Podcasting 2.0 for February 13th, 2026, episode
250, Dopaminergic.
Hey everybody, welcome back to the big show.
It's time once again to bring you the
board meeting of Podcasting 2.0. It's where
all the cool kids hang out.
It's not a lot of us, but we
are incredibly cool.
I'm Adam Curry right here in the heart
of, oh, wait a minute, I forgot to
tell you, this is a boardroom that doesn't
stop for slop.
I'm Adam Curry here in the heart of
the Texas Hill Country, and in Alabama, the
man who is using AI to fight AI.
Say hello to my friend on the other
end, the one, the only, Mr. Dan Jones.
Yes, fight slop with slop.
Fighting slop with slop, baby, it's all you
can do.
Yeah, it's like when they shoot slop at
you, you hold up one of those U
-shaped tubes, and so it goes in the
top and then comes right back out the
back, you know, at the bottom towards the
end.
It's like a periscope that shoots back at
you, basically.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
I can't get logged into the chat.
You can't get logged into the chat?
No, to X.
To X?
Twitter.
To do the tweet.
Does it even matter anymore?
I think it does.
I always post it there to make sure
people know the, you know, where to, yeah,
I think it's a signaling mechanism.
I think it's presence, it's your presence.
I actually, I got, I don't know what
happened, but I got tired of people sending
me Instagram links and then clicking, you know,
I had a phone, I dropped my phone.
Oh yeah, so wait, are you recovered from
this?
Yes, I'm recovered, but when you drop, when
you, this is, I had one of those
Galaxy Flip Z phones, and which, you know,
it's pretty protected, but I opened, it was
open, and I'm outside, and of course I'm
doing two things at once, which I shouldn't
have done, it's my own fault.
And so I'm grilling, I flip it accidentally,
I flip the phone out of my other
hand, it goes up probably taller than I
am, so let's just say almost seven feet,
comes down, face down, on the corner, on
the concrete, I'm like, nah, nah, nah, it's
not gonna survive.
It's a donor.
It didn't.
Which is interesting because, you know, the flip
screen, it actually broke right on the left
-hand side where the hinge is, because the
screen itself doesn't break, it's just whatever's behind
it, that just, you know, that's probably even
worse, it just, you know, and then the
screen's all flickering, top half works and the
bottom half, and then nothing works.
It still has a front screen, but you
can't really do much with it.
And this is before I had to go
on the road, I was taking a trip,
like, oh man, this sucks so bad.
That was right as you were getting ready
to leave.
Yeah, so I got the old Graphene OS
phone, which, you know, is my backup and
it worked, but, you know, then you realize,
oh, wow, this is so slow compared to
the Galaxy.
And of course, no RCS text messages.
So all of these threads that I'm on,
nope, not on them anymore.
No, yeah, because Signal wigs out if you
change phones, it does not like that at
all.
This is just text messaging.
Mm, mm, mm.
You know, because all the iPhone people, they
already have their iMessage and they begrudgingly comply
with RCS, but then when- Yeah, you're
the green bubble in their chat.
Oh yeah, I'm the green bubble, but when
I drop off, it doesn't say, oh, Adam's
now on SMS, you know, it doesn't do
any of that.
So, that was actually quite nice, because it
was kind of quiet.
Yeah, you got an unintentional break.
Yeah, it was nice and quiet, so I
kind of enjoyed that.
I've been leaving my, I haven't really, I
haven't been pod fasting, but I've been like,
I don't know, reading more and just leaving
the earbuds out.
Okay, boomer.
I mean, not 24 seven.
No, boomers, no, man, boomers are, they are
wired in, they are not.
Boomers are just, they're like always online.
They can't get enough Facebook.
Yeah, they are, they are.
Let me just finish the story.
Yes, sir.
So, I think I had Instagram, just, I
don't like to use apps, you know, certainly
not for Twitter or for Instagram.
I don't have Facebook, that's all I really
had.
I'd only have Instagram, basically to see how
my daughter's doing.
And so, you know, I was on the
new desktop Linux and I've got the Surface
on Linux and so I'm kind of on
Linux and this other phone, you know, is
broken and I got tired doing show prep.
People send me Instagram, you know, and then
you got to click away the join Instagram
so you can see what they sent you.
And then you got to quickly hit the
speaker icon so you can actually make, you
know, record the clip.
It's like, I'll just log back in.
Well, well, well, no, that password's not right.
And I think I saw like a password
recovery a couple of weeks ago and just
ignored it.
You know, it says, if this isn't you,
just ignore it.
Okay.
And so now it says, no, this is
wrong.
It's wrong, it's wrong.
Now my account is still there.
It's not hacked as far as I can
tell.
But at a certain point it says, well,
you have to restore your password.
You have to do this from a device
that you had Instagram on before.
Okay.
But what they really mean is on a
device that you had the Instagram app on
before.
Which you don't have.
Which I never had.
And so now they're saying, we're sorry, it's
not safe to restore your account.
Okay.
Oh, so you're just toast.
I'm locked out.
Yeah.
That's great.
That's actually good.
Yeah.
And I'm like, should I do something about
this?
Nah, not really.
I really don't feel like it.
It's fine.
It's good that way.
Instagram, if you don't have the app, is
12 layers of dark patterns to try to
get you to download the app.
By the way, yes, Dreb, you're correct.
I know my daughter is alive because we
share the poop app.
I'm in her poop app league.
So yes.
Poop app?
What is it?
Oh, the poop app?
Oh, the poop app.
Oh, this is great.
Oh, you need this.
You need this in your life.
So it's actually called Poop Map.
And the idea is every time you poop,
you drop your poop and then it registers
it where you did it and you get
badges, awards.
Oh, well, hold on a second.
I mean, I have a lot of incredible
badges.
I have, let me see, what are my
badges?
I've got- Is there a badge for
like corn?
No, no, they don't have that.
But you do have a badge for like
pooping on an airplane, pooping in an airport,
pooping under sea level.
I have all these badges.
This is very good.
Under sea level.
So that means the poop has to go
uphill.
Well, you have to be- To get
to where it's- No, you literally, well,
technically, I guess, yes.
And so my daughter has this with her
friends.
It may be 10 friends and they're all,
you know, in their thirties.
So these are adults.
And like, yeah, yeah, dad, you gotta be
in our league.
And so the idea is you poop and
then you put a funny little line, you
know, like a classic would be, I just
dropped the kids off at the pool.
But of course you get very creative with
this because that's not a good one.
But the bottom line is if you haven't
seen one, someone in the league poop for
a day or two, you check in on
them.
You all right?
You constipated?
Yeah, you doing okay?
Back off on the cheese.
This is, I don't know what to think
about humanity.
I was already pretty down on it, but
this is terrible.
Well, and these are kids who are real,
they're really not, they don't, they're not on
social media.
Oh, Christina does some social media because she
gets paid, influencer-like stuff.
And, you know, by the way, she's now
18 weeks pregnant.
So she's getting free baby stuff and whatnot.
Yeah, that's good.
This is a very popular app in San
Francisco.
I'm imagining this, the poop app.
This is like, do you have to like
rate it?
I mean, do you have to put like
a Bristol scale?
No, you can, you can rate your poop.
But, you know, I mean, seriously, it really
is.
Let me just give you a little overview.
It's got in-app purchase?
For what?
Yeah, so here's from the league.
Let's see.
Winnie the Pooh read the news, commented, oh,
that's on my snooze, just finished their personal
detoxification program, finished their meditation in the Oval
Office, just released some underwater smoke rings, you
know, busted a grumpy.
Now there's this one.
I've never, I've never heard of busting a
grumpy.
Oh man, yeah, do they, you know, I
like ARPP's purchase tool, the paper that's like
in-app partnerships.
No, I don't, I don't know about it.
We've partnered with Cottonelle.
They have not tried to sell me anything,
so.
Busted a grumpy.
That may be a show title right there.
I think, I think we're talking show, show
title material.
That's perfect.
This is the worst thing I've ever seen.
No, it's not.
So, but that was easy to reinstall.
Actually, so, you know, when you do, iPhones,
I guess, are pretty good about restoring when
you get a new iPhone.
Is that the first app that you put
back on?
No, no, no.
Let me tell you the process.
So iPhones that, you know, you store everything
on the cloud and you buy a new
iPhone, it all comes back to life.
Poof.
Although not entirely, because you've got to log
into everything and, you know, all kinds of
stuff.
But with Samsung, they have something called Samsung
Switch?
Slurp?
Slurp Switch?
Yeah, I think it's Switch.
And so you load that on both phones.
Smart Switch, that's what it's called.
And you put the phones together and it
will, via Bluetooth, it'll replicate your phone onto
the new phone.
So the old phone, and this is another,
this is kind of a cool benefit.
It has DeX.
Are you familiar with DeX?
Never heard of it.
D-E-X?
No.
So in these Samsungs, you can plug, you
can plug a keyboard into it and a
mouse and a HDMI, all on a hub.
And you just have a full screen.
You have your phones, you know, on a
monitor and you can use the mouse and
type.
So that obviously still worked, even though the
screen was broken.
And so I could do the transfer, but
oh man, so much goes wrong with that.
I'm guessing it's just half bringing things over.
It brings everything over, but yeah, not really.
The apps are kind of there.
Things kind of got restored.
And I really don't care.
I just want to be able to text,
text, do signal, WhatsApp, because that's what all
the Europeans use.
And Obsidian, that's it.
Obsidian is, Obsidian's my jam.
I live in Obsidian.
Thank you very much, Alex Gates.
I've been hearing a lot, a lot of
people use Obsidian.
This is just a brain mapping thing, right?
No.
Or a mind map, I think.
No, I use it as an outline and
you can use it in many different ways
and it's completely scriptable.
So an example, every day it has a
new folder for the, you know, it's like
a year, month, day.
And I use some, a markdown widget on
the browser.
So if I see an article that I
want to save, then I just hit that
little widget and it will save the title
and the URL.
And on desktop, it'll actually save a markdown
version of the page.
And it saves it in that, it's all
mark, the whole thing is based on markdown
files, which is handy.
And, you know, even like if I get
something from Gemini, I have a prompt that
says, put it into an Obsidian template.
It does tags and all the stuff I
need to just have a database, you know,
a knowledge base of stuff and I can
search it and I can organize it.
And so when it comes to show day,
regardless of what show it is, I'll check
on the tags as I mark all the
different shows I do with tags.
And then I drag it into a show
folder with topics.
And then I have a script, which will
export it to OPML.
And I can import that right into the
Freedom Controller.
Oh, nice.
Yeah, it is.
It really is nice.
But you can then also, if you want,
you can turn it into mind mapping and
I don't use that.
I just use it as an outliner knowledge
-based storage system.
And it syncs, syncs between all my devices.
That is, I live in that.
I just absolutely, right down a note, boom,
got it.
Cause you can find it.
You can really find stuff.
Yeah, I need to, I probably need to
look at this cause this would be helpful.
Alex Gates turned me onto it.
Oh really?
Yeah, cause I was using something else that
came with, came with, I keep forgetting the
name, not the start nine, but your...
Umbral.
Umbral, yeah.
Umbral had an app, forget what it was.
It's in the app store there.
And I was using that.
And then, you know, the Umbral kept blowing
up.
This is no good.
It was kind of wonky.
And then Alex Gates told me about Obsidian
on it.
And ever since I got Obsidian, like, oh
man, I love this.
This thing is awesome.
It really is.
My whole life, my whole life is in
it.
You can put code in it, code blocks.
Code, really?
Yeah, code blocks.
Yeah, it's Markdown.
So yeah.
Hello?
Yeah, I guess.
Hello?
Yeah.
In case you didn't know, I'm a software
developer now.
Just let, just want to remind you.
We are running on Linux.
Once again, I'd like to point out that
I've done two no agendas on the, on
my playout system, all on Linux.
And no problems?
Well, once I, you were so right about
the Surface.
Oh, it blew up.
I knew it.
No, it didn't blow up, but obviously the,
when I was, you know, it didn't do
very well because that was the first test
we did two weeks ago.
And, you know, I literally like switched to
a different workspace and it froze everything.
And the whole thing was a mess.
So I had a Dell, one of those,
you know, that was on the oil rig
that I was gifted.
Yeah.
Yeah, and you moved everything over to it?
Yeah, the Optima, whatever it is, Optima, Optiplex,
something.
Yeah, so I just built a whole new
machine, put everything on, runs like a train.
This thing is, it's fantastic.
It's just, I love it.
And out of nowhere, up pops JB, Jonathan,
and he says, hey, I heard you were
looking for something to record and to clip
with.
Cause I was complaining about, you know, this
really not being any, you know, audacity.
I wound up using Tenacity.
Tenacity, is that a real thing?
Tenacity is a fork of audacity.
It's more stable, actually, it's more stable.
It's okay, but it doesn't have any of
the shuttling, you know, the H-J-K
-L keys, the in and out, just for
fast clipping.
He says, well, I heard, he's a professional
software developer.
He says, you know, I was listening to
what you were talking about.
And he said, you know, I have a
mission this year, and the mission is I
want to buy, to build very small things
that people need that have a very specific
function.
And he said, so I've built something for
you.
And he says, I'm a software developer, but
I've vibe coded this.
And we've got, I think we've done a
couple iterations in the past week.
This thing is outrageous.
I'm going to post the link in the
boardroom second.
It's called Clip Doctor.
Okay, so it's open source?
Open source, and this is so beautiful.
You know, I had to do some, I
had to complete some videos for Godcaster help
videos.
And you just, you say, just type in
the Gemini.
Okay, I need a screen recorder.
Boom, try this.
All right, I need some editing software.
Boom, try this.
All open source, all better than all the
Windows stuff I've purchased or worse have to
have a subscription to.
I love open source.
I love it.
It's so good.
And everyone's friendly and yeah, we can fix
that.
We can change this.
Or you can do it yourself.
This Clip Doctor thing is phenomenal.
I'm recording with it right now.
And you can set, it has whisper built
in.
You can even set like- Oh, for
transcripts.
You can even set trigger words while you're
recording.
So if during the recording I had, you
know, it was looking for a trigger word
like clip this or whatever, then it would
automatically set a marker once you're done recording,
obviously, because it has to do the transcription.
Does it all in the device on your
own system.
It's bad ass.
It really is.
Okay, Clip Doctor.
I'm trying to, what is it?
It's a multi-platform, it looks like.
I think it will be.
It will be.
It's right now, I think only Linux is
available.
It's GUI or is it command line?
No, it's GUI.
Yeah, hold on a second.
I can- What's it using, I wonder?
I don't know.
I mean, I can show you a screenshot
of, well, the recording screenshot isn't all that
sexy because it's just, you know, it's just
recording.
It doesn't show you the timelines or anything.
Here you go.
This is the, so there it is.
And you can see the trigger, the trigger
phrases.
I can hit the mark button if I
want to.
Obviously, it's doing a waveform in real time.
But all these little idiosyncrasies.
Like if you have a full clip, you
know, like a three-minute clip, and I
want to pull out one particular piece at
your in points, at your out point, press
C, clip, it puts it on the timeline
as a separate clip.
It has silence removal, completely customizable, which I
spend a lot of time on removing silence
from particularly news clips from France 24.
And when they have like long shots of
nothing, like take that out, I just want
to hear the audio.
Does that automatically, has processing built in.
It's, I mean, it's just amazing, amazing.
And this is, and the point being that
this vibe coding is really enabling some productivity.
None of this, I could not have gotten
any of this stuff anywhere without the vibe
coding.
Of course, all morning, Gemini was down, which
was fun because I had some bugs I
wanted to fix.
Yeah, yeah, it wasn't working.
So I just took the code, put it
into Grok.
Hey, Grok, fix this.
Okay, done.
Small little things.
You know, there's endless AI coding discussions on,
you know, tech podcasts and that kind of
thing.
Of course.
I think one thing I'm concerned about is
like the mental health issue of AI coding.
I've been thinking about this a lot.
The mental health issue?
Yeah, and I've just been noticing it with
me that, let me see where to, like
how to frame this.
So there was a time when I was
young, young men are prone to video game
addiction.
That's just a thing.
We all, you know, most people understand this.
There's a really good article.
I'm gonna see if I can find it.
There's a really good article.
I think it was like in the Miami
Herald or something maybe 10 years ago.
It's in my freedom controller somewhere.
I need to find it.
But there's this article from a while back
where this guy was kind of digging into
why young men become so easily addicted to
video games.
And his basic thesis was that, well, let
me back up.
He said, if you look, he was pondering
it because he said, if you look at
video games, especially the ones that are the
worst are like RPGs.
Sure.
He's like, if you look at them, what
you see as sort of like an outside
observer watching this 20 year old male, you
know, just spend 10 hours a day playing
this RPG video game.
What you see is it looks a lot
like work.
You know, it looks like a job.
They're having to go over here and, you
know, and kill some enemies over here in
order to get this item to drop in
order to take it over to this other
person in the game in order to buy
this thing that they need to satisfy this
quest.
And it's like, it's just a whole lot
of shuffling things from point A to point
B.
And from the outside, it just looks like
work.
And so your thought immediately is, well, why
is that fun?
You know what I mean?
Aren't you supposed to like leave work?
Isn't that supposed to be the entertainment away
from work?
And, you know, his thesis then was, well,
it is work, but it's a way in
which, you know, men are wired for, they're
wired for work, but this is a short
circuiting of the normal process of work.
It's a way to go, it's a way
to feel like you're doing work, but getting
in very short, very quick reward cycles out
of it, because you don't have to work
for, you don't have to delay gratification and
work and invest a lot of effort into
this long-term goal or a longer-term
project where you end up with these, you
know, this thing tells you to do a
thing and five minutes or five seconds later,
you've done it.
And you get this dopamine hit that short
circuits the normal process of a reward for
a hard day's work.
And I feel like there's that going, there's
that element in vibe coding.
Well, that's interesting.
Allow me to project that onto myself.
So this is all I've done is all
for work.
It's my job, I'm a podcaster.
I have gotten incredible satisfaction, not only out
of building this, and I'm very able now
to set it aside and go like, okay,
I'll finish this tomorrow or whenever I have
time, because you just open up the session
and boom, you're right back.
And I have time to think about it,
like, how do I want that?
But the actual, I've really gotten satisfaction from
my work itself by using the tools that
I've created or co-created.
So if you're doing something for your work,
I find it very gratifying.
I have a hundred more ideas of things
that I can do for work in this
case, for Godcaster, I have a whole idea
for how churches can program their 24 seven
streaming systems.
I built it in the old school way
with grids and formats, like, am I crazy?
I'm going to, this is going to be
supercharged.
I know exactly what I want it to
do.
And I'm now, I'm just spending a couple
of, maybe a week or two formulating in
my mind and writing stuff down how I
want it to work.
The satisfaction is enormous, but it's actually for
work.
I'm not a video gamer.
So do you find that when, for instance,
you put together this, which I like a
lot, the new feeds report on the podcast
index, public.podcastindex.org slash reports.html. There's
actually a different, it's under a different URL.
Now let me paste that in the board.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, so this, yeah, this is a placeholder.
We can talk about that in a minute.
Right, but that you vibe coded some of
this, at least.
Oh, I mean, it was one prompt.
I mean, it was, it took, I mean,
it took me 10 seconds.
Yes, it was, it was absolutely zero work
at all.
And I think it's not, you know, listening
to what you were saying about, about the
production that you've enabled with the, with your
vibe coding, I think it's not an either
or, I think it's a both.
I think what's happening is incredible gains in
productivity and just honestly, creation from, is happening.
Yes, creation, yes.
It's an explosion of creation is happening.
And that stands on its own as a
benefit.
And then, but I think it carries along
with it, this other thing that's sort of
like a payload.
So I was reading, last night I was
reading Wendell Berry, his book, Life is a
Miracle, an essay on modern superstition.
It's an incredibly good book.
It's not very long, but it does require
you to, it's hard to read it quickly
because you find that you, that every paragraph
sometimes, literally every paragraph makes you have to
stop and think.
It's just kind of really pushing a lot
of ideas into a small amount of words.
And so I can't get through it very
fast.
So I was read for an hour or
so last night and he makes this one
comment.
He says, mechanical efficiency always externalizes its inefficiencies.
So you could think of, for instance, I
mean, just think about a tailpipe coming out
of a car.
Mechanical efficiency is always gonna, it's gonna externalize
the inefficient parts of itself.
So there's a bunch of crap and heat
coming out of that tailpipe.
That's the stuff it couldn't handle.
That's the output that is not processing.
But it needed to generate in order to
do its job.
And so I think that the payload that
comes along with AI coding is the AI's
inefficiency is us.
We are the tailpipe.
Yeah, okay, keep going.
I think I'm gonna disagree, but keep going.
And so like some, you know, you can
imagine every, he makes another point later on.
He says, he's talking about discovery and he
makes this point.
He's trying to make this point of some
things are better left undiscovered.
He says every discovery, and he's kind of
comparing, you know, different things.
Every discovery has like two sides of his
story.
You know, you have the Spanish explorers, their
side of the story on one end, and
then, you know, the New World native inhabitants
on their end, and they tell a very
different story about this same thing.
And so I don't think it's, like I
said, I don't think that there is one
story to tell here.
I think it's both.
And I think we're gonna have to learn
how to deal with the output of this
thing if that output ends up being something
internal to us.
Because what I have felt, you know, I've
been vibe coding and stuff occasionally and using
code agents for a few weeks now.
And what I find in myself is that
it, I get this sort of like dopaminergic.
What's that word?
Like a dopamine, dopaminergic.
Yeah, yeah, but what is the word you
use?
Dopa what?
Dopaminergic.
Dopaminergic, I like that.
I get this sort of almost mental mania
at times because what, like one of the
things I was doing, I have very specific
use cases for when I use coding agents.
I'm trying to, it's hard to even outline
what they are, but I immediately, there's certain
things I just do not use them for
at all, ever.
Other things I use it 100% and
never even look at the code.
Like with that HTML report thing, it's like,
I don't care, throw away, whatever.
And so I've got this range of uses.
And one of the things I was doing
the other day was I had a web
app that is slow only because it deals
with a whole lot of data on the
page at one time.
And when you get a humongous HTML table,
it just, the browser really struggles with that.
The DOM starts to chug and it's just
not a very good use case.
And I was like, okay, well, I'm just
going to, I'm going to turn this into
a QT native app and it'll be able
to load faster.
It'll be in C++.
It'll just, it'll be, this'll be great.
And it's a use case I could, I
barely even care about.
So I don't care what the code even
looks like, as long as it works.
And I'm going through and I'm just chugging
along and it's building everything perfectly.
I mean, it's just like, it's wonderful what
it's putting out.
But then I'm like, add another feature, add
another feature, add another feature.
And I keep going and going and going
and going and going.
And I looked at- Welcome to my
world, Dave.
This is the, this is what I mean.
This is the dopamine that is taking over.
It doesn't mean that any of it was
somehow negative for what it did or created,
but it gives me a very uncomfortable feeling
of I'm just going to kill one more
enemy in this video game before I go
to bed.
Okay, just one more.
I feel like there is a, for a
certain type of technologically oriented, technical oriented person,
it, and I may be prone to this.
It is, it gives me an uncomfortable feeling.
Well, hold on a second, because we talked
about this when I first started my vibe
coding journey.
It's a journey.
Tell me your vibe coding story.
Here's my vibe coding testimony.
We talked about this.
And I think within, with developers in general,
it's like, just, I'm just going to build
it one more time before I go to
bed.
Let me just check it one more time.
So it's not like, so it may enhance
that, but that has always been there.
You feel like, I think with the, I
think that what vibe coding, what AI coding
agents bring to the table is a feeling
that you are being incredibly productive.
And so, because in a lot of times
you are, you're being so productive that it
makes you think you're, I can almost, I'm
almost finished.
I can, I'm almost finished.
I'm getting, it's like, it's like when you
have more, you want more.
And you, it's pushing you, sometimes unwillingly to
continue when you should stop.
And I think, like I said, none of
this means that it's bad or any of
that.
It's really, there's no judgment here.
I just, I think that I've become aware
of it, especially in the last maybe week
or so, because I've been doing, I've been
doing less of it.
I've actually been writing a lot of code
by hand through the last week.
And I feel myself like relaxing and coming
back out of that mental mania.
And I've actually felt reluctant to pull up
the CLAWD command line.
And I did today just to knock out
that report thing.
And it was like, okay, it just feels
good to be back.
To be back in, just in the IDE,
looking at your code and you feel like
your mind has a chance to like think
through a topic.
And so I think, I think this is
all just so new that we don't understand
yet how to make it all work mentally
with ourselves.
I can completely agree with that.
Here's, so what I've found very satisfying, because
I've had a whole experience here.
I switched to Omarchi with a tiling window
manager, use of workspaces, this is what I
do.
I sit behind my computer and I've email
and I've got all these different sources and
I'm categorizing stuff.
And so I'm on one hand optimizing processes
that I already had.
I wouldn't, I mean, I wouldn't know how
to write an Obsidian script that could output
to OPML in the proper OPML, because of
course there's OPML and OPML, that the freedom
controller can ingest.
And then, well, I want to set my
monitor color, just the warmth of it, just
so.
And so I've got my, and I don't
have any agents or anything, I literally just
have Gemini browser.
And another thing, I just do a super
key tab, Gemini, and it pops up, it's
a web app.
And I can customize my entire workflow, my
life.
And, but I'm not obsessed with it.
It's just, and maybe that's because I had
so many bad experiences with vibe coding for
the first six months, where just getting something
to work.
And then, you know, these stupid models taking
me all the way down the rabbit hole
to you have to recompile your kernel.
So that's kind of gone.
It doesn't do that anymore.
So I can see the improvement.
And now just as a non-coding person
who understands systems, because I do understand systems,
particularly Unix systems, it's a joy.
Just the other day, I was like, you
know, I've always, for no agenda, I have
to have a non-recoup partner expenses report.
And the way that works with an LLC
is, you know, there's a lot of stuff
you can deduct by saying, well, this was
a business expense.
I paid for it myself.
And then you send that to the accountant
and then the accountant will deduct that from
the money that you've been paid.
So that becomes your new taxable base.
You still paid for it, but you don't
have to pay taxes over it.
That's basically how it works.
And that's why LLCs are very popular.
I don't have to tell you that.
You know what I'm talking about.
So I was thinking, instead of what I
always do is, oh, here comes QuickBooks.
And, you know, I have to connect all
of my credit card, my bank account, PayPal.
I got to connect it all to QuickBooks.
And then QuickBooks is maintaining, you know, what
I have marked as a certain type of
expense.
So what if I just, now, please leave
the dumbness out of this of putting my
personal data into an LLM.
Leave that out of it for a second.
I mentally chosen to ignore this.
Okay, please ignore that.
What if I just said, hey, these are
the categories.
Here's last year's stuff.
Create a new report for me.
But I think with 90% certainty, it
will generate something that I can use and
it will save me a week.
Yeah.
This is, and so now I'm just in
this creative mode of like, wow, how can
I optimize the rest?
If I can win four days of my
life for 20 bucks a month, yahoo, but
that's not an obsession or like gaming to
me.
So I can't approach it from, I can't
approach, because I've always considered writing code to
be an art.
It's not science, it's an art.
It's like poetry, it's like music.
You can approach things from a thousand different
directions and I think you kind of build
it the way I've seen it is it
creates along the way.
Musicians are always great software engineers I found,
particularly drummers and bass players for some reason.
And that you get into that mode and
the further you go, it just starts to
get better and better and then you put
in your quality of life enhancements.
This is a very creative process and I've
now been let into that with the creative
part, but not really because the AI is
still taking an approach that I really don't
even know what it's doing.
I just see the output of it.
So there are a lot of things I
may not do or find or may miss
because I'm not actually in the code, but
it is mind-blowingly creative and fun to
me.
But not like I'm not video games, I'm
not a doom scroller, I don't have that
kind of nature.
So I'm doing almost a 180 on this
stuff, but not from the, well, this, whoever's
going to win the AI race, good luck.
I'm going to stand outside these data centers
in a year and just pick me up
some Nvidia cards because they'll have to get
rid of them and they'll just run the
stuff at home.
Okay, my models will be a year behind
a year from now if I can get
what I have now at home, hallelujah.
Well, AI coding to me is fundamentally different
than the entire rest of AI anything because
it's verifiable.
It's not, the general knowledge problem is, that's
a joke.
I still think AI is completely just overblown
in that whole sphere.
But the fact, if you can break down
things into small enough pieces.
Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
What just happened here?
Well, you're going nuts over there.
What happened?
I don't know what happened.
Is this your vibe coding, vibe coded?
I don't know where that came from.
Clip.
I have no idea.
What is that?
I don't know where that came from.
It did not, it's doing stuff by itself.
I hit something, but I don't know what
I hit.
You got to turn off Claude bot during
the show.
I am not running Claude bot, but I
totally intend on running it, totally.
But I think it's just a different sort
of thing.
I mean, like I said, I don't think
at this point in the game, we have
any answers.
That's the thing is, I don't think.
Well, how about this?
I think it's too early.
It would be like asking in 2005, what
is social media going to do to society?
It's an unanswerable question.
You just don't know.
Just so you know, DARPA was already analyzing
what social media would do in the seventies.
They were already running models.
Not exactly the way we see it today,
but there's a ton of research they did.
And I think they really like what they
see today because man, you can program people's
brains with that stuff.
It's amazing.
So easily, yeah, straight into the cerebellum or
whatever.
Yes, it's amazing.
All of these models, from what I understand,
they focus heavily, heavily on coding.
And they've done that for a couple of
reasons.
One, I think syntax.
Code, it's either right or it doesn't run.
It can run and do stuff you don't
want it to, but syntax is incredibly critical
with code.
One curly brace.
So that helps them create machine learning or
I'll just call it machinery that does good
syntax no matter what it's doing.
They also wanted to be able to, I
guess, have these things build.
And I think arguably, I think it's probably
true that internally at Anthropic, you know, Claude,
it's building its own stuff.
I'm sure it is.
Sure.
I don't know how that will translate to
all these other so-called white collar jobs
it's going to wipe out.
And again, yeah, you can code something, but
you have to know some basics.
It has to be in something that you
really understand and are interested in.
You can't just, you know, grab your Mac
and say, okay, I'm going to build this.
I just don't think it's going to work
that well, except for maybe something that runs
on your machine only and you might get
something out of it.
I mean, you're not a developer, but the
reason you've had so much success with it
is because you have been around computers at
a deep level for 40 years.
Yeah, a long time.
And so you just understand, I mean, you
were running SunSpark stations back, you know, in
the 80s.
Yeah, baby, Spark 3, a headless Spark 3,
actually.
This is knowledge that the average person just
does not have.
And you have to know something in order
to know what to even say, because the
outcomes between saying, you know, build me something
that does so-and-so versus write a
class that accepts these parameters and takes in,
you know, and allows, that is a completely
different outcome.
So if you have some knowledge about the
way to structure things, you're just going to
be way more successful.
And like, I think that that's what we're,
I think that's really where this thing is
going is that it's going to, and this
is what Jason told me when he first,
Jason Hudgens, when he first said, hey, give
me 30 minutes of your time on a
Zoom session and I'll show you how to
do all this stuff.
And he, you know, his words to me
was, you know, if you don't know what
you're doing, it's, you're going to get mad
results, but if you are an experienced developer,
it'll turn you into a superhero.
And that's the thing.
And it's also, I think it's probably revealing
that most of the code that we use
on a daily basis doesn't, the code structure
itself doesn't really matter.
We get pedantic as developers and as systems
people that we really want this structure of
things to be the right way.
And we want a perfect design.
And there are times when that is very
important.
But if you go behind the curtain and
look at what's actually running on any of
the platforms that you're using, there's going to
be a certain percentage of those that are
just a complete and utter mess.
Yeah, of course.
And, but they still actually produce the outcome
that you want, they produce the output you
need.
And so it really, it doesn't really matter
a lot of the time.
And like, so I mean, it's a good
time to talk about this feed report if
you're good with it.
Yes, you have a bug in it, by
the way.
Oh yeah, I'm sure.
The estimate, estimated legitimate is not giving me
a percentage, it's giving me a, looks like
you screwed up a curly brace somewhere.
Wouldn't me, don't blame me.
I just wrote English, it wrote the code.
So, okay, so this is interesting, this report.
So I see total new feeds and this
is the last 24 hours, 2,592, 2139
estimated legitimate, suspected spam of gambling, 13.4%,
possibly AI generated, 3.5%, seems low.
SEO affiliate spam, 1.8%. And you have
a nice report where it's all coming from.
How are you determining the spam gambling, AI
generated, SEO affiliate stuff?
Is that based upon some of the feedback
we've already created with the podcast index monitor?
So not yet, this is completely just a
placeholder.
I mean, now it's using real data and
it's doing some stuff.
But it's really, this is a placeholder for,
I'm trying to build out the pipeline here.
This feeds into this, which feeds into this,
which does this.
And so, this was literally like a one
sentence prompt.
I just said.
Wow.
I said, consume the, I wish I had
even saved the prompt, but.
I'm sure it's in your session somewhere.
Don't you have a session?
Oh, do I?
Maybe, I think I see.
Session.md. C Claude.
How do I look?
Oh, Google.
I think I'm logging in with Google here.
Maybe I can go find it.
So, what I told it essentially, if I
can't find this, was download the file at
this URL, which is public.podcastindex.org slash
newlyaddedfeeds24hours.csv. So that CSV file gets generated
once a day.
And it's simply just the last 24 hours
worth of newly added feeds that have come
into the index from any place.
And so, the layout of that file is,
it just tries to give all the fields.
The purpose of this is I want other
people to be able to do whatever they
want with it.
I want people to be able to slice
and dice this data however they want.
Sure, sure.
And so, it has a bunch of just
standard fields like the podcast index ID, the
feed URL, the title, the author, the description,
the full text of the description tag.
It's got the image URL, the hosting company,
the top level domain of the hosting company.
So like spreaker.com, transistor.fm, captivate.fm,
blah, blah, blah.
The time the feed was added, and then
the source of where it came from.
How did we, how did it come to
be in the index?
Was it through Podping?
Was it through, did somebody add it using
API?
We also look for misses.
So if somebody searches for something using a
feed URL or an iTunes ID and we
see that we do not have it in
the index, we will add it after the
fact.
So search is a possible source.
So that's it.
So it just dumps all that data into
a CSV for the last 24 hours.
That's really gonna be your main point of
output for this thing.
So then we already have the command line
tool where you can mark feeds as certain,
you know, types of, so you can say,
well, it's a duplicate or it's AI slop
or it's a spam and that kind of
thing.
And so you can mark it that way.
What I would like to do is not
that we're going to start necessarily removing things,
but what I would, I'm more, I'm less
interested in removing it, removing things as I
am in becoming, in becoming better at classifying
what these things actually are.
So if there was 2,592 feeds in
the last 24 hours without making any judgments
about any of the content of any of
these feeds, I think it's really, would be
important for all of us to know that
X number of them are gambling sites.
Well, once you know that, then you can
start to make a machine learning model off
of it.
And you can analyze as you go forward,
you can analyze, okay, well, are the, how
many of this next batch is gambling sites?
How many of this next batch is SEO
affiliate spam?
And then you can say, okay, based on
that analysis, looking back, how many of the
previous ones that were classified in this certain
way, how many of those ended up being
removed and when and how fast were they
removed?
Because, so I'm just, what I'm doing right
now is I'm just brain dumping out a
lot of the knowledge that I've acquired over
the last, you know, five and a half
years of doing this.
And one of the points that you can
see very, very clearly is that trial mode
and free account spam is where a lot
of this stuff comes from on the paid
hosting providers that do not have a free
tier.
So you see, for instance, like somebody will
sign up temporarily for a, you know, Buzzsprout
or an RSS.com.
They'll sign up for that trial period and
it's just as SEO affiliate spam.
Mm-hmm.
And then, and transistor and these guys.
And so they're having to constantly fight this
and by going in and nuking these feeds
because these people never have any intention of
actually using the system correctly or paying or
anything like that.
They're purely trying to get SEO links.
So what that looks like from the point
perspective of the index is it looks like
those hosting companies will get, you'll get a
feed that will pop up and then like
within 48 hours, it's gone.
It's at 404s.
So that tells you, you know, before the
trial period elapsed.
Mm-hmm.
So that's a good indicator that that thing
was found to be problematic on the host.
So then we can use that information.
We can say, okay, here are the qualities
of that particular podcast feed.
Here's the properties it had.
And then looking back in time, podcasts that
also had those particular markers, they were rapidly
removed from the host.
Wow.
Yeah, this is good.
This is good.
Yeah.
This is deep.
I like it.
Yeah, so then you can flag them.
And it doesn't necessarily mean that we have
to remove them because we don't, we really
don't want to get the censorship thing going
or not, it's not even what it is,
but I'm just uncomfortable us making those decisions.
But we can, if you have a flag
on there that says, this meets the criteria
for what we've seen rapidly removed in the
past, then you can, then we can start
to, we can stick those in a separate
box and begin to quickly check them over
and over and over, you know, and basically
keep an eye on them and feed that
data back to the hosting companies themselves.
And that's the ultimate goal, really.
That's really what I want to do.
What I was wanting to do, the real
goal of this ultimately is to say, is
to do an analysis of the data as
it comes in and then feed that back
to the hosting companies through some sort of
- Ah, AI talking to AI.
Yeah, some kind of dashboard or just API
end point where they can see feeds that
we have determined that they have removed in
the past and they can see them.
And then that may make it easier for
them to take action on it, rather than
having to waste their time manually searching and
always, you know, trying to find these feeds
that they're, that people are abusing their system.
So that's the goal.
So this first is get the output ready,
which is what this, the CSV file is.
Then, and we've already got the sort of
like human curated flag part thing.
We've got that built and nobody's really using
it really.
But then if we feed that data through
and then start to collect the 404s afterwards,
and I forgot to mention that part of
this is the podcasts themselves, I'm saving the
XML of these 404 podcasts in object storage
so that we can go back and we
can have them in perpetuity.
So like we can always go back and
see what that thing looked like to train.
So we can always train on that data,
even if the 404 is gone.
And while you're doing all this, it seems
like a very good way to build some
kind of search system that everybody can tap
into.
What do you mean?
I mean, if- You mean like the
one that I broke the other day?
Yeah.
I'm just seeing an opportunity here.
I'm not sure how.
Probably it's probably a token burner, but it
seems like there is a way to create
an API with all kinds of mumbo jumbo
on the backend.
Because if we can determine if something's affiliate
spam or slop or whatever, there are also
transcripts available that can be read.
So when someone says, hey, I'm really looking
for a podcast about this, this, this, and
this.
If we're already doing all this work, is
there a way to maintain some of this
knowledge that we create and expand it?
So not just get a bicycle racing podcast
from the title and the description, but from
more?
I mean, isn't that the thing that the
MCP server that was created the other day,
isn't that kind of what he's trying to
do?
Maybe, I don't know.
I don't know if the MCP is caching
stuff, and I have no idea.
It just feels like, you know, if there's
a discoverability, hey, you like this podcast, you'll
probably like this podcast.
Oh, I see.
Which is one of the holy grails of
podcasting that we've never achieved.
That goes back to the whole issue of
podcasts not having a way to make those
linkages between, like, you know, because what Google
does is backlinks, and the podcasts don't
have that linkage between them.
That's the major way that you find, you
know.
Right, right.
Things that go together, because otherwise you're trying
to use heuristics.
Yeah, that's hard.
And heuristics are always, they just seem to
- Suck.
They suck.
Heuristics within a system that has 12 variables
is potentially useful.
With every additional variable, you just increase the
size of the set, you know, just exponentially.
And so you're, it quickly becomes where it's
almost useless.
It's sort of like, it's like those old
Pandora algorithms, and I think they all kind
of do this.
Yeah, they had the music cue.
What was their special sauce they had?
They had a name for that.
Forget what that was.
They had some DNA of music that they
came up with some parameters somehow.
Yeah, and it would tell you like, we're
recommending this because it has these qualities which
also match this other thing you said you
liked.
It was like real chatty, telling you why
it was giving you.
And I always remember thinking, oh, well, that
doesn't work for me because it would always
recommend, the example in my case was it
would, I'm a huge Rush fan, and it
would always recommend King's X.
You remember them, that band?
It was like, we're gonna recommend King's X
because you like progressive rock trios with prominent
bass players.
And it's like, yeah, but I don't like
King's X.
And yes, all the parameters fit, but I
just don't like that band, I'm sorry.
They kind of suck, yeah, that's not what
I'm looking for.
It's not my thing, you know, and it's
like, well, why?
Well, I don't know, it's just not.
It's not for an intangible reason I can't
describe to you.
It's like, cause you can imagine that people,
the recommendation engine of that type would be
like, oh, you listen to No Agenda?
You would like, and 90% of it
is gonna be, no, I don't want that,
I don't want that, I don't want that.
Unless we have the user feedback, then we
can make those backlinks.
Like you listen to No Agenda, and you
might like Planet Rage because there's a high
correlation between those two of people listening to
both.
Yeah, and then, or you listen to No
Agenda, you would like, who's the, who was
that guy that did Bitcoin for a while?
The white?
Which one?
No, the, you remember his brother is like
real annoying, know it all.
That's it, I'm drawing the blank.
Man, his, who was that guy?
I don't know.
This is killing me now.
His brother's.
Let's ask the computer, let's ask the robot.
Weinstein, Weinstein, Weinstein.
Brett Weinstein.
Brett and Eric, yes.
The white Bitcoin guy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Brett and Eric, yeah.
And Heather.
Eric Weinstein.
And Heather, yes, Heather.
I'm here on the Dark Horse podcast.
Dark Horse, that's it.
I was, in my mind, I was thinking
White Horse Inn, which used to be this
apologetics podcast, but yeah, Dark Horse.
It's like you would, no No Agenda person's
going to want to listen to that show,
but it would recommend it because it's.
There is actually, there's actually a high correlation
between people who listen to No Agenda and
the Dark Horse podcast.
Really?
Yes, there is.
Higher than you'd think.
There's also a correlation, listen to Dave Smith.
Oh yeah, yeah.
That's annoying.
Well, I want to thank James for a
second for the work he's doing on Runway.
Have you been following that at all?
Yes, I haven't used it, but I've been
eagerly reading his posts.
There seems to be a bug in it,
what I read today, but that's, it's pretty
cool.
You input.
How do I try it?
Where do I do it?
Well, you need the Strike wallet.
Yeah, I've got that.
Okay, then you go to dashboard.strike.me
and you get an API key and then
you go to podnews.net slash runway.
And you create an API key, obviously just
read only, not like make transactions, duh.
And then you click the button and it
brings in your transactions and it shows you,
it has metadata.
I think he's proxying from some of the
apps, like maybe Fountain, I'm not quite sure.
Not everyone's doing the same format, but it
really works.
And it shows you the Boostergram data and
it shows you the original amount.
And I wonder if he's vibe coding it.
I have a feeling he may be, but
it's cool.
It's in local storage, right?
Yes.
In the browser?
Yes.
Does it take a while to build?
No, no.
I mean, I have a lot of transactions.
Let me see, actually, I could take a
look at it now.
There we go, runway.
Okay, let me get my, where's my key?
Let me see, James, where's James?
Here we go.
Yes, I have my key.
Okay.
Runway, I just, oh, okay.
Yeah, Helipad Runway, it's cute, it's super cute.
Yeah, all right, store, all right.
Fetch latest payments, 1,000, 2,000, 3
,000, 4,000, 5,000, 6,000.
You didn't take this long last time.
Well, I do, I have a lot of,
I have a lot.
Oh, here we go.
Getting 100, 200, boom, there it is.
You can say, okay, you have filters, so
you can say show boosts only, click on
that.
And here we go, payment details, salty crayon,
using Podcast Guru, howdy, Dave and Adam.
Congrats on 250 episodes of JSON's TLV records,
pinging the Pong's key send and LNURL madness.
We're still, we'd still be writing blogs without
podcasting 2.0, then he has a delimiter
for more than seven days ago.
It's really quite spectacular.
Cool.
Yeah, show all.
Good job, James, this is nice.
It's super nice, especially because the main thing
is it shows the full amount.
So what you receive, because I only have
a 1% split on this, so I
get one sat, but I can see it's
50 sats from Nicholas underscore B58 at fountain
.fm. Well, I think if you, I think
if you have, if you have it all
in local storage, you should be able, it
should be persistent.
I think so.
It would, it's probably not persistent on mobile.
I think they have different requirements, but on
the, on a regular desktop browser, it should,
it should.
It works great.
I mean, I hadn't even, I hadn't even
put it on this browser yet.
And so I just did that live.
I did it live in real time.
And there's a CSV export.
Hello.
Hey.
Hello.
The only one he had trouble with, I
think was podcast guru.
And if I'm not mistaken, I saw Jason
come back and say he would work on
changing format.
Yeah.
So it's, it's helipad for strike.
That's great.
Yeah, it is.
The fact that James is doing it is
kind of interesting.
Like James just got riled up all of
a sudden about, about this.
I like it.
Yeah.
Oh, it's, it's really good to see some
movement on that direction.
Cause the, I feel like, I feel like
we're languishing here with the value for value.
Well, don't look at chat F then.
I mean, I just made like, it's like,
there's no, I don't know.
The thing that's kind of sad, and you
and I were talking about this the other
day.
The thing that's sad is, Wave Lake.
Yeah.
That, yeah.
I think it just got overrun.
They've just been inundated with slop, you know?
And then of course, why wouldn't you?
Hey, I can put some slop on there
and get some sats.
You know, that's, that's a problem.
That's a real, in general, the music industry
in general, but that's just like, ah, that's
so sad.
I guess what I mean by languishing is
like, it just, everything seems to have the
switch over from Key Send to, to Bolt
11 invoices.
It feels like it made everything a lot
harder.
You know, and so it's, it's like when,
when there was this, this one API, you
know, Albie.
Sure.
That you, that was supporting everybody.
We're not, it's like, oh, here's an API,
write to it, done.
So, but now people are having to work
harder, and that usually means there's a lot
of drop-off.
So it's really good, like seeing Chad F.
and James and everybody, seeing everybody do these
things, like, like step up and write to
it, and that code and that kind of
thing.
That's great.
Yeah, look at this.
And Oscar is still, you know, he's still
doing his thing.
I got payments last updated, February 13th.
141 total payments.
Analyze 500, last seven days, total payments before
splits.
And it gives me a total sat streamed
before splits.
This is nice.
This is really good.
This is quite, quite amazing.
Yeah, Eric PP said it's all, he said
Key Send made it easy, and now you
have to store the boost info somewhere, but
it's all starting to work.
It is.
This is what I'm seeing.
Exactly.
It's starting to come together.
There was a dip as, as the, as
just everybody had to readjust.
And then, you know, Chad and, and people
are doing, they're pushing through the dip.
Pushing through the, through the, the wall of
fatigue.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, yeah.
And so it's like, cause I think there
was a, there was a general feeling of,
really, this whole thing was, we had it
baked and now it's like, we gotta start
over.
Well, this is, this is getting exciting.
This is really getting exciting again.
I don't see the one coming in from
true fans.
Yeah, it does remind me of Con Shacks.
Oh yeah, Con Shack.
Oh gosh, I forgot about them.
Yeah, Con Shacks.
So many people have come and gone, man.
So many people.
Build the dip.
Yeah, build the dip.
Build the dip.
I like that too.
Build the dip.
Wow.
Did you see how high inception point was
in that report?
Oh, number one, baby.
Yeah.
Yeah, they're just pumping it.
You know, they're doing traffic reports now.
Well, as I was looking through your, through
your list here, I saw, and this is
kind of interesting.
What was it that I saw?
Let me see.
Chicago safety brief.
I can see where that might be.
So Chicago safety brief, Chicago energy report.
You know, I can see where that might
not be a horrible thing to have in
the morning.
Just, I don't know how long it is.
Let me see.
But these are not linked, obviously.
Let me, let me take a look in
the index.
Thank you, by the way, for fixing the
search.
Are you good now?
Yeah, yeah.
That was weird.
I'm like, I can't find this podcast I'm
looking for.
It's giving me all kinds of other stuff.
Here, let's see the, let's see the Chicago
safety brief.
Let's listen and see what this is.
Okay, here we go.
Good morning, Chicago.
Here's your safety brief for February 12th, 2026.
Overnight, local authorities responded to one incidence across
the metro area.
No major emergencies reported.
It's 30, it's 40 seconds long.
I can see that as being something I'd
subscribe to.
No ads?
I did not get an ad, no.
It's by Inception Point AI.
Good morning, Chicago.
No ads, hmm.
Interesting.
That's interesting.
No ads.
I'm not sure how, I'm not sure how
prescient of a traffic report is in your
podcast app.
I mean, those things change minute by minute.
Right, but you know, in the morning, I
look at my most recent in Godcaster and
there's SRN News, Fox News, Pastor Jimmy's devotional,
Pod News.
These are all very short things that I
just hit play and it just runs through
them while I'm taking a shower.
Sorry for the visual.
And you know, and it's like, yeah, I
wouldn't mind listening if there was a local
Fredericksburg overnight police report or traffic report, I'd
probably put that in there.
I mean, this is not the best AI
voice I've heard, but nothing that, what's that?
That Chinese thing, QI-TTS, QI-3-TTS.
Oh, Quinn, Quinn, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I'm good, QI, QI, Quinn, whatever.
You know, I can, that's not, that's valid
to me.
You don't think so?
Oh, I'm sorry, I got distracted because everybody's,
I'm seeing now people were saying that there's,
that we're not, they didn't get the live
pod ping.
Did we not?
I hit it, I hit it, I hit
it, I hit it.
Yeah, I hit the live pod ping.
I remember doing it.
I did it at 1225, so who's saying
they didn't get it?
Oh, let's see, Justin at Transistor City didn't
get it.
Trying to listen live for the first time.
I clicked through on your link and went
to the true fans and found pages on
the web, no live indicator.
I definitely hit it.
Oh, is it a true fans problem, maybe?
I don't know.
See, I've done a manual refresh of the
RSS feed, Sam said, and we are not
seeing any pod ping update for podcasting 2
.0. Hmm, well, look at my feed, baby.
Okay.
I hate it when that happens.
Podcasting 2.0, all right, let me look
at the feed.
Where'd it feed at?
Here we go.
Feed.
Yeah, well, there was a pod ping that
went out.
I see the live bot, podcast live bot
posted it.
And I'm looking at the feed.
Are we not working?
And yes, status equals live.
Yeah.
Let me check Castamatic here, live.
Yeah, we're live in Castamatic.
Yeah.
Suck it.
Suck it, true fans.
Suck it.
Yes, status equals live.
Yeah, yeah, we're good.
We're live, man.
I don't know.
I don't know what happened, but okay.
Oh, Seth said it eventually worked, just very
delayed, about an hour late.
An hour late?
That's interesting.
For the pod ping?
It went out.
I show that the pod ping, podcast live,
so that's, so podcast live at podcastindex.social
is Burlock's live bot.
Yeah.
Whenever there's a pod ping that goes out,
a live pod ping, he posts it through
that bot and it posted at 1226.
Yeah, there you go.
So that's immediate.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It's amazing any of this crap works at
all, Dave.
Yes.
It truly is.
By the way, Eric PP did something very
cool on the website, on the podcast index
website.
He implemented a proof of work defense against
scrapers.
And is that something I can see?
No.
Okay.
So what it is, the website has always
been a weak point for us on the
API because the website itself uses the API.
For adding a podcast, you mean?
Well, not just for that, but for it
uses it to get all of this data.
And because it's using that, what it means
is somebody can scrape the- And use
the API.
And use the API without having an API
key.
Right.
So they're just doing HTML scraping, essentially, or
calling the wrong- SecOps, SecOps.
SecOps.
Call out the purple team.
And so what he did was he added,
whenever there's an API call that happens, so
whenever the main page calls one of the
API backend, it uses JavaScript to
make the browser do a proof of work
calculation first.
And you can set the difficulty of that.
You can set the difficulty to how high
you want it to be.
And then it has to find the solution
to the POW problem and include the solution
in its API, in its call.
Oh, interesting.
So it slows down the site- A
little bit?
Very slightly, yeah.
But it's going to overall serve to throttle
the traffic coming from the website- To
the API.
Scraping bots.
Nice.
Yeah, yeah.
That's very good.
It's really cool.
Him and David Marzall are doing, they're doing
tons of stuff on the website, and it's
awesome.
So I'm very appreciative to them for doing
that, for maintaining the website and keeping it
going.
Keeping it running, baby.
Keeping it running.
Yes.
Shall we thank a few people?
Oh yeah, sure.
Kick it off right away with Lyceum.
That's Martin Lindes' code.
Coming in from true fans.
Row of ducks, 22, 22.
And you know, I actually got my, actually
got my ducks back.
There you go.
Late to the game.
I'm glad that Sam could fix the live
stream manually.
Friday fun, grocery shopping, and sushi takeaway, and
listening to you guys, ducks in a row.
There you go.
Coming in from podcast guru, two and a
half thousand sats from Salty Crayon.
Howdy, Dave and Adam.
Congrats on two, I read this one earlier
from the runway.
Congrats on 250 episodes of Jason's TLV records,
Ping in the Pong, Key Send, and Ellen
URL Madness.
We'd still be writing blogs about podcasting 2
.0. I don't know about that.
I appreciate the sentiment.
And I think that's it.
The next one I have is Chad F.
from five days ago.
So that's probably in your rundown.
I've got, for some reason, for some reason
when I pulled the- While you're looking,
I will explain a few things.
One, this is a value for value project.
The podcast is just the funnel of the
project.
This is where we suck people in who
want to come in and hang out, develop,
make podcasting better, extend it, do whatever you
want.
This is just a crazy jam that we
have every single week.
We call it the board meeting.
Your value for value support supports directly and
only the podcast index.
To keep the machines running, keep enough running
so that if no one, if anyone decides
this, if everyone just stops supporting us, we
can go for another year or two, maybe
a little longer, depending on how lean we
run it.
But it does go directly to making everything
run.
And we appreciate all of the support that
everybody gives.
We had a huge node issue a few
days ago.
And thank you to Graham over at Voltage,
the man who literally never sleeps.
Like, I get a ping from you like,
hey, is the node broken?
And I don't even go look anymore.
I just like, Graham, the node's broken.
Boom.
Oh, let me take a look.
I'm in it.
We were, that thing was restarting and rebooting
for like 36 hours, probably.
Yeah, it was bad.
What was the problem?
First of all, it's because we have, I
mean, our node is just bigger than most
guys' node.
Let's be honest about it.
We got a huge node and we're pretty
proud of it.
All the ladies go, woo, look at that
node.
People can't handle our node.
No, they can't.
But was it breaking because of your script,
trying to drag stuff out?
That's what was happening?
I figured that's what it was.
Well, I used Boz, Balance of Satoshis.
I used that to export all the transactions
for the year for taxes.
Yeah.
And it's always worked in the past, but
then, but last year I had a lot
of trouble with it and I had to,
and Alex Bosworth had to put in an
extra command line argument just to support basically
us.
Because what you could do is you could
do it by year and by month, but
then the month was still too much.
It was still causing too much memory usage.
And so we had to do it down
to like the, you could add the day
also.
So I had to go like day by
day.
Oh no.
Yes.
Yeah, that's a lot of days.
So I still have the script from last
year and I just bumped the number up
to 2025 and ran it again.
And I just left to go to the
office.
And then like by lunchtime, I was getting
messages that the node was down.
Whoops.
And then the next day, we got it
back up and running.
And then the next day I tried to
run the script again and it crashed the
node again.
And we just got so many transactions that
we can't handle it.
We can't suck anything out of our node.
So the LND uses, I think it's a
Go language native key value store called B
-Bolt.
And it's not a true database, according to
Graham.
It's just more of like a, just a
big key value store.
I guess maybe like Mongo kind of.
Yeah.
But it's meant for like built-in library
inside a small app.
It was never really intended to be able
to use it at this scale that we're
using it at.
And so that's why the LND project has
undergone this massive transition to SQLite.
Oh, I didn't realize that we're doing that.
Oh, okay.
Yes, it's going to take forever to finish
this.
I mean, like they're transitioning like one table
at a time over a period of probably
a couple of years.
And so this, but that doesn't help us
because we're not there yet.
And so what Graham ended up ultimately having
to do was he just sent me the
raw channels.db and it was 40 gigabytes.
Deal with it.
40 gigabytes.
How did he send that to you?
Email?
Yeah, he sent me an object storage link
and I downloaded it.
And I vibe coded a transaction extractor out
of- In about 45 minutes.
And so I just extracted the raw transactions
right out of the B-Bolt database.
This kind of blows away your whole argument
for the first half of the show.
You love it.
I know you love it.
You are characterizing my argument as an anti
-AI coding argument.
That is not what it was.
No, no, no, no.
But did you get a, wait, was it
a dopamine magic?
What was it?
Dopaminergic response.
Dopaminergic response, yes.
Maybe I did in my pants.
Dopaminergic, I got to write this down.
Dopaminergic.
With an N?
Dopaminergic, okay.
Yeah, like nerd, but nerdge.
Dopaminergic, is it ma-nergic?
Dopa, D-O-P-A-M-I-N.
Oh, M-I-N, dopaminergic.
E-R-G-I-C, dopaminergic.
I'm going to use this.
I'm going to use this in my everyday
parlance.
You're getting a real dopaminergic response from that
doom scrolling you're doing, baby.
I feel like you can weave that into
- Anything.
To the Valentine's Day dinner with Tina.
I don't know, Pastor Jimmy should do it
in the service on Sunday.
I believe in you.
I believe this is possible.
No, no, I'm sorry if you got that
impression.
Yeah, I was not, and I do not
want to give that impression because that's not
how I feel, but I do, I think
there are concerns that we just have not
fully unearthed yet.
Oh, well- And it doesn't mean when
we know the concerns that we'll stop using
it.
I mean, it just means that we have
to figure it out.
Well, you always have to remember one thing.
Let me see if I can find it.
Yes.
We're all going to die.
That's all you need to remember.
Yes, this is true.
We're all going to die.
We all need to remember that.
We're all going to die, no matter what.
Yes.
What was I even doing?
We were going to thank some people.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
And you were complaining about your thing didn't
extract right or whatever.
I'm not sure.
Oh, yeah, I couldn't get everything out of
my node.
The, all right, Sterling Ellsworth.
Oh, we got some PayPal's here.
These are all mixed up.
Sterling Ellsworth, $22.20. And he just, his
note just says, Sir Sterling.
Oh, Sir Sterling, thank you.
Kevin Bay, $5.
Thank you, Kevin.
Cameron Rose, $25.
Thank you, Cameron.
Oh, we've got a new monthly donor.
The Content Creators Accountant.
Oh.
$50 a month.
Ooh, thank you.
I get boosts whenever there's a boost nearby.
Yeah.
Thank you, Content Creators Accountant.
You can tell I've been working on my
cart wall.
Yeah, you've been spicing it up a little
bit.
Yeah, I found all kinds of stuff.
Like I should add this, put this in.
This is great, yeah.
Oh, Martin Lindeskog, New Media, $1.
Thank you.
Brendan at Podpage, $25.
Thank you, Brendan.
Very nice.
Oh, look, there's Oscar Mary, $200.
Bala, shot caller, 20 inch blades, only in
Bala.
Thank you, Oscar.
And the boys over there at Fountain.
Fountain app and hosting.
There's no girls at Fountain, right?
No, no, no.
It's just a boys club.
No, that's complete.
The girl suckers on the door with the
S backwards.
Go away.
Joseph Mraka, $5.
Podverse, that's Mitch and Creon.
And Kyle, his brother, $50.
Thank you, beautiful.
Lauren Ball.
Hey, Lauren.
$24.20 as usual.
Thank you, Lauren, appreciate it.
Christopher Harbarick, $10.
Hey, Christopher, thank you for that.
Mitch coming in solo with a $10.
Nice.
Boost, boost, boost.
Oh, Harry.
Okay, we got a one-off, $50 from
Harry at Lower Street.
That's it, Harry at Lower Street.
Lower Street.
Instagram.
In the house, thank you.
And he says, I've started using the API.
Thank you for it.
You deserve some reward for creating something great
for free.
It's called value for value.
Welcome to the party, brother.
Thank you, Harry, appreciate it.
Value for value, yes.
Terry Keller, $5.
Chris Cowan, $5.
Thank you, Chris.
Thank you, Terry.
Silicon Florist, $10.
Silicon Florist.
I love these names.
These are good names, good names.
Paul Saltzman, guess how much?
$22.22. Always $22.22. Yeah, it's actually
a Roe of Ducks is what he brings.
Damon Kasejak, $15.
Derek J.
Visker, the best name in podcasting, $21.
And we've got one Boostergram that I can
find.
Wait, that's the delimiter, but I think I
see a problem here.
Well, let me see what I see.
I see from Castamatic, 333 from Chad F,
and that's an NWC test.
Okay.
Network Wallet Connect.
And then I see, yes.
And then I see- Did you see
one from CELOS?
CELOS.
Let me do a little search.
He said, okay, so my fountain didn't even
go through.
This is January 30th.
Yeah.
Test from True Fans.
And he had one from Fountain.
Yes, Fountain.
This is, no, this is an old one.
That's very old.
I'm going to have to use Runway.
We're missing Boost.
I'm telling you, Runway's the way to go,
baby.
It's the way to go.
All right, I'm going to start using Runway.
Eric PP, he could add Runway to, or
the- Yeah, add it to Helipad.
To Helipad, yeah.
Yeah, just a new page.
And an extra setting.
Yeah, that's it.
An extra vibe.
Just five minutes of vibe coding.
Just vibe code it, baby, vibe code it.
But we do have a delimiter, though.
Yes.
23,000 sats from Comicstrip Blogger.
Nice, thank you.
Through Fountain, he says, how do you, Dave
and Adam?
Today, I'd like to recommend a Plastic Fantastic
podcast called Sans Stormcast, a cybersecurity podcast that
Dave is listening to himself.
It's a short and published on Workday.
Dave, please elaborate why it's worth subscribing to.
Aha, aha, I like it.
Just search for Sans Stormcast in your podcasting
2.0 apps.
Yo, CSP, AI Arch Wizard.
He is the AI Arch Wizard.
And Justin, 3333 from Eric PP.
Oh, thank you.
Coming in from CurioCaster.
So next week, I don't think I can
do the board meeting because I'll be traveling
back from Nashville from the NRB.
NERB.
The NERB, yes.
The National Religious Broadcasters Conference where I'll be
speaking about the future of podcasting.
And you know what we ought to do
is we ought to have Gordon come in
the boardroom at some point.
Well, he's going to be there with me.
But yes.
I mean, like sometime after NRB.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
He, you know, I know he's a listener.
And he's always like, I don't know what
you guys are talking about.
Well, we don't either.
That's the beauty of it.
All right, boardroom.
Thank you all very much for being here.
Dave, good to talk to you.
I miss, honestly, I miss talking to you
last week.
I do too, brother.
Because we don't really get to speak except
during these meetings.
And this is what we talk about anyway
because we are all about podcasting, no matter
what.
It's always about podcasting.
All right, everybody.
Have yourselves a great weekend.
And we'll be back in two weeks, but
I'm sure we'll see each other on podcastindex
.social. Until then, we'll see you soon.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
Visit podcastindex.org for more information.
Go podcasting!
Busted a grumpy.