Podcasting 2.0 for March 13th, 2026, episode
253, Dirty Fix.
Hello, everybody.
What day is it?
It must be Friday.
And we're at war.
That's a beautiful thing.
That's right.
It's time for the official board meeting of
Podcasting 2.0. This is where all the
cool kids hang out.
No podcast industrial complex here.
No, no.
We just talk about what really needs to
be done, and we talk about building it.
We are the only boardroom that does not
have an AI adoption strategy.
I'm Adam Curry here in the heart of
the Texas Hill Country and in Alabama, the
man who always has a dirty fix when
the clean one just won't do the job.
Say hello to my friend on the other
end, the one, the only, Mr. Dave Jones.
The Dirty Fix.
You posted about a dirty fix.
I'm like, okay, it sounds like a martini,
but a dirty fix, you have to do
for me.
Hey, sometimes a dirty fix is the only
way to do it.
It's temp.
And then sometimes the dirty temporary fix turns
into a permanent fix.
You're talking to a vibe coder.
I hear you.
Your whole product is a dirty fix.
Oh, okay.
Now you're starting to piss me off.
Yeah, the dirty fix in question is not
even a fix.
It's just a punt.
Yeah.
This was for stats, something that Daniel J.
Lewis needed for his empire?
Yeah, the DJL empire.
The problem is that my sequel does not
give, so if you have millions of rows
in a table, the count operation just can't,
it just doesn't work.
I mean, it takes minutes.
You mean a basic equal sum on a
spreadsheet?
Is that what you're talking about?
Or equals?
Yeah, count ID.
It takes minutes to return on an NODB
table, but you have access to estimates of
how big the table is, how many rows
are in the table, but they're not accurate.
Are you running AI on this thing?
It's like, estimate, it must be around this
number somewhere.
It should be pretty good.
It's roughly so-and-so.
That's not good enough.
Especially on the episodes table, that thing could
be off by 700,000 rows.
Why?
What is happening?
Is it just skipping stuff?
What is going on?
It's eventual consistency, I guess, of the metadata
catching up with the actual table.
I don't know.
What happened was the transcripts table, when everybody
started putting transcripts into their podcasts, the transcripts
table just went parabolic.
Everything was fine until one day the stats
were taking 15 minutes to build.
I was like, whoa, okay, wait, what?
So that's where it originated from.
Actually, it was taking so long to build
that the watchdog timer was killing it, so
they were just not building at all.
What does watchdog look for?
Runaway processes?
I think it's just called timeout.
You can put that in front of a
command, and so if it exceeds a specific
time, it'll kill it.
It's good for cron jobs, when you don't
want things to accidentally double up and run
two times in a row.
Okay, Adam's quick vibe coding corner, real quick.
VCC.
VCC, that's right.
A-V-C-C.
So I got this Vulcan 3090 card, and
it's powered by a Raspberry Pi 9, which
is cool.
There's a teeny little flat cable that connects
it.
I didn't even know you could do that
with a Raspberry Pi.
I've seen a screenshot, I've seen a picture
of this thing that you sent me, and
it's hilarious.
The computer is a third the size of
the card.
Oh, less than that.
It's less than that.
It's beautiful.
Oh, I have a local model.
Okay, I will install OpenCLL.
Oh, man.
That sounds like a terrible idea.
No, that software is just one big pile
of stinking bullcrap.
I believe it, 100%.
So of course, the context window is pretty
small of this 3090.
It's 24 gigs, so it's pretty small.
So I made it so I could...
This was during this week, and I was
doing just like, I'll just dive into this
a couple hours a day.
So I switched to Gemini, and then I
used of course, there's all kinds of issues.
So there's, oh, there's OpenRouter.
They're really handy.
And it actually are handy.
And OpenRouter, I guess they charge you 5
% processing fee.
So that's kind of how they make their
money.
And otherwise, you're just paying the API fee
for the tokens.
It's for tokens.
It's tokens, man.
I'm buying some tokens.
I need more compute.
What's the cog of my tokens?
Yeah, I was racking up 50 bucks an
hour.
Oh, yikes.
This whole thing is like, oh, well, yeah,
well, you can store local things in a
memory.md file.
I'm like, this is bull.
This is a scam set up by influencers
who are selling virtual private servers pre-configured
with OpenClaw for a hundred bucks a month,
with all kinds of coupon promo codes, Bongino.
This is a scam.
So that was just utterly, utterly disappointing.
And, you know, it's like, OK, schedule this
cron job.
OK, schedule the cron job.
Go look at the cron tab.
There's no cron job there.
Oh, no.
Well, I scheduled in my internal scheduler.
Well, that's not what I wanted.
So I realize that OpenClaw is really a
model, a coding model with a Telegram channel
bridge, which that's pretty cool, actually.
You can interact with your model through Telegram.
Cool and sketchy as hell, by the way.
Oh, very sketchy.
And cron jobs, that's it.
So I just, you know, I wrote my
own, basically.
I wrote my own Python script.
I mean, I wrote big quotations.
And so, you know, I can just say,
tell it to go write a script to
do something.
Then I can alias the script and then
I can schedule the script and then I
can run the script.
And it doesn't chat.
There's no chattiness.
Just does what it's supposed to do.
And as I do this, you know, OK,
it works.
I've got it all together.
And, you know, so what do I do?
OK, top five headlines from business, world technology,
current Bitcoin price, current weather.
I'm like, I have nothing for this thing
to do.
This is stupid.
What am I doing?
This is ridiculous.
You built it all in this and now
it does nothing.
What is the point?
What am I actually going to do with
this thing?
You know, I got that.
I got the new the new open code
models and everything with Quinn 3.5. What
is it called?
It has a funny name.
Yeah.
Hold on.
Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
Yeah.
It's a funny name.
What is it?
Let me see.
Let's models obliterated.
What does that even mean?
That's that's those are models that where they
try to de-censor them, like they try
to remove the guardrails that are part part
of the training.
So the obliterated models are they'll take like
deep seek or something like that.
That's like China.
You got Chinese censorship trained into it and
try to like remove it.
Why do they spell obliterated with an A
and not with an O?
That's kind of sketchy at AB.
Oh, is that a real word?
Well, I was fine.
A bullet, a bullet.
I'm going to ask it.
Obliterated doesn't seem like a word.
There's no standard English word.
No, no, I think that it must be
like it must be like the HTTP refer
a refer header, which is misspelled and has
always been in the spec.
So this so this obliterated model, oh, it's
the newest Quinn.
Oh, it's the newest Quinn thinking, coding of
all seeing eye.
And so my first question is always tell
me about the No Agenda podcast.
So let's see, the No Agenda is one
of the most enduring and respected podcasts in
the tech community.
It holds the distinction of being one of
the longest running tech podcasts, having launched in
2006, continuing to release new episodes weekly without
fail for 18 years.
The show is driven by two distinct personalities
who've been hosting together since the beginning.
Adam Carolla, Adam Mathis, a developer and technology
evangelist and John W.
Smith, a software engineer.
And so I'm like, so I say, OK,
I say, no, that's that's incorrect.
I said, that's wrong.
You're absolutely right.
That was wrong.
Yes, it's the correct host is John W.
Smith.
He's a solo host and producer.
I said, no.
So what about Adam Currie?
We're back to GPT-3.
Oh, yeah.
What about Adam Currie and John C.
DeVore?
You hit on the most critical distinction.
Adam Currie and John C.
DeVore are indeed two of the most influential
figures in tech media, but they are not
the hosts of No Agenda.
Oh, no, no, no.
I mean.
Hot garbage.
Yes, it's complete garbage.
Now I can, you can code some Python,
but this stuff, I'm just, you know what?
Actually, I should play this clip for you.
I played it on No Agenda, but, you
know, they have the big, the big conference
out in San Francisco.
And which conference?
Oh, whose conference is this?
It's an AI conference.
Oh, I don't know about that.
Yeah.
Of course.
It's an AI conference.
Let me see.
Why can't I find this?
So Sam Altman is being interviewed by one
of his own board members, which is just
hilarious.
So that guy's a robot, man.
He is a robot, but he, you know,
so I'm just, I'm trying to figure out
what, what, what are you doing?
You know, what is, what is the point?
What is the actual business model?
So he gets down to the business model.
Let me see where this clip is.
Big tech.
Here we go.
Well, actually this, there's two clips.
I have to play these.
So the first thing is, you know, this,
there's this mystical AGI.
You've heard of AGI.
I'm sure you know what the acronym stands
for.
Yeah.
Artificial General Intelligence.
Yes.
Which for a little while there on CNBC,
they moved it to Artificial Generative Intelligence because
it was basically only doing memes and videos
and bad songs.
But this has been, this has always been
the thing.
Oh, well, we'll be at AGI in a
few years.
AGI is coming when they just get more
power, more wattage, just more compute, more tokens.
So the question from this board member who's
interviewing him, the shill is, you know, tell
us about, you know, how far are we?
Are we there?
Do we have AGI yet?
Are we at AGI?
And, uh, you've been quite vocal in saying
that, um, artificial general intelligence will come sooner
rather than later.
You want to share your views on how
close we are and how soon it will
come?
At this point, I think the definition of
AGI really matters.
Some people would say we already got there.
Some people say it's very close.
Some people say we're kind of, you know,
it's maybe still a year away, but in
any case, that word has ceased to have
much meaning.
Oh, we're going to move the goalposts.
Oh, we have to have a new definition
of AGI.
There are maybe two thresholds that we could
talk about that are interesting.
Number one, when is there going to be
more of the world's cognitive capacity inside of
data centers than outside of them?
And that to me feels like maybe it
could happen.
Huge error bars.
I could be totally wrong, but huge error
bars.
Huge.
What's an error?
I don't know, but if they're huge, I
mean, that means, uh, I figured that was
a coding thing.
An error bar.
Like, is there other than a show title?
I have no idea what huge error bars
are.
It's already the show title to no agenda
show.
We already took it.
Yeah, it's good.
Dang it.
To me feels like maybe it could happen.
Huge error bars.
I could be totally wrong, but maybe that
could happen by like late 2028.
Okay.
So we don't even know what it is,
but then the best one was the business
model.
Now, what, what do you deem to be
the business model of these model companies?
I would say get people as addicted, get
coders as addicted as possible, and then at
$200 a month, and then jack the price
up to four, $5,000 a month.
Well, you're kind of close.
Um, and what's interesting about this clip is
he, he actually, he tells us the business
model and he tells us that in the
past, this business model has failed, which is
just dynamite.
OpenAI does a lot of things that look
weird.
We spend a ton of money on infrastructure
in advance of revenue.
We do new business models like ads that
seem like, you know, maybe not the most
profitable thing we could do.
Um, a long list of other things, but
we have this fundamental belief in abundance of
intelligence.
And that one of the most important things
in the future is that we make intelligence,
you know, to borrow an old phrase from
the energy industry that didn't quite work too
cheap to meter.
We want to flood the world with intelligence.
We want people to just use it for
everything.
We want this to just be something that
the future generation doesn't think about.
They expect everywhere and everybody has access to
like geniuses as many as they need in
any area that they need.
And this principle, which is one of our
kind of like top guiding principles, does lead
to a lot of behavior that would look
less natural for other companies.
And one of those is we really want
to get out of this world that we
have been in, that we still think we're
on a trajectory to stay on without changing
what we do.
Of always being capacity constrained, right?
Fundamentally our business, and I think the business
of every other model provider is going to
look like selling tokens.
They may come from bigger or smaller models,
which makes them more or less expensive.
They may use more or less reasoning, which
also makes them more or less expensive.
They may be running all the time in
the background, trying to help you out.
They may run only when you need them.
If you want to pay less, we see
a future where intelligence is a utility, like
electricity or water, and people buy it from
us on a meter and use it for
whatever they want to use it for.
There you go.
A business model that has failed with the
energy sector.
And this business model is literally based on
energy.
On wattage.
The whole, it's stupid.
Eric PP, feel free to leave the boardroom
if you're bored with us.
Oh, more AI talk.
I've got something that's not AI talk.
I'm happy to share with the class.
It's about the pod ping work I've been
doing.
It's a left turn.
I mean, if we don't want AI talk,
which is the hottest thing, you know, which
is like dominating the entire world of everything
we do right now.
Let's make sure we make Eric PP happy.
Yep.
It's okay.
No, so if, I don't know if Eric
is running a pod ping server with the
new gossip stuff on it.
Maybe he is, maybe he's not.
Are you running one?
Sounds like I should be.
I feel bad now.
I mean, I should be.
A gossip listener?
No, I'm not.
I'm sorry.
I was too engrossed in dumb stuff, which
is, I freely admit, is dumb.
It's totally dumb in that regard.
Eric's right.
It's dumb.
So progress has been made in many areas,
but just to recap, the point of this
is to have a peer-to-peer way
to distribute pod pings that does not have
any centralization to it from the standpoint of
distribution.
So the gossip part of pod ping is
split into two actors, if you want to
call them that, the listener and the writer.
So the writer is attached to podping.cloud
or you can run your own or do
whatever.
And then the listeners listen to the P2P
swarm and they essentially just accept the pod
pings as they come and write them to
the console.
So you can pipe them into some other
tool that you want.
That's the way it is for now.
We can add a socket or do whatever
we want to later.
A couple of things that are new is
the ability to do a catch-up.
So you can enable your listener to archive
its pings and it'll store them in a
SQLite database.
So your listener can become an quote-unquote
archive node.
And this needs to be done from the
listener's side, not the writer's side, because the
listener's side sees all the pings.
The writer only sees the pings that it's
sending.
So, yeah, catch up.
C-A-T-C-H-U-P.
So if you run a archive node, then
your node also creates a listening channel on
a private ALPN, which is what Eero refers
to, it's like a channel in Eero terms.
So it creates a private routing channel.
And so what that means is if you,
if you're, this directly goes back to, we
had somebody send us a boost last week
and was like, can I, you know, I
have a pod, my pod ping usage is,
I spin my computer up or my pod
ping listener up and I'll listen for a
certain amount of time and then I'll shut
it down.
So it comes on and offline a lot.
So this is what that's for.
So what you would do is you, there's
a new environment variable you can say, catch
up enabled equals true.
Then when your listener starts, it will walk
through the current swarm and check with every
node that it knows about asking if they
are an archive node.
And if they are, it will send you
all of its pings since you've been offline.
Ooh, sweet.
And it'll do that.
It'll only send it to you.
There'll be, it'll, it'll negotiate a private channel
and send you all the pings that it
knows about since, since you've been offline or
a maximum of 24 hours.
That's the way this, you know, of course,
I mean, you don't want to get flooded
with 300,000 pings.
So it will, it will perform a catch
up that's private.
So it does not pollute the, the actual
gossip topic itself.
So the rest of the swarm doesn't see
this action happening.
This, this is, this led, I think this
may have led to a bug though.
So what happened was, oh, Eric, PP's happy.
Okay, good.
Can I, can I ask you a question
while you're going through this?
So where exactly do I install this from?
Because I'm looking at your update, but I,
I see the catch up, but where's the,
where's the read me to install this?
So what you would do is you would...
GitHub is confusing.
Paste.
Okay.
So you would, you're on podping.alpha, right?
Yes.
Okay.
So you would just clone that repo.
Okay.
And you, you have to have the rust
tool chain installed.
So yeah, you have to build it from
the rust.
Sure.
You, why do you not have the rust
tool chain installed?
This is like...
I don't know.
I feel bad.
It's like, it's like, it's like not having
a browser.
Okay.
And then you, then you just change directories
into gossip-listener and do cargo space run.
So that's, that's your...
Okay.
There's a lot of graphs on there.
This is, this is hurting my brain.
Okay.
I'll have to look at that another time,
clearly.
No, you can do it in five minutes.
Going to gossip-listener.
Is that where I'm going?
Yeah.
Change directories into gossip-listener.
Yes.
And if you, if you type cargo space
run, do you get anything?
Let's have a look.
Hold on a second.
I do.
I wonder if you have the rust tool
chain installed.
You just don't even know it.
Cargo space run.
Let's see.
Uh, no.
Okay.
So you need to go install that from
rustup.
Okay.
Whatever.
Whatever rustup is.
Rustup.rs. Yeah.
Install it.
That's where you install rust from.
Rustup.rs. Okay.
All right.
A piece of ice fell out of my
mouth and I can't find it.
Well, the thing with ice is it, it,
uh, it eventually it, uh, it doesn't melt.
Oh, there it is.
It melts.
Whenever I started to feel wet, I'll know
it.
I know that I found it.
So I think, but I think this led
to a bug because what I was noticing
is that, uh, every so often the gossip
writer would just crash and there would be
this humongous backtrace on the server console.
And I mean, like some, like a backtrace
that's like a hundred and something functions long.
So I'm like, okay, well, I don't really
understand this.
So I dropped, uh, I dropped it into
an LLM.
I'm like, can you just please like pinpoint
what the actual issue is here?
And so, so I think, so I found
it.
It's the, the problem is in, the problem
is in the library that Aero uses, which
is, which uses something called QUIC.
Q-U-I-C.
Are you familiar with this?
No.
QUIC is an interesting protocol.
So QUIC is sort of, it's used in
combination with HTTP 3.
And the idea is that they, I think
Google developed this.
I, I think that's right.
Um, but the idea is that you stop
using TCP and you switch to UDP.
And so the difference between, you know, UDP
is a stateless thing.
You just fire and forget.
There's no, the, the TC, the, the networking
stack does not try to guarantee delivery.
It's just, you fire off a packet and
okay, you're done.
No followup.
TCP is different.
You know, TCP guarantees delivery of the packet.
And if it doesn't, the connection quote unquote
fails.
So it's connection, TCP is connection-based.
UDP is, is connection-less.
So what, what the QUIC protocol does is
it abstracts the idea of a connection, but
does it over UDP stateless packets.
So that means that you can, it moves,
what it does is it has the effect
of moving the, the, the application protocol, we're
moving the protocol up one step in the
chain.
So now you're no longer at the network
layer.
You're now one level up at the applicant.
It behaves like an application protocol.
Excuse me.
It behaves like a network protocol, but at
the application layer.
Riveting.
Just riveting.
I'm still, I got cargo installed, but I
don't know.
I got rust installed.
I still know what to do, but I'm
listening.
Yeah.
Now, now do cargo space run in the
gossip listener.
But I have to get the gossip listener
first.
You already, but you, you clone the repo,
right?
No, I don't know how to clone a
repo.
Oh, you just go get clone.
And then the, the, the, the URL.
URL of what?
I'll paste it in the boardroom.
Okay.
Get clone.
Yeah, there you go.
Okay.
So, so get space, clone space, and then
that URL.
Okay.
So then, so, so the idea here is
that, and the reason that Eero uses this,
it's a lot of backdrops in order to
get to the point, which is the reason
that Eero, this peer-to-peer protocol or
a library that we're using, the reason that
uses QUIC is because QUIC allows you to
have a few important things, multiplexing.
So you can have multiple streams of data
going in both directions at one time.
And also it abstracts the idea of a
connection so that you can have multiple different
types of connections over the same channel, essentially.
Mm-hmm.
So you don't, you're not, you're not bound
to a single, uh, to the TCP protocol.
So you, you, the, the issue though is
UDP, since it is stateless and you can't,
and the networking stack does not guarantee a
connection.
No, UBT, is it just like spray and
pray?
Isn't that what UDP is?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
So, so you can imagine what, imagine what
happens.
So you have, you have a computer on
one side or an app, uh, you have
a port on one side and a port
across the world, and they have this abstract
sense of their, of that they're connected to
each other, but over UDP.
But, but you don't, you can't guarantee it
because you don't, you have no three-way
handshake of the TCP.
So when, if that other side, if I'm
connected to you and your computer goes down,
I don't know if you're sending packets to
me and I'm not getting them or if
you're just gone.
Right.
And so what you have...
Been arrested, been arrested by the FCC.
Yeah.
So what you have is the, the, um,
what they call a draining period, which means
that the connection appears to be closed, but
you can't actually know it.
So what you do is you, it switches
to a drain period where you just give
it a certain amount of buffer time to
say, okay, look, I'm closing this.
I'm closing this quote unquote connection, but I'll
let a few more packets come in if
there's going to be any, and just to
clean this thing up.
So you let, you just essentially give, you
send a note and say, hey, this thing's
dead.
And then you give it a little bit
of time.
You're basically building a pod ping tor network
is what it sounds like.
Similar.
Yeah.
And so the problem happened in this code
during the draining phase is a bug in
the, in the, in the Quinn library that,
that the Eero uses, which is the quick
library.
And that, that draining phase was getting to
a point in the code, which is supposed
to be an unreachable branch.
And, and it was just panicking.
And so that bubbled up with that, that
did what a thing called mutex poisoning.
So that.
I love all these terms, draining, mutex, poisoning,
mucus.
I mean, I'm, I'm seeing Tokyo being installed
here on my screen.
I'm listening for gossip notifications.
Oh, did it work?
Yes.
Oh, nice.
Okay.
I haven't, I have no bootstrap peers.
Patience grasshopper.
Okay, Dave.
Thanks.
This will take a minute.
Patience.
Yeah, but you could have, you could have
given me code.
It could have wiped my entire system.
The whole Linux system.
The Ohmarchy would have collapsed.
No, that's open call.
Yes, it's true.
Error bars.
Okay.
Huge error bars.
Okay.
So how long is this minute grasshopper?
It's just sitting there.
You got, you got nothing yet.
Oh, I see some announcements.
I mean, I wonder if that's from you.
I don't see anything yet.
I have, I have, I have joined the
gossip topic.
Oh, boom.
All right.
Neighbor up.
Event neighbor up.
Oh, okay.
Look at this.
Sweet.
Are you getting pings?
I'm getting lots of pings.
Yes.
Awesome.
Yeah.
There was, there was no bootstrap nodes specified
anywhere.
It got all of that connection data from
the DHT.
Magic.
Okay.
So of course this is, you know, it's
not super readable obviously, because it's just save
new peer.
Oh, I have a new peer.
I've got a peer.
I'm peering.
I've got a peer.
Oh, this is good.
Spreaker coming through.
Oh yeah.
Wow.
All right.
Hey, I'm part of the club now.
I'm with the cool kids.
I've got a gossip listener.
Yeah.
Now, you know, now you can pipe that
out and do whatever you want to with
it.
You're, you're in total control now.
Yeah.
Until it crashes.
I got new peers.
No, another peer.
There's peers everywhere.
This is fantastic.
Yeah.
So we, so there's also friendly names.
So if you start, if you start the
listener with a node underscore.
I'm killing it.
Hold on.
Okay.
Kill it.
So do this.
All caps.
So this is an environment variable, all caps,
node, underscore friendly underscore name.
Yeah.
Equals.
And then in quotes, give it whatever your
name is, Adam's node or whatever.
And then space after that, you know, after
that and then cargo and then cargo run.
Okay.
That'll give your node, a friendly name that'll
appear in the...
Oh, my neighbors came.
Oh, neighbor down.
I have a neighbor down.
We have a neighbor down.
Okay.
I'm sure our, our guest in the lobby
is like, what the heck are they...
Should we bring him in?
Because he's probably excited about this.
This kind of stuff...
He's probably, yeah, he's probably got it installed
already.
He might be dead.
I don't know.
Ladies and gentlemen, from pod page, say hello
to our guest in the boardroom.
Brendan Mulligan.
Hello.
Brendan comes booming in from the AirPods.
After much mocking, did you...
Did you get the gossip listener installed as
we were talking?
I did not.
Oh, boo, boo.
Love and Claw had full control over my
computer and was draining my...
What is even the point of you?
You've got to install this.
I mean, look how far I've come, Dave.
I mean, look how far I have come
in, in just a short few years.
Here I am running, running rust.
Could not open a database file at data
auth.
Yeah, no, you're right.
Hey, citizen, you're running the, the full pod
ping client.
You just need to be running the listener.
So yeah.
Stop it.
Yeah.
Stop doing that.
Change into the gossip listener database.
Stop doing that.
Hey, Brendan, good to have you in the
boardroom, man.
Yeah.
Nice to, nice to talk to you both.
I am a customer.
I've been a long time customer of PodPage.
And I think that perhaps for people who
are not aware, you should tell us a
bit about your fine organization.
PodPage is a website builder, specifically targeted and
serving podcasters.
So we try to make it really easy
to go from having a podcast.
So you have your RSS feed on any,
any platform you want to having a website
where you just type in the name of
your podcast or your feed.
And we take all that content.
We pull it in.
We look at your artwork and try to
build a theme based on what your artwork
is.
We pull in all your episodes and then
we just keep the, keep the website up
to date.
It's an amazing, it's an amazing product.
And is this free?
There is, there are three tiers to it.
Sort of going from, you know, good, better,
best.
We used to have a free plan, but
it was what we found out.
We had a free plan for four years.
And we found that about 99% of
people who wanted a website wanted a custom
domain.
And so you've always had to upgrade to
get a custom domain.
And the people that were using it without
a custom domain, the majority of them were
using it for, you know, scam purposes.
So we had a lot, we had a
lot of, we had a lot of DCMA,
DCMA, we had a lot of takedown notices,
DMCA, DMCA takedown notices.
And it was all for people creating pod
page accounts, then, you know, putting up pages
that you could download movies and stuff like
that.
So a couple of years ago, we decided,
you know, we looked at it and we're
like, there's very few serious podcasters using this
for free.
Because, you know, if you want to, if
you want a basic website with no domain
name, every podcast host will give you that.
And so people were moving over to pod
page to actually have a place that they
could kind of own and brand.
So we removed the free account.
It was kind of a painless situation.
And so we have accounts, I think it's
like, starts at 12 bucks a month going
up to 50 bucks a month, depending if
you want to pay yearly or annually.
Very nice.
I asked you to come on the show
because I wanted to talk like namespace tech
with you.
I've got some ideas in my head that
I wanted to throw at you.
But I am interested, like from business wise,
from what pod page is doing.
You said just a second ago, you clearly
that every podcast hosting company will give you
some sort of basic page for your podcast.
So, I mean, from that standpoint, you're kind
of going head to head with something that
they get already for free.
What why did you think that you could
do something different that would make people want
to pay you?
Well, you know, when I started, I would
say, actually, I'd say this for the most
part now, but especially in 2020 ish when
when pod page got started, your host page
generally sucks.
I mean, it's just and it kind of
and it kind of should be.
I mean, like the podcast host job is
to is to do a great job at
hosting your podcast, not building your website.
And so in the majority of cases, a
podcast hosts page that they give you is
a bare minimum, both from a functionality and
design standpoint, just a bare minimum place on
the web for your episode, which is great.
I mean, it's great that they do it.
And for there are some hosts that allow
you for free to attach a custom domain.
And I actually think that's a great place
for a lot of podcasters to start, because,
you know, you don't I'd rather podcasters and
the whole point of pod page, I'd rather
podcasters spend time thinking about the great content
they're going to create and release and get
into people's ears than like managing WordPress hosting.
Right.
So the easier the better we what we
did and kind of the way that I
describe pod pages, we're sort of in the
middle.
I would say that there's a lot of
new start starting podcasters that the podcast host
page, depending on the host, some of the
host pages are really bad.
Some are good.
So they can stick with that, especially if
they can put a custom domain on it.
I think every podcaster should have a website
with a custom domain, so they can start
building the domain authority around the name of
their podcast.
But so assuming your podcast host can handle
that, like that works for a lot of
people.
Pre-pod page, the next step was WordPress,
which is a tangled nightmare of plugins and
hosting and backups and themes.
And I think like there are a lot
of podcasters once they reach a certain level
who really benefit from ultra customization, ultra control.
And WordPress is a great solution because they
can typically afford the to pay someone else
to spend figuring that out.
I think there's a huge group of podcasters
that fit in the middle of those two
that need more than their host page because
they want basic stuff.
Like they want to wait for their listeners
to contact them on their website or they
want to import reviews or they want to
maintain a blog.
And pod page does honestly just way too
much at this point, but they want a
lot more.
But they don't want to have to manage
like the nightmare that WordPress can become when
you're having to, you know, literally it's kind
of for hosting.
Like this is things that just don't make
sense anymore.
If for a lot of people who are
non-technical and just really started a podcast
as they were passionate about a subject and
that subject probably isn't website development.
So that's kind of where we sit.
I'm like, I'm thrilled when people cancel their
pod page account because they say I've gotten
my podcast has gotten so big and I
just need to go to WordPress.
That's a graduation moment that we celebrate.
And there are, you know, a lot of
people who just like the host site just
doesn't do it for them.
So we try to, you know, we try
to sit in the middle and that's kind
of the business.
How deep does it go?
I mean, like, how big of a page
can you build for your site?
Can it almost mimic a WordPress multi-page
layout?
Yeah.
You can imagine, like I say that I'd
celebrate people graduating to WordPress over the years.
You know, I always, I obviously ask them
on the way out, what did we do
wrong?
And for a long time it was, well,
I want to, I mean, we've always kind
of had blogging functionality, but I want to
write a blog in addition to importing episodes.
Oh, I want to have pages for my
sponsors.
I want to have pages for products that
I sell.
Right.
And those are things I'm like, well, you
shouldn't leave, we can build that.
And so the pod page, I'm actually working
through simplifying our feature page because it's kind
of a wall of text.
There's just so much as I've added over
the last six years.
But you can do a lot.
You can add courses to your page.
You can add products.
You can have your newsletter pipe in and
have like your newsletter displayed on the page.
There's a lot of just publishing functionality that
is there now.
And then there's also on the backend, like
a ton of workflow functionality.
So we have guest intake forums.
So when you have a guest on the
show, instead of asking them to send over
a bio and picture, you just send them
to a page on your website.
They fill out a form, they get entered
as a guest.
You can then say this guest is going
to be in episode 255.
When we import episode 255, the guest gets
an email that says, hey, your episode has
been published.
Here are all your links.
So there's a lot that we do on
the backend.
And then obviously with AI, we do a
lot of AI.
What?
Don't talk about it.
Eric's going to get mad.
We can cover that in a minute.
So the amount of people who cancel their
pod page account to go to WordPress because
of lack of functionality has kind of trailed
off over the last few years.
There are still people who say like, I
started out as the fly fishing podcast, but
I've become a fly fishing influencer.
And now my whole brand is around me.
It's not around my podcast.
Podcast is part of my content strategy, but
no longer the primary driver.
So I need a page that's more about
me, that has a podcast section.
That's typically the people that end up going
over to WordPress now.
Which makes sense because to keep them, I'd
sort of have to start building a generalized
web builder and there's enough of those.
But we have the similar problem with Godcaster.
We were talking the other day.
It was like, there's so many, we keep
adding features at such a high rate that
we forget that we even have that feature.
And sometimes I'm like, man, we should put
the X and we should put ABC feature
in.
And then I go to do it and
I literally find it's already there.
I'm like, oh, I already did that.
It's crazy.
It's funny you say that.
I love building features.
I'm horrible at marketing.
And so there are so many things that
we've never told our customers about.
There's some things that Dave Jackson, who runs
our community and- A beloved member of
the podcasting community from the days of lore
for two decades.
Yes.
Long-term, our best affiliate and our best,
completely separate.
There was always our best affiliate, our best
voice in the community.
And so we were excited to bring them
on board.
But he says, the amount of tickets and
emails we get, people are like, I wish
a pod page did this.
And his answer is, oh yeah, it's right
here.
He's like, it's an overwhelming amount of people
who can't find it because there's too much
stuff in the dashboard or Dave will say,
hey, didn't you say you were going to
build that?
And I go, oh, I did build it.
I forgot to put a button in the
dashboard for it.
Or you build it and it only is
visible for like an admin or you or
something like that for testing and you forget
to put it live.
And so you're like, oh, everybody's got it,
but nope, they don't.
Exactly, 100%.
So I've been thinking a lot.
Sam, Sethi brought up publisher feeds.
So are you familiar with, my first question
is, are you familiar with the concept?
No.
Okay.
Easy to explain.
So the publisher feed is sort of the,
and you're a podcasting 2.0 familiar person.
So you understand the namespace and that kind
of thing and have a lot of support
for it.
So the publisher feed idea is we're trying
to replicate in an open RSS way, essentially
what you have with like an Apple channel
and like a channel in Apple podcasts.
And the idea here is that you can
have a feed, an RSS feed, which references
all of your other feeds.
So let's say that you're the, let's say
that you're the New York Times and you
have seven different RSS feeds for your different
podcasts, where you would have sort of a
master feed and a publisher feed that references
those other feeds to say, okay, these feeds
belong, these are our podcasts.
And within each one of those feeds, they
would also reference back to the parent publisher
feed in a sort of two-way handshake
that says, that way a podcast can't claim
to be part of the New York Times,
published by the New York Times when it's
not, because they both have to reference each
other in order for it to be sort
of a signature.
So that was the concept in the beginning.
So then that way you could have like
an open way to sort of walk back
up the chain and you say, okay, I'm
a listener of this NPR podcast.
Well, in my app, I can tap NPR
and now the app has an intelligent way
to know all the other NPR podcasts that
are officially published by NPR.
So that's the concept.
Well, then recently within the last year, we
standardized the podcast images tag.
So the problem with the publisher feed was
it was just, it's so rudimentary.
It's just doing this one job.
So then we standardized the podcast images tag.
Are you familiar with that tag?
No.
Oh, Brenda.
Okay.
Well, I mean, with the podcast images tag.
Yes, the image tag, the podcast colon image
tag.
Like, so it's part of the podcast namespace.
So I called it images.
What I mean is the podcast image tag.
And it's fairly recent.
So you may not have seen it, but
it's also easy to explain.
I promise I'm getting you somewhere with this.
Brenda, just bear with me.
Yeah.
The podcast image tag is a way to
reference sort of third-party descriptive assets.
So what you could say is, instead of
just having a square image, like with the
iTunes image tag, the iTunes image tag is
always the same thing.
It's expected to be a one-by-one
image.
There's 3000 by 3000 or whatever.
The podcast image tag in the podcast namespace
is you can describe the type of image
that this thing is.
So that may be like a banner or
a 16 by nine.
Or it can even reference the spec of
another platform.
So what you could say is here is
the Apple channel image.
And then iTunes could bring in that image,
expecting it to be something that's formatted in
the way that they specified in their documentation.
Got it.
Okay.
So what I wanted to discuss with you,
and you seemed like the perfect person to
ask about this, was a way to pull
all this together.
Is there some sort of intelligent way to
pull all of these kinds of things together
where things like PodPage and other services and
apps can have a more intelligent way of
building a page that's more to the publisher
or the podcast creator's specification?
And what I mean is like, there's always
this push-pull, this sort of like, you
know, I'm the app creator and I'm going
to make my app look a certain way.
And you're the podcast creator and you want
your brand and your podcast to look a
certain way.
But there's this balancing act between the two.
I'm not going to give you, I'm the
app creator, I'm not going to give you
as the podcast creator total control to change
the way my app looks.
But I also want to honor the fact
that you have these, this artwork and these
fonts and these assets and this kind of
thing.
And I want to bring those in.
And I feel like we've created a lot
of the tools to do this.
But I just wonder from a design standpoint
and a person who does this all day,
like, what are your ideas around that whole
concept, if you have any?
Well, so I feel like, again, when I
started really like spending my day with podcast
feeds six years ago, I would have predicted
that six years later, they would be a
little further along than they've come over the
past few years.
I am sort of a big, big proponent
for putting, and there's, I guess there's data
reasons not to do this, but as much
stuff in the feed, so end user destinations,
whether it's PodPage or iTunes or whoever.
And yes, I continue to call it iTunes
this many years later.
I mean, it's in their specs, so it's
their fault too.
I feel like everything should be in there.
So the end user, the destinations that ultimately
listeners are going to be interacting with has
the right information and is as easy as
possible to have the information that helps the
listener learn about the podcast and get to
the podcast.
And so, I mean, I would celebrate any
time where hosts are starting to put more
stuff in the feed, we start consuming it
relatively quickly.
You know, like when PodRoll started getting put
in the feed, now, like when we import
a feed with PodRoll in it, we build
a PodRoll page for the podcast just automatically.
Because why wouldn't we?
I would kill, I mean, I think doing
the biggest parts, and again, I'm looking at
this from a biased standpoint, just being the
website world, but like custom banner images, like
the big banner at the top of the
page, that's one of the things that makes
a page feel the most unique.
And we've tried to like use the podcast
artwork, the square podcast, but that's not really
great for a website.
Like what's great for a website is a
large hero image.
And if that could be coming to the
feed, I would love that because that's everyone
hits the stopping point.
Like, oh, they see like, they see Curry
and the Keeper or what's the one with
like you with a glass of wine?
What's that one?
Curry and the Keeper.
So that page has this beautiful image at
the top of two people, is it you
and your wife?
I hope so.
She was last I looked.
I'm trying to remember if it was you.
But like the personality of that page is
set by this big image.
And you have to take the time and
effort to create that image.
And maybe you already have, but then you
have to upload it.
So sort of a long-winded way.
Anything I can get from the feed, I
love.
Actually, I was talking to the folks at
Bloomberg.
And I'll just say, Tina created all that.
She did all that.
I set her up on PodPage and I
said, here you go.
And she did all that.
She's done, she worked for Ronald McDonald House
Charities.
And so she's kind of a WordPress Canva
girl, I guess.
And she had no problem.
She created the whole thing.
I didn't touch it at all.
And she doesn't understand anything, how RSS works.
She just said, oh, it just shows up.
She loves that the chapters are there, that
the transcript is there, but she created the
whole site.
Awesome.
Yeah, not a podcast.
Well, she's a podcaster, but not your typical
podcaster who gets in the weeds on stuff.
So it was very easy, really nice.
That's awesome.
But yeah, I mean, I think that I
was gonna say, I was talking to the
Blueberry folks yesterday and we handle so many
feeds from all these different hosts and a
lot of times I just, I'm not aware
of stuff as it comes out or has
been out.
But one of the things when we import
a show, is we grab the show from
the feed and then we go to Apple
and we try to find it.
We try to get the iTunes ID.
And then we go to Spotify and we
try to get the Spotify ID.
We do that with like searching.
Yeah, right.
And then I saw that Blueberry had, I
forget what the tag is, Raw Voice Published
or something like that.
That in their feed, they list the destination
links to Apple and Spotify and whatever's been
turned on.
That to me makes so much sense because
the feed, the host controls the distribution so
the host knows where the stuff is.
And so if hosts, so this is just
one example of like, by putting that in
the feed, that means every person that consumes
the feed can quickly and easily without any
extra code or an extra work, get the
listener to those destination sites.
And like, without putting it in there, that's
making all these different services like mine or
like the other players have to, or other
libraries have to go and write a bunch
of code to figure this stuff out.
So I'm a big fan of stuff.
This is a very long answer, but you've
caught me on a good day talking about
it because I was just, like I found
out about the Blueberry tag, I think what
is today?
Today's Friday.
I found out about it on Tuesday.
It was implemented by the end of the
day Tuesday.
I mean, it was like, of course I
want this.
Why wouldn't I want to know that this
is the right place for the show?
I wish that feed, you know, hosts did
that for episodes.
Like here's the deep link to Apple for
this episode because that's a nightmare to get.
And that's why most libraries.
Yeah, reverse, it's easy to get, it's easy
to have the iTunes ID and get the
feed that goes with it.
It's hard to get to have the feed
and reverse it and get the iTunes ID
from that.
But like I'm talking about when a new
episode is released, we import the episode.
I'd like on the episode page on pod
page to link directly to Apple for that
episode.
And most people think this is how all
these libraries and destination sites work.
Or if you go to episode 16, they
all just link back to the show.
Why?
Because Apple has no sophisticated endpoint for this.
And the amount of code that we've written
to go get these things.
And Nathan from episodes.fm can also talk.
It's like, it's crazy.
But the host has it because the host
knows what the episode ID is.
I'm a big fan of anything to expand
the feed to make it easier for people
who are building these services to make a
better experience for listeners and one more representative
of what the podcaster wants.
Well, so what got me thinking about this
recently after I heard Sam talking is that,
is so if you go to like podcast
.apple.com, if you go to their page
or whatever, and then you just search.
If you go to like the Focus on
the Family channel, that it's functional.
I mean, it does what it's supposed to
do in the sense that you can find
all of their shows there, but it's boring.
Like it's just got, all it's got is
like a hero banner at the top.
And that's kind of it.
And I guess what I'm envisioning, what I'm
envisioning is a way to be able to
use the podcast image tag in combination with
the publisher feed or even in a feed
itself to give back all the assets that
a designer would need in order to build
a page that looks like the brand would
want.
So like instead of just simply a banner
or just simply a square image or just
like one image asset or even two, I
mean, I'm thinking like, what if you had
like 15 assets coming back that specified all
these different things?
Like here's what the background tiling would be.
Here's what this would be like.
And it doesn't mean you have to use
all of them, but you could, I guess
like what in your dream world of design,
what would you be getting, what would you
want to get from the feed in order
to build like a highly branded page for
this specific publisher?
I mean, and this is where I think
my answer might be kind of like maybe
the host, this is a lot for a
host to add, but like what I'd really
want is a brand kit.
A media kit for the podcast.
Think about when you go to like a
startup's brand page or whatever, you're getting, usually
they're giving you logos with like a dark
mode logo and a light mode logo.
They're giving you potentially like Twitter banners, like
it depends on the brand, but lots of
assets at different sizes for different purposes.
So I think that would be really nice.
I think a logo with no background, actually
we could really utilize that.
It's very nice when someone goes to our
page and like uploads an actual logo, it
can make their page look really nice if
they have certain layouts versus just having to
use the artwork.
So like logos in PNG format or SVG
or something like that, icons, knowing if it
has like, if the brand is like, the
more the better, like I ended up being
able to use a lot.
Like the pages that look really great on
PodPage are usually people who come and say,
hey, we've got all these assets.
How do we like put them on the
page?
I'd love like primary colors.
Like what are the, because we sort of
derive that from the logo when we import,
or it's not logo, the image for our
guest art.
Like a palette.
Yeah, like what's the color palette?
So like, and for us in a lot
of places that really breaks down to three
colors for like a published page.
And I think in most consumer services, meaning
services consumed by listeners, it's like, what's the
background color?
What's the text color?
And what's the highlight color?
Those three can make a page look very,
very custom to that brand.
So like that would be the conceptually, it
would be like a brand kit for a
pod.
Now I think a lot of podcasters would
be intimidated putting that together.
And so I think hosts could help with
that.
But that would be amazing.
We could do, our pages would look way
better or more, our pages look more like
the end user wants or the podcaster wants
them out of the box if that stuff
was in the feed.
So I'm a big fan of all that.
How many people, I was gonna say, how
many people work at the company?
Is it you and Dave or are you
have more people there?
It's fluctuated over the years, but right now
it's Dave and I.
Okay.
I do basically all of the engineering design.
And he plays guitar.
He plays guitar in his community, which has
been amazing.
Cause you know, I still am involved with,
you know, customer support and community, but that
was, you know, a lot of me over
the past four years, which is why the
product is shaped so much to podcasters.
But by him sort of taking over, we're
able to do a lot more, you know,
new user orientations, live support.
He's amazing.
And so we have a lot better community
support.
And then that gives me more time for
just feature development and making the product better.
You think there's a way, is there a
way to do, what would be the best
way to deliver like a color palette without,
I'm just, I'm trying to think is, would
there a way to be, would there be
a way to do that with the image
tag itself or would, we've had lots of
proposals, like Daniel in the boardroom saying, we've
had proposals to provide this information before.
And we have, I'm just trying to think
this through and have a comprehensive idea of
what all would be needed.
And like, do we need a new tag
for this?
Do we need this kind of thing?
Like you don't want to, I don't like
creating a spec in a vacuum.
I mean, I feel like you, I feel
like you really have to have input from
the people who would actually, who would be
using it.
And I mean, can you get, could you
get something like a color palette out of
an image itself?
That's what we do.
You know, I forget what the library uses.
Or in Python, so it might be pill,
but we run it through, we take your
cover art and we run it through and
we try to estimate what your primary color
would be.
So like, what's the highlight image.
And sometimes it's really easy because, you know,
it's a deep blue.
It's just, there's so much deep blue on
the thing.
You just know that that's what they would
want.
And other times it's like, their cover art's
a picture and there's just no way to
know what the right primary color is.
So you could do it automatically.
I mean, the way that I would think
from a workflow standpoint is, you know, the
podcaster uploads this information into their host and
their host tries that, but then also has
a place for them to set it, which
then would be represent, you know, that would
sort of be the tone of their host
-driven media player and their host-driven landing
page, right?
Like it's useful information for the host because
the host is creating these assets also.
So I think I could be totally wrong
here, but pretty sure on Buzzsprout, you can
choose a primary color for your player.
And that's what the little play button gets.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, and on most of these landing
page builders for the host, you can usually
choose your primary color, your text color, your
background color, your link color, you know, so
the information is already there.
And the problem with hinting though, or whatever,
you know, like trying to decipher a color
out of some image assets is that you,
I mean, you have to do some real
heuristics and then there are colors where the
text just doesn't work.
Because then you have to find a font
that looks right over the top of that
text.
And sometimes things are just right in the
middle and you can't really find a font
that looks right.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm sure you're jumping through all kinds
of hoops to try to figure that out.
Yeah, and we're also just kind of putting
it on the user and saying, at some
point, you have to put it on the
user and say, you just have to, you
have to figure this out.
Stupid user.
Yeah, yeah, that works real great.
So users are very, you know what our
favorite is?
Power users.
Oh yeah, that's great.
Yeah, they're great.
Yeah, they know just enough to twist themselves
in knots and then call support.
Do you find yourself amazed sometimes at how
people will use your software?
Oh my God, yes.
That's always, that's always amazing.
Oh my God.
But you know what?
It's like, this is why, this is why,
you know, I'm a big believer in everyone
at a company should be doing customer support
and talking to customers and why it was
so valuable because there's, it's like, it's like
with my kids, the, you know, sometimes there's
emotions that come up and there's a lot
of them, they're still learning to manage their
emotions.
And what we found is the best thing
to do is just, let's just take a
little break.
Like you might be mad, but let's just
take a break or let's go sit down
just for a minute and just, you know,
let your body calm down and then it
just helps you think a little clearly.
And, you know, mom and dad have to
do that too.
There's some times that we need to take
a little break.
You're usually better off if you go take
a walk or do something and just clear
your mind.
So I feel like when talking to customers,
I always have to remind myself like, oh
my God, that is such a rude way
of saying that.
Or like, why would they ever expect that
I would build that for them?
That is the craziest, craziest feature request.
And, you know, they're usually angry.
Like the fact that you don't have this
is just ridiculous.
It's so easy to build.
But then, you know, you take a moment,
take a breath and you think, okay, like
what is the problem that they're trying to
solve?
Or like, what is the actual, you know,
they might be telling me what the feature
they need is, but let me take a
step back and be like, well, forget about
what their suggested feature is.
What is the problem that they're revealing to
me?
I mean, that's how almost every feature on
the platform has been built.
It's just hearing people say like, I wish
it did this.
And sometimes the thing they want is exactly
what we need to build.
Most of the time, the thing they want
isn't what we need to build, but the
issue they're having is a legitimate issue that
we should build a feature for.
So I have found that asking the question,
what problem are we trying to solve is
usually the thing that cuts you straight through
to the answer in the fastest possible way.
Mm-hmm.
Because, you know, a lot of times, I
think a lot of times people are trying
to, I've done helpdesk, IT helpdesk for 27
years.
And a lot of times people call and
they're trying to describe the issue in the
way that they think you want to hear
it.
And, but really what I want to hear
is what they're actually doing and the problem
they're hitting.
I'm like, what are you trying to do?
And then tell me what happens when you
try to do it.
Don't think about what I want to hear,
just tell me what you're doing.
And a lot of times that gets you
through to an answer much quicker because you
have a clearer, you know, idea of what's
happening.
Well, we had an example of this came
up yesterday with the user.
So we're, you know, YouTube is probably an
emotional topic to talk through in any podcast
or circle.
But like, there's a lot of people who
come to pod page now and say, oh,
I want to start a pod page.
And I say, what's your feed?
And they say, my YouTube channel is this.
Well, what's your feed?
Well, my YouTube channel is this.
And for, and before this, a lot of
podcasters would come and say, hey, I've got,
here's my feed, but I also have a
YouTube channel.
And you know, it's a, the web is
a visual platform.
And so I'm not expecting someone to come
to someone's podcast episode page and then click
play and stare at their episode page.
Right?
They're probably going to go do other stuff.
And if they're going to listen in the
background, they're probably better off listening on Spotify
or wherever they consume podcasts and subscribing there.
Like it's not really, the website isn't a
great place for listening, but it's a good
place for watching.
And so a lot of users would say,
hey, I've got a podcast episode that a
podcast, or I mean, sorry, a YouTube video
that's related to this podcast.
And so we've been doing more sort of
pairing.
When we import a feed, we can also
check YouTube for you and say, oh, here's
the episode on YouTube.
And so on your episode page, we'll put
the player, but we'll also put the YouTube
videos so someone can just come and watch
it.
And so obviously the natural next step from
that is people saying, well, I don't have
the feed, but I have the other.
And so we have a user that we
pull in his YouTube videos as if they
are episodes.
And it's an experimental feature that we're working
on.
And yeah.
Until YouTube decides to change something.
So your experimental feature breaks.
Exactly.
Right, right.
Um, but so we, we basically, so this
is to get back to what we're talking
about.
This user yesterday emailed us and said, hey,
yeah, we, I have, I have like, I
put all my episodes into different playlists based
on what the category is.
So the feature I need you to build
is being able to connect, build categories and
connect playlists to them.
And so when you import them, you're auto
categorizing, you know, well, they didn't say auto
categories.
No, like, so the, so the videos on
the website can be sorted by category.
Yikes.
Well, I mean, it's, so at first I
was like, well, that's just, and he even
said, cause he's a good user.
He said, I realized that YouTube isn't your
focus.
And this is probably not worth building for
you.
But this is what I would want it
to do.
How many, how many podcasts do you have
currently that are hosted with PodPage?
Active.
We've got about 20, 30,000 that have,
that have tried it.
And then, uh, you know, I don't know
what the active number is.
You're just going to the SQL database and
you ask it to count the rows.
I hear it works really well.
And you wait 15, 20 minutes.
Yeah, and it gives you a ballpark.
Yeah.
But, okay.
So this user was like, this is what
I want.
A very specific feature.
And what I, you know, when I, when
I, so I replied, I was like, just
forget all every, then you just told me,
are you just wanting us to intelligently categorize
your episodes when we import them?
Like, you're just looking for auto categories.
Your, your, your method is this weird playlist
thing.
That you'd, right.
You just want us to be able to
know like, oh, this is a cat.
This is for every, he was, it was
like a, it was a cocktail show.
And so I was like, you want us
to know that this is in your whiskey
sour playlist.
And so, you know, we've actually already, we're
working on something that probably in the next
couple of weeks, we'll release that does the
auto categorization.
Cause that's really useful for SEO and Google
to know like, hey, here's there's 500 categories
or 500 episodes, but here's how they all
break down.
So we're already working on that.
And like our, the, what we're building, we'll
already do what he wants.
So like, again, it was that, like the
problem you're trying to solve is you just
want us to get these things into some
basic categorization.
Yeah.
You're just what power users do.
They, they, they try to form, they try
to take what you've already built and sort
of like improve your product, their own solution.
And a lot of times you can do
it, you can do it that way, but
it's, it's so convoluted a lot of times.
Yeah.
But if you listen to what their intention,
you're like, oh, that makes a lot of
sense.
Why didn't, you know, so many times, so
many times I think I start with, oh
my God, that is, of course we're not
going to build that.
That's insane.
And then like, take a break, take a
breath.
And I think, why doesn't pod page do
that?
That should be like, that would make it
better.
That's a, that's a better way to do,
you know, that Google would love that.
SEO would love, you know, so.
Yeah.
You can, I think a lot of times
people will, well, most people don't realize you
can stick a YouTube RSS feed into the
podcast index and it will, it'll convert, it'll
do on the fly.
It'll convert it to standard RSS with an
enclosure and that kind of thing with a,
with a reference in the, that exact reason
was because we ran into this so many
times with people sticking YouTube feeds into the
index and just expecting it to work.
Cause it's like, well, there's an RSS feed
there, but it's, but it's not standard RSS.
You know, it's media RSS.
So it's this weird, you know, bastard format
from, you know, forever ago.
But, but eventually you just kind of give
up and say, oh yeah, you know, at
first you, you sort of like fight this
purity battle and you're like, you know, no,
no, just make a real podcast.
And then eventually you're like, whatever.
You just do it.
Let me, yeah, I, yeah, I mean, it's
power users, but you also go down to
the, the, there's a lot of podcasters that
of course, why, why would they be?
They're just non-technical.
And so we've got the people who have
all the answers and the people who have
no answers and are just super confused about
everything.
And that's a blessing too.
Cause you're like, oh, I need this to
work for both of those people.
Yeah.
You know, times when someone writes in and
says, why, how do I do this?
And I'm like, the button is literally in
the screenshot you showed me.
What?
And you just want to like, and then
you really, you think like, oh, well, why
aren't they seeing that button?
Oh, there's a lot of that color on
the screen or it doesn't, you know, you
just, you end up learning regardless.
Yeah.
It always makes the product better.
What do you, so have you been experiencing
the AI slop take, you know, explosion on
your end?
I mean, very much experiencing across the board.
I mean, podcasting specifically, people launching pod page
accounts with just purely automated shows and that
kind of thing.
Um, you know what?
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know if the show's
automated or not.
I haven't seen like a big, since the
AI stuff started happening, I haven't seen a
big uptick in like, oh, suddenly we have
a ton more people coming in.
It's still, you know, pretty steady.
Pod page is weird.
It's been like, it's been this slow.
I mean, I spent time in Silicon Valley
and it's all about exponential growth there.
Pod page has been just slow, linear growth
over the course of years.
And it's, and we don't do any marketing.
So it's just podcasters telling each other about
it.
And, um, so I haven't noticed a difference
since the AI, uh, from a content perspective,
like more podcasts being created by AI and
therefore more websites being created because there's more
podcasts.
I haven't noticed that.
I just wondered if you were, if you
would have a use for the podcast, for
the AI tagging, you know, that Spreaker and
RSS.com and others are starting to do,
saying this show is automated.
Yeah, I, I can see why that, I
think Apple said they're going to start labeling
recently.
Um, is that what I'm remembering?
On Apple Music, yeah.
Oh, Apple Music.
I mean, you know, if they did it
on music, then they do them.
I can see why it was like a
directory might want to do that because you're
in there searching and browsing.
From a, for me, I don't know if
it really matters because, you know, if, if
the creator of the podcast wants to build
a website and people go to that website
because they're interested in the podcast.
I think at that point, it's not really
my responsibility to say, Hey, just letting you
know, this is fake.
Yeah, right.
You know, it's like they're creating a brand
that it's like, you don't, at this point,
you've got to use software and most of
the software is written by AI, but they're
not tagging it like, Hey, our people didn't
make this.
So what's the, what's the, what's the, do
you have an end goal?
I mean, do you want to bundle this
up and sell it eventually?
You just want to have it run on
autopilot.
What's, what is, what are you going to
do with the rest of your life, son?
Uh, when I started it, it was not
intended to be, I started at a time
where I, I'd been working at Google for
a few years and I left Google and
I said, you know, I just want to
be creative again and build stuff.
And so I gave myself about a year
to just to build, um, tiny little apps
that aren't, that weren't very, uh, not big
ideas, not things I'd raise money for, just
like things I found interesting.
And I was like, I'm going to spend
about a month on each one.
So about 12 months went by and I
built 12 different things, all of them.
And I was like, all of them are
going to be failures, but I'm just going
to, you know, Google, I was a, you
get into this corporate, uh, workflow and you
start, for me, like it really killed my
creativity.
It killed just the idea of like, like
going zero to one on an idea for
me without a, without a Google type infrastructure,
you know, can take a day to a
week to a month.
At Google, you, to go to do anything
there, it takes, you know, a team army
of lawyers.
You can't really do anything.
So after about, after a few years there,
I felt a little like muscle atrophy coming
out of it.
And I was like, oh, I want to
just build.
One of the projects that came out of
that year was Podpage.
And so it was never intended to be,
you know, I knew when I launched, I
was like, this is a, this is never
going to be a big company because there's
this small total addressable market with generally a
low willingness to pay.
But I think it can be a really
useful product that I would never raise money
for, but could be a nice little business.
And, and over the years sort of, you
know, for a while it was growing and
I had to go get another job because
it wasn't growing.
Like I said, it's been linear.
It wasn't like a rocket ship.
And then I had another job for a
while and it was running in the background
and then it was able to support me.
And then I was able to support hiring
some people and investing more into it.
And so that's still kind of the categories.
And so it's an awesome business because it's
super flexible.
I don't, again, I didn't raise money.
So I don't answer to anyone.
We get to do whatever we want to
do.
And at the same time, it's, it's websites
are a good product for customers because it
takes, you have to support them, getting them
set up.
But then most, the best thing that you
can do for customers to not have them
use your product and still do really well
for them.
I don't know if this is a question
that concerns you at all, but the removal
of, was it XSLT from browsers?
Any thoughts on that?
It hasn't concerned me enough to really look
into.
Okay.
Yeah.
I would think that would do nothing probably
than that would probably just help you because
some hosts only do XSLT pages.
Yeah, I mean, you know, and if you
zoom out, just in general things that would
concern me, a lot of people say like,
oh, what does this business look like at
the age of AI?
Um, and I think as long as there
are podcasters, they're going to want to build
a canonical place on the web to display
their information, right?
You know, this is why I went to
the music industry for 10 years and I
was in back in the music industry in
the age of MySpace when suddenly MySpace, when
MySpace started, there was, it was very hard
to put music on the web and MySpace
made it easy.
And so all the musicians, all the labels
flocked to investing enormous amounts of time, energy
and money into building followers, a following on
MySpace.
Um, and then MySpace dies.
And so does the following and all of
the work that you've done.
And after that, there was this big ricochet
being like, you have to own your customer.
You have to own your, the relationship with
your customer.
And so I built a website platform around
that time for musicians that was like, all
you need to do is just get an
email address.
Just have some relationship.
Don't let the platform connect you to these
people.
So that was a while ago.
And that's actually, that was the entire purpose
of PodPage is I had a friend who
had a podcast and I couldn't find his
website.
And I said, where's your website?
He was like, oh, uh, I just, you
know, my stuff's on Apple and Spotify.
I was like, well, you don't have any
relationship, direct relationship with your customers.
He had a pretty big podcast.
Um, and so that's very common.
Oh, very common.
Yeah.
And so I still believe like, you know,
you shouldn't rely on the platform.
Platforms, it's an amazing thing that you can
just put your stuff into a host and
it's on, you know, Apple helps you with
distribution.
I mean, it's a huge, amazing thing, but
you should have some place that people can
come to get the information that is like,
this is the canonical information for this podcast.
And whether it's a person, which is what
it's been like from this point back, or
chat GPT, there still needs to be a
canonical place to get the information.
So I don't really worry too much about,
um, I think, I think regardless of, you
know, kind of anything, you're still gonna want
that one spot.
So, you know, that's why I haven't really
worried about many changes.
We just keep plugging away.
What'd you do at Google?
I was a product manager for, I worked
on Firebase.
So we had a really small startup that
we'd raised venture capital for.
The app spy.
We had a really small startup we'd raised
venture capital for.
It was helping.
He's still under NDA.
Can you believe it?
He can't talk about it.
I can talk.
I mean, so I'll tell you how I
got there.
So we, so we had a startup that
we were building like a photo app that
didn't work.
And then part of, this is when we
were just starting, people were just starting to
build apps.
There was so much infrastructure to build just
to launch, literally to launch and market apps
that we ended up, we built so much
of it for the app that didn't work
that we started sharing our tools with other
people.
That was called LaunchKit.
And Google saw that and it ended up
being a lot of stuff they were building
into Firebase because they bought Firebase as sort
of a database product and then wanted to
build a whole suite of developer tools.
So they did a tiny acquisition that paid
our investors back and we got great jobs.
And so I went in and worked on
Firebase for a little bit, doing some of
our, some of the tooling.
And then I moved over to a team
that was building Google's attempt at like building
a Slack for G Suite or Google Work,
for what is it called now?
Google Workplace?
Workspace, Workplace, Workspace.
The chat version that there was, there was
like an internal chat tool.
So I worked on that and then we
spent some time working on just internal developer
tools to make developers at Google more productive.
Maybe just, maybe a question out of left
field, but if you look at the Google
graveyard, how, why is it that Google creates
things and then kills them after a few
years?
Do you have any insight into that?
Well, historically, one of the things that I
disliked the most about Google, but I don't
think it's, it's not necessarily just a Google
thing.
I think this happens to a lot of
the companies is, the, as an individual at
Google, your goal in general is to, for
a lot of people, I don't mean to
generalize, but that's what I'm doing, is to
progress in your career and progressing in your
career.
I mean, all these places have these career
ladders and you want to progress up a
ladder.
And so as you want to progress up
a ladder in order to get to the
next rung of the ladder, you need to
prove that you deserve to be there.
And a lot of that is, has historically
been- I shipped a product.
I shipped shipping, not landing a product and
doing well with it.
Shipping, yeah.
But shipping, that was a big deal because,
you know, you get press and that was
a big deal for a while.
And so if you're, and, or it could
be shipped a feature.
And so there, it was, it was, that
was the most disorienting part about working there
was, you know, I would go in, I
remember one of my first days at Firebase,
I was like, okay, like this, the way
that you create these links, I was working
on this product called Dynamic Links, which was
sort of deep linking into apps for a
developer who like wanted to distribute a link
on Twitter that would get you to a
certain page.
Oh, brother, you're talking our language.
We just did that ourselves.
Yeah, yeah.
So we were building this thing.
And so I, first day I was like,
all right, well, how do you create this?
And I opened a form and it's like
a 50 field form, so confusing.
And so I went to the team and
I was like, all right, we have, I
mean, if I wasn't allowed to touch code
because I wasn't technically an engineer there, but
I was like, if I could get someone
for like a couple hours, we could turn
this into like a four page on, you
know, quick wizard kind of experience.
It'd be way easier.
It'd be very clear.
At the end of it, the user would
know what they created as opposed to now,
which is totally, it's, you can't really tell.
And I learned, you know, within my first
week, they're like, yeah, that's probably not something
we're going to do for a while.
Why?
That's going to drastically improve the user experience.
They're like, because there's, there will be no
reward for the designers working on that or
the engineers working on that.
Like that's not a feature.
That's not something I can put in my
performance review packet or someone will evaluate my
performance because it's just like, so if you,
if you notice it, and this isn't just
Google, this is a lot of big companies,
like the polish, the things that where they
come back and they make the product great
versus like just shipping it tends to be
ignored.
So that's one of the reasons that a
lot of things go to the graveyard because
the products just get shipped and then the
person shipped it says, okay, I have this
badge on my performance packet.
I got my promotion.
This is another piece.
They're like, I need to go work on
a new team so I can do another
big thing at it.
So people shift around every two years.
So the people who cared enough to build
the thing tend to move quickly to a
different department.
Yeah.
You're like, I got my senior vice president
title.
Now I don't care anymore.
Yeah.
Or another alternative is when you start wanting
to do a lot of the polish, like
everything you change at a company like Google
has to go through a legal review.
And, and it's just, I couldn't believe it.
I was like, oh my God, we're just
changing some fields around.
And they're like, well, it's got to get
a check sign off from legal.
And then the lawyer's like, well, I've got
a thousand, you know, things to sign off
on.
I can get to this in like six
weeks.
Just put it on.
It's crazy.
And I will say from everything I've heard
from people who are there now and sort
of more familiar is that it sort of
feels like they're in war mode and things
are getting shipped a lot faster.
And they're, they're trimming a lot of fat.
The other, the other thing to know about
like a company like Google and probably Facebook,
I didn't work at Facebook, but is, you
know, 90%, the vast majority of the revenue
is still made by the same thing that
made revenue 20 years ago.
Yeah.
So they had this enormous cash cow, which
they really should just be doing that.
And then everything else is like a little
experiment.
And so then, you know, what ends up
happening is people are like, that's a great
idea.
Google domains.
I wasn't part of that, but my guess
is Google domains.
Oh, the domain buying experience is awful.
Let's do something awesome.
They do it.
It is awesome.
I still think Google domains was the best
domain registrar.
And then you kind of have people are
like, well, this product isn't going to turn
into a billion dollar product.
So then the people working on it are
like, well, I'm not getting rewarded for just
continuing to improve it.
And then eventually it's like, well, why are
we even running this if it's not really
making us a ton of money?
It's not strategically important.
All right, let's just spin this out or
kill it.
Like that's kind of the, yeah, I don't
know what happens.
Yeah.
Well, that's, that's the same thing happens like
at Microsoft.
I mean, you have the, you have the
stuff that used, that made them money 25
years ago.
Windows, you know, Windows Server, Windows, Windows and
Office are still the things that make them
most of their money today.
They just have moved.
They've just recategorized it in their earnings calls
to make it look like it's in other
departments.
But if you actually, if you, if you
drill down to the actual revenue, it's still
coming from Windows and Microsoft and Office.
Now with Copilot.
Yeah, exactly.
They just keep layering these things on top
of it, but it's really just the same
core things that made the money to begin
with.
Well, but, and, and I, you know, so
that I gave sort of more of a
negative pessimistic view of the whole scenario.
The positive is like, they don't really need
to be building not, you know, 80%
of the products and features that they're building,
but they still are.
And they're still providing, you know, yeah, they
turn it, they turn them off.
But like, there's a lot of features that
launch this sort of experimental nature is why
we have features that are awesome that we
don't like, you know, I still use Gmail
or Workspace for almost everything.
I think that's an amazing product and that
you can't have those kinds of successes without
like a lot of failures.
What, what is your view on how they,
because search is still their, their core business.
I mean, I presume that's what you, what
you were saying earlier and advertising through search.
How do you think AI, can they really
pull this off?
Can they really make it profitable to incorporate
all that and still have their ad business
working?
I have no idea.
I haven't, to be honest, like it's been
so, and I stopped working at Google in
2019, I think, and I still have a
huge amount of respect for the company.
I love, I still love them.
But I think, you know, I still think
it's a, it's a really, well, I think
it's definitely the best company I've ever worked
for.
I mean, the way they treat their employees
is amazing and the autonomy they give you.
And there's a lot of process, but if
you can put that headache aside, like as
far as just having a good job, it's,
there's just, it's a great, it's a great
place to work.
And I think the stuff that they're building,
you know, you can tell it's, might not
exist in the world for a very long
time, but it's, some of it will and
it's great.
So, you know, I think corporate process is
a pain no matter where it is, but
I'm a fan of them, but I don't
spend a lot of time thinking about the
company anymore.
I, I think that they.
That sounds healthy.
Yeah, it does.
I think that they like, I don't know
what the ad business looks like in the
age of AI.
I'm sure that they will figure something out
that's interesting, but I do think they are
executing really well on AI in general.
And it's really hard when you have a
business, I don't know what their earnings are
at this point, but the numbers are just
so crazy that it's like, how do you
compete with that?
Like everything seems like a side project when
you're making that much money.
Well, I mean, these are, these are not,
these are not to me, they're not really
tech companies anymore.
They're mostly financial services, firms that sell software.
And, you know, I mean, like they do,
they do software as a facilitation of that,
of that goal.
I mean, so much, so much of what
these big tech behemoths like Microsoft and Google
and Apple and Facebook, so much of what
they do is, is really just money management.
I mean, they're doing, you know, they're doing
financial.
They're doing financial structuring, selling bonds by a
share buybacks, you know, they're, they're, the goal
is to, is to move their money financially
in a way that keeps that thing going.
And then the technology part of it, the
software part of it, there's still people in
those companies that care deeply about it and
ship beautiful products.
But it's really, it's really secondary to what
the C-suite is, is really looking for,
you know, that's, that's just a, that's a
financial end game.
Yeah.
And I mean, at the size of those
companies, though, I mean, you can't, what else
do you expect?
I mean, if you're, if you're, if you're
making $120 billion in profit a quarter or
something like, like these companies are, how do
you, of course, you're going to be, all
of your time is going to be consumed
with financial issues because, I mean, now you're
talking about the size, now you're talking about
financial concerns that are the size of the
GDP of countries.
Dave, I'm going to, I'm going to stop
you because if you look at the time,
I don't know if you have to be
somewhere today, but Brendan, it was so nice
to hear your story and we're real happy
for your success and love how you're incorporating
podcasting 2.0 features and you're carrying that
banner.
Love that you've given Dave Jackson a home,
a good guy.
I bump into him from time to time,
like he's a good guy.
He's just a good guy.
Here's that good guy again.
Dave, you want to, I don't, I can't
give any current boost because what happened is,
I guess my start nine decided to lose
its tour connection three days ago.
And so I lost my channels and then
I tried to log into our node.
Did you change the password?
No.
Oh, then we may have other issues.
Oh crap.
No, that's not good.
It's also possible.
I'm just not a lot.
I mean, I think maybe my IP address
changed or something because I can't, I can't
get to it from.
Oh, you're not whitelisted anymore.
I guess not.
So you'll just have to do all the
thank yous.
Oh, okay.
Well, I mean, let me do some PayPals.
Okay.
Real quick.
See, we got, these are all, all in
one batch.
We got William Cockrell, $10.
Thank you, William.
Appreciate that.
That's a one-off.
We got Lauren Ball, $24.20. Podverse, that's
Mitch and the boys, $50.
Christopher Harbaric, $10.
Oh, Mitch.
Here's Mitch Downey by himself, $10.
Thank you, Mitch.
Oh, let's see.
We have, this was a weird one.
We had a new subscription.
Oh, hold on.
Oh, good call.
Oh, we got a new subscription, but it
says, amount that will be paid each time
is $0.
So I don't understand how that works.
You've been refragmented.
Yeah, yeah.
You did, yeah.
Fragment that guy.
Terry Keller, $5.
Terry had been giving for a long time.
Chris Cowan, $5.
Thank you, Chris.
Silicone Florist, $10.
Paul Saltzman, $22.22. As always.
Derek J.
Visker, the best name in podcasting, $21.
Damon Kasejak, $15.
And then we got some, oh, wait, we
just got another PayPal that came in.
That's a last minute.
Who is this?
Oh, this from Sam Sethi, $200.
Thank you, Sam.
Appreciate that.
Sammy has a note here.
He says, go publisher feeds.
Also proposed AI tag is now working in
TrueFans with RSS.com and Spreaker.
TrueFans video hosting goes live Monday.
Monday 3 p.m. with MP4 streaming.
No download.
Watch time metric.
HLS supported in the alternate enclosure tag.
Live podcasting next.
All right.
Nice.
Very nice.
Just as Podbean goes away from live feeds.
Very strange, strange company.
Well, that whole Podbean support of live stuff
was always very proprietary.
I think it only worked on their app
and their website.
Rather iffy, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
The closed system.
Oh, Bruce.
So we got some boosts here.
We got Bruce, the ugly quacking duck.
22, 22 sats.
The podcast really says after much argument, all
is still the same.
LOL.
Adam moved my FT8 to a different computer.
Are you working?
What is what is FT8?
It is a digital ham radio mode, baby.
Oh, OK.
He says, Adam, move my FT8 to a
different computer.
Are you working FT8?
N9UQD, my call, if you are.
Yes, 73 kilo 5 alpha Charlie Charlie.
No, I'm down right now.
I'm down.
I've got a I'm down.
I'm down.
Everything's down.
The node, the ham, everything.
But my gossip is rocking and rolling.
It's ClaudeBot.
ClaudeBot just took it all down.
No, Claude has been removed from the system.
Believe me, Claude is gone.
Thanks for the episode.
Go AI slop and free accounts.
73.
It's the future.
Chris, you know, since 2345 sets through fountain,
he says, thrilled to hear Castamatic is testing
Nostra Wallet Connect.
Awesome.
No longer will I have podcast wallets hit
zero balance without realizing it.
Auto top ups with a monthly budget will
be fantastic.
Yeah, Franco's really he's he's digging in over
there.
And we got a delimiter.
Commissary blogger, 21,000 sets through fountain, he
says.
Howdy, Dave and Adam.
Today, I want to promote a podcast by
Adam Curry and his local pastor, Jimmy Pruitt.
To subscribe, go to Webcat website podcast index
dot org and search for Adam Curry.
It's third from top in that podcast.
They talk politics and religion merely by listening
to this podcast.
You automatically go to heaven after you die.
Fact.
Yo, CSB, AI arch wizard.
And then we got a oh, oh, we
got a Dreb Scott, one, two, three, four
from Castamatic with us with single word note.
This is test, test, test, received, test, test,
test.
Thank you all very much.
Go to podcast index dot org and go
to the bottom as a red donate button
for your fiat fund coupons.
Sorry if I missed your live boost.
We'll catch those next week and we'll put
those in.
And we just appreciate everybody who's supporting the
podcast index dot org project.
All of it keeps the machines running.
How many machines we have running right now,
Dave?
Oh, 18, 20, 20, 23.
Yes.
So your work, your work is going towards
good things and people can make wonderful stuff
with it.
Case in point, there's Brendan.
Do you actually do you use the index
for your lookups?
You're still sucking off Apple.
Um, let's see a question.
I changed that a year ago and I
can't remember.
It's too much to keep checking.
It's all yeah.
Brendan, you're sprawling, sprawling.
Brendan, thank you so much.
We appreciate you being here and congratulations on
all your success, man.
Thank you.
Great talking to you too.
All right, Dave.
Sorry I kept you a little longer.
But if you hurry, then you can just
get to that zoom call in on time.
Yep, yep, yep.
That's exactly what he's doing.
All right, boardroom.
Thank you very much for being here, RTP.
I hope you enjoyed everything except the first
part of the show.
We'll be back next week with podcasting 2
.0. Podcasting
2.0. Visit podcastindex.org for more information.
Go podcasting!
Your whole product is a dirty face.
Okay.