Podcasting 2.0 for May 2nd, 2025, Episode
219, BudCast.
Hello, everybody.
Hello, boardroom.
Hello, America.
Hello to the world.
Welcome to the only board meeting that talks
about podcasting, because we are podcasting 2.0,
and coincidentally, the only boardroom that isn't at
war with Russia.
I'm Adam Currie, here in the heart of
the Texas Hill Country, and in Alabama, the
man I'd rather be vibe coding with than
Claude or Grok.
Say hello to my friend on the other
end, the one, the only, Mr. Dave Jones.
So as you were introing, I had tooted
earlier about the show being live, and I
included, as I always do, this time correctly,
the episodes.fm link.
Yeah, although episodes.fm didn't still tell you
it was undefined?
Yes, that's what I was about to say.
It didn't do anything, and then finally the
open graph tag popped up right at the
end of your intro, and it just came
up and it said, undefined.
I know, I know, I know.
It sat there for like a minute, and
then it said undefined.
This bug has been there for a long
time.
Nathan, what are you doing?
It's undefined.
Nathan is undefined.
And I've learned a lot of undefined.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to TWIV.
This Week in Vibe Coding?
That's right, This Week in Vibe Coding.
Did you see my code?
Did you look at my code?
What do you think of my code?
I did not open your Python file because
I was on the way out the door,
but I should open it right now.
Let's look at this thing.
Yeah, so in the ongoing, and this is
all podcasting related by the way, and I'll
tell you what I'm doing.
Can I just tell you that you sending
me a Python file is kind of weird?
Startling in and of itself.
I'm like, wait, there's an attachment?
The project I've been working on for, I
think, four weeks now, which you and I
together, Vibe Coding, could have done in four
hours.
Started out with me using all different kinds
of AI, trying to get liquid soap to
work.
I'll cut right to the chase.
After trying everything, and I mean everything, even
Cursor, but Cursor's like, I need an IDE.
My eyes rolled up in my head like,
no, no, I don't want that.
What is Cursor?
It's another AI that integrates with your IDE,
and I understand what it does, but I
want nothing to do with an IDE.
I just want to copy-paste stuff into
it, into Nano, okay?
And then I can go and find log
files, and I can feed it back to
you.
So anyway, long story short, after trying liquid
soap, after trying ICES, after trying MPD, Music
Playlist Daemon, and I'm trying to turn an
MP3 feed of files, so it's a Godcaster
feed, so it has files from different podcasts
in there, different hosts, et cetera, turning that
into an IceCast stream.
You think it would be easy.
Ultimately, because I kept saying, liquid soap, I've
spent at least 20 hours trying to get
liquid soap to work properly, forget about it.
That's when, you know, whichever AI I was
using at the time finally told me I
needed to recompile my kernel.
I'm like, okay, you're stupid.
So what actually finally worked, with some reasonable
success, using FFmpeg as the streamer to IceCast,
was doing this in Grok, in SuperGrok.
SuperGrok, which is grok.com, but for some
reason it calls itself SuperGrok.
Is that the one that doesn't have any,
like, filters, it cusses at you all the
time?
I cussed at it.
It didn't cuss back at me, so I
don't know about that, but quite impressive at
creating a Python script.
I think I've probably worked on this for
the past four days, and it's really incredible.
It has zero intelligence.
Can it parse syntax, and does it understand,
um, you know, code, and how code should
probably work?
Yeah.
Is it intelligent?
Absolutely not.
I'm sitting there going, hey, this is obviously
what's going wrong.
Maybe you should look at this.
Oh, you're right.
Snap.
Yeah, okay.
All right.
Snap.
Oh, that gets your goat faster than you.
You hate that.
You hate the oh, snap.
Oh, snap.
This Python script, now, I'm not a Python
guy.
I don't, I'm never going to claim to
know much about Python.
I can just sort of hammer my way
through it if I need to fix something,
but I've never seen Alex Gates cry, but
I believe this might be the main, the
ingredient that would make that happen.
Tell me why.
What is it about the script that, now,
I've told it to comment things, even include
whatever you need in your Python environment, all
the required includes, so I made it document
stuff all over the place.
What would make Alex Gates cry?
Well, I mean, first of all, it's just
all run together.
I mean, like trying, you would have to
go, there's a cursory attempt at some sort
of documentation in this code.
Like there's essentially one comment at the top
of each function that tells you what the
function is supposed to do, and there's no
other comments anywhere in the function.
And so you're, it's, I mean, you would
really have to go through this thing line
by line for 45 minutes and say, oh,
okay, what is this doing?
What is this doing?
And then, I mean, it's very hard to
follow.
The logging is all just straight logging.
There's no like, yeah, this is rough.
Well, there you go.
As long as it works.
It's going to take over the world, people.
It's going to rule the world.
It's so smart.
No, this is what I thought.
But there's no Chinese that I can see.
No, there's no, I look for that as
well.
Indeed.
No Chinese characters, but it does work.
The hardest part.
What do you think the hardest part of
this whole exercise was?
Now, give me more.
You're like coding wise?
No, no, no, no.
What took the most time to figure out
and reiterate over and over again to get
it right?
What failed the most?
Come on.
DNS.
Close, close second.
Parsing through, no, parsing through all the permutations
and variations of URLs to MP3 files.
And I mean, people have got multiple redirects
and wrong MIME types.
And then the file is, you know, you
can't get the size because there's no size
in the RSS feed.
The file itself is, you know, you've got
images encoded in it and all kinds of
stuff.
And that that makes it complicated.
Then you've got a question mark after the
dot MP3.
And that is a whole nother tracking thing.
And so by the time I took my
intelligence told Grok, like, you can ignore that.
That's tracking stuff.
Oh, OK.
Wait.
So you're wait, wait, wait, wait.
So you're ignoring the URL parameters that come
after the the the main part of the
URL?
Not on the first.
Well, the first access obviously brings the whole
thing in, but then it has to parse
it out to give a proper URL that
FFMPEG or any other streaming software will understand
because that all breaks it.
No streaming software that I could find can
actually handle redirects and parameters.
If you're not giving it a straight up
file URL to an MP3 file without hoops,
it's all going to break.
OK, so you're you're saying that you're saying
that you have to follow the URL redirect
chain to its final destination, get that final
URL, then give that to FFMPEG.
Correct.
Gotcha.
Yeah, I got you.
So that was the hardest part.
And of all of the different RSS feeds,
all of them.
And believe me, I've tried a lot.
You're getting a tour.
I got a full one.
By the way, my heart goes out to
podcast app developers, man.
I can only imagine what they have to
go through.
Straight up.
And so what is the there's only one
host, only one host that constantly blocks my
script, no matter how I spoof it, no
matter what refer I give it, no matter
what identifier I give it, even passing off
a cookie to it.
Buzzsprout is the one that will not let
me create a script to download their MP3
file because I think those guys are the
only ones who really try to just stop
download bullcrap.
What are you getting back?
403?
403.
Yeah.
So what is the user agent you're using
to send?
Tried everything.
Tried Mozilla, Safari, tried spoofing, because I could
literally do it in my browser on the
Brave browser, same machine, same connection, no problem.
The minute I fire up the script, no
matter what I was passing off to it,
and Grok and I did a lot of
work on this, it would continuously give me
a 403.
It's like it identified me and for some
reason, I know you're no good.
What is the source IP?
I mean, not the IP itself, but where
is this coming from, this traffic?
Oh, I'm sorry.
You're right.
In this case, Linode.
It's coming from Linode.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Linode.
And it comes from Linode block.
Does it work if you come from somewhere
else to Busbro?
Yes.
Okay.
So you're probably running up against an ASN
block.
Yeah.
Linode, just because it's Linode, that would make
sense.
Right.
So certain ASNs- ASN stands for what?
Autonomous system number.
That's the owner of an IP block.
Oh yeah.
Oh, I knew that somehow.
Yeah.
So if you have an ASN that belongs
to Linode, DigitalOcean, parts of Amazon, Azure, you
run the risk of getting blocked by some
of this stuff because the only way you
can do it- Yeah.
They figure that's going to be some download
script.
Right.
That's not a real end user.
Yeah.
My point being, Busbro is the only one
doing it.
Nobody else.
Luckily, we know somebody over there.
Oh, no.
I just put it in.
You'll see somewhere in that spaghetti of code,
you'll see, oh, it's from Busbro.
Expect to go to 403, just skip ahead.
Well, I'm looking at it right now.
This is headers, user agent, refer Busbro.
There's a bunch of stuff in here from
Busbro.
Yeah.
Clean your, yeah.
Yeah.
You got a lot of Busbro avoidance code
in here.
Except for the one thing I can't help,
this actual location of the machine.
It's been fascinating.
However, I will say it works.
I got it to work this morning.
I'm like, holy mackerel.
Now, there's still some buggies in there, but
in general, it works.
It's real.
And so, I got like three streams running
and it's fun to listen to.
It's like, oh, I'm listening to radio all
of a sudden.
I will say that you need to not
impersonate a browser user agent.
It can seem like the right thing to
do, but ultimately you will run into problems.
Right.
So, what should I impersonate?
Because obviously I'm a machine.
Well, no, you don't need to impersonate anybody.
You just need to give your app a
name and just eat it.
Because if you, like podcast index though, we
do this.
If you're coming from an ASN that belongs
to Amazon or Linode or somebody like, if
you're coming from a hyperscaler ASN and you
claim to be a web browser user agent,
instant block.
Because I know you're not, nobody's running Mozilla
browser.
Am I masking as Mozilla right now in
that script?
Yeah.
Your user agent is Chrome.
Well, your user agent is Chrome.
Okay.
All right.
I'll tell it to, I'll change that.
You shouldn't have any problems, I wouldn't think.
I mean, you're not getting blocked by, Buzzsprout's
not blocking you because your user agent is
something else.
No, they're blocking because of me.
Just Adam.
It's like, Adam, no, no, that guy's, he's
up to no good.
It's like, this joker again, kill it.
Yeah.
Now the thing I'd like to do, I
mean, I have so many ideas now that
it's kind of working.
I'd love to be able to somehow hand
off a count.
So if I've got another person listening to
a stream and it's, hello Dreb Scott, thank
you.
If I've got another person listening to a
stream and it's a podcast hosted on Buzzsprout,
I'd love to hand off a, hey, I
got a listener.
You know, which would, I guess, mean another
download or whatever, you know, just to just,
or give them a count somehow.
Okay.
Yeah.
Because what you're doing, I'd actually like to
hand it down the whole stream now, you
know, all the redirects and everything I'd like
them, I'd like, I want everyone to know
that there's another person listening and not just
one continuous stream.
I think that would be fair to do.
I think you can, I think you can
follow the redirect chain with some, what you
could do is follow the redirect chain with
something like curl.
And then this is a good, this is
actually a good question because I don't know
if a head request would follow a redirect.
No, you'd need the, okay.
You, what you could do is like follow
the redirect chain with, with something like curl
just to get all the intermediate, intermediate hops.
Right.
Give everybody, give everybody a ping.
A heads up.
Yeah.
Give them a heads up.
And then.
Yeah.
I'll put that in eventually.
And then just go straight to the source.
Right.
Well, I give that, I do all that
once, but then once somehow I want to
see if ice cast can then say, oh,
we got another listener.
You're listening to this particular file, follow the
chain, give them a, give them a hit.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
I think, you know who I think would
be like the master of knowing the proper
way to do this would be John Spurlock.
You're telling me that Grok can't figure this
out.
Grok is the master of all.
It's the best AI ever according to Elon.
Good luck.
The thing I'm most afraid of is if
I actually had to pay for this man,
the amount of computes, the amount of compute
I must've sucked up in resources has got
to be out of control.
And then sometimes Grok just says, oh, I'm
sorry.
I lost the connection.
Regenerate like, like refrag or whatever.
Well, you can click that regenerate button all
you want, but your session's over.
It is almost impossible.
Much.
I got no credits.
So then you got to start a new
session and say, here's what we were doing.
Get it?
Cause they can't connect to the old session.
This stuff sucks so bad.
It sucks so bad.
And I know that if you and I
had sat down, I'm telling you three, four
hours, we would have banged this out.
It would be working.
This code would have been a 10th of
what this is.
You know, that's.
It would have been in PHP, not Python
though.
I could just say, Hey, this is great.
Do it in PHP.
No, you can tell, you can tell Grok
to convert this script to PHP.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
I'll try.
That would be fun to watch.
No, no.
I think I'll make it work in Python
now because it suggested Python.
I didn't, I said, what should we do
this in Python?
Okay.
Yeah.
Python's not, it's that's, that's a good choice.
Yeah.
It's a good choice.
Hmm.
I'm look, I'm, I'm impressed.
I'm impressed.
I'm impressed as much by, uh, your persistence.
Yeah.
You know, like what, what is the, you
know, the scripture was at Matthew or it's
like, uh, you know, your name, you know,
your neighbor gets up and goes and bangs
on your door.
I was saying, give me some bread.
And it's like, uh, are they going to
get up because they're your friend and help
you?
No, but they will get up and help
you because of your persistence.
Yeah.
You just keep banging on that door.
Just keep banging.
And eventually they're going to get up and
give you some dinner.
Yeah.
Well, no mere mortal could do this.
I have a, you know, I have 25
years of idiot experience of doing this stuff.
I mean, I can, I can get myself
around a shell, you know, it was like,
I, I know conceptually what it's doing, but
if I'm just some schmo showing up and
saying, Hey, write this for me.
No, not, you already know what the pitfalls
are going to be in pretty much each
step of this process.
If you just go in naively and are
like, Oh, I'm just going to have this
thing down, you know, download or go to
a URL and start streaming.
It's like, no, no, please.
That's not how this works.
No, no, exactly.
But so again, it has, it, it knows
what the next word should be.
It understands syntax.
I mean, the syntax of the language of,
of Python is well-known and it's obviously
been trained on all kinds of, you know,
uh, overstack, uh, was it overstack?
No, what's the way everyone searches for answers
on, uh, on their code.
Is that, uh, why am I saying overstack?
Stack overflow.
Yeah.
Stack overflow.
Yeah.
Obviously it's been trained on all this stuff.
Yeah.
So, so it understands, I'm telling you there
is 0.0 intelligence.
The term intelligence is just get out of
here.
No, there's no intelligence.
It's, I mean, it basically wrote code for
me, the way it would write a marketing
document with someone who doesn't, knows nothing about
marketing.
You get a, you get all this flowery
wording and all this mumbo jumbo, and it's
all way too long.
You know, the same, if you're doing a
resume, you know, a professional will just do
a much better job in much shorter amount
of time.
So what I do a lot is I
search for things.
I just Google search for things that I
kind of already know what the answer is,
but I can't remember the exact syntax.
So a lot, most of pro most of
programming is just interacting with what's called the
standard library for that language.
And so like, you know, it's all your
normal, like, uh, find a string in another
string, uh, print, you know, print to the
print to this, to the console, uh, multiply.
And I mean, it's just, it's like, you
know, it's just a bunch of standard things.
And 90% of your code is going
to be using the standard library, no matter
what language you're in.
And, and so eventually over time, when you
just code in that language enough, you begin
to remember just the standard library stuff, you
know, most of them, but there are, but
standard libraries are large, you know, they got
hundreds of functions in them.
So you can't remember all of it.
And like one that gets me every time
is, um, and especially in PHP is, uh,
uh, P reg replace NP reg match so
that, you know, these are standard library functions
to search a string for a substring using
a regular expression.
And I just can't ever remember what the
syntax is because for it's not like a
lot of PHP functions, because I think it's
like the second function or third, uh, excuse
me, second argument or third argument, you pass
in a variable in that variable is going
to receive an argument on output.
And so that's, that's sort of a, that's
a way that C does things.
And you don't really see that in other
languages, but because PHP has C under the
hood a lot, you, you get some of
this functionality.
So I always have to, I'll do like,
uh, I'll just Google search for PHP P
reg replace.
Sure.
And, and I don't, and used to, it
would always just kind of take you to,
uh, the, the PHP website with their documentation.
Now it gives you, uh, an AI hit
using Gemini or something like that.
Or Bing, Bing gives you an AI hit
like every time.
Um, so what I like, so now that's
happening a lot and most of the time
it's fine.
You know, it's just kind of, cause I'm
just searching for simple stuff, but I searched
for something the other day and, uh, Bing
came back with, with an answer and it
was a, it was claiming to be just
the standard library.
This is the way you use this function.
And it was completely wrong.
Yeah.
Hallucination.
Yeah.
It was like the, the, the, the parameters
for the function call were just wrong.
And I was like, it called me off
guard cause I was like, what, wait, is
that right?
That doesn't look right.
And here's the thing.
That type of a search that comes back
with an quote unquote AI query result is
seven times more expensive for the search engine
to do.
Yeah.
Then just an Apache get request to php
.net.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's, this is the problem
is it's all so expensive where, you know,
it's like, it, it took, you know, it
takes a gigawatt of power to power this
data center.
My brain runs on 20 Watts.
You know, it's like my brain can do
so much.
It's so much more efficient if I've trained
my brain in the right manner to speak
this particular language.
I just don't see the business case for
it other than a lot of bad code
getting put out there.
Well, I mean, I use, um, um, probably
like a lot of people, I use different
browsers for different, um, yeah.
One for porn, one for, yeah, that's, yeah,
that's the one that's all screen.
Yeah.
Um, I use like, uh, I have, for
some reason I've fallen into using edge for
all my Godcaster stuff because really, well, yeah,
because I don't know why it's like we
all used to use IE in the web
development world.
All right.
We got to check it on internet Explorer.
Oh, we got to have a whole nother
version for IE 5.3. Oh man.
It was the worst.
It's like brave's my main browser for everything.
So I keep, it's almost like having different
workspaces.
My edge is my Godcaster workspace.
Yeah.
And, uh, so I still haven't changed the
default search engine in edge away from being
to a Google and, uh, which I need
to be using Coggy anyway.
I need to use if you do Coggy
slash assistant, they give you, I pay my
10 bucks a month, whatever it is.
They give you, I think 10 different models
to use for your $10.
Yeah.
Let me see what they give you.
I think, uh, Alex turned me onto this.
Uh, how much is it for real?
Is it like 10 bucks a month?
I think nine, nine something.
So yeah, I've heard nothing but good stuff.
Yeah.
So you get a chat SDPD four Oh
mini four, one mini four, one nano Mistral,
pick stroll Mistral, small three, one Gemini two
Oh flash.
And 2.5 preview Lama three, three, four,
and four scouts of four Maverick Nova light
and deep sea chat V3.
And then if you upgrade, I've not done
that.
You can get Claude three dot seven Gemini
2.5 pro preview and grok three.
I get grok three for free, 10 bucks
a month for unlimited searches and standard AI.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's not bad.
Yeah.
I think I'll go ahead and go ahead.
And Coggy is just, and Coggy, if you
put in a search query and whatever you're
searching for and you add a question Mark
at the end, it'll give you the AI
hits at the top.
That's a little tip, a little pro tip
for you.
A little pro tip.
Okay.
And I think it'll do that just no
matter what, I mean, I don't know.
What am I paying for this stuff?
I think I'm only paying.
How's the search results in Coggy?
I mean, is it comparable to Google?
Yeah, it's good enough.
Sometimes for the, now, if I'm really looking
for something obscure, I go over to my,
my start nine and I use, hold on.
What is it called?
Yancey?
Is it?
No, no, no.
It's the other one.
You're on the right track.
No, I use where is it?
Embassy search XNG.
Ooh, I don't even know what this is.
So it's a meta search and it's completely
customizable.
So it searches, let me see what I'm
set to right now.
So it searches, you can determine different search
engines for different types of queries, dict zone,
Libra translate, lingva, mozi, my memory translated, bing,
brave, duck, duck, go Google, mojik, priest.
I mean, you can set a whole bunch.
It's a meta search.
Blending all the results.
Yeah.
I got you.
But if I'm for details on somebody or,
you know, some obscure thing from a long
time ago, always, always search XNG.
The problem is I can only access it
over Tor on my, on my start nine.
So it doesn't integrate very well with my
workflow.
So I wind up, you know, copying, pasting,
copying from the Tor browser into a regular
browser.
Is it Tor only?
Can you only get to it through Tor?
Yeah.
I mean, you can, you can get to
it.
There's a way to get to it through
dot local, but that fails a lot for
some reason, depending on, you know, Oh, well,
you got your VPN running.
You got this running.
You got that.
And it's like, and it's just, it's too
disruptive.
If I just, you know, you don't want
to get used to something.
And then all of a sudden you're on
the road and like, Oh, Oh, I can't
do it now.
You know, Cotton Jensen, I self host certain,
certain gig.
What?
Yeah.
Sear XNG, Sear XNG.
That's it.
Okay.
So you can self host it.
Yeah.
I'm self hosting it on my start nine.
Oh, on your start nine.
Yeah.
I got you.
But it's just getting to my start nine.
It's Tor or it's complicated.
I got you.
I'm following that.
You got to insert, you know, you got
to add a certain to your browser manually.
Yeah.
I'm, I'm already dreading adding SSL to my
ice cast to server.
I can't wait for that process.
That's going to wait until they drop the,
uh, the SSL renewal period to 47 days,
which is that coming announced.
Yes.
You can.
What a psyop this whole thing was.
I don't need it for this.
I need it for some stuff, but not
for this.
And I, and then Chrome and all these
browsers go, Oh, look at this little bandit
crawling through your window.
Someone might be trying and stealing your stuff.
Are you sure you want to proceed a
bandit?
Yeah.
You've never seen that guy?
A little bandit with the mask with the
mask on.
Yeah.
Like, thanks Google.
Thanks.
Yeah.
Psyoping everybody so that the, you know, you
know what it irritates me about this there
and I'm thinking there has to be a
name for this dark pattern.
I don't, well, it's not fair to call
it a dark pattern.
It's because I don't think it's necessarily, I
don't think it's intentional, but there is an
epidemic now of websites and even native apps
that slide new UI components under the thing
you're about to tap on.
So you go to tap on something or
click something and right before you click or
tap, Oh, it pops something up.
Yeah.
It's a, it's a hijacked dark pattern.
And it's like, um, so you, like you
go to click on the website loads.
I blame, I blame react, you know, react
based page hydrators, because I think that they,
this, this, this idea of hydration where you
load the page in full and then more,
and then the page itself like fills in
its content after the fact.
I hate that because I think it, it
makes it, there's like this weird delay that
happens.
You think the website is there in full,
but then, and so you start to interact
with it, but right before you do something
changes.
There's also a, who does that?
Um, what's the, uh, the website, uh, how
they do financial information.
They have all kinds of, ah, why can't
I come up with it now?
It's a very famous website.
It's got news, but then you, so you're
reading the article.
It'll come to me.
I hope you're reading the article and like,
Oh, this is cool.
And then you scroll and then it pops
up.
Don't you want to register?
No, I don't want to register.
I just want to get this article from
you for free.
Don't you understand the economy of the web?
We should talk about app, the Apple.
This.
Yeah.
What, what a win.
I'll, I'll read the headline.
I have it here from nine to nine
to five Mac.
Apple updates app store guidelines to allow links
to external payments.
The full changes 3.1.1 apps on
the United States storefront are not prohibited from
including buttons, external links, or other calls to
action when allowing users to browse NFT collections
owned by others.
Nice.
Uh, 3.1.1 a on the United
States storefront, there's no prohibition on an app,
including buttons, external links, or other calls to
action.
And no entitlement is required to do so.
The prohibition on encouraging users to use a
purchasing method other than in-app purchase does
not apply on the United States storefront.
This is good news.
Very good.
The, the, the donation known as the funding
link is now approved as if it wasn't
already boosting buttons, not a problem.
So I think it's worth kind of going
back and giving the context of this because
I mean, a lot of people just don't
keep up with this stuff.
Isn't this from the game company lawsuit?
Yes.
So this goes all the way back to,
uh, 2020, uh, is late 2020.
Uh, Apple got sued by Epic games.
Yeah.
Epic games.
That's right.
Yeah.
And it was, it was clearly a, I
mean, it was an intentional.
So what, what had happened is Epic had
put in to Fortnite, the, the mobile version
of Fortnite Epic had put in a link
to poison pill.
Oh, poison pill.
Hmm.
Yeah.
I mean, they, they intentionally poison pilled the
game, uh, to have an in-app purchase
system.
And, uh, that was not Apple's in-app
store purchase in-app purchase.
And so of course, Apple blocked them, you
know, block the game, the game and Fortnite
sued them.
They just needed some premise, you know, to
bring, to take them to court for anti
-competitive behavior.
Yeah.
And so they, they sued them and Epic
removed Fortnite from the app store, uh, withdrew
from the app, from the iOS app store.
And they sued them for, um, for anti
-competitive behavior regarding the 30% app store
commission.
Yeah.
And so this, this all tax, let's just
call it what it is tax.
Yeah.
The Apple tax.
Yeah.
And so, and to be, to be clear.
So the, you know, for people who may
not understand how this works, Apple in the
iOS app store, which applies to, uh, iPhones,
iPads, they make a distinction between digital goods
and physical goods.
So if you, that's why you can use
the Amazon app and you can make, you
know, purchase, you know, a book and have
it sent to your house for cash.
And there's just no problem.
It's a seamless experience.
But if you try to buy digital goods,
things like streaming music, streaming movies, um, you
know, pot, let's say podcasts.
If you try to buy anything digital, it,
you, what they had was a pod, that
app store policy that required you to use
to a use in app purchase.
You had to, you can't, you could not
use your own payment system and you could
not link out to an alternative payment system.
Um, and you could also not promote the
fact that you even had another alternative payment
system.
You could not even put wording, even if
you didn't link to it, you couldn't even
put wording in your app saying that it
was available at some, as some other place
to go get it.
And this is at that time that Epic
sued and you could not communicate with your
customers through even through like an email or
something like that saying that there was any
alternative.
Bastards.
I mean, it was complete lockdown.
Yeah.
You know, just actual prohibitions against the way
you communicate with your own customers.
That's how, that's how thorough their blocking of
this was.
And as a result, you had to pay
the in-app service in-app purchase commission
of 30%.
So Apple gets 30% of everything that
you do through in-app purchase.
So that's what Epic sued them about.
Um, so that's like, uh, what, what is
the word I'm looking for when you were,
uh, back in the old days, you were
the, the owner of the castle and the
land, and then you made all your plebs
working the land where the feudalism.
Feudalism.
Digital feudalism.
That's it.
Yeah.
We're just, we're all, uh, digital sharecroppers.
Um, so, you know, they, Epic did not
want to be a digital sharecropper, so they
sued Apple, uh, and on paper, Apple lost
that case.
Right.
And then they went nana, nana, nana.
Yeah.
And the judge ruled that they had to
allow apps to link out from their app
to an external payment platform, uh, somewhere else.
So their website was Stripe or something like
that.
But, but in reality, nothing actually changed because
what Apple, what Apple did a handful of
things in their, in like the way they
complied, they did a handful of things that
made nobody actually want to do it.
Right.
And the things they did was they, the
first thing they did was, uh, they made
you, uh, if you were going to put
a link to an external method of payment
in your app, you, so let's, let's just
say you're, let's say you're Spotify and you
want to put a link in your app
on the profile screen saying, you know, Hey,
if you want to upgrade from premium to
family package, uh, click this link and go
to our website and upgrade your account.
Right.
If you wanted to do that, you had
to ask for an entitlement.
Yes.
I'm very familiar with the entitlements.
You want to use mapping function.
You got to get an entitlement, which means
they know exactly what you're doing.
So they created a new entitlement.
The name Dave entitlement, you are now entitled
to do that, but we can remove your
entitlement.
You play whenever we wish.
Yeah.
Baked into the word entitlement is the threat
of removal of that entitlement at any moment.
That's right.
Um, so they, first you had to ask
for and hopefully receive an entitlement from Apple,
allowing you to put a link in there.
Then next of all, they put in, when
you click the link, they put in a
interstitial like scare screen.
You're going to an external, Oh, here's, here's
a, here's a bandit with a mask.
You might be, you might be getting ripped
off.
I just linked to it in the boardroom.
The scare screen is like this big, scary
thing that says you're about to leave the
app and go to an external website.
Apple's not responsible for the privacy or security
of purchases made on the web, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, it's a full screen notice.
Yeah.
It tries to scare people away from actually
doing it.
Um, and then finally they, uh, they did
not get rid of, they, they didn't forfeit
their, their 30% Apple tax commission.
What they did was they took the credit
card fee, which was like 3%.
They cut that because now you're going to
be using your own credit card processing.
So that cut it down to 27%.
And instead they just charge you 27%
for all outside purchases and you have to
do your own ledger keeping and report it.
Yeah.
It's worse than a ASCAP BMI.
Yeah.
So you can, yeah, it's like, yeah, you
can, you can take payments if you want
to on your own website using Stripe, but
you're going to have to track every one
of those payments, add up 20% and
send us a check once a month.
Like who in the world is going to,
nobody's going to do that.
So I would love for podcast apps, if
funding tag equals one surface, the funding tag,
nice and big.
And I'll tell you what's really exciting because
we're seeing this with the Godcaster app that's
being built right now.
Uh, there's an option in the funding tag
to put in text what you want the
funding tag to say.
And so if I look at the app,
you know, some say give, some say support
the show.
Some say donate now.
Now I understand there's issues with how much
text people put in and how that fits
into a button, but when you figure that
stuff out, it's sexy.
It's really, I mean, that's, it's different, man,
because it's like, you, you want to have
a, you know, you want to have a,
you know, depending on what your show is,
what that page is, where you go to,
I mean, I might want to say, uh,
support us with PayPal.
And then you hit that.
It goes right into the PayPal pay payment,
uh, page, you know, straight in with a
code.
So I know it came from the app.
I mean, there's lots of cool stuff you
can do with that.
And this will drive innovation.
This will drive adoption of this tag.
So, you know, we, we have, particularly for
Patreon people.
Well, see this fixes the, yeah, I mean,
this fixes the Patreon, Patreon's problem.
Yep.
You know, they, they had this, they had
the, this issue of, uh, getting pulled into
this, this digital goods commission problem.
And this fixes it because they can go,
they can link out to their own, to
their own, um, payment platform.
I mean, the, the judge's ruling on this
was about the most scathing thing I've ever
written.
80 pages of you guys suck.
Yeah.
I mean, Apple was in, she said Apple
was in willful violation of the court order
and lied about it.
And it's being referred to the U S
district attorney for criminal process.
AG Barbie coming down on you.
Barbie's dropping the ball.
I mean, what, what is, you know, so
what does it mean?
So they, the judge ruled yesterday that basically
all this, what Apple did after that initial
ruling was willful violation of what her order
was.
So as of today, uh, Apple changed their
guide, their app store guidelines, uh, to make
the language clear that you can put a
link into your, into your app to an
external purchase flow or, or funding option, uh,
without needing any sort of entitlements and without
any scare screens and without paying any sort
of commission to Apple.
They didn't actually say without scare screens.
I don't think they said that specifically, to
be honest about it.
It said, well, let's see.
It says, um, doesn't say without scare screens.
She referred to that in her ruling.
Oh, she did.
She did.
She's, uh, she specifically said that, uh, that
was part of their willful violation is thing
is, uh, scaring using language to scare impose
new barriers and new requirements to increase friction,
increasing breakage rates with full page scare screens.
So that's what they did.
Uh, let me see what else here.
So this was the link entitlement because you
had the scarce.
Oh, she has a whole section here.
Yeah.
Apple deployed.
Oh yeah.
And even with yours, did you get that
straight from the, from the ruling that picture?
That's the same picture.
Okay.
So we're on the, we're literally on the
same page.
Wow.
Um, let's see.
Um, and so yeah, the, so the changes
they made, uh, you read some of it
earlier, the external link account, you know, all
that stuff's not required and it's plain language.
The prohibition on, uh, this is from the
Apple's terms of service, the prohibition on encouraging
users to use a purchasing method other than
in that purchase does not apply.
So you are, there is no barrier to
you putting a, a funding tag or any
sort of like top up your wallet type
tag, uh, type of button or link or
anything like that in your app.
If I, if I was Apple at this
moment, you know what I do?
I'd front run this thing.
I'd be putting digital wallets, uh, in the
SDKs.
I'd be getting, you know, stable coin, lightning,
Monero, everything.
I'd be front running that and become the
master of the universe at owning that concept,
not owning the money or owning anything, but
being the, you know, being the, you know,
have a sanctioned, uh, do Hickey in the,
in the SDKs, you know, whatever it's called,
uh, I would be front running that.
You mean, you mean competing?
No, I, yeah.
Competing against the, against any other wallets.
Sure.
Yeah.
Compete.
I mean, and that's all anybody ever wanted
was, was just, you know, competition and like
the, every company immediately, I mean, as of
starting like today, apps are already changing and
putting this stuff into their Spotify already.
They already submitted an update and it was
approved.
So now you can change your music and
you can buy your music.
Yes.
Wow.
Did that send their stock price skyrocketing?
Let me check.
You know, it may have, that's a good
question.
Spotify stock price.
Let me check it out.
I'd be buying that.
Oh, they tanked with 11.72%. Not
sure what happened there, but yeah.
Yeah.
What happened there?
That's a good question.
Spotify, they, they updated their app today.
Proton updated their app and they're sending out
emails to users saying, you know, basically pre
please go and uns and resubscribe to your
account using our platform instead of Apple.
Yep.
Oh, that's great.
But the markets, the markets are up today,
300 points on the NASDAQ.
So it's interesting that well, they suck first
and foremost, let's be honest.
Um, and, and this will float, this will
flow to Google as well because Google is
embroiled in their embroiled in their own antitrust
stuff and they're not going to go near
anything that looks like this.
You know, they're going to, they're not this,
this will have a chilling effect on, on
the big, uh, on, on Apple and Google
both.
Sure.
I think this is, this is probably the
best outcome we could have possibly hoped for
big time for clarity.
Yeah.
No, I love it.
I love it.
What is it not?
But what, okay.
What does it not mean?
It does not.
It's only about linking out to an external
payment platform.
Yep.
You, it still doesn't mean that you can
put your own in-app purchase mechanism inside
your app.
No, you have to link it out.
Yeah.
So, um, so like if you, if you
continue, if you continue using an, uh, you
know, like, uh, in-app purchase, you're still
going to be paying apples 30% or
15% if you're a small business.
Yeah.
And it doesn't seem like, I mean, the
court's not requiring them to change that at
all.
So, so baking stripe or some other payment
API directly into your app is not okay,
but this, you know, fully clears the way
for adding a link in your podcast app
to the funding tag.
Um, it also clears the way for apps
like true fans to put a link in
their app where a listener can bounce out
to their website and top up their wallet
and then come back into the app and
use that money.
Yep.
That, that way true fans doesn't have to
eat that 30% of in-app purchase,
which I'm sure Sam wasn't eating anyway.
I'm sure you figured out a way around
that.
Yeah, maybe.
I don't know.
I mean, he's still, he's still trying to
launch, you know, so who knows how much
he's price and flexibility he has.
Yeah.
Um, but anyway, this is, I mean, it's,
it's excellent news.
And because so many companies are flooding in
to make this change right now, that tells
me that you're, you're not putting this genie
back in the bottle.
No, no.
This is, it's just going to, this is
just kind of the final word on this.
Now, Apple said that they're going to appeal,
but I don't even know really what they
would be appealing because this is not a
new ruling.
This is just, this is from the old
ruling.
Yeah.
This is an enforcement measure on them, not
following the injunction from the previous ruling.
So I don't even know what they're appealing
really.
Uh, evidently they filed some sort of, I
don't know, but I just don't see that
this is going to fail.
I think this is just the way things
are going to be.
And Apple's just going to have to get
over it.
Yeah.
Um, and that's just great.
It's great for podcast apps and for podcasters
because now, you know, podcast apps can really
help direct funding to podcasters in a way
that's, that's straightforward and easy.
Just stick a freaking link in your, in
your RSS feed and you're done, you know,
I'm going to make a bet with you.
One whole dollar.
Okay.
Ready?
You ready?
Got it.
Give me, give me, go.
Marco will not put the funding tag in
overcast.
No matter what I bet you a dollar.
Take that bet, brother.
Take that bet from me.
Come on.
I'll give you 10 to one, 10 to
one odds.
No, I'm not taking it.
Purely for ideological reasons that he thinks we
suck.
Probably so.
Yep.
I I'm not taking that bet because I
will lose my dollar.
I love that pocket cash just went ahead
and did it.
Oh, that's huge.
Yeah.
They've got big market share.
They've got, you know, what I would love
to see.
I would love to see Ted and Apple
do it.
Yes.
Thank you.
That would be hilarious.
It'd be awesome.
It would be awesome if they did that.
Ted, please do this so I can put
that on the apps on the podcast.
Does Ted have that kind of juice?
Oh, he's full of juice.
He's got so much juice.
Please do that Ted.
So that I can put on podcast apps
.com that Apple podcast supports the funding tag.
I want that so much.
Oh, goodness gracious.
Anyway, good, good.
This, this is a, this is a banner
day.
A red letter day.
It is a red letter day.
I'm super excited about it.
What is the origin of that term?
Red letter day?
What does that even mean?
Oh, let's let's ask a seer in X
and G.
Red letter day origin.
Okay, here we go.
Red letter day.
The phrase red letter day originated from the
practice of marking important dates, such as church
festivals and holy days in red on the
calendars.
There you go.
There it is.
Cool.
Well, that's all I had, Dave.
Oh, I'm trying to find this.
I'm trying to find this video.
Bitcoin's up nicely too.
97, 5, 6, 7.
Oh, yeah.
I've noticed that.
I don't know what that's about either.
No, it's the devaluation of the dollar.
Let's see.
What's the dollar at?
The dollar has been, it's down like 8
% this year.
Let me see.
I'm posting a link to a video I
watched the other day in the boardroom.
It's, it's a guy that, this is random,
but it's a guy who is a language
expert and he gives the history of the
English language.
And I mean, a lot, I'm sure a
lot of people kind of know that, you
know, English came from the Germanic Anglo-Saxons,
sort of a mishmash of, of mostly that
and other sources.
But he tracks this, he tracks the origin,
he tracks the English language all the way
back to like Sanskrit and Hittite in these,
these in a, an unknown, an ancestor language
called Indo-European.
It is fascinating.
And he taught, he talks about how you
can, if you went back and listened to
someone speak Hittite, you could, you could understand
entire sentences that sound just like English.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
I just posted that and it's, it's a
fascinating video.
He just reminded me of it when you
were talking about red letter.
You know, I did a deconstruction yesterday on
no agenda, which I will not repeat is
too long about stable coin.
Do you know that stable coin Tether specifically
has 400 million users?
What are these users doing with it?
I don't understand.
It is emerging countries, countries that have crap
currency, Turkey, South America, they are using it
between each other, just using dollar denominations to
pay each other.
Because their own money sucks so bad.
And they're just, and it's, you know, and
the, the stable coin is backed by us
treasury.
So it's literally stable.
And I, 400 million users, and this is
like, you know, to buy groceries.
I'm telling you, and no KYC.
Really?
Yes.
Well, so part of the stable coin bill
that's coming, that is moving through Congress right
now, there's no KYC.
There's no, there's another one.
There's C I Y or something.
There's some other extra KYC that you have
to do with the bank account.
Those are quite now, mind you, it may
be that that is not necessarily available in
the United States that way.
Because they're trying to separate the Euro dollar
from the dollar dollar.
So Euro dollar being all the dollars that
aren't in America, like they're like, Hey, do
whatever you want.
You know, just go for it, whatever you
want to do.
Of course it's completely trackable, obviously.
But I am going to predict that that
is, you know, stable coin already works on
the lightning network.
I know people are rolling their eyes.
I know Stripe integrate it.
They use it now support for stable coin.
Yep.
Like in, you can do use it for
purchases.
Yes.
It's, I mean, it's going to be the
future.
You know, there's a good, there's a guy
that I watch on YouTube sometimes who explains
a lot of stuff really well.
You know, you're a dollar.
You sent me links to him.
Yeah.
Now, now sometimes he can be kind of
insufferable at times.
You got to get, you got to get
past a lot of the, Oh my God,
we're all going to die.
Like his face just to get to get
past his face.
I don't mean, I'm not intending to be
mean, but he's like, okay, it looks like
a weasel weasel.
He's got a little weasel face.
Oh, every video is, Oh my God, we're
all going to die.
But if you get past that to some
of the like underlying economic mechanics, he's phenomenal.
It's phenomenal.
And he debated Lynn Alden a couple of
times about some things.
But you know, one of the things that
he, one of his main, can I ask
you a question before you move on?
Yeah, sure.
About Lynn Alden.
Maybe it's just me.
Is Lynn Alden trans?
Yes.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
I always wondered.
Yeah.
Uh, there was a whole thread about it
on Twitter.
Yeah.
Um, yeah, no, that one's like, I know,
but it never bothered me, you know, like,
but it's just this lingering question.
I was, I should ask someone about that.
And finally I got the chance to ask.
Thank you.
All right.
So, um, so one of the things, one
of his main sort of like pillars is,
um, of, of the Euro dollar system is
that when you, uh, that other countries, see,
seeing as how the U S dollar is
the reserve currency of the, as the world's
reserve currency, other countries are constantly having a
problem of running out of dollars.
Exactly.
This is exactly what I talked about yesterday.
So they need, they need dollars.
And, um, and so there's a whole dollar
market, which was always set by LIBOR, the
London interbank offered rate LIBOR died.
It failed.
Yes.
And now it's SOFR, S O F R.
And that's controlled by the New York fed.
And the whole idea of the stable coin
bill is we're going to keep the dollars
dominance by flooding the world with stable coin
tether specifically, but I think you'll have there'll
be all kinds of stable coins, you know,
JP Morgan coin, whatever, and then weakening the
U S dollar itself that we use internally.
So that our exports become cheaper.
And see, and by flooding, what you really
mean is just having an open market for
dollars that is not controlled by the fed.
Yes.
Well, it's not.
It's not.
Well, it will be controlled.
Now it will be controlled by the fed,
but the fed can let it do whatever
it wants.
It'll control our dollar the way it wants,
but the fed may think they can control
this, but I can tell you already they
can't.
This is where it goes beyond my knowledge.
I have no idea.
Well, I mean, so global banks trade U
S treasuries, that's their main source of currency
bank to bank.
If you're a, if you're HSBC and you're
trying to do a deal with a bank
in Singapore, you're doing those deals based on
U S treasury bonds.
Yes.
And so if there isn't, there isn't.
So, and, and if you're a JP Morgan
and you have a subsidy, if you have
a subsidiary of yourself in Germany, you can
create U S dollars at will.
There's no governor on that.
You can do it as much as you
want.
That's right.
And so all those, what they call money,
money lenders, creators, makers, there's certain, there's certain
primary dealers, whatever primary dealers, primary dealers, those
primary dealer banks can just create as many
U S dollars as they want.
And that's when they're backing them with U
S treasuries.
And that's what Tether, their backer is Cantor
Fitzgerald.
They're the primary dealer.
So they can create all these stable coins.
Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, who is currently our
secretary of commerce.
Hello.
Now no agenda millennial is saying in the,
in the boardroom that it was planned LIBOR
to SOFR.
Yes, it was planned and LIBOR ended technically
was supposed to end 2021.
But you know, when the last contract ended,
the very last contract that, that finished off
LIBOR ended on March 31st, 2025, which gives
a whole new meaning to this.
My fellow Americans, this is liberation day.
So we, we were all told it was
about tariffs, but I think it had more
to do with SOFR than anything.
Oh, you may be right.
Well, the, you know, Paul, is it Paul
Volcker, one of the fed guys called, um,
called the U the Euro dollar, uh, like
poison or something system.
Now they called it the, it was the
hole in the side, in the hole of
the boat of the U S economy.
Sure.
Especially because China has all those dollars.
Yeah.
And you, you can, you think of, of
the U S economy as this boat and
the fed is increasing and decreasing the money
supply, but then you ignore this giant hole
in the hole, which the Euro dollars just
flow in and out of at will.
So you can have trillions of dollars of,
of trade, you know, of treasuries and now
stable coins just coming in and out of
that system.
And it's not as completely unaccounted for.
Now the fed can't control it.
They can't stop it.
They can't regulate it.
It's completely beyond their control.
But if it's a stable coin, they can
monitor it.
If, if it's a stable coin and they're
buying, if, if somebody is buying a stable,
if tether is buying a stable coin to
increase supply because they have a customer and
they're doing so by selling a treasury, I
don't know how you track that.
Well, uh, I do know one other thing
that, um, these stable coins will also also
be backed by Bitcoin and Cantor Fitzgerald, again,
huge holder of Bitcoin.
Um, Cantor Fitzgerald were basically wiped out because
they were in one of the twin towers
on nine 11.
Interestingly, Howard didn't go to work that day.
Um, that is interesting.
Yeah.
So, uh, and he holds hundreds of millions
of dollars in Bitcoin personally.
So I guess what I'm saying is if
we want the value for value economy to
work, it's worth observing stable coin.
If we're going to be jihadist and maximalist
about it, that's fine.
But I'm just saying it's worth the, the
infrastructure doesn't have to change.
In fact, the infrastructure becomes easier, but the
lightning network, that was the whole tap root,
uh, whatever the, whatever that extra widget was
that was added.
Yeah.
Does that even, does that work?
Yeah, it works.
It does.
It works.
Yeah.
You can, you can transfer stable coin over
lightning.
Um, it's going to become very easy to
use stable coin in programmatic ways that will
be understandable due to hundreds of millions, if
not billions of dollars of marketing to help
people understand it.
So I'm just saying it's a new frontier,
man.
I'm just saying, I don't think anybody knows
what, uh, you know, who knows if you
were to take this strike kid, Jack Mallers,
he knows, he knows what's going on.
So, you know, he's, he's using stable coin,
but he's also has this 21, forget the
name of the company.
He's a company that, uh, will give people
shares and it'll be Bitcoin.
The, the, the measurement mainly will be how
much Bitcoin per share.
So he knows, he knows that there, what's
going on behind the scenes.
His parents are in there.
They're the commodities.
I think they pretty much are the, the
Chicago, uh, uh, commodities exchange where they were.
He knows what's going on.
I would follow whatever he's doing.
I would follow.
Strike has been using stable coins since the
beginning.
As far as I, as far as I
understand.
For their transfers.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So it really is the perfect solution for,
for its use case in that, you know,
when you're talking about, you know, dollar availability,
but I'm just going to say it straight
up.
The opportunity for value for value might be
in stable coin.
Please keep your mind open to it.
That's what I'm saying.
If we're all going to say, no, it
has to be Bitcoin and nothing else.
Okay.
Then we'll, then we'll remain that.
But for me, it's always been about the
value being able to be returned.
Simply for me, it was never, it has
to be completely, you know, anonymous and it
has to be Monero and all this stuff.
I'm just not like that.
I just, I, you know, I take PayPal
as my main income.
My number one income is PayPal.
Um, yeah, Eric PP, we do have a
new podcast location tag and it is cool.
The, uh, where's Eric PP been?
Where have you been, man?
Everybody knows about the location tag.
We talked about it on the last board
meeting.
Where you been?
The, uh, yes.
So that is formal now.
I formalized those changes, uh, I think Monday
or Tuesday.
I can't remember.
So I formalized those, uh, and, uh, James,
uh, I did, I did some changes in
the James, uh, clean things up and, uh,
we pushed it into the namespace.
So that is good to go.
And, um, I started, uh, working on putting,
now that, now that we have, uh, in
Godcaster, now that we have lat, latitude, longitude
started, um, I started a, uh, a new
branch to put that in the, that stuff
into Godcaster players.
Yeah.
We're, we're using it heavily.
Did you see the, did you see the
map?
Yes.
I did.
It's really nice.
And it's, it's this tag, this tag lets
you do that kind of stuff.
It's amazing.
We built all this stuff and then all
of a sudden we got an opportunity to
use it.
We've never had that.
It's like, Oh, yes, it is like, Hey,
if only we had a, Oh, wait a
minute.
We built that solution.
Yeah.
It has been really fun to be able
to actually use this stuff other than just
like blindly sticking it into a parser.
Yes.
I'll, I'll, I'll, I'm going to send a
picture.
I'm going to give this picture to the,
uh, to the boardroom.
They'll love it.
Hold on a second.
Where am I?
Oh, is this the map?
Yeah.
Hey, we can share screenshots.
Let me see.
Hold on.
This, this, this takes a lot to do
a screenshot these days.
Hold on.
I'll show the sec.
I got two screenshots.
I'll show, I'll share both of them.
Here we go.
Uh, boom.
There's one and boom.
There's two.
Okay.
There you go.
So now it's back to everybody's favorite, uh,
aspect to everybody's favorite tag, the images tag.
Are we on that?
What happened?
How do we get back to that?
Does that, uh, problem the images?
Well, we, I put it off until after
we finalized the, uh, the, the location tag
changes.
So now we're back to that.
And, uh, you know, I'm just, I'm going
to, my plan for this is to work
with Nathan, uh, middle name undefined.
I'm going to work with, uh, Nathan undefined.
Yeah.
I'm going to work with undefined Nathan to
get, um, to get some, some stuff that
we can link to, to show what can
be possible with the, with the images tag.
So that's going to be, that's going to
be where we go and where we go
forward on that.
So I'm, I don't, I don't want to
talk about it today too much, but I
just, that's, that's where we're headed next in
back, back into the mouth of the beast.
Okay.
What does that mean?
Um, the, the images tag is the, it,
oh, that's the mouth of the beast.
Yeah.
The B the images tag is the beast.
Oh goodness gracious.
Uh, but I, in the meantime though, I
have, I've started working on, um, uh, started
back working on the new parser, uh, the
new, uh, yes.
Yeah.
The new, the new, uh, parsing age party
time part.
Yeah.
The new version of party time.
Um, we can talk about that next week.
I am, I do want to, I do
want to run through though.
Um, I've been promising, uh, Archie that I
would just kind of lay out how our
backend is, is put together.
Cause he's been asking about that.
I think, I mean, I think I've talked
about this before, but maybe not.
I know, I know we've talked about all
kinds of stuff, but, um, let me just
make sure that, uh, that I give that
some time since I promised I would.
Uh, so I mean, our infrastructure for the
index is pretty simple.
I'm trying to get, trying to get logged
in here.
Hang on a second.
We, um, we just have a single, a
single main database, uh, running my SQL, you
know, trying to get my two factor code.
I, I, I don't know on Leno.
Do you always have to wait for the
code through email when they log you out?
No, I have it.
I have it in my, uh, code app
one-time password app.
Oh, okay.
I should probably use that because they can
take five minutes to send that email.
I always get worried.
I'm looking at spam.
It does.
Yeah, it does take sitting around like, come
on, come on.
I got a project to do.
Grok is waiting.
Grok is very patient.
I'll give it that.
You can come back a day later and
says, hi, yeah, we're continuing.
It's all good.
Um, okay.
So we got, we have one, one main
MySQL database.
Uh, it's a 32 gigs of Ram.
Uh, I don't know.
That's some bunch of bunch of desk.
I don't know how much disk it is,
like 640 gigs or something like that.
Whoa.
Um, yeah, it's big.
It's, I mean, the database is big though.
Uh, so we've got, uh, we've got that
it's running MySQL eight, uh, the front.
So the front end is two, uh, two
servers, uh, each running, uh, NGINX reverse proxying
into, uh, PHP FPM that then, um, you
know, sit in front of the database and
those are load balanced using a cloud flare.
So we have, um, so it's, it's just
round robin load balancing on that cloud flare,
man.
What a genius operation that is really when
you think about it.
Oh, it's, it's so slick.
It's a game and money saver.
It really is.
You know, one of the best things about
cloud flare is you don't, it, you get
to piggyback on their SSL certificates and you
don't have to do, you don't have to
do all that junk.
Oh, interesting.
Interesting.
You just proxy it and, and you get
to piggyback as an SN on their certificate.
Certificate is great.
Nice.
Um, so then, so that's, that's basically the
whole of the API, uh, direct API is
just the database and two front end servers.
The two front end server is everything's Ubuntu,
uh, Ubuntu 20, Ubuntu 20 LTS, I think.
LTS 20.4. Is that it?
Okay.
Yes.
I happen to have been doing some Linode
work lately.
Okay.
Uh, it's 20, it's 20 LTS.
And then, and then we have a, uh,
then our main website is just, you know,
running off on a, on a thing.
It's on its own on a small Linode.
Uh, the, uh, no, nothing is running.
None of that's the database and the front
end servers.
None of that's running like Docker or anything.
Those are, they're just running on bare metal,
uh, the processes.
Then we have 10 aggregators, uh, each running,
um, on two, uh, excuse me, one, well,
about half of them are on one gig
Nanodes, the smallest, uh, Linode.
And then, uh, three C six, uh, yeah,
six of them are on that four of
them are owns two gig Linodes because they
have more volume on them.
And so each one of the aggregators is
just, is running party time and it, uh,
runs, you know, runs it, it does the
puller, uh, runs the puller to pull the
feeds.
It processes them with party time and then
it directly talks to the database and does
SQL, uh, inject SQL execution on the database.
Uh, there's no pipeline of, of SQL.
It's just, everybody's talking to everybody's talking to
the database at once.
Um, then we have our search indexers.
We have three of those.
We've got the main indexer just pulls the
database every 15 to 20 minutes and, um,
searches for, it's running, uh, Manta, uh, Sphinx
Manticore.
And it's a very lightweight, very fast, uh,
search, uh, language index on Dick can sit
on top of my SQL.
So we have, um, you have three, uh,
instances of that.
Uh, the main one pulls every 15 to
20 minutes and look and just indexes the
title of the fee of the podcast and
the author and, uh, the, the author field.
And then, um, we have another one that
is, uh, the person tag search, um, not
the tag, but there's a person search.
Um, and then another Sphinx Manticore instance, which
runs and does autocomplete.
So in the API documentation, there's that's a
sexy, you didn't know we had, I did
not know that.
No, that's cool.
Wow.
Nice.
We did that a long time ago for,
uh, for Martin, may he rest in peace
of a pod friend, our Danish friend.
Yes.
Um, he's going to come back one day.
He's going to have a whole new interface.
We get angry when we, uh, when we
encroached upon Greenland.
Yeah.
He's like, Hey man, that's our stuff.
Yeah.
Then we got, um, I'm sorry, we got
four search indexes.
There's also the value for value podcasts.
Those have their own.
Ah, yes, of course.
Of course.
And then, uh, there's the, then there's three
like utility servers.
You might want to call it.
There's a, an email server that's just running
on a tiny, you know, one gig nano
at five bucks a month.
And all it does is act as a
bastion host for email to go out.
So any, any email traffic all goes through,
all goes through that host thing gets redirected
to, um, Mailgun and then Mailgun does the
delivery of the, of the, of the email.
Uh, then there's a utility server, which is
a four gig load and it's it that
handles all of the backups, like nightly backups,
weekly backups.
Um, it, what it monitors pod ping, um,
and flags the database for, you know, when
things need to be pulled.
Um, and does a whole bunch of just
any, anything and everything that did this just
sort of like utility work that happens on
the, on, on the index.
It's all running through that one, that server
runs all those cron jobs and does all
that stuff.
Uh, pruning, uh, slow polling for specific things
that are needed.
Uh, the weekly database dump, all that stuff
happens on that one server.
Nice.
There's a webhook gateway server that handles, um,
stuff that handles things coming from, um, CurioCaster
or not CurioCaster, but, um, Sovereign Feeds.
Sovereign Feeds.
Yes.
Thank you.
That handles webhooks coming from Sovereign Feeds.
Can I just say once again, thank you
so much Stephen B for Sovereign Feeds.
It is my life.
It truly is my life.
Thank you for, he added the location tags.
That is, that is such a wonderful, wonderful,
wonderful tool.
Thank you so much.
In fact, I'm going to send him some
Satoshis right now.
I forget to do that from time to
time.
He's in my splits, but he needs, he
needs a boost.
He's a bonus boost.
The, uh, the webhook gateway also, uh, unlocks
our, um, the podcast index lightning node from
Voltage.
So it auto unlocks that.
Um, it basically does any webhook traffic that's
necessary.
Uh, and then we have, uh, and that's,
that's running on just the five bucks a
month, uh, Nanode.
And then we have a, uh, a, a,
we have a server dedicated to lightning node
maintenance and all the stuff that goes around
lightning so that it interacts with our lightning
node and is constantly pulling once a minute
it's pulling the node and pulling in transactions.
And that's what's responsible for generating like the
charts.
And that's how I pull, um, weekly, uh,
booster grams.
And it just keeps a running total of
all the transactions.
And it's, it's constantly sucking them into a
MySQL database.
So to make it easy to search at
the end, at the end of the year
for taxes, we had to dump all those
things out, all this kind of stuff.
Um, so that's, that's on a server by
itself.
And then we have 1, 2, 3, 4,
5 pod ping hosts, uh, one in Australia,
one in Europe and three in the U
S by region.
So there's one, I hope everybody who's in
the board meeting and listening is proud of
what you all have accomplished.
I mean, Dave, you've done this work.
Thank you.
Of course.
But man, I mean, with all the, just
the whole community and the, the funding from
the community has just been phenomenal.
Look at, look at what we've created.
Don't break your arm, patting yourself on the
back, but Holy mackerel.
It's awesome.
It is.
I just got to stop and say, it's
awesome.
What a, what a group, what a group.
And we're all pretty too, except for that,
and good looking, that undefined guy though.
I'm not too sure about him.
Yeah.
Holding judgment with that.
Um, and then there's activity pub bridge that's
running on a two gig linode.
Um, people probably may forget that even exists,
but the activity pro bridge is there.
And then, um, we got one other nanode
that's just, uh, used for various things.
I use it for testing new, you know,
new stuff where I don't have any other
place to put it.
So all now he has one, two, three,
four, five, five, there's 10, 20, say 24,
25, 26, 30 servers.
We have a lot.
So let's, uh, let's thank some people who
help keep those servers running.
Shall we, Dave?
Yes, let's do it.
Because, uh, you're going back to the office
today.
It feels like you're at home today.
I don't know why.
Uh, I am, I'm at home currently, but
I am going back to the office.
Oh, okay.
It felt like you were at home this
morning.
No, it's, uh, it's post tax season.
Very slow at the office right now.
Dave's like on the ball, like, Oh, well
he's not, he answered another message.
He answered in less than an hour.
Well, Hey, I'll take a day.
So it's all right.
I get it.
Thank you.
See loss on Linux two, three, four, five.
He says, I think with podcasts have to
have RSS.
We have enough elitism already.
We don't need everything needs to be pure
Bitcoin elitism.
No, I'm I'm with you, brother.
I'm with you.
Uh, let's see.
Martin Linda's Coke, AKA Lyceum coming in from
a true fans, 420 sets.
Thanks for your economics in one lesson about
stable coins, funding tag, et cetera.
I'm happy to be a super fan of
your podcast on true fans game on and
go podcasting.
I'll top up my wallet next week.
Lovely.
Stephen B one Oh one.
And he says it's coming.
It's coming.
What's coming?
It's coming.
You don't know that it's coming.
Oh, it's coming.
May 10th, 10th, 10th, the satellite spotlight.
See the future of everything.
Everything podcasting 2.0 has been working on
for the last few years, few years, May
10th, 2025, the satellite spotlight.
I did a promo right there.
35 nitro burning funny cars.
Triple seven from Sam, Sam over there to
true fans.
I'm so happy.
Apple are being forced to change their feudal
tax.
The EU will follow and then we can
submit our true fans native app.
I assume Google will be forced to do
the same for the play store.
Spotify's updated app is already available.
Patreon are updating their new app next.
Yes, this is a sea change.
I think as we call it a sea
change, sea change.
Yeah, I don't know if, I don't know
what Google's current policies are.
I really not familiar with it.
I think they have a similar thing, but
I just don't think they're as aggressive as
Apple is.
But I think even, even if they were,
it's clear that this is a chilling of
all that.
I mean, I, I really think that, that,
that Google would not have a whole lot
of desire to do strict enforcement of any
of that kind of thing.
I, I think you're, I think the feeling
that you have, Sam is totally correct.
Yes, I agree too.
Uh, four sevens from Dreb Scott.
He says, uh, coming in from podverse, thanks
everyone for their patience with delays.
Am I posting of chapters lately?
Hey brother, you know me.
I'm like, I'm amazed you do it at
all.
I appreciate it.
I've recently started exercising to try to lose
about 50 pounds.
I started gaining when my now eight year
old was I hear you got to drop
the baby weight.
The exercise is making me more tired than
usual and using up my extra energy that
I use for chapters doing my best to
keep up.
Thanks again for your patience.
Hashtag go podcasting brother.
It is all okay.
I appreciate what you do, man.
I really do.
Uh, he does chapters for no agenda podcasting
2.0 curry in the keeper.
I know he does it for at least
three more shows.
He just does a ton of work.
The Bruce Wayne of podcasting 2.0. Thank
you brother.
And uh, there's the delimiter.
So you're up Dave.
Oh, we had one counting one, uh, PayPal,
PayPal, PayPal, one off PayPal.
Yeah.
It's very slow these days.
Very slow.
It's tax season.
It's not summer.
It kind of is.
It's not here.
It's not summer.
Yeah.
Summer.
Not people already getting out of school.
Jason Tiamin, $10.
Thank you, Jason.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
We did have some booster grams though.
We've got plenty of plenty of booster grams.
We've got, um, boost the grams of plenty.
Uh, we've got Sam 42, 19.
Welcome back.
Gents.
Friday night restored red wine in hand and
geek chat.
Yeah.
I think we read that one on the
last show actually.
Oh, did I?
Yeah.
You might've doubled up, doubled up, doubled down.
April 25th.
Did I pull the wrong start?
Let me see.
Our last show, our last show was April
25th.
Yes.
So everything from the 25th you can ignore.
You may have, that may have come in
from the, I may have had my, uh,
Tom stamp wrong.
Uh, let's see.
1701.
Yeah, we've got a butt.
Ooh, a bunch of these.
Captain sweatpants says my boost didn't make it,
but shows it went through on my node.
Okay.
I'll read your boost.
I listened to a podcast last weekend that
said podcasting too.
Oh, wait a minute.
I did see that one.
How come I, did I miss that one?
Hold on a second, brother.
No, we're discombobulated.
This is falling apart.
Yeah, it is falling apart.
Um, I'm sure I saw that one somewhere.
Hold on.
I thought I saw that boost come through.
I know I saw it.
Well, anyway, I'll read it from your, uh,
from, from the board, the boardroom, uh, listened
to a podcast last weekend that said podcasting
2.0 is just too geeky for the
average podcast listener.
Well, duh, it's supposed to be we have
fun with all the sexy namespace and coding
talk each week.
Jeez.
Go podcasting.
Michael, what happened to that?
I know I saw that boost come in.
I did it disappear.
Oh, there it is.
Yeah.
13, 13, hiding in plain sight.
You had hiding in plain sight.
1321 Randy black.
Thank you.
Gotcha.
Uh, Lyceum one, one, one, one central Richards
through true fans, Dave, an episode of episode
171, a butt cast.
Uh, I think we read that one too.
What?
But I heard you said, but cast, I
heard you say, but cast, what are you
listening to?
Title, but cast, um, oh yeah, we read
that one too.
I, this, my time, you're all over the
map, man.
They're mixed up.
Okay.
This is not, thank you.
Mike Dell 1701.
Hi guys.
Long time.
No talk.
Yes.
We see you.
We see a Cole McCormick Godcaster video coming
Sunday.
Oh, thank you.
Cole.
We've, we hired Cole.
Oh, nice.
Yeah.
We hired Cole to do some Godcaster videos.
Okay.
Look, I think I've found, I think I've
found my figured it out.
Yeah.
The timestamp was wrong.
Uh, Hey citizen.
Hey citizen.
69 69.
The pod verse says, thanks again for the
index fellas.
Last episode gave me a strange impression that
we're going our separate ways.
Monetizing V for V using well established platforms
like Patreon for easier onboarding.
Am I reading too much into this love
and lit?
I don't know what read that again.
Read that again.
He says last episode gave me a strange
impression with it.
We're going our separate ways.
Monetizing V for V using well established platforms
like Patreon for easier onboarding.
No.
Well, yeah, you're reading too much into it.
You are.
Yeah.
As usual.
You know, it's, listen, you're in a Curry
world experiment.
I'm always 10 years early.
We've got five more years to go before
V for V V for V really works.
And at that point, Jack Mollers is going
to make all the money and we'll still
be sitting here doing this silly podcast with
y'all.
Prediction point trillionaire.
This is a prediction guaranteed.
That's my lot in life.
I get to have a lot of fun,
but no money.
No, I mean, I don't see, I mean,
I don't see anything changing.
I mean, we, I think in order to,
you have to, you have to hit every,
um, if you're a, if you're a podcaster,
you have to allow people to give to
you in whatever way that they feel.
Yes.
Do you know that, um, Dvorak go, we
have a, a bank.
I think I might've told you this.
We have a bank in, in, uh, California
near him in Albany, I think.
And it's called mechanics bank, which is clearly
a gangster bank.
And, uh, and he cannot change banks because
the only bank that will accept him coming
in every two weeks with like a stack
of 50 checks for like three to all
different $3 and 33 cents, $5, you know,
it's just, and it's great.
Now they do charges, but only 15 cents
flat fee for each check they process.
So we'll take anything except Bitcoin, stupid Dvorak.
It's, I mean, you gotta, you know, you
have to allow checks, PayPal.
You just can't, you can't be jihadist to
get about it, you know?
No, I mean, it's crazy.
If you say someone says, Oh, I want
to, I want to, this is why I'm
so frustrated with Bitcoin.
The other day was so happy.
Oh, we can now take Bitcoin.
I'm like, what do you mean through Stripe?
I go, look, no, they can take stable
coin.
No Bitcoin.
I said, but you know, Trump takes it
for his, his sneakers.
Bobby, the op takes it.
Robert Kennedy jr.
Takes it for, took it for his campaign.
We'll get there.
He's just mad.
He's mad.
Nothing's changed.
No, nothing's changed.
But yes, the bottom line is you got
to give every people the opportunity to donate
however they want to.
And it should be stable coin, Bitcoin, lightning,
meme coin, Trump coin.
I don't care.
Yeah.
Anything, anything that you can pay your bills
with.
Yes.
Correct.
See loss on Linux.
That's where Richard's one, one, one, one, through
fountain.
He says this vibe coding talk cements what
I boosted in previous shows.
You need to know how to code and
the more detailed your instructions are, the better
it will do.
Probably also depends on how much memory the
app and context window, the LLM has.
Yeah.
Knowing how to code in order to use
one of these things is pretty handy.
Yes.
Handy.
Very handy.
Um, aqualith media, 10 33 through fountain says,
uh, the live stream on my podcast part,
just lit my mind on fire soon.
Go podcast.
He has go podcasting.
Go, go, go.
Yes.
Bruce, the ugly duck, ugly quacking duck to,
to, to, to do podcast guru love funding
tag using butts, bus sprout, butt sprout, using
bus sprout, hosting, but sprout, um, a push
of the funding button.
And it takes you to my, uh, push
the funding button and it takes you to
my support page on my website with different
ways to support.
Thanks for the episode 73 years.
Yes.
The, the bus sprout way of doing, uh,
the funding tag is, uh, I think it's
the way to do it.
You tap the funding link and you land
on a page and you just can donate
like five different ways.
Yeah.
It's just so easy.
I wish other hosts would build a similar
backend.
It's the way to go.
Yes.
Uh, comic strip blogger.
Oh, let me make sure.
Is that the delimiter?
We hit the delimiter delimiter.
That is the delimiter.
Let me make sure.
Yep.
We're good.
Comedy strip blogger, 15 four 65.
Yeah.
Fountain.
Howdy Bitcoiners, Adam and Dave, please tell your
audience to visit my blog at www dot
C S B dot L O L for
my mostly hand-drawn cartoons about artificial intelligence,
about podcasting 2.0 and dogs.
These are copyright free cartoons.
So anybody can repost or use anywhere.
Also follow me on X at C dot
S dot B just the three letters C
S B C S B C S B
little house ad from comic strip blogger.
We got some, uh, monthlies.
All right.
Uh, Chris Bernardik, $5, Michael Kimmerer, $5 and
33 cents.
Dreb Scott, $15.
Thank you.
Now lighter.
Dreb Scott, the 50 pounds lighter, uh, Cameron
Rose, $25.
Chad Pharaoh, $20 and 22 cents.
Kevin Bay is $5.
Thank you, Chad.
By the way, uh, Kevin Bay, $5.
Jason, uh, see, uh, Martin Lindeskog, $1.
Mark Graham, $1.
And, uh, Brendan over a pod page, $25.
Ah, love you guys all so much.
And gals.
I'm sure some gals are hiding in there.
Thank you for supporting.
Thank you for supporting podcasting 2.0. Um,
really you're supporting the entire infrastructure and for
a long time.
So we'll be good for that.
When that, when the next five years hits,
when everything becomes successful, it'll still be running.
We'll see who donates then.
It won't be Jack Muller's.
No, it won't be.
It won't be.
That's okay.
We all have our role to play on
this grand stage.
And with that, I want to thank you,
brother, Dave, uh, what you're doing this weekend.
Yeah.
Hanging out, having a good time this weekend.
We'll probably do some rock climbing and, and,
uh, housework.
Well, you should go grab the brand new,
uh, beta of the Godcaster app on Android.
Your mind will be blown.
Yes.
I've got my Android phone here.
I may after, after work, prepare for your
head to explode.
I'll get, I'll get napkins.
All right.
Boardroom.
Thank you very much for being here.
We look forward to seeing y'all again
next week as we return once again, with
podcasting 2.0. You
have been listening to podcasting 2.0. Visit
podcastindex.org for more information.
Go podcasting.
Oh, he's full of juice.