Podcasting 2.0 for January 2nd, 2026, episode
246.
Trap, trap.
Well, happy new year, everybody.
Welcome back to the boardroom for Podcasting 2
.0. That's right.
What is gonna be happening this year?
Well, we're not looking back, that's for sure.
We're only looking forward.
In fact, we are the only boardroom that
does not have free daycare.
I'm Adam Curry here in the heart of
the Texas Hill Country and in Alabama, the
man who only gets smarter with each year
that passes.
Say hello to my friend on the other
end, the pod sage himself, Mr. Dave Jones.
I'm looking at this picture you sent of
your wiring closet.
It's not a wiring closet.
It's a closet full of wires.
Okay, of your wire closet.
Yes.
Why?
Yes, where I keep my stuff.
I think I spot the, your, how do
I describe it?
Your aborted project.
Oh, the Podcaster Pro?
Podcaster Pro.
No.
I think I spot one.
No, it's not.
What am I seeing in here?
That is the PodMobile.
Oh, that's right.
I forgot about the PodMobile.
Yeah, the PodMobile, which is still selling.
People like it a lot.
I still recommend people get it.
It's that perfect, you know, you want two
microphones.
You want to have someone on Skype or
a clean feed or Zoom or Riverside or
whatever.
You want built-in noise gate compressor limiter.
That's the box.
I totally forgot about the PodMobile.
It's fantastic.
It's a good little rig.
What's the blue thing with the, let's see,
one, two, three, four, five, six knobs.
The blue thing?
Yeah.
Hold on.
That's a half rack.
No, that's not a half.
No, that's one of those weird, weird sizes
that doesn't really fit anywhere.
I'll tell you what that is.
Oh, the blue one?
Yeah, it's a 3 7th rack.
Oh, I can't focus on it.
It's underneath my Motu M4 EXPS.
I think that's a, hold on, let me
see.
Oh, you're actually going in the closet.
Okay.
Oh, I see.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, cool.
PreSonus compressor limiter.
Oh, is that the tube one you're talking
about?
No, no, no.
The TLS?
No, that thing is in the garage somewhere.
That thing is huge.
That's like a 3 19 inch rack high.
The studio that used to be over, I
don't know if I've mentioned this before, but
there used to be a great studio over
here in Homewood, which is about five minutes
away from me.
And they had a plate reverb.
Oh, yeah.
You know, in a room by itself because
you couldn't have anything.
It was a humongous plate, huge.
Just hanging on it like, it was in
this big contraption suspended by wires.
So it was great.
When I was working in the Netherlands, 1984
at the big government run facilities.
And we were kind of like the pirates
who came in and we were playing music
they'd never heard before.
And we had three hours on Friday night,
but there would be someone else.
I think it was actually the Evangelical Broadcast
Corporation.
They had a couple hours before us.
EFCO.
And so all the microphones, any reverb was
also done in a plate room and the
plate room was open one time.
And so when they cracked the mic, we
were yelling into the plate.
So you could hear us come, our reverbs.
Yeah.
That's hilarious.
Yeah.
Cause you could just yell into it.
This is like Eddie Van Halen with Makita
drill over his pickup.
You just, it just grabs everything around.
Oh yeah.
Everything in the environment.
Yeah.
How was your new year's brother?
Oh, it was good.
Yeah.
How are you feeling by the way though?
That's the most important thing.
You were down.
Yeah.
I'd say energy level is 95%.
Head clarity, about 95%.
Snot quotient, very high.
You're still like just pumping out the snot
for no apparent reason.
Oh man, yeah.
I've been using the mute button a lot
this week.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, sneezing and snottering.
Yeah, it's okay.
But whenever you say I'm down, that clearly
means you are in bad shape.
Yeah.
You don't usually say that.
Although for a while though, I was able
to do Alex Jones's voice really perfectly.
I don't think I got any more, damn
it, I've got neuralgia.
Cold order.
Yeah, I love Candace, but she's got it
all wrong.
Got it all wrong.
We got all the documents.
We got the documents.
I've been telling you for years about this
stuff.
Oh, that's good.
Pretty good.
Pretty close, pretty close, yeah.
This, yeah, everybody around me has it.
You know me.
I mean, I'm like, I'm a virus magnet.
I get everything.
You are a seething infected human resource.
Yeah.
Usually.
A little tupperware of pus and mucus.
But there's no- Wait, show title, Tupperware
of Pus.
Okay.
Got it.
That's great.
Yeah, that'll really draw them in.
Oh, yeah.
But I mean, I usually get everything, but
some, I mean, people are just sick all
around me for weeks now, and I'm immune.
I don't know what is going on.
That is interesting, because Tina stayed away from
me, and because, you know, when she's sick,
then she gets really sick.
So she didn't get it, but we were
on no agenda yesterday.
I guess ABC got the big pharma bucks
for this week or something.
So they were just like, super flu, who's
got the flu?
Who's got the flu?
We got people dying from the flu.
And they admitted in the report that the
science got it wrong.
They guessed on the wrong influenza this year.
So if you got the flu shot, it's
not gonna help.
But the best thing you can do, the
best thing you can do right now is
get the flu shot.
I swear to God.
It's not gonna help, but you should go
ahead and get it anyway.
I'm telling you, it's the craziest thing.
Cool, that's good reasoning.
I had a bit of, I don't know
if an epiphany is the right word, but
for the past, I don't know, it's been
months now, there's been all this talk of
HLS video, alternate enclosures, which is all fine.
I'm all good with it.
And I decided to look a little, and
the one thing I've heard is, well, Apple
doesn't support HLS video.
Of course, and if Apple doesn't support it,
no one's ever gonna do it.
It'll never happen.
We're all gonna fall, we're all gonna die.
And I was thinking that HLS audio, if
there was ever a way to differentiate podcasting,
and I'm talking about the podcast industrial complex,
because I'm here for everybody, and I have
no dog in the hunt.
But when you, if you, and I don't
know exactly the reasons why this hasn't been
discussed, but if we put HLS audio in
the alternate enclosure, which might actually motivate Apple
to recognize the alternate enclosure, the Apple podcast
app loves HLS audio, has no problem with
it.
Wait, the Apple podcast app?
I'm pretty sure, yeah.
I'm pretty sure it does.
In the regular enclosure?
In the regular enclosure, yeah.
They don't recognize the alternative enclosure.
So you're telling me that the Apple podcast
app will read an HLS media type out
of the enclosure?
99% sure.
And of course, most podcast apps do, because
it's an MU38 file, right?
Isn't that?
Yeah, it's a playlist.
Wouldn't that be a huge differentiator for the
quote unquote industry, if we were able to
actually pinpoint if someone heard the ad?
Because when you have HLS audio, you can
do that.
Yeah, yeah, mm-hmm.
What is this hemming and hawing you're doing
at me?
No, no, I'm not eschewing you.
I'm assenting.
That's a contemplative assent is what that is.
I mean, because everyone's talking about HLS video.
Why not do HLS audio?
Because then you could finally deliver to the
advertisers what they really want.
Now, I believe no one wants to push
for it because, oh my God, when they
find out that they're just counting downloads and
they're not actually listening, we're going to lose
out.
But I would say the opposite.
Let me pop your bubble, though.
I don't think it's necessary to pinpoint the
ads because that's already done with range requests
if you're talking about streaming.
But no one's reporting that.
They're only reporting downloads, or am I incorrect?
I mean, I'm talking about- No, they're
accounting for it.
They're accounting for it.
It's part of the IAB measurement standard is
how to handle a range request.
I don't know how they tie that back
to ads, like at the slots and all
that stuff.
I don't know about that.
I just thought if we could move the
industry away from downloads only, which is, as
far as I know, is still the metric,
instead of we can tell you exactly who
heard your host read ad or whatever, DAI
or whatever, it's all fine.
But really being able to pinpoint here's how
many people heard your ad, I think that
your CPMs would go up, like dramatically.
So what's your...
Okay, so let me see if I can
replay this back to you.
You're, so you're saying if we had, if
there was an HLS audio, and I think
you could do, you could do MPEG-3
over HLS, I think.
Yeah, sure you can.
Yeah, okay, so you can do MP3 over
H.
So if you're saying something like MP3 over
HLS, that if that was the delivery format,
that then it would be, the default would
become streaming instead of downloading, and that would
make for broader attribution of ad placement.
It's all about attribution.
I would say the way it would go
is if we had a couple of hosts,
and I think there's a few, that would
provide an alternate enclosure, because I'm trying to
accomplish a few things at once, an alternate
enclosure with HLS MP3, then we could offer
a nice sample to advertisers based upon the
modern podcast apps that would implement this by
serving up, so you can still download.
And so everything is extra.
It's more file storage.
It's more, I mean, there's a lot more
work for everybody, but you could then offer
maybe five or six different podcast apps that
would give you a sample of how many
people heard your ad.
You can extrapolate that into whatever formula you
want, but it might actually spur Apple to
recognize the alternate enclosure.
And once we have that, then we have
all kinds of fun stuff we can do.
Does that make sense?
Yes, I follow your reason.
Yeah, I follow your chain of reasoning.
It feels, see, it feels, I don't know.
And I see where you're going, but it
seems like they would be more likely to
tie it to a new feature rather than
an invisible, already sort of mostly supported feature,
because then you get something new.
Well, the problem is you can't just switch
to HLS MP3 for everybody, because you're gonna
break all kinds of stuff.
Yeah, for sure.
You know, the bots that go out and
look at stuff, you get size issues, you
know, how many bytes, all kinds of stuff
breaks if you do that.
Yeah, but what I'm saying is if you
have like, I feel like an Apple or
a Spotify or somebody like that would be
more likely to adopt video HLS in the
alternate enclosure than audio HLS, because they, just
thinking from their terms, they've already got the
audio part nailed down, you know, that.
Now, I think, I just don't think they
would want to do like an invisible feature.
Well, I'm trying to create something that is
unique to audio podcasting for the apps versus
everybody trying somehow to catch up and compete
with YouTube, which you can't.
You can't, you just can't.
No, no.
So why waste all this time, energy and
money on sending out video, which people are
just gonna watch video and YouTube and TikTok
and et cetera, et cetera.
Why not create something unique that is unique
for advertisers?
Because that's what it comes down to for
the complex.
But see, YouTube is just a different thing.
It's not.
When it comes to where the money's going,
it's not.
But when it comes to the way that
people, what people choose to listen to or
watch, like when it, because when it comes
to listening to a podcast, I go to
my podcast app.
When it comes to audio books, I go
to Audible.
When it's, you know, when it's something, but
when it's something other than that, I go
to YouTube.
But yeah, exactly.
You just said it.
But that's not the crisis the industry feels
it's in.
Listen to the most recent episode of Podcast
Weekly Review.
Oh, I haven't heard it yet.
Oh yeah.
Well, it's, if we don't do video, podcasting
is gonna die.
Now, I don't agree with that, but I
understand the motivation to take what it must
to shoehorn video into podcast apps, which I
just think is a mistake.
I've said this before.
I don't care.
It's fine if we do it, that's okay.
But you're not gonna win.
You're not gonna beat free YouTube hosting for
your podcast.
People will release an MP3 podcast and they're
gonna put it on YouTube or Rumble or
wherever.
So I just don't see, instead of fighting
that, why not offer something more to the
advertising industry that gives them a good, warm
feeling about audio?
I'm trying to see the aspects.
I'm trying to see something in what you're
talking about that makes sense to me.
And I think I may see a little
bit of something.
So if you're, the one thing that HLS
would have that the other, that MP3 delivery
out of whole cloth, as it were, doesn't
have right now, or it would be the
ability to stream ads, I think in a
more simplistic way.
My understanding of the way the stack works
on the hosting side when there's dynamic ad
insertion is, and somebody can correct me if
I'm wrong, but my understanding of the way
it works is that the hosting company has
the source audio.
So they have, you as the podcaster upload,
and I'm talking about as a host, if
you're using a hosting company.
So you would upload it to, let's say,
Blueberry.
Blueberry hands it off to Soundstack, hands that
MP3 file off to Soundstack, which does some
insertion, some ad insertion, and then delivers it
back.
With the ads baked in.
Well, you're talking about ad insertion.
I think that's a race to the bottom.
I still think host-read ads are more
valuable, but are very difficult to track when
you're talking about inserted ads.
The industry has inserted ads kind of figured
out, but if you want to make more
money at a higher CPM, that's when HLS
becomes a magic bullet.
So you're not talking about DAI.
You're talking about something that's baked in.
Yeah.
During the recording.
Yeah.
DAI is crap.
That's, you know, it's $3 CPM.
It's going all the way down to the
toilet.
Of course.
And that's why it's not valuable.
The host-read ads are very valuable, but
they've fallen, as far as I can tell,
a little bit out of favor.
You know, Joe Rogan has solved that by
interrupting the show five times an hour and
jamming in some ads that sound like they're
read by him, but they might not even
be.
You know, and I'm sure they track that
too.
But the natural flow, if we step back,
you know, five years and we have someone
host-read ad, which is always, always going
to have a higher CPM, but that you
can actually track it, how many people heard
it, just seems like that would be better.
Side note real quick.
If you're, if you are a, a big
audio production podcast, podcast or, or, or otherwise,
why would you not, with the current voice
cloning technology, why would you not just hire
a staff member to do all of your
ad reads with a cloned voice on your
behalf?
That way you never have to read a
lick anymore.
Because they suck.
But, but they, they're, they're use 11 labs
or something like that.
I've, I've tried 11 ads, 11, 11, 11
labs.
It sucks.
It's not consistent, you know, it's no, it's
not great at, at cloning.
It's just not, none of it is.
Couldn't you have, couldn't you read, have somebody
reading it, but then it's just making you
sound like the other person?
Yeah, but that, that second part you said,
making you sound like it, it, in, in
reality, it doesn't really work that well.
Oh, okay.
Or it sounds dead.
Hey, what is the problem?
Just read the ad.
But they don't want to.
Well, that's, that's a different issue.
But if I'm paying for Joe Rogan, I
want to hear Joe Rogan.
I mean, the whole relationship with advertising, Dan,
I don't, I don't know if you've listened
to the latest media round table.
No, I haven't heard it.
I haven't heard it, no.
He was interviewing these, these two girls from
Girls Gone Bible podcast.
I already like it.
I'm sure these are nice.
I'm sure these are nice young ladies, but
the, the questions about their relationship, you know,
and they're, they're, you know, they're Christians and
that kind of thing.
But the, the sort of like tortured relationship
that they were trying to work through with,
with, with advertisers, it just, it hurt my
heart.
Wait, before you continue, I just want you
to hear 11 Labs.
An ad, an ad from Adam Curry.
Okay, here we go.
This is Adam Curry and you're eating farmer's
dog.
That's, that's terrible.
He's number two.
This is Adam Curry and you're eating farmer's
dog.
See, that's, that's my voice, but it sounds
like crap.
Yeah, it doesn't sound like anything you would
do.
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
That's like you, that's like you own steroids
or something.
I don't know what it is.
It's no good.
All right, back to the Bible ladies.
Oh yeah, the girl's gone Bible.
They, I guess what, you know, like one,
they were, they said the same like thing
that we hear from most podcasts.
I can't, again, I'm not criticizing them.
This is just kind of what you have
to do.
The, every podcaster you will hear, you will
hear says the same thing when it was
related, when, when they're talking about their relationship
to advertisers.
They're like, if I don't believe in the
product, I'm not going to talk about it
on my show.
You're right.
Exactly, and we all, we all sort of
internally eye roll that because we're like, look,
man, if somebody offers you a lucrative ad
deal, you're not, you're going to, you're going
to make it say, what you're going to
do is you're going to, you're going to
love farmer's dog.
It's going to taste great.
You're going to make yourself love it.
Yes, of course.
You may, you may not be lying to
the audience, but you may be lying to
yourself.
Oh man.
And to Jesus, which is even worse.
Well, and the, the, the, the, the thing
that made me just sort of literally, you
know, just laugh out loud was that it
got to a point where Dan Granger was
like, do you have a, do you have
an example of a certain type of that
or whatever?
And she's in one of the girls was
like, yeah, you know, yeah, there was this
great mattress that they, you know, that we
loved.
And, uh, um, uh, what was it again?
Like loved it so much.
I don't remember what it was.
And she was like, is she pitched to
the other girls?
Like, what, what was the name of that
mattress?
And the other girl was like, um, I
can't really remember right this second.
Give me a minute.
Neither one of them could remember this, this,
this mattress that they quote unquote loved.
Yeah.
Yes.
It's I'm like, man, this is this relay,
this advertising relationship thing is so, I mean,
I understand, I think I understand what your
motivation here is.
Your motivation is a technical one.
I want to help people.
I know my motivations.
I want to help people because they're stuck
in this loop of video and I can
just see it coming down Broadway.
It's going to be meh.
Yeah.
It's this, you know, put a lot of
effort into it.
Okay.
I've sort of been in, for some reason
I've gotten into, uh, to, in addition to
the girl's gone Bible, I've gotten into a
couple of other, like what we call gen
Y women podcasts.
Oh, is this an only fans thing?
No, no, no, no, no, sorry.
So I'm, I'm writing a, I'm writing a,
and I'm writing an app for a, I
say an app.
I'm writing an application that will help people
monitor the index.
Uh, so I started, I was hoping to
have it ready today, but it just did
not come together in time, but it's like
a, it's, so it's a, it's a console
app that you can run in a terminal
and it will, it will use the, the
recent feeds in point.
And the goal of this application is going
to be to help people run it on
their machine.
It's a crap trap, a crap trap.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so you, you run the application, it'll
give you a whole, it will show you
all the new feeds that are coming into
the index in nearly real time.
You can, and you use your own neural
networking to determine what's crap.
You can triage it.
Yeah.
You can, you can hook, you can hook
your own functions into it and that kind
of thing in order to do like lots
of people can do all kinds of cool
stuff with it and then feed that.
If you have a public read, write key
API key for the index, you can feed,
you'll be able to feed that triage back
into the index to let us know whether
something, what, what type of stuff this is.
I like it.
The dashboard.
It's a dashboard.
And for, and so I've been listening.
So part of the, what this app does
is you, um, you can just like cursor
around on these new feeds and you can
hit the P button and it'll just play
the latest enclosure.
Oh, awesome.
So you can listen and try to, cause
sometimes you think something's AI, but you're not
sure.
So you can play a sample of it.
Yeah.
And I got, I've been listening to, Ooh,
there's some good stuff apparently.
Oh, there's some great stuff in here.
But man, if you just watch the fire
hose, yikes.
Oh, I'm sure it's fun.
I love looking at pod ping dot, uh,
tiles or whatever is the, I love seeing
the new stuff update.
I almost wish I had like a, like
a radio button that would you could just
like listen to 30 seconds of each one
as they're coming in.
That'll be the first thing I vibe code
the minute you release this console.
So like, this is a, this is another,
uh, I I'm calling them Gen Y girl
type thing.
Uh, I sent you some clips.
Uh, the one, the one I listened to
yesterday was, uh, she's, she's like a therapist
or something.
And she's giving, there's all kinds.
I've got multiple little tidbits of advice that
she's giving, that I will just sprinkle throughout
the show.
What is the name of this much?
What is the name of this podcast?
I don't even remember.
It was something so generic that I don't
even remember.
It was like success for life.
I don't even know.
Okay.
I don't remember what her name was.
It's like the mattress.
It's like the mattress is so good.
This, I clipped it, but I don't remember
the name of the show.
Okay.
All I had was the enclosure download.
That's all I remember from this thing.
It came from your, from your console basically.
Yeah.
Okay.
I got you.
Yeah.
For a little sample of this, let's listen
to her advice on success.
You send someone an email because you would
like them on your podcast.
By the way, she's using the same microphone
Mitch Downey's using.
You send someone an email because you would
like them on your podcast or blog or
like some kind of collaboration, right?
You send them an email because you want
to collab in some shape, way or form,
whether whatever.
Okay.
And you don't hear back from them and
you're like, okay, whatever.
And you just give up on yourself, but
you haven't really gotten an answer.
So the door's open, right?
There's sometimes when you send stuff and people
don't respond, but you don't never not follow
up because you want to get an answer,
right?
And to see whether the door is closed
and or at least mostly closed, right?
Cause then you can be like, okay, I'll
reach out in six months time or whatever.
Right.
And like get back on their radar.
Right.
But for now you know that the radar
is closed and you're complete with that versus
you doing a half ass job and only
reaching out once that is leaking success because
you're leaking the possibility of more success because
you haven't followed up on something with someone.
This goes for like when you're applying for
jobs too.
Like if you really want a job at
a certain place, then you want to follow
up, you know, you want to keep applying.
You want to like get into it somehow.
Now, do you consider that a good advice?
No, but I, I considered a valid podcast.
That's for sure.
It's a great pod.
I'd listen to it this from time to
time, just a little bit, like a sampling.
Sure.
Oh, I listened to three episodes of it
and I still have no idea what her
name is.
I couldn't stop listening to it.
It was great.
Well, I mean I was, I was getting
ISO.
I could have hit you with 75 ISOs
from this podcast.
Well, I want to hear the donation segment
advice because is that from her?
Yeah.
Oh, the donation segment.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Okay.
And it's all right.
I got you.
No, you can, you can, uh, great.
You can hit the ISO though.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm actually terrible at like tabs on my
computer.
There was, there was a hundred of those.
You know, I'm thinking all of it, you
know, I have streaming on my mind, right?
So I'm thinking, wouldn't it be great to
have a 24 seven live stream that just
plays 30 seconds of every new episode that
hits the recent API end point?
That would be horrible.
No, no.
It's a discovery mechanism, baby.
This is K you're, you're an agent of
chaos.
I am.
Uh, this is, uh, this is actually, I'm
kind of liking this idea now.
I mean, anything that's streaming, I'll listen to
it.
It's like streaming, streaming crap is fantastic.
I, yeah.
Okay.
I can't wait for this radio chaos podcast.
Right?
Yes.
Well, people are always looking to be discovered.
Well, there you go.
Well, and just one other thing before we
bring our very patient guests on.
Yeah.
Um, and I think this was a thread
and I can't remember exactly who started it,
but it was about the, um, you know,
kind of a follow on to, uh, change
my feed or my podcast, this or whatever
we were talking about.
Yeah.
Move your podcast or I got a sneeze.
Go, go, go.
It didn't happen.
It's when you, when you have to sneeze
and you say it and then it doesn't
happen.
That's the worst.
Um, what is, so I don't know where
it's some, it came up somewhere.
Someone said, what about a verified check Mark?
You know, instead of saying, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah.
You know, to verify your feed and then
have a check Mark type system.
People love doing that.
I'm just, I remember I was trying to
say, how do we market this idea that
people actually do this?
But what if the index became the place
where you could check to see that a
feed was verified?
I had it just yesterday.
Someone emailed me, say, I'm listening to this,
you know, I'm subscribed to Alex Jones.
Um, can you check and see if this
is the right one?
And it wasn't.
So there's someone who added a bogus feed.
It was from Spreaker, you know, a feed
hijack and I successfully merged it in with
the official feed.
I was pretty proud of myself.
Um, and I was thinking, you know, wouldn't
it be great if, if you had that
check Mark and you could always verify it,
uh, on podcast index and we could do
some auto verification through the hosts, maybe even
with an iTunes ID.
You know, we look, who else is going
to do it?
You know, we're, we're trusted enough as far
as you can throw us.
I mean, here we are, we're in our
sixth year, we're in our sixth year, you
know, we're not making any money off of
this.
It's just running.
It's just there.
We do this podcast.
Why?
I don't even know.
I like, I don't even know anymore.
I like talking to you.
I mean, it's like, I like talking to
Dave, you know, give a chance to connect,
but we could be that place.
You know, podcastindex.org could be a verified
place.
You could, you could expose an API, see
if it's verified, et cetera.
And then when people find something that's checkmarked
and it's not theirs, they freak out, but
they have an easy way to come into
us.
We look at the dashboard, the crap trap.
Oh, bam, you good pop up.
You know, it could be, we could provide
that service and that might clean up a
lot of different stuff.
I mean, let's not wait for someone else
to build a website.
We have the website, we have everything you
need.
Yeah.
I think this, that actually kind of fits
with, with a similar to something I was
thinking, which was I feel like it's a
need to actually put a decent dashboard into
podcast index now.
And I know how to do it now
because I have a good, I finally have
a good PHP framework, Laravel that I'm, that
I'm, that I'm now just very familiar with.
And, um, I got multiple projects under my
belt.
So I think, I think you're right.
I think that's a good idea.
Just cause I've been one, I've been trying
to figure out how to like do the
beginning of this thing that we've been talking
about for the last few weeks.
And now you feel it, you feel it.
Yeah.
I'm starting to see, it's starting to, to
sort of like solidify in my, in my
mind what the beginning of it looks like.
And I think it begins with just a
new dashboard that would allow people to come
and interact like what we've been talking about.
People who actually own the podcast, they can
go log in, have an account and do
the management of it themselves.
Wow.
That's hardcore.
You think so?
I think it's great.
Manage, manage, manage your check Mark.
I don't think it's actually that hard.
I'm just saying having, having a check Mark,
you know, a verified flag, whatever it is,
people will go for that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think you're right.
And if the result is that we clean
up the index and subsequently everybody else can,
can clean up their own directories through us,
that would be fantastic.
Yeah.
And I, I think we can kind of,
yeah, that's, this is the next step we
need.
And then we'll, and then we'll figure out
how to sort of like disseminate that in
a decentralized way where, you know, where it
can be, you know, a tag or something
like that.
No, man, we just dumped the whole table
into a Tor file, a torrent, a torrent.
That's popular.
Yeah.
Torrent.
Just a thought.
But on your HLS thing real quick, you
know, I forgot to bring up, but it's
the first thing here in my notes is
finally there's HLS native support in Chrome.
Oh really?
Yes.
So Chromium added native HLS support in the
video tag.
I'm assuming the audio tag too, because underneath
the hood in Chromium, audio and video tags
are both just clones of the media tag.
So they should both have support for this
now.
So the train is rolling.
Nothing stops this train.
Hmm.
Yeah.
So, I mean, if that's, if we're going
to do HLS, this is good.
This would pressure web kit to support it
in the video in, in their native audio
video tags.
And they may, that might just make things
trickle down.
I think it's, yeah, I think things are
moving fondly on the HLS front.
Well, the one thing we've learned is these
things take, well, we already knew this.
These take, things take a lot of time
forever.
And, and that's just what it is, but
we're in this for the long haul.
We're doing it for humanity.
We're not doing it for us.
And for some reason, you and I like
each other enough to keep doing it.
So that's kind of good.
It's just that this show is just a
check.
It's just a plus a lot on the
calendar.
That's right.
It's just another thing I do.
You know, I go to church, do the
show with Dave, walk the dog.
You know, it's just one of those things
you do.
Hey, let's bring in our guests.
They've been waiting very patiently as we've been
yammering about here, but we haven't heard from
them in a long time.
Boardroom, please.
Welcome the, from the new Podverse web alpha
and Podverse legacy.
Here are Mitch and Archie.
Howdy.
Hey, what's up guys?
There it is.
It was Archie first, then Mitch.
Hey guys, how are you doing?
Happy new year.
Doing good.
Happy new year.
So I told you, Mitch, you have a
career, uh, as a Gen Y podcast lady.
Less vocal fry and upspeak though.
Well, that's true.
Do you have, there's all of a sudden,
there's some extra audio artifacts that are coming
down the line.
You have a fan.
It could be that the, uh, radiant heat
in my building has just turned on.
So this is going to be a rough
experience.
He's got steam gauges.
Just kind of like alpha, you know, this
is an aesthetic choice.
It's a, a rough product right now.
I think it would probably help to hear,
uh, to hear Gen Y ladies advice on
something.
Oh, uh, sorry.
I missed the cue.
Just getting into the habit of closing things
like closing the door on things.
So we're not leaking our energy thought awareness
and thought process on things into things that
like, we don't need to be in them.
If that makes any sense.
Wow.
Did you get that?
Wow.
Yeah.
She's great.
Uh, anyway, let's get back to our guests
because, um, Mitch has been started kind of
ramping up posting on podcast index dot social
in the last couple of months, uh, after
some absence, it seems, uh, maybe just bring
us up to speed, Mitch, what's been going
on with you and Archie and what's been
happening in the background and, uh, and, uh,
and tell us about the web alpha and
just, just bring us up to speed, man.
It's been a long time since we spoke.
Sure.
Well, um, 2024, I was pretty burnt out
on, uh, software development, uh, after, you know,
nine years of doing open source software.
Uh, I just didn't, uh, have it mentally
to be able to focus and, uh, take
progress to the next level.
Um, I also knew that a big rewrite
was needed to take it to where I
wanted to be.
And I feel like 2024 was just like
a lot of processing and resetting, uh, to
be able to be up for the task.
Uh, 2025, uh, progress has been very good.
Uh, we have basically like 90% of
the infrastructure complete for the next generation Podverse.
So a lot of the work that's done
isn't necessarily visible with, uh, what's on the
website right now, but it's there.
And, um, it think the pieces are falling
together quickly.
Uh, so yeah, we have the website currently
at alpha.podverse.fm, uh, which is a
live demo for people to get a preview
of what is coming soon.
So if I understand correctly, you are developing
the new Podverse app by creating the whole
infrastructure first and exposing that on the web.
Yes.
Uh, so Podverse one, uh, the legacy version
that started, well, technically it started in like
2015, but, uh, that new infrastructure started in
2019 before Podcasting 2.0 existed.
So I had a lot of assumptions built
into that, what people know of as Podverse
today that had no concept of Podcasting 2
.0, uh, no concept of music ever being
a part of it, for example.
Um, and so developing with it was always
kind of fighting against all these root assumptions
I made about what a podcast is and
what Podverse would do.
Now, this new version is, uh, from the
ground up built to align with the Podcasting
2.0 namespaces.
Um, and there's all kinds of technical reasons
why it's a better way to do it.
And it will allow us to easily integrate
these features going forward.
Eric, by the way, Mitch, Eric PP says,
it sounds like you're in the shower.
He is.
I think he is taking a pod shower.
I cannot stop the radiators that are controlled
by my landlord.
So he has some, uh, uh, leaf blowers
outside of his house.
So it's going to be a rough ride.
No, instead of listening to a podcast in
the shower, do a podcast in the shower.
That's the best.
That's the better alternative.
But you know, I just wanted to tell
you, Mitch, just, and I just brought it
up on op3.dev. If you look at
the apps that are used for the no
agenda show, the 35.35% is Apple
podcast.
That's the top number two Podverse 14.67.
So you're number two on my list, man.
That's something.
I mean, that's, I think that's awesome.
Yeah, that is a, and I moved to
a different room.
Hopefully it's.
Oh yeah.
That made all the difference.
Okay.
Good.
Um, yeah, the, uh, it, that, that's been
one of the most encouraging things is to
see how popular Podverse is with the no
agenda audience.
Um, and like we aren't necessarily the most
popular podcast app, but we're very popular with
certain audiences and we get a lot of
appreciation from those audiences.
And so it helps us know that we're
on the right track.
What do you, why do you think, why
do you think that is?
What, what, what do you think it is
that does that?
I think it's mostly, uh, you recommending a
podcast apps.
And, uh, for whatever reason, a lot of
people are choosing Podverse.
They're going, you know, through a new podcast
apps.com.
Um, and it's mostly word of mouth.
It seems to be, um, that this is
a direction we want to lean into, uh,
with marketing going forward.
I mean, we want to reach everyone, but
we also are like happy to deliver the
best experience possible for like specific shows and
their audiences, uh, to, you know, to like
podcasting, 2.0 features may not have, uh,
you know, it might be a small number
of feeds today that use these features, but
for those shows, we want to deliver the
best experience possible to be the best app
for that purpose.
You know, I think that's a really good
idea.
Uh, and I've always found it curious that
podcast apps don't work more or at all
with, with podcasts, podcasters, you know, we've always
had this kind of, um, you know, like,
well, it has to be fair for everyone.
It has to be equal for everybody.
And I, I just don't, you know, I've,
I've given my Rachel Maddow example in the
past.
It's like, why?
You know, uh, it's like fountain.
Fountain has a very specific audience and I
think they're very successful for that audience.
So, yeah.
And that's pretty much the philosophy we're going
with, with a pod verse is, uh, we're
designed first for these, you know, a future
forward podcasting 2.0 feeds.
We will have support for legacy feeds, but
they're not our priority to the same degree
as the podcasting 2.0 feeds.
Are like, for example, alternate enclosure is at
the root of our architecture.
We don't even have a traditional enclosure.
We like convert it into an alternate enclosure.
Like we use these design patterns that are
2.0 focus.
Oh, okay.
Interesting.
Yeah.
I like that.
What, how are you, this, this is interesting
from a person, from the perspective I think
of many developers, not just podcast app developers,
but anybody who has a forward facing a
web service or application that when you come
to the point of deciding that you're going
to do a rewrite, it's always the first
question is in, in what order do we
do things in?
Like you have a, you have the quote
unquote stack that represents the full application from
the, from the user, what the user sees
all the way through and through to the
data storage at the, at the very end
of the chain.
How do you, where do you choose what
pieces to push in and out and change
out and swap out in the stack first
and what order to do them in?
Like where did, how did you figure that
out?
Well, it seemed the logical starting point for
me was to do a one to one
matching with the 2.0 spec.
So it was the data schema that came
before everything else and parsing.
And then from there making the parsing as
efficient as possible.
But so, yeah, I mean, I don't know
how to explain it without getting too technical,
but like our data schema is pretty much
a one to one match with these join
tables with all the different XML fields that
are, you know, a part of RS, RSS
feeds.
At some point.
Are you, so you, you, you seem to
be running two separate systems right now.
The new one and the old one.
Is that accurate?
Yes.
So I decided to go with a totally
green field environment.
There will be a great migration.
There will be a migration someday, which I
think will be feasible.
I love migrations.
But, you know, in order to, to work
with the legacy one, it was just so
there was just so many problems with it,
just like I said, those rude assumptions that
I'm constantly battling and poor coding patterns and
I'm now a better coder now.
So it was just like, all right, just
do the green field and we'll figure it
out eventually how to migrate it.
So for now we're trying to make the
website as good of a standalone product as
possible.
I mean, it's plausible that somebody could deploy
this software for a website before we even
have the mobile app done and that it
could be like a high quality website on
its own.
So this is all still open source, Mitch.
Oh yeah.
All open source.
I love it, man.
Of course.
You're really, really doing a lot.
I wouldn't be motivated without it.
So this is, I've always been that way.
And I should say right off the bat,
the Godcaster app use a lot of your
framework.
I believe Dave might know more.
The, the React native part of the mobile
app.
Yeah.
I think it initially got things up and
running, but I think he switched a lot
of that code out now.
I don't think there's anything that's still left
in there, but yeah, it was a, it
was a, it was a helpful thing to
bootstrap it.
Yeah, it was for sure.
So Archie.
Yeah.
I was going to say, this is a
good point for Archie because he is helping
with the operations and deployment side a lot.
And he's taking us in a direction that'll
allow like to make self-hosting simple for
other people.
Oh, okay.
Take it away, Archie.
So I've been doing a bunch of DevOps
stuff for the past several years for Podverse.
Lately I got into Kubernetes K8s and I
decided to move the entire infrastructure over to
that, which means with only a couple of
files or repo, you could deploy your own
Podverse on your own systems.
I've also been including the idea too much
about doing the podcast, podcaster specific apps so
that not everybody will get to add a
podcast to these apps.
So you could have your feed or your
app just with your stuff in it and
nothing else.
There'd have to be some white label stuff
done to make it prettier for everybody.
But at the end of the day you
could have your Rachel Maddow app just for
her and she could have the whole infrastructure
just connected for that one person or podcaster.
And it's easy enough that I've been able
to rebuild the whole thing in about 10
minutes.
Do you and Alex Gates live in the
same house?
No.
Do you notice that Dave, how Archie's cadence
is very similar to Alex?
That is.
Yeah.
I think, I think these are, I think
they're deeply technical people and I think they're
deep tech dudes.
Yeah.
Very deep tech dudes.
Yeah.
Explain.
I don't understand.
I don't fully understand what you mean, Archie.
What, when you say that you, that there's
personal, a personalized sort of deployment for a,
for a particular person, what do you, can
you explain that?
So right now Alpha has the idea of
ad feed.
And so if it doesn't exist, we don't,
we're not ingesting the entire index.
We're only ingesting parts that people actually want
to listen to.
And if no one's listening to it or
subscribe to it, we'll get rid of it
and we'll use the podcast index as our
backup to find things later if someone wants
it again.
So the fee, when you start out, it's
an empty blank slate.
And as you get more users and more
people or admins, et cetera, it will get
bigger and have only the things that actually
matter to the listeners of that podcast app
or the admin of the podcast app.
Web app.
Oh, I see what you mean.
So if I was going to deploy my
own Podverse, then it would be a, it
would have a completely like a different complexion
as far as content goes than, than the
main Podverse.fm. Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
I got you.
So that way.
Yeah.
That way we don't have to have 175
million podcasts in our podcast app.
Just in case someone wants something from 10
years ago, we only need to have things
that people need now.
And we could save a lot on storage
costs.
Yeah.
And I think, um, I mean, this is
similar to what, I think this is similar
to what we did with Godcaster.
We did the same thing.
It's you, you have a, you know, we
don't ingest the entire indexes.
It's only when somebody decides to add, you
know, uh, a show that, that it actually
gets into the content mix.
And, but I was thinking like, uh, I
was thinking about this.
If y'all, y'all have the, the
thing that has impressed me the most about
what you guys are doing with the next
generation Podverse is the care that you're taking
with the database schema.
And I'm wondering if podcast index should just
adopt your schema, you know, because we're, I'm,
I'm actively thinking about, uh, the new structure
of things.
And, you know, you've, you've been helping with,
uh, with, with the code as well, as
well as Eric PP.
Um, and so I wonder if you, you
know, if you already have, I don't, I'm
not a Postgres guy, but I'm wondering if
you already have the schema that you think
that y'all think is great.
I mean, why, why would we not just
adopt that instead of trying to recreate the
wheel all over again?
Well, we're happy to give you a tour
of it.
Um, the, like I said, it's, it's, it
attempts to be a one-to-one match
with RSS.
Uh, if you can picture that just like
with join tables.
So there's like, uh, you've got a channel,
but then you also have a channel pod
role, and then you have channel pod role,
remote item.
And those are three separate tables and it's
just supposed to align with the RSS spec
because that is at the core, what pod
versus RSS app.
You also do, um, the time split.
Yep.
Yes.
We have remote items.
Perfect.
Yes.
We have all of the data being parsed
and saved.
That is all finished.
It's just a matter of bringing the features
into the apps now.
Now you did something real.
It's really amazing to do this.
I mean, not many podcast app developers would
go this route and say, okay, we're just
going to redo it all.
Yeah.
Well, it's been a big undertaking.
Um, but I'm living off some savings at
the moment.
So I'm dedicating myself full-time to this.
Wow.
Um, and it's exciting.
I, it's hard to explain to normal people
why this is so exciting, but I really
love working with this stuff and the, the
vision of podcasting 2.0 can do so
much.
And, you know, I don't want to be
bogged down by the talk of, Oh, this
app doesn't support it.
So we can't do this.
It can't do that.
Like to me, pod versus just the way
to move forward.
Uh, you know, the specs are sound in
the, you know, we know it can work,
so let's just do it.
And the rest of the industry can catch
up if they want.
So it'll be a reference app for all
things.
Podcasting 2.0. Yes.
Wow.
That's very cool.
Eric PP's asking some stuff in the, in
the boardroom that I'm, that I'm curious about
as well.
Cause, um, the way you described it, the
way you described your database layout is that
if I understand you is that you have
basically every, every 2.0 tag is a
two additional tables, the table for the tag
content itself, and then a pivot table to
get to it.
Is that right?
Um, I think so.
I don't, I'm not really fluent at speaking
about databases, but I mean, like I said
with the example, like in this spec, we
have a channel element and then we have
channel and we have a pod role that
is nested within a channel.
And then we have remote item, which is
nested within pod role.
And so from our spec, that would be
three tables joined together.
Okay.
Maybe I misunderstood.
So, so like for, in the, for instance,
um, a person tag in an item, uh,
in an episode, you would have, um, would
you have the episode, I'm assuming you have
an episodes table and then you would have
a person's table and then would you have
an episodes to person's linkage table?
Um, yes.
It depends.
I forget what the person tag is.
Uh, those aren't grouped under one tag, right?
Those are the funding tag.
Use that as an example, like a funding
tag.
If an item can have like five funding
tags, then the there'd be five rows in
the item funding table that link to that
item.
Okay.
Because that's the RSS spec, but you don't
have like a third intermediary table that takes
care of like linkage between the two.
There's just a reference in the funding table
that links back directly to the episodes table.
I think so.
Yes.
Okay.
Can I just ask before Oystein Berger has
a conniption, will you be supporting the live
time splits live lit?
I would like to, I haven't seen the
spec for it yet, but it's absolutely like,
uh, if there is a adopted standard for
it, we absolutely would like to do that.
Okay.
This is really cool.
I, I can tell you right now that
the whole idea of the white label, I
will definitely make a, uh, a no agenda,
uh, pod verse app.
Hmm.
That's just cool.
Kidding me.
That's fantastic.
I love the whole idea.
Archie, have you seen, uh, what have you
seen the Kubernetes switch do as far as
like cost goes to y'all's system?
So I haven't done that for on actual
VPS.
I've done that in my local, it's on
three, uh, machines with eight gigs and two
CPUs, uh, VPS.
So it's still going up and down.
It's kind of just through it.
I started out doing some tests.
I'm going to actually throw another project into
the boardroom that I initially started out based
off of something else.
Adam said, um, and I put that into
my Kubernetes cluster and it doesn't seem to
be too bad, but it's going to be
probably just for our infrastructure, not the database,
$36 a month, maybe 50.
Um, just the way it seems.
And then the database is as big as
it needs because storage is the big problem.
Um, and the thing I just posted just
to take that side note, Adam, this was
for you specifically a flask app that checks
the end points of a specific RSS feed
page or MPEG, JPEG, MP3, et cetera.
Uh, so it just grabs them, checks them
and gets and make sure that they all
have the same hash.
Vibe coders unite.
Thank you.
That's awesome.
Thank you very much.
My flask app.
Basic off baby.
It rocks.
Yeah.
Because that's the one thing that I've been,
uh, concerned about, you know, we, I've been,
uh, talking to you forever about, uh, looking
at our infrastructure and that kind of thing.
And I'm, I'm, I'm never, I'm never able
to, to put it together to get, to
get you in there to look at things.
But that is one thing that I've been
wondering about is how to, how to containerize
things, uh, in a way that, that cause
I'm so caught, I'm so cost conscious.
I mean, our, our overhead, you know, our
expenses every month are, are not insignificant.
And so, you know, we have, you know,
about probably if you add it all up,
probably 15 grand worth of expenses a year
on the index.
And, you know, so like making, I'm so
worried about just accidentally blowing, you know, inflating
our cost too much.
And because that, that would be the worst
possible thing is all of a sudden we
have, we go from, you know, a thousand
dollars a month of, of fees to 1700.
It's like, well, we can't do that.
You know?
I don't know.
One of the biggest things for us when
we had, uh, some cost realignments was switching
our file system off of ext4 to a
copy on right file system like CFS with
on the fly compression that significantly saved us
money because we weren't writing, uh, as much
data to the disc.
And then it was reading faster because it
was reading compressed data.
That's on the database server.
Yeah.
Really interesting.
So our database server was getting to like
700, 800 gigs for Postgres.
Um, I was able to get it down
to about, I think we're up to 250
now with a mirrored pair of, uh, discs.
Yikes.
800 gigs.
Woo.
That's a lot.
That's like a whole blockchain, baby.
Yeah, that's a man.
That's big.
I don't think we're anywhere near that.
I think we're like, I want to say
they were like two 50 maybe on our
date, on our database.
Well, that's a problem we're trying to solve
with the new setup because, uh, the legacy
version is a full clone of the directory
of the podcast index directory.
This one, I mean, I expect us to
cut our number of feeds by like 95
% in this new version.
Um, and not to mention probably a lot
of schema problems I had with the first
version that should be cleaner now.
So are you, are you taking your, uh,
if I'm a B, I've been like a
B back and forth between, uh, normal pod
verse and alpha pod verse.
And you know, as far as UI goes,
they look almost identical.
And so did you just take your existing
UI for now and just stick it on
top of the new backend and then you're
going to do something with that later?
No, the design will be very similar.
Uh, this is an entirely new web app.
Um, and there, the most of the changes
are, are ones that people wouldn't see, uh,
just from the, uh, the surface.
Uh, for example, all the components of the
website are now differentiated by medium type.
So we have podcasts episodes, we have albums,
we have tracks, we have artists, uh, we
have live streams in the legacy version.
I tended to use like one component and
then like add a bunch of conditional statements
to have it do different behaviors.
And that's handy in some ways, but it
is restrictive and also becomes a headache when
you want to make, you know, an artist
or an album look different than a podcast
and you know, to the user.
So, uh, the front end is totally rewritten
from scratch and it's way more modular so
that we will be able to optimize the
different music podcast, video, live stream experiences.
Interesting.
Okay.
Good.
It definitely, the alpha version definitely feels quicker.
Um, you know, it feels like it feels
like things, uh, parts of the site are
sort of coming, coming up fat in a
more responsive way.
Yeah, it should.
There are problems with the legacy site today
that there are queries that just hang forever.
Unfortunately, um, that won't be a problem going
forward.
I don't expect that we have that all
solved with proper indexing with our new schema.
The one, um, the one drawback to having
separate tables per sort of like a item
type is you tend to have more locking,
you know, database locking as things cause, cause
that updating or deleting content in one table
since you have just tons of linkage across
tables tends to have this kind of logarithmic
ripple effect.
Have you seen any of those kinds of
issues?
Uh, we do.
I have been mindful to try to avoid
those situations.
Uh, we have transactions within the parser to
try to group things together.
Uh, we also use, uh, active MQ, uh,
which is we have D duplication to make
sure that the same feed cannot be getting
parsed at the same time, which, uh, and,
and aside from that, there's aside from what
goes to the parser, there shouldn't be any
rights to these, you know, RSS tables.
Uh, there's no way for the users to
directly change these tables with their, their actions.
Uh, so the combination of a D duplicated,
make sure there's only one parser per feed
running and there's no outside changes possible.
We're hoping that that will avoid those sorts
of collisions.
Can I talk, uh, money for a second?
Of course.
So it's very hard to have, uh, a
podcast app and actually make any kind of
financial return for it.
How's that been working in the past?
Are you going to keep that the same?
Uh, what are your ideas moving forward?
I think our ideas will be similar.
Our goal is to deliver a much better
optimized product to just be a top of
the line, elite listening experience.
Um, we do make revenue, which is encouraging.
Um, it's almost covers our annual expenses.
Um, I don't know how specific I should
be with numbers here, but we have like,
we have almost a thousand paying members.
Wow.
That's cool.
For pod verse, which, which is great.
And it's far from a full-time job
for us, which is the ultimate goal here.
Uh, that would be nice, but, but yeah,
we don't have like a novel, uh, payment
system going forward.
It's just try to make a much better
product and then we'll increase our marketing around
that.
I've always, um, I've had hesitation with marketing
the legacy product cause I'm so aware of
all the problems with it.
So now that this new version should have
all of that fixed, uh, like one of
them, namely being that the Android mobile app
experience is noticeably like less high quality.
There's more like clunkiness to our Android app
compared to our iOS app.
Um, so we're going to make sure that's
fixed going forward.
So will there be a premium version with
premium features?
Just asking people to support you on a
monthly basis, regardless.
The premium, no, they'll get, um, some extra
features with premium.
I think one of the main features people
end up paying for is notifications because, I
mean, that's something that our backend service has
to handle and send all these push notifications
and register them to devices and stuff.
And when people use the app, if they
like it, it's like, well, there's this one
missing link.
I would really like to get notifications.
Right.
Um, that seems to be one of the
primary features.
You using Firebase for that?
We are using Firebase.
We also have a unified push integration, which
is like an open source way of, uh,
handling notifications.
Did you hear me ask that question, Dave,
with some authority?
That was good, right?
I did.
I'm impressed.
I want to jump in here about another
possible, uh, financial reason to support premium for
the white label glove and adding feeds in
the future.
We're hoping to make that a paid feature
that you get like 50 feeds a month
being paid.
And then everybody gets to, um, benefit from
those feeds being add, which also gives us
a signal saying that this is worthwhile for
someone to actually think about and add to
our podcast app.
Explain that again.
I didn't quite understand how that works.
So right now, alpha, you sign up, you
can add feeds.
And the new version, you'll have to make
that.
That's going to be a premium feature to
add feeds like that.
You'll still be able to do it on
your phone as a separate thing, but when
it gets added to our database, there has
to be some sort of signal saying that
this is worthwhile for someone to actually add
and not just slop.
Interesting.
I like it.
Not just slop.
Well, you can make a lot of money
off of, uh, what are those guys called?
Dave.
They don't send us money though.
Inception point.
Inception point AI.
Yeah.
There's some money from them.
Charge them double.
And then if anybody wants to add it,
they can send us a contact former.
We can make a form and we could
review it later and possibly add it.
I like it.
Interesting idea.
I think you mentioned that on podcast and
desktop social the other day in there.
That's a good signal.
I like it.
If somebody's willing to pay for it.
I mean, so is that you have to
be a premium?
Do you have to be a premium member
to do that?
Is that what that, okay.
Okay.
Another element.
So the premium, uh, users for our new
stats tracking system, uh, where we, we track
people's, I mean, you can opt out of
this if you like, but you can, uh,
we track, you know, what podcasts they're listening
to, what episode, um, we're only tracking that
for the paid premium users.
It's to help reduce the ability to manipulate.
And, you know, like the legacy version uses
a tracking, that's more of a conventional like
website tracking and it has its own like
IP detection to try to prevent bots from
artificially inflating numbers.
But we're leaning into following the data only
for premium members going forward so that there'll
be a better like signal to noise ratio.
It should be more meaningful.
Uh, the stats data that we have, which
down the road could lead to like a
better recommendations algorithm amongst other things.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
That makes, that makes a lot of sense.
This, you know, the signal, the signal, the
noise problem is real.
I mean, obviously we're going through all, all
this, jumping through all these hoops, hoops to
try to make some sort of differentiation between
what's garbage and what's not.
And I mean, it's pretty, I guess it's
pretty, a pretty simple idea.
And it just reinforces my, my notion that
the apps are what's going to help the
index understand what's going on to, um, you
know, if that, if that feeds back up
to us in any way.
And, um, I should probably get, get going
and getting that, that up, you know, that,
that data sharing stuff put back together.
Yeah.
Well, as we mentioned in DMs, like we
can share this, uh, the publicly available, uh,
stats data with you.
We could also potentially integrate some sort of
report process into our UI that could feed
back into some shared data resource with the
podcast index.
Well, you're, you're not alone by the way.
Financially, you're not alone in the we're almost
breaking even category that, you know, we, we,
I taught, I talked to quite a few
podcast app developers, you know, routinely, and that's
not an uncommon thing.
So I don't know that anybody's really making,
you know, significant money in any of this.
So that's, you can at least commiserate on
that fact.
The, the, uh, I mean, our, our millennial
podcaster girl has some advice on money though.
It's whether you value yourself and you know,
it's worth it or not.
Sometimes when you don't pay as much, you
don't show up as much.
Right.
So if I only charged a hundred dollars,
you'd be like, Oh, it's just a hundred
dollars.
Like you wouldn't care.
You'd be half-assing it.
You know, you wouldn't actually follow up and
be consistent and do the things that I
sent you an email about, which by the
way, those fucking emails take me at least
an hour.
So all in all, I'm spending at least
three, four hours per person for a fucking
session, you know, and that's, I, I price
my things at the rate that they're at,
which it's just going to go up over
time because you're not just paying me for
the work.
You're paying me for the experience and all
the things that I also went through to
be able to quantum leap and help you
get there as well.
Hey Grok, put a bikini on her.
Yeah.
She's quantum leading.
Quantum leading.
I don't know what that means.
I love it.
I think we should try it.
Shall we thank a few people, Dave?
Well, well we've just got that advice on
how to be quantum leading.
Yeah.
We got a couple, a couple of boosts
in real time.
I think our node may be down again.
Our our LN node that you set up.
Yeah.
It's just saying, just saying.
But at least I'm getting something.
I'm getting 1% over here from Martin
Lindeskog.
Rove ducks, two, two, two, two.
It's fun to be in the boardroom listening
to programming talk.
I am totally lost and on at the
same time.
You have the ducks in a row.
All right.
Gallagher.
Have we ever heard from Gallagher?
Yeah, I think so.
That sounds familiar.
Coming in from, let's see, CurioCaster.
333, the amazing master tool corporation, a subsidiary
of Flyby Night Industries has entrusted who me
to show you the handiest and dandiest podcast
tool you've ever seen.
And don't you want to know how it
works?
Well, first you get out an ordinary feed,
then you place the feed between the patented
pans.
Then you reach for the tool that is
not a slicer.
It's not a dicer.
It's not a chopper and a hopper.
What the hell could it possibly be?
It's the new Podverse app.
Yeah.
OK, there you go.
Salty crayon with a row of swans.
Five, five, five.
Big fan of test driving the Alphadot Podverse
app.
The past couple of months, it's a complete
revamp from the previous version.
Beautiful.
Yeah.
A nice row of sticks.
11,111 from Boost Beach Management coming in
on Podverse legacy.
The winter chill is real.
Warm up by the glow of the upcoming
video stream of Boost Beach's grand opening.
Local Minneapolis band So Big performs live and
lit with a boostable interactive set.
January 9th, 7 p.m. Central.
Tune in at Boost Beach dot live and
head there now to listen to the trailer.
BYOB Swingwear and welcome.
This is interesting.
Boost Beach.
Yeah.
Salty Crayon 2026.
Happy New Year.
Boredom.
Another year of figuring out what works and
what doesn't in podcasting.
Here's to another year of keeping our scissors
sharpened and our nodes pinging and ponging.
Go podcasting.
Yeah.
And 100 sats from Fountain from user 59050973.
I also hate the A.I. slop and
all the world takes that is just normal.
There's real artists or content creators that receive
less attention than those stupid videos.
If you see a video, just block the
channel or just scroll.
Don't keep in there.
Amazing podcast here.
Thank you, guys.
You you reserve more than this.
You reserve more than this with.
I can help.
Have a good day.
Lightning bolts.
All right.
Thank you very much.
And with that, I hit the delimiter.
You know, I was listening yesterday.
I was doing some renovation work here in
the house and I was listening to pet
sounds.
Oh, the Beach Boys.
Yeah, Beach Boys.
Martin, I'm not the Beach Boys.
It's Wilson.
Brian Wilson's solo project.
Yeah, it.
No, no, no.
Pet sounds was the Beach Boys.
It was the full Beach Boys band.
Oh, it was.
I thought it was just Brian Wilson.
OK, well, they say it's the best the
best album ever made.
I don't know if I know.
We all know that's Rush.
Come on.
It's a twenty one twelve.
Let's let's not get crazy here, but.
They just you just don't.
Music like that is gone.
It's just gone, man.
It'll come back.
It like that is just.
It's just beautiful.
It's beautiful creativity.
This is what happens when you get old,
Dave.
This is what happens when you start talking
like this.
That was before.
That was before my time.
I was born in 76.
That was before me.
And I and I just have such I've
said this before.
You know, my daughter's like all the bands
and stuff that that are at the community
art center here that they get tons of
bands and nobody wants to play anything new.
No, everything they play is from the 90s
or earlier.
Yeah.
And that's beautiful.
Because there's nothing nothing new is is you
might you might tap your toe to it,
but you don't want to like play it.
It's a toe tapper.
Yeah.
Anyway, that's an aside.
We got we got a got a donation
from our friends at Transistor.
Yes.
Five hundred dollars.
Thank you.
Wow.
Shot caller 20 is blaze on the Impala.
Thank you, boys and girls at Transistor.
That's very much appreciated.
That would be John and Justin over there.
Yep.
Podcasting two dot o is basically one ongoing
hackathon that never ends.
Well, that's a quote from you, except we
don't have any pizza.
Well, he says, well, here's some here's from
your friends at Transistor FM wishing you the
best in 2026.
Lovely.
Thank you very much.
That's all that's everything helps.
Of course, everything helps.
Yep.
That is our only PayPal one off PayPal.
We got some we got some boost, though.
We got we got two anonymous from true
fans for forty seven thirty.
Those look like streamings, which that's great.
And then we've got the delimiter.
So there's clearly like you said, there's clearly
a mismatch going on now between the node
and I'm going to have to go figure
that out.
So I will figure out what went to
the node.
The Albi hub thing, Ellen address.
Hickey do do widget of the widget widget.
I'll figure what out what that was and
I'll read anything we missed.
On the show next week, because that's on
a different machine and it's not playing nice
with my script anymore, but comedy blogger did
give us 17 515 sets the fountain.
And he says, how do you, David?
Vince Gilligan created Breaking Bad and he has
over 60 million dollars.
But still, I'd like to recommend his new
TV show, Pluribus on Apple TV reasons.
It's an allegory of a stealing content and
taking over mankind without consent.
But also because purebred Polish milf, she has
two sons.
Actress plays Zosia, a chaperone and free use
lesbian.
What is it?
What is a free use lesbian?
I don't even want to know.
I don't.
I just don't want to know.
OK, CSB.
Oh, wait, wait.
Yo, CSB, AI arch wizard.
He is.
He is the AI arch wizard.
He has a hat, so he's I'm going
to have to.
I'm going to have to be clued in
on what a free use lesbian is.
The monthlies, we got a lot of them.
Jeremy Gerds, five dollars.
Michael Hall, five dollars and 50 cents.
New Media, that's Rob and Todd RIP.
Thirty dollars.
Oystein Berra, five dollars.
Jorge Hernandez, five dollars.
Michael Goggin, five dollars.
Christopher Reamer, ten dollars.
Cohen Glotzbach, five dollars.
James Sullivan, ten dollars.
John's Creek Studios, LLC, five dollars.
Dreb Scott, fifteen dollars.
Chris Bernardik, five dollars.
Michael Kimmerer, five dollars.
Thirty three cents.
Saggio Management Group, fifty dollars.
Thank you, Sergio.
Cameron Rose, twenty five dollars.
Thank you, Cameron.
Kevin Bay, five dollars.
Mark Graham, one dollar.
Brendan at Podpage, twenty five dollars.
And Martin Lindesco, one dollar.
Thank you, guys.
That's our group.
Thank you all very much for supporting the
podcast index.
That's why we do the show.
Besides the fact that Damon, I just want
to catch up once a week.
Go to podcast index dot org.
Down at the bottom is where you can
find a big red donate button.
Hit that to send some PayPal fiat fund
coupons to us.
Of course, we always appreciate the boost to
the podcasting 2.0 compatible apps and appreciate
all of the support time, talent, treasure.
So everything matters.
Of course, if you want to join podcast
index dot social, you can always follow Adam
or Dave through the Fediverse.
Or if you want to join and you
have something to contribute, just hit us up
and we will give an invite link.
Did you you played the donation segment?
Do you want to hear her advice on
money in general?
Of course.
So other examples of money leaks is you
not getting money back when you let someone
borrow money.
OK.
Let's say you pay for someone's dinner and
you're like, oh, just PayPal, Venmo, sell me.
Right.
And they're not if.
OK, so if they're not paying you, they're
leaking their energy.
But if you're not actually reaching out to
them, you're leaking your energy, right?
This generation is lost, Dave.
They're leaking energy left and right.
So bad.
Look, I'm just thinking about Mitch and Archie.
I just don't want them leaking.
Don't leak out your energy, boys.
You know, you just got to follow up
with people.
You've got to spend three hours per user
writing them an email.
Yeah.
I'll work on it.
I don't know that it's a stage that
maybe LLM can help with the emails.
It's a.
Hey, guys.
Congratulations on on on all the work that
is really looking good.
And do you have a timeline for for
full on release of the web and possibly
the app?
Well, the Alpha Web, I'm expecting it to
be done this month.
But in terms of when will it be
fully live like replacing the legacy app, that
won't be until the mobile app is finished.
And it's hard to promise deadlines on that.
I would like to say it should be
safely done and deployed by summer.
But before that, as I mentioned, the website
should be a standalone product that people may
be able to deploy for their own purposes
before the mobile app is even finished.
So it would be cool to see Podverse
deployed and running for somebody else before we
even fully go live with it.
Well, will you have a test flight and
a private beta on the Android side for
the new app?
Yeah.
Yeah, we definitely will.
Yeah.
Count us in, man.
Count us in.
Archie, any parting words?
Go podcasting.
Hey, guys, happy new year.
Congratulations again.
We look forward to having you back on
when everything launches.
And thank you for all you're doing for
2.0 and for podcasting in general.
It's highly appreciated.
Good to be here.
Thank you, guys.
All right, Brother Dave, have yourself a great
weekend.
More renovation.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Winter renovation and hopefully some some smoker action.
Smoker action.
All right.
Yeah.
Crack is on, baby.
All right, everybody.
Boardroom.
Thank you very much.
Have yourselves a great weekend.
We'll be back next Friday for another board
meeting of podcasting 2.0. You
have been listening to podcasting 2.0. Visit
podcast index dot org for more information.
Go podcasting.
That's a big bottom.