that's
the listener he means.
No, what, what he, what he was, okay,
you're, you're driving in the right direction.
What he is, what I heard him asking
for is applications and or platforms, whatever you
want to call it.
He said apps that keep people engaged and
listening all the time on the podcast app.
Well, you're never going to get that because
that, that, that's not what they're built for.
They're actually built to organize your own cadence,
your own listening.
And you know, the minute I hear, well,
AI can solve some of this and like,
oh no, that that's not, you're never going
to get that.
You're never going to get that from a
podcast app because it doesn't, it's not, there's
no one that I'm aware of, including Apple
who, you know, are going to put the,
uh, the, the bare metal behind it to
track your behavior and suggest things that that's
not really what it's for.
And so the thing that bugged me between
what Tom was saying and Matt's response is
the one thing that was omitted from the
entire conversation is the content.
It's the content that people listen to.
It's not the app that makes people want
to listen to, oh, I'm just going to
to this random thing because it popped up.
No, it's the content.
And you usually hear about it from someone
else.
And remember the most powerful term in broadcasting
today is wherever you get your podcast.
So both things can be true that a
podcast is in a podcast app.
And if you consider a podcast, a video
on YouTube, that's fine.
Um, but what we're doing here has very
little to do with driving more engagement or
being, you know, or having more people use
certain features.
I, I just, this continuously, and even the
responses, you know, well, normal people won't do
this or we'll do that.
Like, oh, by the way, all, all, all
listeners are stupid.
Apparently this is just not true.
Yeah.
People are, are willing to contort themselves and
they will beg, steal and borrow to get
the content they want.
And, um, you know, RSS readers are still
a big thing today, but you don't hear
about them because people get their feed from
these platforms that just give you a fire
hose of stuff.
And maybe you'll see the people you were
following or the content that you're following.
Maybe you will, maybe you won't.
Um, but with Matt's response, it kind of
came into, well, I guess, because Tom said
there's no steady hand on the tiller driving
it forward.
Well, this is, this is not a boat.
This is, this is not a boat.
I didn't feel, I didn't, yeah, I thought,
I think Matt misunderstood as well.
Cause the, um, I didn't, I didn't, I
didn't feel like it was any sort of
shot across the bow.
He said, he said, um, podcasting is a
loose podcast.
2.0 is a loose initiative.
And he's right.
It's about as loose as it gets.
There's still a very big misconception.
And I feel James has this misconception and
Sam has this misconception.
You're not going to get to a point
where every, but every app has all the
features or even a 10th of the features.
And it was kind of interesting because I
was listening to power and, uh, they were
talking about pocket cast the day released a
web player version.
And, uh, well, you know, it's kind of
the same thing Apple did only, uh, Apple
may be better or whatever.
But the thing that I didn't hear them
say is right there in the web player
pocket cast displays chapters 2.0 chapters.
Apple doesn't have that.
You know, I, I find that to be
a huge win that pocket and they have
it in their, in their app as well.
I find that to be a huge win
that they're doing that.
And so all these, these features, you have
to understand, this is the big misconception.
The media has fragmented.
Um, your television viewing experience is it's a
bunch of different apps.
It's Netflix, it's a peacock, it's Disney plus
it's, you know, HBO or max as it,
you know, that folded in.
It's, it's just, it's a bunch of different
apps.
And then, you know, hopefully whatever you were
watching, you can pick up there from the,
from the top row, continue watching.
Hopefully it'll, it'll give you a suggestion for
something you might want to watch, but typically
you're like, Oh, I heard about this show.
What's it on?
Oh, it's on Hulu.
Okay.
Do we have a Hulu subscription?
Yeah.
Okay.
Oh, we don't.
Well, I'll get the month so I can
drop it after we've binged this show.
Um, you know, you go in and you
watch your show and then you're done.
I pulled some stats because I thought Tom
would enjoy this.
Um, because I have a couple of interesting
examples of podcasts and so I use OP
three stats, um, because, and I just use
them across the board cause you know, no
matter what you call a download a unique
or any of this stuff, it doesn't really
matter as long as we're using the same
number every single time.
So if I look at no agenda just
to get a rough idea, um, from OP
three.
So we had in, um, the last 30
days, 847,799 downloads.
And according to OP three in February, we
had 707,224 unique audience.
I don't know what, what it means.
It doesn't really matter, but that's just a
number.
Now here's what, what is interesting.
Uh, no agenda is not on Spotify.
And we're not on Spotify because well, and
we're not on YouTube and I'll tell you
the YouTube experience cause people have said before,
Hey, can I put your shows up on
YouTube?
So yeah, go ahead, do whatever you want.
And after a while they come back and
say, well, I stopped doing that because I
kept getting strikes.
I was about to lose my account.
So, you know, I know that won't work.
Um, Spotify, I'm glad that we never agreed
to their terms, which, you know, includes all
kinds of advertising possibilities and stuff.
I just didn't like, I just felt it
was kind of icky.
Um, so we never, we never built up
an audience on Spotify.
And now I'm delighted we didn't because if
they, if there's any kind of music in
your podcast automatic, they remove the episode, even
if it's licensed.
And of course we have end of show
mixes, which are, um, uh, which are used
under fair use of parody and in education.
Uh, but so every single show could get
a strike or be taken off.
And like, so I'm glad we don't have
to deal with that, but let's just look
at some of the numbers of the no
agenda show.
And this is OP three numbers.
So the number one app, actually the number
one place where people listen to the no
agenda show is Apple podcasts, 37%.
I'll just do that.
I'll round up the numbers.
Number two is pod verse with 14%.
Then comes podcast addict with 7% podcast
guru with almost 7% overcast with 6
.2 pocket casts with 5.2 fountain with
4.4 and antenna pod with 2.7.
Now, if you just take those numbers, everything.
And so that those are all 2.0
apps.
And I know that people use those for
a number of reasons, but I know they're
seeing chapters.
I know they're seeing transcripts.
I know that for whatever reason, maybe because
we said, Hey, these are interesting podcasts apps
to use that total number of those 2
.0 apps is 39.7%. That's more than
Apple podcasts.
So more people are using two or at
least being exposed to 2.0 features.
I presume they're using them.
I presume they like them.
Then Apple podcasts.
Now you go over to, um, the web
browser, 11.1% of people listen to
no agenda at no agenda show.net.
How much 11.1%. And if you go
to no agenda show.net, what do you
see chapters, uh, transcripts, scrolling transcript people, and
how does no agenda show.net get, I
don't upload.
They just get it from the RSS feed.
Also my RSS feed is shooting it to
wherever you get your podcast.
So if you take, um, the 39.7
% plus the 11.1%, you're almost 51
% that don't listen on Apple podcasts and
no one listens on Spotify.
Mm.
I think, I think that's a pretty big
win.
Now let's look at another show, Curry and
the keeper.
Curry and the keeper was never put on
Apple ever.
I want it to be a 2.0
podcast only.
So if you look at that, the top,
uh, podcast app with 47.6% is
fountain number two, 10.56% podverse podcast
attic with nine and a half pocket cast
with 5.4 podcast guru with 5.4
cast thematic with 4.6 and Apple podcasts.
I guess people are subscribing themselves.
2.93%. We're also not on, um, we're
not on Spotify.
Um, now very few people listen, uh, that,
uh, I think episodes.fm cause I, I
tweet out a link is 1.05%. That
show does about $15,000 in revenue from
fountain and PayPal with 5,000 unique audience.
I call that a huge success, a huge
success.
You know, so in aggregate, if you're looking
at all podcasts, you can't do that.
It's what do people care about?
What content do they want to listen to?
You know, these numbers are interesting too, because
if you compare, like if you compare no
agenda, not compare, but if you, if you
look at no agendas audience, the vast majority,
I mean, I, here's what I'm trying to
say.
If you were to do a Venn diagram
of the number of people who listened to
this show and the people who listened to
no agenda, the overlap would be tiny.
Yeah.
There's hardly, there's very few people listening to
no agenda that also listened to the boardroom.
And so most of, so that audience mix
that you have that's 51%, you know, 2
.0 or web that came, those are normal.
Those are what you might call normal listeners.
They're not just like diehard 2.0 advocates.
Right.
You know, and it seems, it seems to
me the only explanation for why that's the
case is one, just, you know, behave, just
behavior that's inscrutable and with the web and
combined with the fact that you've been telling
people to go to these apps in the
show for four years now.
And for reasons, but for reasons, and the
reasons is no agenda.
I say, Hey, you want to see cool
chapters.
You want to get notified.
You want to have your app is connected
to pod ping.
And the amount of times that people will
send me a note, you haven't uploaded to
Apple.
So no, I don't upload to Apple.
It's not how it works.
If you want to get it within 90
seconds, use these apps.
Oh, okay.
Then they're happy.
But I guess my overall point is that
wherever you get your podcasts is has never
been more prevalent now than ever.
The original intent of RSS in the enclosure
feed was to activate one single device, the
iPod in a very low bandwidth world.
We had always on computing.
That was the world in which podcasting was
developed.
So the idea that your iPod will be
updated with content was just joyful by itself.
Like, Oh my God, you know, cause if
you wanted to listen to a podcast and
you clicked, you would wait three to five
minutes just for the, for the thing to
load.
You know, there was, there was barely any,
you couldn't really stream anything in there was
no on demand.
And that was the world in which it
was developed.
And that kind of grew out now into
RSS is a distribution mechanism and a feature
mechanism, really.
And so when I see, um, when, when,
I mean, even what a great example, even
these, these two pieces of content, I listened
to what Tom had to say in my
web browser on podcasting X dot social.
I listened, kind of watched, uh, Matt's response
on YouTube.
You know, now would it be easy to
go back and find, uh, uh, Matt's response
or subscribe to him?
Probably not Tom.
Yeah.
I could probably find that pretty easy if
I wanted to.
The thing is wherever you get your podcast
is just a fact.
Um, most of the people who listen to
curry in the keeper, I'll say you should
listen to our show.
And then they open up duck, duck, go,
and they type in curry in the keeper
and they click on the link and then
they see a player and they play.
And I said, well, you can use a
podcast app.
Yeah.
I've seen that thing.
Yeah.
It's what, what your RSS feed gives you
is the capability to have your content distributed
to many, many different places.
Pod page, another great example, you know, it's
not just an app anymore.
And we have to get over this, this
idea that the apps are going to be,
you know, the full blown experience because they're
just not, it was very relevant back when
we had feed readers and we loved it.
Now, do I still use a feed reader?
Yeah, sure.
From time to time, but it's not my
primary way of consuming anything.
Um, lots of podcasts, I'll just, you know,
hit the page and just listen.
And if I want to subscribe, I agree.
I'm not your normal podcast listener.
So I subscribe to a lot of things,
but I never go looking forward to say,
Oh, what showed up in the feed today?
I'll grab this.
I'll listen.
There's a lot more stuff in there that
I don't listen to than I do listen
to.
So Kiwi bones, it says how many people
these days would still have their VCRs flashing
12, 12 o'clock.
Young people may not even understand what that
means, but you know, it just means that
you never took the time to set the,
you set the time on the VCR and
it's just always flashing.
Right.
I mean, that's, I think that's a good
point because I mean, most, most people are
not going to, I don't know.
There's this weird tension.
Um, there's this weird tension between people not,
they're not going to exert a lot of
effort over techie over what seems like technical,
um, fussing, like just setting the clock on
your VCR.
They're like, I've got to watch what, what
I need to waste my time doing that.
And then, but at the same time they'll
go find the content they want.
I mean, they'll seek it out.
Like there's this sort of dual, um, I
don't know.
It's almost a paradox where I'm willing to
exert the effort over some over this thing,
but I'm not going to futz around with
the technicalities of this thing.
So whether I, I'm going to go get
the content, but if I land in a
web browser, when I try to find it,
I'm fine.
Exactly.
I don't really care.
And by the way, I think that the
biggest, there's two success stories in my mind.
I think fountain is a huge success story
because fountain has everything that Tom talked about.
When you, if you're into fountain and you
open up the app, you're going to see
people you follow, they're recommending stuff.
People are commenting on, on shows with booster
grams.
And then you can comment back on that.
There's all kinds of interactivity happening, all kinds
of stuff.
There's no agenda show.
One of the most fun things I find,
which is really only kind of available in
Curio caster, just by a web embed is
the troll room.
So there's 2000 people listening live on average.
It's a little bit higher, you know, to
Thursday and Sunday we've had, you know, we've
had people, 4,000 people listening live.
And there's just a scrolling IRC channel of
all kinds of stuff.
And people are giving each other karma.
This is your thumbs, you know, your thumbs
up stuff and all, all the things that
we've been talking about.
And it exists only within this little world.
You have to go to troll room.io
and that, you know, the, you've got to
log in.
And if you want to post, you have
to authenticate.
And it's, Oh, it's horrible.
It's very difficult.
Everything always goes wrong.
But people somehow figured out and they do
it and they love it.
And it's a party.
It's an absolute bonanza of a party.
Not a podcast app.
It's just a web thing that people get
into.
And some people use an IRC client, others
just do it on the website.
So my point is we're not building radios
anymore.
We are building a feature set that can
be used in many different ways.
As you, as we're seeing with Godcaster, it
can be used in so many different ways
that we haven't even started to explore.
I mean, right now I've got a developer
named Paul, Paul Blair, and he's building an
app for me, an app for Hello Fred.
It's amazing.
And what is it based on?
It's based on RSS feeds.
And what are the features going to be?
It's going to be all kinds of 2
.0 features in there.
Maybe I'm building a radio.
Maybe that's the one button joy.
Hey, you want Adam's world?
Just get this app and click on it.
And there's my world or whatever.
I think there's a lot of different opportunities
that we just, we're kind of stuck.
We're stuck in it.
So it's not that no one has their
hand on the tiller.
It's we're on a sandbank.
We've run aground.
But not with what we're doing, but with
the concept.
Because people just, they're just as used to
going to YouTube to find something as they
are to going to Spotify or whatever else.
It's not that podcasts have to be consumed
in a podcast app.
Proof is there.
I had no idea until I went looking
because I don't look at numbers.
No number to look at is, can I
pay the mortgage?
And I see 11% of people using
noagendashow.net.
That's a lot.
That is a surprising amount.
That's hundreds of thousands of people listening on
a website.
Why?
I don't know.
That's what they like.
It's snazzy.
And Tim who built the website, he doesn't
have to do much.
It's all automated.
Whenever I publish, it goes into the feed
and shows up there and shows up all
kinds of places.
And part of it goes to bingit.io.
So it's distribution.
If you want to do a podcast and
just put it on YouTube, and by the
way, there's other places than YouTube where podcasts
are being consumed.
No one talks about Rumble, but they have
market share.
There's other places.
If you don't want to control that and
you want to risk, take all, it's like
people more and more these days saying, hey
man, you can live stream to spaces.
I say, why would I do that?
First of all, it's the worst experience because
you have to stay there.
You can't use the app and scroll around
and do other things while you're listening to
a space.
And second of all, it's like, well, what
if I build up an audience there and
Elon sells it or he changes his mind
or whatever happens?
I have no control over that.
Why would I do that?
This, the, one of the, one of the
ways that I, um, I spent a lot
of time this week thinking about, um, I
don't know, just, just trying to step back
and take a 50,000 foot view of
things.
And, um, it was helpful.
And one of the way, I think I,
I think I came to Tom's article in
sort of a good mindset.
It hit me, it hit me at the,
it sort of hit me at a, at
a good point because there's been a lot
of criticism of 2.0 lately.
And so I think I was just in
a bad place, you know, like last week.
And I'm glad that he wrote that this
week so that I could had a chance
to come, come at it with a different
outlook.
And, um, you know, I think that it
may be just that people, uh, who love,
who really love podcasting that, uh, people like
Tom and James and, and, uh, and some
others, um, Mark Asquith and some others, I
think what they're wanting, and I'd like to
ask him about that this next week is,
I think there, I think there may, they
may be, um, annoyed by the, by the
fact that these other platforms have, seem to
have such like polish and unified experiences, like,
and they want podcasting to have some of
that, you know, cause it's, it's hard, you
know, to take it as an ad, like
an advertiser focus, which is what the, you
know, podcast industrial complex is.
I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's an advertising
focused thing and take it, you know, like
if you're, if you're in that world and
you're trying to sell ads into podcasting, it's
gotta be hard.
It's gotta be very hard because you're, because
podcasting is a mess.
It was never built to really sustain, um,
uh, advertising, um, uh, mechanisms.
I mean, again, people don't enjoy podcasts.
They enjoy content.
Now, if you call that a podcast and
you get it, what you think, you don't
need to get it in one particular, but
people want content.
When I was in 1975, yeah, come on.
And then my, sit on my knee, young
man, I'll tell you a story.
When I was a kid, when I was
a kid, uh, we had FM radio blanketing
the entire country of the Netherlands, crystal clear,
beautiful signal, never crapped out, uh, repeaters everywhere.
But yet we would get our little transistor
radios and listen to long wave, not medium
wave, long wave to listen to the pirate
ships in the North sea to listen to
music.
So when you hear stairway to heaven on
a long wave signal, it's not quite the
same experience as FM, but we didn't care
because this is what we wanted to hear.
When MP3s first came out, nobody's going to
listen to music on that.
That quality is horrible.
Yeah.
128 kilobyte.
That's no good.
And here we are.
It's always going to be the content that
drives it.
I mean, come on.
I mean, the faces of death video, which
not everyone will understand that reference, but I
watched it.
It must've been the 20th generation.
And it was still cool.
Like when you, when you see all those
people dying in these horrific ways, and then
the people eating the brains out of the
monkey's head and had the static stripes across
it because it'd been copied so many times
and then you have the sink would go
up.
But that's the point.
It's the content that you want.
If cereal had come out on just a
webpage, I still think it would have been
very successful podcasting.
The concept of podcasting wrote its coattails.
Now, like every other mass medium, like certainly
user generated, a lot of it is just
no good.
It's just not, or, you know, it's, or
it's going to be interesting to a very,
very small audience.
Well, unless you are able to cobble that
together in, as you said, in a slick
platform that has all kinds of measurement and
algorithms, et cetera, you're not going to be
able to really blanket that with a successful
advertising campaign.
There's just too many moving parts that you
YouTube, YouTube has subsidized the whole thing to
a certain degree, because what they, I mean,
I'm not saying, I'm not saying they're losing
money, even though we still don't know how
much money they actually make.
That's never been reported.
YouTube?
I've looked.
No, I think it's, I think they've reported.
No, they've never reported profit numbers.
No profit.
They don't report.
No, not profit.
I mean, all you get is revenue.
You never hear how much of that is
profit.
It's got to be quite expensive.
And I'm, you know, so, so we don't
know.
I mean, we don't know how much profit
they make.
If they make, I'm sure they do make
a profit, but it may not be that
big.
You know, there may be other, you know,
so like, I mean, what they have is
massive costs.
They have gigantic costs.
I mean, they build their own, they build
their own GPUs to do transcoding.
I mean, like they build their own microchips.
Like there's not really, that's, that's why Spotify
and Twitch and all these other, are never
really going to be serious competitors to YouTube
because YouTube, they've just done something that almost
nobody else can do because they just are
willing to pour billions of dollars into their
infrastructure.
And that's why that thing is what it
is.
But in spite of that, you know, I'm
still just as consistently disappointed in my YouTube
algorithm as I am in my podcast app.
Yeah.
Like, you know, I'll, I'll log into YouTube
and I'm, I would consider myself a pretty
heavy YouTube user.
I, um, I, I finally bit the bullet
and bought the premium subscription.
Ah, so you don't have to deal with
the ads.
Yeah, exactly.
Well worth it in my, in my book.
Well worth it.
Yeah.
And you know, I, I log in and
I have about, I don't know, I have
about 30 channels I subscribe to and some
days I'll log in and there's just nothing,
there's just nothing there.
And then you look at your home, there's
nothing there, like there's just nothing there that's,
that is new.
And then if you look, if I look
at my home screen that has like suggestions
and stuff, it it's, there's nothing on there,
but a bunch of stuff I'm not interested
in.
And so from that standpoint, it's really not
that different than sometimes I log into my
podcast app and I really am just not
interested in any of this stuff.
Of course, except for the, the shows, you
know, you want to catch because you know,
it's like, I, I, I, I checked my
podcast app Wednesday evening and I know when
I'm walking Phoebe, I'm hoping that there's another
this week in Bitcoin, which by the way,
is another show that does about a thousand
dollars a month, maybe $1,200 a month
because he's value for value.
And it's all sats, it's all sats, streaming
sats and booster grams.
And that's, and I, and I look forward
to that show and I may have to
scroll down.
I may have to refresh a feed because
I want that content.
And then after I'm listening, done listening to
that, I'm going to listen to Todd and
Rob and thank God for chapters.
Like, Oh, what's the video segment.
Okay.
Skip that.
Skip the video segment.
The chapters are great.
And then Friday morning, I'll be looking for
power.
You know, first I listen to the pod
news weekly review or to the pod news
daily podcast.
And then I'm looking for power.
And you know, sometimes there'll be so much
other stuff.
Cause I subscribed to Gordon's Godcaster feed.
Cause I'm interested what he subscribes to him.
Like, you know, I don't need the hourly
Fox news report.
You know, I don't need Megan Kelly.
No, but you know, but sometimes it'd be
like, Oh, what is Megan Kelly doing?
You know, Tucker may pop up, but usually
I scroll past all that stuff.
And sometimes it's so far down, I have
to search for it and I find it.
So it's, it's a utility, but that it's
really, cause I'm looking for the content and
yes, my life.
And, and you can say I'm not a
normal listener, but I think that's a very,
that's very normal behavior.
If we don't release a curry in the
keeper on Wednesday night before nine 30, the
phones are ringing.
Are you guys okay?
What's going on?
You know, Thursday morning, I'm so upset.
There's still, you know, we had a server
outage, so I couldn't upload it until Thursday
morning.
People, people are upset.
They're concerned.
And that's really very normal people.
It's church people who pop up their Google.
I don't know how to get to a
website, but I just type in a curry
in the keeper and I click on it
and then I click on it again.
And then I click play.
Oh, you know, okay.
You know, perhaps why the people gets, this
may be part of the explanation.
The, the reason why people get so antsy
about something like curry in the keeper, not
coming out at, you know, at an expected
time or no gender, that kind of thing.
It might be just because there is so
little good content that like, I mean, I
mean just like truly good content that some,
that what people consider to be good content,
that's not just time waster content that people,
something people really want to listen to and
look forward to that, that it, it is
a meaning, it makes a meaningful impact on
their life.
I mean, like, because there's a difference between,
you know, I've said this before, like, uh,
America this week is a podcast that I,
I'm the same way with it that you
do, you know, that people are with curry
in the keeper.
I want with America this week, it's a,
it comes out on there, have a Monday
night live stream.
And then they release their episodes on Friday.
If, if I'm, if they're, if they don't
release something, I, I'm, I'm irritated and bothered
by it.
It really botherss me.
Sure.
Like I want that content and I will
go to all kinds of links to get
it, but there's very little content that's like
that.
Even things like, even things like Rogan.
Oh, they're so popular.
I skipped five out of the, of the
10 episodes, maybe even more.
Yes.
And you, you skip five out of the
10, the, the, you know, there may be
three or four you listen to that you're
just like, I got nothing else to do.
Right.
Well, listen to it.
And then there's one that's actually meaningful that
you want to, but if the time wasters
are that's what you do with the rest
of your life.
And yeah, tick tock is doing $4 billion
a year.
YouTube, you know, their revenue is 10 billion
a quarter or whatever, you know, you're right.
We don't know the cost of that.
But that's just for all the other stuff.
And so podcasting had, remember podcasting started.
Facebook was just becoming available to people without
a.edu email address.
YouTube really didn't come until what, 2007, 2008,
when, when Google bought it, at least.
And it was a big deal.
So, and, and, and I just have to
repeat podcasting was completely, you know, page 23
below the fold.
No one was talking about podcasting, the venture
capital people that had invested $65 million in
pod show.
They were like, well, you got to do
videos, clearly videos until cereal came along and
you could, where could you get cereal?
You could only get it really in a
podcast app.
So that's one, that's one thing I thought
was that I liked about, um, that I
thought was good about what Tom said was
that he clearly just was like video videos,
not the answer.
We can just stop talking about video because
that's, it's not even, it's not even part
of the conversation that we're having.
And he's right.
And just look at Rogan because he's now
back on podcast apps.
He's on Spotify.
I think Spotify, it's hard to get the
audio version.
You kind of get the video version by
default, I think.
Um, but two years ago when I was
on Rogan, I think that the YouTube views
for whatever that means, 60 seconds watch was
3 million.
Now his average is about 1 million, you
know, so it's spread out.
It's in different places for a while.
There was exclusively on, on Spotify, which I
think may have actually hurt him to some
degree because it gave a lot of people
opportunity to rise up.
And now to be honest, I see Rogan,
Theo Vaughn, Megyn Kelly, and Tucker Carlson, they
all have the same guests on.
They're just rotating through the same people all
the time.
Yeah.
It's like, instead of, you know, Tonight Show
and, uh, and David Letterman, now we have,
you know, four Tonight Shows.
Uh, and you can only really, and, but
you know, I prefer to listen to, I
listen to Tucker a lot too, but I
prefer to listen to Rogan.
I think what a lot of people are
doing, Tina is a big, uh, big fan
of this is she'll go on Instagram or
YouTube and she'll just watch clips of Megyn
Kelly.
So she'll watch a 15 minute with one
guest.
She won't even watch the whole show.
Well, that may be fine for what Megyn
Kelly's doing and maybe it's, maybe it's working
out great for her.
That's just not what I prefer to do.
So it's interesting.
I was having a discussion with my two
older kids.
Um, um, my 23 year old, my 21
year old, uh, 23 year old girl, 21
year old boy.
And they both told me that, uh, they've,
they pretty much never look at TikTok anymore.
Oh, really?
That's interesting.
Yes.
What they said, and both of them said
for the same reason, um, they said that
the TikTok shop ruined that, ruined that.
And that's really the way they make money
is the TikTok shop.
That's the moneymaker.
They, so it's seen, according to them, uh,
according to them, them and all their friends
basically have stopped list, uh, stopped using TikTok.
They said they'll, they'll open it up every
now and then for five minutes and just
scroll through, but they're largely off that platform
now.
And they've gone back to Instagram.
Yeah, I believe it.
Because it's all the same stuff anyway, but
they said, they said that the TikTok shop
thing basically just ruined everybody's algorithm because all
it is, is just a bunch of people
selling stuff.
Yeah.
Cheap, cheap crap from China.
Yeah.
It's a bunch of people selling stuff combined
with, um, like a bunch of Russian car
crash videos and other stuff that just, they
don't want to see.
It's like, it's just there.
They said their timelines are just junk now.
So the bottom, I found, I found pretty
interesting.
I mean, like to, to have every, you
know, cause TikTok was the thing that was
going to eat the world.
And all of a sudden the bloom's coming
So the bottom line is this is all
based on user generated content and we have
a lot of it.
And, you know, yeah, for a while you
can get into your algorithm of watching people
dancing, you know, TikTok was the, the big,
really they, they blew up because of the
music and the dances.
And then they got into a fight with
universal music.
And, you know, so I think they lost
a lot of the, or they, they decided
not to renew their licenses.
So that, that vibe kind of went away,
but it's, it's the thing that I think
everyone gets wrong is it's the content.
It's always going to be the content that
drives people to your podcasts.
I'm not on Apple with curry and the
keeper.
Uh, I'm not on Spotify with any of
my shows.
Has it hurt me?
I don't think so.
I really don't think so.
Cause people know where to get it.
They want it.
They'll come and get it wherever I am.
But it's podcasting is not a, a, a
platform that engages you when you're, you're on
your podcast app all day.
I mean, there was a little, little moment
there and hopefully I successfully turned people away
from that where, you know, they're just gorging
content had two times speed.
I need to listen to more podcasts.
I need more information.
Got to go faster.
Got it in my brain.
Um, but that, that's just not what it
is.
You know, you don't, you're not constantly watching
Netflix all day.
There also is no podcasting middle-class.
Oh, that's interesting.
That's an interesting observation.
There's just not, there's really just not one.
I mean, you, you've got, it, it may
be there's the bottom, there's the bottom, there's
the bottom 95% and then there's the
top 4% and then there's just like
a 1% middle-class.
There's really not a, a, a meaningful podcast
middle-class anymore.
And there, there kind of is in the
world of YouTube and that kind of thing.
There's a few of those people who are
making okay.
I don't know if it's any more than
it is in podcasting, but it's just, there's
podcasting is just not, man, it's just, it's
hard.
It's hard and it's messy.
And, you know, and, and, and like it
is a, you know, one, one of the
things that Tom said in his article was
that podcasting 2.0 has had spotty success.
And I agree.
We have had spotty success, but you know,
spotty success is all that most of us
can hope for.
And it's, I love it.
I love my spotty success.
You talk about like, like podcasting was, um,
I mean, podcasting was created by a radio
guy and a programmer in a hotel room.
Pretty much.
That's pretty spotty.
That's a spot.
And we love RSS, but let's admit, let's
all just be honest here.
I love RSS for what it gives us,
but as far as a spec, it's pretty
terrible.
I mean, it's, it's nobody would create RSS
in the same way today.
If we were going to do this thing
over from scratch, it's so loose and so
vague and half the tags don't even make
any sense.
And like, but, but, but I, I kind
of disagree because half the tags make a
lot of sense to groups of people.
I just look at the music stuff.
No, no, no, no.
I'm talking, no, I'm talking about the original
RSS 2.0 spec that Wiener, that Wiener,
I'm talking about that spec.
Oh, oh, oh, I see what you're saying.
Yeah.
That spec reads like, Oh yeah.
Yeah.
There were some things in there that made
no sense.
Yeah.
I agree.
There's yeah.
And, and the restrictions on, I mean, it
just, what I'm trying to say is that
all of podcasting is built on the shakiest
of, of specifications to begin with.
So anything, any improvement is an improvement, you
know, but somehow it still works.
You know, it still works.
It works fantastic.
It's not pretty, but it works.
You know, I, I mean, I, I look
at when, uh, when, when the kids do
their, uh, their, their, um, battle of the
douchebags and all this other stuff.
And they've, and you know, when they're doing
a skirmish live and they've, and they're playing
and people are boosting.
And I mean, I look at the, at
the boost board and like my eyes, like,
it's like, I'm on an acid trip.
Like, what is this thing?
I barely understand half of what's going on.
And it's like, you know, how 2000 meets,
uh, um, a minority report.
You're like, wow, look at all this stuff.
And that's all possible because of, of the
stuff that we've built.
I don't know.
I, that is success to me.
Is the whole world going to do that?
Absolutely not.
The whole world's not going to listen to
no agenda.
It's just not going to happen.
And by the way, we've churned our audience
five times at least.
Yeah.
There's still people who've been around since episode
one, but, um, you know, people get really
mad at us.
It's like during COVID we had a different
opinion.
A lot of people left and a lot
of people came in, you know, Ukraine, Russia,
a lot of people left, a lot of
people came back in.
It's just how it goes.
And so we just, we have this kind
of, this is the amount.
And, you know, we tell people to go
hit people in the mouth and let them
know about it.
And they're not all listening in podcast apps
or listening in all kinds of different ways.
Some only listen live at work, you know,
it's like, so I don't, I don't know
what, what, what people define success as, you
know, when, when Steve Jobs introduced podcasting revolution,
it was born, boom, fantastic.
Oh, there's this stuff that people are making
and I can listen to it.
And then Apple kind of said, Oh, by
the way, you can listen on demand to
BBC, NPR, you know, and PBS and all
that stuff.
Cause they put a lot of focus on
quote unquote professional stuff in the beginning, if
you recall.
But the beauty has always been, I can
listen to anybody.
I can listen to no matter what it
is.
Then now I can get audio books on
it and it's not going to, it's never
going to be one big platform.
All the podcast apps and all the websites
all have the same features.
It's not going to be that way.
Just as you know, there's only going to
be a few mega successful people that everybody's
heard about and everybody has seen once or
twice or has seen a clip of, that's
the same in music.
But the beauty is in those little groups
of people who are completely dedicated.
I mean, college radio used to be a
thing too, you know?
So to me it's so successful and it
doesn't need, you know, what we're doing doesn't
need anyone to drive or anyone to be
the evangelist.
It doesn't need that.
It's just technology.
Use it how you want to use it.
You and I saw an opportunity and went,
Oh, let's build this thing, Godcaster.
By the way, seeing those stats you built
this morning was kind of mind-boggling.
That wasn't interestingly difficult.
Do you want to talk about some of
the tech on that?
Yeah, let me just explain what it is
and then I want you to talk about
the tech.
So we've explained that Godcaster is mainly for
radio stations.
That's just our phase one.
And they can put their live stream in
as a lit tag and then they can
put all the programming they have that they
play nationally, all the podcasts and anything they
have local, and they can mix and match,
arrange it.
It's a feed by itself.
So you can subscribe to the station.
You get the, in the modern podcast app,
you can listen to the live stream because
it's lit.
And then you can get the most recent
episode.
And because we control the player, we have
all this first party data, which is great.
So the station can see what is working
for them.
If people are listening to that programming, it
also does video, but I think the majority
is audio.
And then we showed it to people and
these program producers who are on anywhere from
60 to 2000 radio stations, they're like, wow,
it would be very cool if we could
see what's happening on each of the affiliate
stations.
And so you built that.
And I go in, I'm like, holy cow,
look at this.
You can see exactly what stations people are
listening to it more.
What's getting more engagement, who's listening longer.
Oh, let's look at the Canadian version.
You can see exactly what's happening there.
And it's all this first party data.
It was mind boggling to me.
It was, I never, cause not, you know,
it, it, it took it out of the,
here's downloads and regions too.
There's this radio station over there.
They're promoting this on their website and their
podcast experience on their website.
Some of them have it in their app
now and, and you can see how it's
doing with that audience.
It was, it was, I really love seeing
that it, I had, I was all giddy
with it.
I really was.
So let me talk about the tech as
to what is going on there.
Because this is, I think this is an
overlap with what, with what we're going to
be doing with the index as well.
We've always, we've used, we've used SQLite from
the beginning in various ways.
I mean, from the beginning of the index.
To deliver, we deliver the weekly download as
a SQLite database.
We use SQLite for the backend of podping
.cloud. We use it for, Helipad uses it.
We've, we've always, we've always done this.
And so one of the things we knew
that we needed in Godcaster was that these,
each radio station was going to need to
have stats about who's listening to their show
or not necessarily who, but how many plays
they're getting on what shows, how many support,
how many people are clicking on the donation
links, just all the different stats, the metrics
that you want from you, you, you roll
out this, this web player to your website
and you want to see all the stats
or record all the stats.
And that's a big commitment.
So we, you know, we, we know that
the hosting companies are very good at stats
really in a lot of ways.
In a lot of ways, hosting companies are
really stats companies.
Yeah, for sure.
You know, that's really what their main, what
is such a huge feature of what they
do.
Otherwise, why don't you, all you would do
is you throw it on archive.org or,
you know, a sound cloud or something, but
for, because you, but if you want to
have real meaningful stats and see what's happening
with your feed and with your episodes, you
use a hosting company.
Right.
And then they put, you know, they have
good UI on top of it, but, but
stats is a big part.
And I know from all my friends in
the podcast hosting world, that stats is also
a huge pain in the butt.
No kidding.
Yeah.
It's, it's hard, it's hard to do it
right.
It takes tons of server respaces, server resources
and disk space.
You can really just, you can really just
sell the farm when it comes to stats,
if you're not careful.
And so I was like, I had that
in mind and I was thinking, what's the
best way to do this best in quotes.
Right.
And it struck me, okay, let's, why don't
we just do it this way?
Why don't we have a stats, a SQLite
file for each web player for each month
of each year.
So anytime an event happens like a play
or a share or a support or anything
like that.
I think it's like 18 different events.
Yeah.
It's a lot.
This would also include RSS downloads from the
station's feed, clicks on funding tags, all these
things get recorded.
Anytime that happens, anytime an event comes in,
it looks at the time, at the year,
the month, the year, the month, the day
and the hour.
And that gets recorded and that gets put
into a SQLite database for that player for
that year and month.
So you would have like 2025 underscore three
dash the player ID number dots dot DB.
And that's the SQLite database for that player
for the month of March of 2025.
And so everything in all the month of
March for that player gets recorded in that
thing.
And then when it rolls over to April,
you get a new database, new file, new
file.
So there's obviously there's tradeoffs, you know, it
would like anything.
One of the tradeoffs is, and this is
a big one, is that you have to
store all your files on object storage.
No, no, no.
On the disk.
You have to store all your files on
the disk that is serving the content.
Right.
If you want to write directly to the
file now, we could queue these things and
ship them off to a different server that
would do the recording, but we're not, you
know, that's scaling.
We're not we're not that's not necessary at
this point.
But there's that's just one of the tradeoffs
that you have to, you know, you have
to consider.
But one of the on the pro side
of the tradeoffs is you get like super
fast SQL storage and you don't have to
run a separate SQL server.
It's great.
It's fantastic, which is great.
Now, let me ask you a question.
So when you so I understand that.
And of course, people can download their month's
worth of stats, raw log file, which is
great, you know, CSV format, boom, open it
up, pivot table, rotate, zoom, enhance pie chart.
But then how did you parse out by
program?
So that's yeah.
So that's the next.
That's that's the next part is.
So when we went to give publishers their
stats, so I want to see I want
so I'm let's say I'm focused on the
family and I have 12 different different podcasts
and I want to see how my 12
different podcasts are performing across all of the
players on on on the platform.
What now what we do is we have
a publisher database, same thing, SQLite database for
the year and the month publisher database, and
then once an hour it goes through and
finds all the players that have that show
in them in their lineup, opens up the
opens up that shows database, pulls the latest
entries out for just those programs and sticks
it in the publisher's database.
That could be quite a process over time.
It's not fast, but it's not horrible either.
I mean, it's it's not too bad, because
the one thing about again, SQLite is lightning
fast.
It is so quick.
And I mean, once you these files are.
Generally pretty small, even for lots and lots
of entries, they never tend to grow too
huge and all you're taking is the delta
each time.
So you're just taking this hours entries.
OK, right.
You know, so at most you're only really
pulling out, you know, a few hundred entries
or a thousand maybe each time.
You know, so it's not too bad.
And so then that.
That's how we have.
You know, database, we have stats databases that
are specific to each thing, and the other
nice thing about it is when you want
to when you want to purge stats for
older months, you just delete the file.
There's no database work.
Yeah, there's no pruning.
No, there's no pruning is because you just
it's like, well, you know, we keep two
months, we keep two months of stats currently.
So when we get, you know, to April,
February, we'll just disappear.
We'll just do an RRM.
We'll ship it off to Iron Mountain on
tape.
You know, go under the earth.
Of all, you know, of all the times
back in the day in the 90s when
we had think new ideas and you know,
we had we it was required by some
of our customers like Reebok and Anheuser-Busch.
You know, you have to have backups of
everything.
And so we do we'd run legato tape
backups.
We'd ship it off not to Iron Mountain,
but something comparable.
I would say the two times we had
a catastrophic crash, it was the most horrible
process to restore everything from tape.
I mean, it took weeks.
It took weeks to get that done.
It was like, this is not a real
solution.
This is not really working well.
It was bad.
Yeah, we.
You know, tape storage is great until you
need to restore and then it's very slow.
It looks great.
Oh, look at all these tapes we got.
Oh, that's cool.
That's awesome.
A object storage and cloud storage for backup
is all right.
Yeah.
It's also kind of that way.
It's great until you need to restore and
then it can be a very slow process.
Can be.
I see Iron Mountain trucks all over the
place.
I mean, they still they're still a big
deal.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
That's all the isn't all the V.A.
pensions done on paper in Iron Mountain.
Oh, I heard that.
Well, but but I think the SQLite database,
this I've already started working on the version
to version 2.0 of the podcast index
API.
I've got some some sort of some scaffolding
code written that.
So it's going to it's a it's going
to be this new version of the API
is going to be in Rust and it'll
be it's built on poem.
This poem, a poem, open API crate.
Alex turned me on to this crate and.
It's this thing is so slick, it is
so easy poem crate poem dash APC poem
dash open API poem crate is just a
great, great show title poem crate.
Yeah, poem dash open API.
So you can it makes it like effortless
to create routes that attach to some assume
a code like a function.
And so I think that's going to be
really the the the heart of version two,
version two of the podcast index rest API.
And then.
But what I'm going very slow and very
careful because what I want to happen is
as we have this API.
We need it to follow a specific.
SQL schema.
So that we can then.
Here's here's kind of what I'm hoping for
is to be able to ship.
My ship SQLite.
Files that contain slices of the database around.
So then so what we would do is
like we talked about this before, what our
vision is, is that.
Somebody can request part of the part of
the index and take that on as a
workload on their on their node.
And so in order to make that happen,
we got to be able to ship.
You know, a decent chunk of data.
To them, Eric, it's not.
I mean, I wouldn't really.
I'm not really thinking in terms of shards
because I'm uncomfortable sharding something across like this
massive distance.
You know, it's not going to be on
the same land segment or even close.
So these really have to be.
Like these really have to be able to
operate as if they were disconnected from the
mothership.
Big, I mean, so I'm thinking, you know,
if somebody requests a slice of the database
that's 10,000 shows, I mean, I don't
know, 40 40 megs or something like that,
40, 50 megs worth of data.
That's going to be sent across to this
other node through, you know, our DHT connection.
And so that then that other node gets
this SQLite database and loads it into whatever
their back end databases or they could just
work off that SQLite database itself.
And then if they ever needed to give
it back, they could send the send, you
know, they could send it back.
So I'm thinking about like this would be
the message passing would be these SQLite database
files because they're they can be very small.
I, um, that's very exciting, Dave.
It's not, but thanks.
I'm looking forward to it.
I got five gigabit per second.
I got lots of disk space.
I'm ready for you to shard on me.
Bring it on, big boy.
I'm good to go.
There's about four people in the boardroom who
enjoyed that.
Yeah, I wanted to just before we thank
some people, because I know you got to
get back to the office.
I just wanted to mention one 2.0
feature that has just been a thing of
beauty, and that's the funding tag.
And it would work perfectly well with chapter
links.
So in the Godcaster, the host of the
show, they have a post role in their
audio.
That's there's a whole infrastructure set up in
Radioland called Ambassador.
And so at the end of the show,
the host and the host voice says, hey,
if you liked our program, go to KHCB's
website.
If you're not already there, click on the
donate button.
And that's the funding tag.
And so when you hit that, it takes
you to the program producers donation page, and
we send off a referring URL.
And that shows up somewhere.
What was really beautiful is I did this
for Focus on the Family, and I had
already donated, I guess, once.
And so I didn't complete my donation.
And then I got an email from them,
kind of like a shopping cart, where someone
said, hey, you left and your shopping cart
is still open.
You didn't donate.
And it had a link, and it was
our link with the referral code.
And so the implication of that is that
we can show a conversion from a radio
station's Godcaster player all the way through a
programmer's database, their customer relationship management database.
We can show that conversion because their system
is already aware of that link.
This would work extremely well with per inquiry,
call to action, Code Bongino type stuff.
You know, hey, just- We should talk
about this with Tom next week.
Yes.
Because I think this is an untapped experience.
To be able to show, because I saw
it, it's like, holy crap, we can now
show conversion when someone hits that link.
And it doesn't have to be the funding
link.
It can be a chapter link.
It can be all kinds of different things.
But that going all the way in and
automatically having the referral code, wherever that came
from, whatever the app was, which is something
we could- I think we could kind
of do that.
I think we could all agree, like, well,
why don't I just have a referring link
or something that I send along from my
podcast app, whether it's Podverse or Podcast Guru,
then you can also talk about- To
me, it's kind of like a value for
value sharing mechanism where, hey, this many people
use my app to look at your product
and they went through conversion.
I mean, there's a lot of opportunity there
that we're not- And you know, Rocky's
really hot on this too.
She really likes this chapter stuff.
Not just for- Rocky from Soundscape?
Yeah.
Not just for tracking, but the whole conversion
thing, that could actually be, I think, pretty
groundbreaking.
We could work with our brothers and sisters
in the podcast industrial complex.
It wouldn't be a hard code change, I
don't think.
Well, I mean, if we just have a
spec for what to send and then how
to- And then part of the spec
is store it- When you receive it
on the receiving side, store it this way
so that you can then confirm the conversion.
Yeah.
With some ping back or something.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I like it.
Yeah.
Let's chat with that.
Duly noted.
All right.
We are value for value.
That's how everything keeps running.
It's proof that podcasting 2.0 is a
success, as is the value for value model,
because everything's still running and we're getting ready
to shard.
So something must be working.
And a lot of that comes through the
modern podcast apps, people using the Satoshis to
boost us.
In fact, the split kit was used by
Randy Black, who sent us 1321 Satoshi.
Says, oh, this sexy stats and coding talk
has me all excited this afternoon.
I just love it when Dave and Adam
get all geeky on us.
Go podcasting.
Okay, Randy.
People like the geek.
They like the geeky stuff.
They do.
They like the deep dive.
Cole McCormick, 1111.
I tried being consistent with editing my podcast
video, became exhausting.
Now I'm planning on simplifying it with live
streaming to all podcast apps and most important
video platforms, YouTube X and Noster.
All right.
Bruce W, 1192, baby's first boost.
Go podcasting.
Is that really your baby coming in from
true fans?
Salty Crayons on CurioCaster, 3140.
Howdy, boardroom.
Happy Pi Day.
My raspberry pie has been running for three
plus years and has never failed as my
node.
Still pings the pongs in the pipe.
We have Martin Lindeskog, a true fan, 1701.
Back to the future.
How will you celebrate the Persian New Year?
Nowruz.
I am lost in space, but I have
Ron Plouffe's griddle cakes and Sam Sethi's virtual
wine on my starship.
That's 1701.
Oh, 1701 sats, of course.
Yes, of course.
It's the Enterprise, wasn't it?
1701?
Yeah, that's right.
Martin Lindeskog, PS Dave, what is skinny pop?
Do you get gay by eating them?
Do you like pork rinds?
Skinny pop is, this is aged white cheddar.
I don't think there's gay in the bag,
but I'm not sure.
It could be.
You have to get the non-gay kind.
That's your own preference, whatever taste you have
today.
3141 from Dreb Scott.
He says, go podcasting.
Happy Pi Day.
Coming in from Podverse and from CurioCaster, 314
from Salty Crayon, 314 Pi Day bat signal
confirmed.
And then we've got Cole McCormick with 1111
again.
He says, Dave, please know there's a random
guy in Los Angeles who deeply loves your
spirit and your work.
It's clear that your intentions are to serve
podcasting and all that enjoy it.
I see you and appreciate you.
Choose your thoughts wisely.
This is what creates your life.
At least you didn't get into an argument
with your podcasting wife.
That would be Adam.
I don't, I don't think we've ever, have
we ever had an argument?
I don't think so.
I don't think so either.
No, no, never had an argument and they
never had a podcast for 15 years and
they never had a fight and I hit
the delimiter.
So Dave will tell us who else supported
the show this week.
Well, we got, uh, let me, I've got
foolishly stapled these pieces of paper together.
So now I have to de-staple them.
Um, what is, oh, here we go.
I got it.
Oscar Mary, $200.
Ooh, very nice.
That's a big baller.
Hold on a second.
Thank you, Oscar.
Salty Crayon, you're going to send me some
beef sticks?
Yes, please.
I'll take beef sticks.
Um, Franco, our buddy Franco, 100 bucks.
He says sending some coupons and a lot
of love.
Very nice.
Thank you, Franco.
It's appreciated.
Yeah.
I sent him an email asking when we
can get him back on the show.
Cause we need an update on Castamatic.
Yeah.
We need an update on Italy in general.
Italy.
Yes.
Are you still there, Italy?
Italy, your points please.
Podverse, $50.
Ah, Mitch, thank you so much.
I'm assuming that Mitch is heads down coding
away on Podverse next gen.
NG.
Yes.
A lot going on with that.
And still a, um, the number two app
behind Apple on, uh, no agenda.
That's, that's not bad.
Mm.
Uh, let's see.
Uh, Franco actually just responded to me.
So, okay.
We'll, we'll figure out a time.
He said, I'm listening, but let me in.
Let me in.
He says, yeah, we'll figure out a time
to get him on the show.
Let's see here.
We got some booster grams.
We got 22, 22 from Bruce, the ugly
quacking duck.
Yeah.
Uh, podcasting 2.0, uh, podcast guru.
He says it should work.
Great to go.
Okay.
It should, it should, it should work.
Uh, let's see what we got.
Oppy 1984, 4,000 sats through the fountain.
He says, Dave, as a former business owner,
one hard lesson I had to learn was
trying to please everyone is a path to
ruin.
Sometimes you just have to be thick skinned,
take ownership of a decision and tell the
people who don't like it, that they can
either accept it or leave.
They'll get mad.
They'll threaten to leave.
And nine times out of 10, they'll come
back.
And if they don't come back, then they
weren't the right, uh, one for the project.
So look at after yourself first, brother, sweet.
Thank you.
Appreciate that.
I'll be 1984.
Um, Oh, let me see.
I've got one to go here.
Yeah.
You, you read Cole McCormick.
So I did.
I did.
So we hit the delimiter then hit the
delimiter is comic strip blogger, 18,045 sats
through fountain.
He says, howdy, Dave and Adam, young people
and children nowadays prefer YouTube and Tik TOK
videos to podcasts.
So it's a wonder that Dave meet us
convinced his daughter Lila to create podcast with
him.
And it's already second it's entitled.
Everything's an argument and it can be found
at www.argumentpod.com.
The hosts describe it as both an educational
and comedy podcast.
And they sometimes share expert opinions.
Yo CSB PS, Adam Kerwa AI is not
a parlor trick exclamation point.
Comic strip blogger is the recommendation engine of
podcasting 2.0. That's what I love about
him.
You don't need any AI.
He just needs CSB.
That's all you need.
You're good to go.
But CSB is AI.
I mean, like we were pretty convinced he
died years ago.
What were he's just doing?
This is all AI.
Yeah.
We got some monthlies.
We got Joseph Maraca, $5.
Randall Black, $10.
Basil Philip, $25.
Thank you, Basil.
Lauren Ball, $24.20. Thank you, Lauren.
Christopher Harabaric, $10.
Mitch Downey, $10.
Terry Keller, $5.
Silicon Florist, $10.
Chris Cowan, $5.
Damon Casajak, $15.
Paul Saltzman, $22.22. Thank you, Paul.
Derek J.
Visker, the best name in podcasting, $21.
And Jeremy Gerds, $5.
Wow, that's beautiful.
Thank you all so much.
Those are the PayPals.
You can go to podcastindex.org down at
the bottom.
Red button takes you to our PayPal for
your fee out fund coupons.
Of course, it is podcasting 2.0. So
we love the boost, boost, boost.
And we got a late boost from SourceD.
Also a Starship Enterprise boost 1701.
He says running with scissors.
And that we are.
And we look forward to running with scissors
again next week.
Who knows what the argument will be then?
What will be on deck?
Well, we'll have Tom.
We'll have Tom with us.
I'm looking forward to it.
I hope we can come up with some
solutions for Tom.
Tom needs money.
We need to help him make money.
Tom needs money.
I think I think we can.
It's always good.
Like, you know, it's always good to it's
always good to have these different perspectives.
I really enjoy it.
I mean, every time we have somebody on
who's not just steeped in this stuff, it's
it's always a learning experience.
Yes.
But, you know, because you got to you've
got to we can't just go like, you
know, just down navel gazing into the silo
all the time.
We got to have somebody we got to
talk outside the bubble.
And I'm thinking that that funding tag could
be used even even Apple could could get
on board with that.
What if what if you just had if
you forget what it's called, if you just
had a star or a donkey or something
on Apple podcast that you could hook up
to anything, you know, it's like, well, if
you hit the donkey, if if you whack
the donkey, then you can you go straight
to this advertiser's website and and I'll get
credit for it or something like that.
There's something there we'll have to explore.
We will explore it.
Can we please call it something other than
whack the donkey?
Because that makes me super uncomfortable.
All right, brother Dave, I'll be praying for
you for decent weather throughout the weekend.
Thank you, bro.
All right, everybody.
Thank you very much boardroom.
We'll see you next week right here on
podcasting 2.0. Bring the doughnuts.
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Oh, my bathrobe fell open.