Podcasting 2.0 for March 27th, 2026, episode
255, Snark Week.
Hello, everybody.
Once again, it is Friday.
It is a overcast day here in the
Texas Hill Country, but it's bright and shiny
in your podcast app because it's time for
Podcasting 2.0. Yes, the official board meeting
of the group.
We are, in fact, the only boardroom that
doesn't pay salaries or dividends.
I'm Adam Currie here in the heart of
the Texas Hill Country and in Alabama, the
man who worked for 20 hours on Podping
only to get snarked at.
Say hello to my friend on the other
end, the one, the only, Mr. Dave Jones.
I've been snarked.
You know, I've been snarked.
It's been one of those weeks for me.
For me too.
Yes.
Like for a lot of reasons, like a
lot of personal reasons having to do with,
you know, people I interact with at work
and stuff.
It's just been snark week.
It's like shark week, but not entertaining.
Oh, we already have a title right off
the bat, snark week.
But there's something, I think it has something
to do with podcasts themselves.
You know, I do a lot of podcasts
and I've noticed over the past couple of
months, maybe six months to a year, but
increasingly so in the past few months, that
people who interact with me and I'm pretty
reachable, you know, email X, that would really
be it.
Email and X.
I don't look at much else.
But people think they can say the most
obnoxious, annoying, sometimes hateful and mean things.
And it has increased and it has something
to do with podcasting, I think, in particular.
And I think it's that people want, really
want to be a part of the podcast
or they feel that they're, they're so connected
to the podcast and that when they're talking
to you, they're on the podcast.
Seriously, I mean, and this has been a
difficult couple of weeks for me, like very
difficult with Dvorak being out and, you know,
trying to keep the ship afloat with Mimi.
It's not easy.
You know, you got someone who's never done
it before.
John's back.
He's clearly not 100%.
I mean, it's obvious to me, not to
everybody, but I can tell, you know, so,
you know, there's like more energy for me
is going into it.
But then, you know, the things people will
say, you know, just rude and mean things.
And like, where do you, where do you
think you, I mean, who gave you permission
to be like that?
I'm not sure what exactly.
I'll give you an example.
C11 Brooklyn just said something shitty on the
Mastodon.
Like, are you going to talk about AI
today or be about podcasting?
This is the voice I hear in my
head when I read it, you see.
And I'm like, who are you?
Who are you?
You're on the Mastodon I pay for, listening
on the live stream I pay for, with
a project that Dave has poured his entire
life into.
Who are you?
Without this podcast, without this podcast, without the
board meeting, would it be as successful?
With everyone just jacking off on a GitHub?
Probably not.
There's another show title jacking off on a
GitHub.
They're just falling out.
This is what a little bit of aggravation
will do.
It'll just show title engines.
And it's just, and, you know, I really
try to have patience and self-control and,
and it's hard.
It's been very, very hard.
I'm losing my shit over stuff.
And, and of course, you know, people in
the, you know, if I, and I'm trying
not to comment, if I comment, then it's
like, oh yeah, I got them now.
But the same people show up in my
life all over the place.
And probably the worst is like, I consider
podcastindex.social to be kind of a safe
place for us, X, you know, whatever.
But it's the, it's the boardroom and the
troll room.
I know it's called the troll room.
People just, they say things and I mean,
I pay attention.
I'm, I've trained myself over years to have
this third eye peripheral vision to be looking
at what's going on.
I think it makes the podcast really exciting
and interactive, but all kinds of people, even
people who are friends will just say shit.
I'm like, don't do that.
Do you realize I'm reading it?
And in real time, I think they do,
but it's just like, it's your own podcast.
It makes me not want to even look
at the, the boardroom or the, or the
troll room or anything.
Something has changed and I'm going to blow
my shofar for these people.
If I can get it to work.
Yeah.
This sounds more like a Vuvuzela.
I can get it.
Hold on.
It takes a second.
I get, it's like a trumpet.
I can't do it with headphones.
Hold on.
Let me take the headphones off.
There's something about that.
Almost.
The headphones didn't matter.
Close enough.
You're not going to be able to finish
the show.
You're going to be so.
Tina's like, that was bad.
I can't blow it with my headphones on
for some reason.
It's very hard to blow it with the
headphones.
Your face is probably purple right now from
this.
That's about how I feel actually, the way
that sounds.
It's like a, it's like a bird.
It's like a kid's birthday party.
When all the, with the balloon just fly.
If you were, if you were hoping to
inspire people and call them to the mountain.
Yeah, we're still, we're still in the desert.
We're not at the mountain.
It made me feel better.
Okay, good.
Well, that's, that does count for something.
Yeah, it does.
No, I mean, I see, I know what
you, I think it's more than just, I
think it's more than just podcasting.
I think there's a general, I don't know,
fatigue and frustration with lots of things going
on in the world.
I know lots of people checking out from
like news and stuff in general.
Sure.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
It's like, they can't talk and you can't
really tolerate that, that sort of thing right
now for some reason.
And, and I, I don't really, I don't
really know, but I feel like there is
a, a vibe that's going through just society
in general.
There's also, there's always these like lulls that
happen too.
And well, James, you know, James and Sam
were talking about on power.
They were talking about how there's some big
changes coming for Spotify and they, they're not
exactly sure what they are yet or anything
like that.
Oh, I didn't listen today.
So I missed it.
What do you, any, any word, you have
any idea?
Uh, they were just, well, James was saying
that he thinks some stuff's going to happen
with their video, you know, product and that
kind of thing, video podcasting product.
And of course it will, it would probably
have to, and they laid off people and
then, um, who was it?
Some, uh, Epic games also laid off a
thousand employees out of 3000.
There's these, these, I think, I think these
row, the, the economy is pretty, is we
all, we know it's sort of rotten from
the under, from underneath.
And that's been taking its toll on a
lot of tech, you know, tech people, tech,
tech in general is protected from economic downturns
for, for many, many, many years for decades.
But it's kind of caught up at this
point.
And I don't know, I just think there's
a general, um, malaise that's happening.
Yeah, that could be it.
I mean, yeah, people are definitely spinning up,
spinning out and has people on edge.
Yeah.
It has me on edge too.
I mean, I, I, I have, I've been
unable to sleep beyond like four 30 every
single night for the weeks for weeks.
Exactly.
It is Rick.
I can't believe you said that because I
suddenly, um, the same thing is happening to
me.
I've always been a six o'clock, six
30 guy.
Yeah.
Me too.
Six 36.
I'm gonna say we're six 30 guys, ladies.
It's a six 30 club.
And then suddenly about two or three weeks
ago, I cannot sleep past about five, five
30 at the most.
It's usually four 30 or five.
And I don't know why.
Yeah.
And it's not, it's not like I'm tired
when I wake up.
Like I'm not tired.
Yeah.
I'm okay.
But then, and even, you know, we go
to bed 10 o'clock and I'm not,
I'm not really saying, yeah, I'm not like,
Oh boy, what a long, I mean, show
day sometimes are long, but I'm like, what
a long day.
Hmm.
Okay.
Well, that's interesting.
So there's definitely something in the air.
Well, you know, my, my theory, so my,
my theory with vibe coding is, was, is
that it has the same dopamine dynamics as
video games.
Hmm.
And in the past, I haven't been much
of a gamer really at all for, for
many, many years, but I was, when I
was young and what I remember from my
teens and, or, you know, uh, in twenties
was that when you have, when you get
super involved in a game, in a video
game, like some, something that's pretty intense.
And this, this can happen with TV shows
too.
Um, but, but video games, I noticed it
more.
You're, um, what you end up, sometimes you
end up having dreaming about the game because
especially if you, if you play the game
right up to the point when you go
to sleep, but, but it also can happen
just, just because you're, you're, I think it's
because your brain is so, um, focused on
this one thing that those patterns just begin
to play over and over and over in
your mind.
And then you'll go to sleep and you'll
dream about this and it will definitely affect
your sleep.
And I think it, and so I turned
a buddy of mine on to where we
talk, uh, he's a tech guy and I
taught, I was telling him to give cloud
code a shot.
And so I got him into the cloud
code, you know, vibe coding world.
And so then he's, he's, he put messages
in me not too long ago and he's
like, uh, man, this thing is awesome.
I'm already knocking out stuff.
I'm, I'm creating apps, I'm doing all this
kind of stuff.
And he was like, and you're dead.
And he, this guy's a heavy gamer, daily
video game user.
And he was like, he was like, I'm
on like day five of, of hammering out
apps with cloud code.
And I haven't played a video game in
five days.
Okay.
I think you're onto something here.
Um, and, and as an aside, thank you
for helping me understand the difference between using,
and yeah, it's a little bit of AI
chat just a little bit, but I've been
building podcast applications.
So maybe I can sweep by with that.
Um, I was using open code.
Uh, I hit my Zen big pickle limit
and so, okay, I'll try a Claude sonnet
four dot five, six, whatever it is.
Well, that, that ate like a hundred dollars
in two hours, like a pack, just ate
it up.
And then you said, no, no, no, you've,
you've got to use Claude code or use
the, the CLI.
So I didn't realize that you, and I
haven't really use it that, I mean, I've
been just been using for today, um, using
Claude code.
I don't know if it has, if it's
exactly the same as open code, but it's,
you can certainly go into a directory and
say, fix this.
And it's been fixing things.
And so that apparently will cost less if
you get like the max subscription.
That's, that's what I'm led to believe.
Yes.
Okay.
Um, it's yeah, you, you just, you just
have a limit, but I can promise you
you'll never hit it.
Okay.
That's a big promise because I am that
guy you just described.
I am that guy.
And the first thing I built, there's been
two, two things in my podcasting life that
have been an issue.
One is, and if you're doing value for
value, I don't know how people do it.
Um, but if you have a spreadsheet, spreadsheet,
spreadsheet applications are the worst for a smooth
donation read, because it's all, you know, cause
you have, you have notes and you got
different things and then it'll snap and then,
and you, you can say word wrap all
you want.
It never does it right.
So it's very difficult to just have a
smooth scroll on the spreadsheet.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, totally.
So it's not snapping to cells.
So I, so I vibe coded a donation,
uh, spreadsheet reader, which really, really is amazing
because it, I run it through my local
model here through the note to extract the
jingle requests because people are always requesting all
these wacky jingles and I'm always searching around
for them.
And it takes me, you know, 25 minutes
before the show just to find them and
put them in a folder and have them
ready.
And you know, you're reading and you're searching
for the jingles and setting them up at
the same time.
So now it, it scans the note and
it does it on my, on my local
Raspberry Pi setup.
It extracts the jingle request, pretty good at
that.
And then, um, I, I built a little
server into my play out system, the curry
caster available on the GitHub.
Um, and so it searches for the jingle
and it sets it up and all you
have to do is hit the, hit the
cell on the spreadsheet and it lines up
the jingles.
Yeah, it's nice.
Dude, perfect.
Dude, this, this is like, this is what
I'm talking about.
This is functional for me.
And then I also, and I'm, I also,
I'm, I've been working on a, uh, an
O an outliner standalone.
Yeah.
Standalone outliner because browser stuff just has its
drawbacks.
Uh, in, uh, in my life, it has
a lot of drawbacks and a man you
want to talk about recursion issues.
Try and include node.
Oh man.
And include node rendering HTML.
We've got recursion.
Yeah.
This, yeah.
We're you're, you're, you're coding OPML like it's
a 1999.
Yeah.
Anyway, but it's interesting because open code could
not figure it out with big pickle, with,
uh, GPT five, you know, code X five,
two, or with Claude sonnet.
But then I fire up, go open.
Yeah.
But I fire up Claude code.
Boom.
Fixes everything within 10 minutes.
Amazing.
They, they just have some sort of magic
that nobody else has figured out yet.
And I don't know what it is.
Now can Claude code also like do stuff
like SSH to, into a different server and
do stuff or do you have to kind
of set it up on that server individually?
No, it's fully agentic.
You just have to give it those permissions.
Oh, okay.
Um, the, the thing, like, I just feel
like we're paying a price that we don't
understand yet.
Oh yeah.
Well, no kidding.
You know what I mean?
Like this, this, these things are, um, these
things are making truly they're enabling us to
do truly important things that are, that we
would not have been able to do before.
But, but there is a cost.
It's sort of like, what's the old out
the alchemy thing.
It's like, whatever you can create gold out
of lead, but you have to pay this
cost for, you know, there's a cost that
has to be paid.
And this, I feel like we're paying the
cost collectively.
There's a, there's a mental health cost that
I do not understand fully yet.
And I will admit that all day long.
This is where, this is where I was
going.
You're absolutely right.
I think it's a part of it because
I wake up and I always, the first
thing I always do good morning, Holy spirit,
Lord's prayer.
If I, if I, if I don't get
it right, I do it again.
Then I get up and then in my
head is, oh, how about that?
So OPML project.
I wonder if I could approach it this
way.
Yeah.
You're right.
That I think, I think it's, I think
it's tapping into, into the nervous system.
It's doing something that's not good.
And it doesn't mean that it doesn't mean
that there's anything inherently bad or that we
have to stop using the tools or anything
like that necessarily.
It's just that we don't, this is new.
This is all very new and we just
don't understand how to deal with this stuff
yet.
But that, but you have to go through
these growing pains in order to learn how
to have a healthy relationship with these, with
things that are new this way.
How, how does, how is it different from
just regular coding?
Well, because it's gamified.
I think that's really the issue because you,
you feel they, the speed at which you're
able to do things makes, well, see, that's
what, okay, I'm trying, I'm trying to figure
out where to start because that was, that's
the issue with video games and why they
become very addictive is because they allow you
to short circuit the normal payment cost, the
normal cost, the cost is your time and
your, and your mental attention.
They allow you to make, to sort of
circumvent that and go in the back door.
And so it makes the, it makes the
effort reward cycle very, very short and it
makes it very fast.
So you're just like, bam, bam, bam, bam,
bam, bam.
Right.
And then when it slows down, it's sort
of like listening to podcasts in 2X.
When you slow the pace down and you're
not doing it anymore, your mind's like, wait,
wait, wait, no, but keep, keep going, keep
going, keep going.
You can't, why are you stopping?
Yeah.
I need this.
I need you to keep doing this.
But because it's a, because it's sort of
like a vague goal, the goal is just
produce features.
It's not like this one particular thing.
Then I feel like you just have this
sort of vague anxiety and you don't really
know what it is.
I don't even know if it's that vague.
It's pretty real, man.
It's pretty real.
Like I had this, uh, you can bring
a, you can bring a, yeah, this is
a good idea because I'm sure he has
some contributions.
Welcome to the board meeting, uh, here at
the big table, the one and only Nathan
G as we know him, Nathan Gathright.
Hello.
What's up brother.
Are you still not working for Spotify?
I'm still not working for Spotify.
I work over the link tree these days.
The only guy I know who sells something
gets paid, gets it back and then gets
the name back and then somehow didn't have
to give the money back.
It's always nice when it works out like
that.
That is fabulous.
I am, I am in awe of, uh,
of this, uh, of what you've done here.
Do you have good lawyers or is it
just Spotify stupid?
Uh, I, I think they just realized it
wasn't really a thing they needed when they
acquired pod sites and they acquired charitable, they
essentially got two different versions of the same
thing and didn't really need, uh, the one
that was not as deeply hooked into like
charitable system.
So mine could very easily be cut loose.
And I had friends on the inside who
were, uh, you know, maybe felt bad that
I got laid off and were willing to
put in the time and energy to convince
their lawyers that it would be a, uh,
you know, an, a gesture of goodwill to
the open podcasting ecosystem to have this be
out in the public again.
And, you know, they wanted that, that headline
out there.
And I was, uh, just the lucky recipient
of all those circumstances.
Well, amen to that, man.
That's fantastic.
I'm real happy for you.
I love pod, pod.link. I use it
for everything for all my podcasts.
Yeah.
People love it.
They love it.
You know, if I don't, if I, I
forgot what was something, maybe it was like
a couple of months ago, it wasn't working.
I was like, I'll just do my regular
link.
And right away I get, Hey man, where's
the pod.link?
This is no good.
That I've got you see, you wrote, you
wrote this article and you, and you, uh,
you wrote this blog posts, I guess, uh,
you released it this morning, I think.
Um, but, but before I don't, I don't
want to talk about that yet.
I want to talk about, cause something else
kind of jumped in the way of that,
uh, discussion.
Uh, and I've got other things that are
the whole, I'm afraid we're not even going
to talk about the whole reason I asked
you, uh, into the boardroom today, but we'll
try to get there.
But, uh, Dustin Block from cast the Castro
app developer, he responded to you, you made
this post and you're, you were talking about
the, uh, you know, so open, open, open
discovery for podcasts, uh, uh, for RSS and
that kind of thing.
And so Dustin jumped in and he said,
and I'm, this is not really necessarily about
him.
It's just about what he said.
He said, um, why don't he said podcast
apps have spent far too time optimizing for
open web standards and far too little time
on features that users actually care about.
And that, that phrase at the end there,
just the snippet that use the features that
users actually care about that.
It kind of jumped out at me because
we've heard that for a very long time.
That phrase comes up a lot when it's
things like, uh, the podcast person tag or,
you know, podcast scheduling tag.
And these there's all, there's a lot of
times that we do something in the namespace
or 2.0 where we hear that phrase.
And the, I mean, I don't really want
to lock in on any particular wording that
he used there, because I think if he
was, if he was here with us having
this discussion, then, um, I think he may
like phrase it different and that kind of
thing.
So I don't want to get hung up
on that, but like we had a topic
that we discussed heavily internally with Godcaster over
the past week.
And it was like a similar nature.
It's like, on the one hand, you have
customers telling you they want a thing.
And then on the other hand, you have
this vision for what the product is, is,
or could be that you, that conflicts with
that, at least in your mind.
And this is a longstanding like debate.
You have this Steve Jobs idea that users,
you know, users don't know what they actually
want and you have to figure it out
and design it and give it to them.
And then they see it fully formed in
like, oh, I never even knew I wanted
that.
It's beautiful.
But, but now I can't live without it.
You have that on one side, you know,
and then you have on the other side,
this idea of like building your product based
on market research and customer feedback and these
things that you're, you're building what the customer
tells you they want.
And it was kind of like this juxtaposition
of those two ideas that got me thinking
about this.
And like, I've got some ideas, but I
want to know like, what, what are, what's
your initial thoughts on that whole idea as
related to like what, what Dustin was talking
about?
For sure.
I absolutely am like in complete agreement with
Dustin, honestly, that yes, they should prioritize what
users want or what users need or what's
good for users.
You know, find the right phrasing, whatever, whatever
you think works there.
But it really comes down to a strong,
like ownership of the vision of your product.
Podlink has always faced people who said like,
yeah, I'd really love Podlink, but can you
like just show Apple, Spotify, and Google, and
then swapped out Google for YouTube, you know,
when, when that deprecated.
And I'm like, no, that's not my vision
for this product.
A, I use, you know, Pocket Cast most
of the time.
And the whole reason I made Podlink was
because I wanted, you know, the eighth place
podcast app to be included as something that
every major podcaster linked out to.
Right.
And so I've always sort of had a
strong vision.
And at first part of that was that
I limited the list to basically only people
who were in the top 1% of
all podcast apps, which was, you know, less
than a dozen.
And when I did the like episodes.fm
relaunch, and then was able to, you know,
rebrand that back into Podlink, expanded that to
every single link that I could support.
That was an expansion of that vision to
say, no, I think actually listeners are willing
to, you know, not be overwhelmed by a
list and pick something and set a cookie
and a default so that they don't have
to browse the list every time, things like
that.
Here's a question.
Yeah.
If every single one of your customers was
paying, if they were paying for your product,
would that change how you listen to them?
Definitely.
I think there's, but I would, you know,
find a way to make sure that I'm
like, still achieving the mission that I wanted
to accomplish, which was to make an open,
you know, listing that anybody could use.
That doesn't mean that if somebody is paying
me that I couldn't also give them, you
know, additional bespoke URLs, but it doesn't necessarily
mean that that's the URL anybody who visits
the homepage, you know, would see.
So I'd like find ways to make my
customers happy.
I've, you know, explored like, can customers make
a custom sort order of this list?
Can they, you know, hide certain links?
I've thought about it.
But I don't think, you know, I think
that was one of the advantages that Chartable
had over me is that basically all their
links were private links.
So every single podcaster could make a bespoke
list of apps they wanted for any given
marketing campaign and send out a link to
their SmartLinks product.
But Podlink, you know, it was open first,
but that also came with the benefits that
any listener could share a Podlink to their
favorite show and not wait for the podcaster
to set it up first in any way.
And so then it could grow just by
the virtuous cycle of listeners sharing it with
other listeners, podcasters seeing that, podcasters using it
to promote their own show, other podcasters seeing
that, and the cycle repeats, right?
And so I never wanted to lose that.
And I like recognize if I allowed podcasters
to hide the apps that they didn't care
for off the list, that would be breaking
that core growth mechanic for my product.
So I'm like, all right, I can find
a way to, you know, satiate, you know,
my paying customers with something, but it doesn't
necessarily mean that I have to break the
other things I believe in.
Do you think that would you, would it
be fair to say that you think open
was an open standards and sort of adhering
to that open mindset was a negative for
you as far as growth and your business
and stuff like that?
Or is that going too far?
No, I think that's going too far.
Like, I think I really only ever sold
Podlink as, you know, for the paying customers.
They basically got a vanity URL and they
got the tiny little 120 pixel by 60
pixel banner ad off the sidebar.
They never really got more than that.
And it was cheap enough that they couldn't
really complain that they weren't getting a ton
more features for that price.
So I was never under that much pressure.
And then we made it free and we
gave those features away and added even more.
And, you know, I'd like to add a
paid tier back to Podlink at some point,
but, you know, life's been just too busy
to make that happen.
That's very helpful.
Thank you.
Yeah.
I think that like, it sounds like to
me, and this is kind of where I've,
my mind has been heading this morning, sort
of thinking through these things after I read
that from Dustin, I was, I was thinking
that, you know, there's not really, as, as
is often the case, there's not really a,
there's not a right answer to these kinds
of questions because the answer is really, I
mean, the answer is both.
I mean, the answer is you, you know,
you have, you have list, you know, customers,
listeners, whatever you want to phrase that for
your, for a podcast app, you have, you
have these customers, but, and they tell you
they want things and you can't ignore that.
You have to do it to, in some
degree, but then you also have a vision
and the, the difficulty is sort of, is
trying to meld those two things together so
that they, so that you don't lose the
integrity of either one, you know?
And like, cause I was thinking to myself,
what, what is the point of an open
standard?
So like, if you just ask yourself that
question, what, what is, when you write a
standard, if you're, if you're doing that work,
what are you actually trying to achieve?
Works anywhere with anything.
Yeah.
When people, yeah.
Interop.
Yeah.
Interop.
That's it.
Yeah.
I think, but also there is this aspect
that lock-in is part of the goal,
you know?
Like, do you remember that article or blog
post that the guy that used to be
the CEO of Spotify wrote a few years
ago where he said that the reason podcasting
had not advanced is because of RSS had
people locked into a particular standard?
Yeah.
Yes.
I remember this.
Yeah.
And so I don't remember what his name
was, but- Mike Mignano.
Yes.
Thank you, Mike Mignano.
But he, he wrote this and the thing
about it was he wasn't completely wrong.
I mean, he wasn't completely wrong.
The RSS did lock people in.
I mean, now it was, it's a closed
spec in that sense, but the podcast, you
know, the podcast namespace obviously made that idea
not really hold up over time, but he
wasn't long, he wasn't wrong in the larger
sense.
I mean, so like we, to the point
that, well, like lock-in is part of
the goal as developers, we want to, we
want there to be one standard we can
follow because that makes interop work.
But, you know, and then, and having to
support a half dozen protocols and standards just
make us, just makes us crazy.
And we slowed it and it slows everything
down.
So, but, but then we also have this
idea of wanting to be open.
So there's, again, there's this like tension, this
paradox.
And so we do things like we try
to bake in the idea of extensibility to
the spec.
So RSS 2.0 did this by like
writing on top of the XML namespace feature
and ActivityPub, like for example, has extensibility baked
in where you can define new actors and
actions and object types over time.
But, but then again, in practice, as is
so often the case, people don't, people don't
do that very often because you'll have this
thing, you have like, for example, ActivityPub, you
have Mastodon.
It's the dominant application in the ecosystem.
And it's going to always just display your
fancy new actors and objects and events.
It's just going to cast them to types
that already understands and all your, all your
new fancy stuff is just going to kind
of get, get munged into these existing object
types.
And so you just lose, and it makes
every, it makes the developers that would do
cool things kind of like not want to
do it because they don't want to see
it.
Like, I don't know, I feel like there's
this constant tension between those two things.
And when, and when Dustin is saying that,
I feel like he's expressing the, the thoughts
of a lot of developers in podcasting, where
there is this constant tension between doing something
new and maintaining adherence to some, to some
kind of standard.
Do you, do you feel that all the
time as well?
Yeah, I think ultimately everybody's really in trying
to pursue the same goal, which is the
sustainability of the project, either the sustainability of
the open ecosystem or the sustainability of their
own app.
And so they're not going to waste time
and dev hours on things that are going
to actually increase their support burden.
So I linked his blog post in the
boardroom.
And one of the things he was talking
about is getting hundreds of podcast listening apps
out there to adopt a comment section for
podcast episodes, back when he was just running
Anchor and not part of Spotify.
And so he didn't control a app side
UX, and so he couldn't do a listener
experience.
But there's nothing stopping Apple for making a
comment section and saying, yep, everybody with an
Apple ID can comment on this and it's
not in an open way.
And really, I think in podcasting, sort of
that burden is, if you try to, you
know, maybe a little bit of like tall
poppy syndrome or something like that, where if
you try to jump ahead, you're actually inviting
a huge support burden of like, well, all
my listeners in Apple podcasts are going to
complain, all my listeners in XYZ app are
going to complain because it only works over
here.
But that's, you know, that's a little bit
running with scissors, like you got to accept
that burden if you are trying to push
the medium forward in some way.
When I built Steno.fm, I was basically
treating, I was like, I'm going to design
as if the podcast standards or as if
the podcast transcript tag is universal.
I'm going to make a transcript to be
the default tab instead of the show notes
and show a little error message if you
don't have it, but basically put the blame
on the podcaster for not getting with the
times.
And I knew that this was not going
to be an enormous success, but I was
like, I just wanted to design under that
premise and see what comes out of that.
And then, you know, you say like, yeah,
I'd build this feature and this feature and
this feature and just say, sorry folks, you
know, for the ones who didn't have the
transcript.
And you can see other apps taking different
approaches to that, Overcast buying 48 Mac minis
and deciding that they need to compete with
Apple podcasts by doing all the transcription themselves.
If I can just say, I think Franco
nailed it.
It was so obvious what he did with
Castamatic that I'm kicking myself.
We had this whole conversation, never actually came
up with it.
And he said, just doing it on device.
Different though.
He said, if you want a transcript, hit
this button.
If you want a, if you want chapters,
hit this button.
He's not doing it.
He's giving the user the same option as
skip ahead, listen quicker, double speed, all this
stuff, optional.
I think that's a brilliant way of doing
it.
Yeah.
I think Fountain basically was also doing that,
but charging sats for it.
Trying to see if that was a monetization
lever for the app itself.
If it's using your own devices processing, then
you can.
Well, also then you, this is what Dave
has always wanted for this one podcast that
he listens to that has no chapters.
It was Windows Weekly.
Security Now.
Eh, whatever.
It's all from the same, it's all from
Petaluma.
Yeah, right.
So, security now, and all you have to
do is now you, you, you have the
podcast, it's on your podcast app.
And then you can say, oh, I want
magic chapters from Castamatic.
You hit the button, it gives you chapters.
And I feel there's no violation of what
the RSS feed had.
There's no violation.
I mean, you've got the podcast, whether you
decide to burn that to a disc, to
throw your phone in the trash.
I mean, it's all up to you.
I think that is a, that was so
obvious and so elegant.
I mean, that's essentially what steno.fm did,
except you just did it off device.
You, you did it like it wasn't in
an app form necessarily.
I, I never actually offered transcription.
I mean, I, I built transcribe.fm as
well with, and I was going to sort
of merge the two at some point.
Um, but steno.fm basically was just like,
sorry, you are SOL if this podcaster did
not provide their own transcript.
And I had some feature branches along the
way that were like, yeah, you can maybe
upload your own, um, or other things like
that.
But you used L402 at some point, right?
Yeah.
The transcribe.fm was, is essentially transcription as
a service, but I didn't actually tie it
back into the like podcaster, uh, or like
the listener facing UI.
Yeah.
That's right.
I mean, I think there's this trade, like
there's this, I think maybe it's helpful sometimes
to think about what, not what users want.
Um, I know Dave Weiner used to kind
of bristle at the, at calling people users.
And that's, that's the thing that I always
admired about him.
I think, uh, users, the way developers and
it people talk about, about people as quote
users, I think it can be sort of,
um, uh, not fair sometimes, or it's sort
of like, you know, looking down on, on
them, but like not what users want, but,
but like, what P what do people want?
You know?
I mean, and that includes developers.
That's, you know, so what do we all
want?
We want new, well, we want new experiences
that in my opinion, we want ice cream.
We just want ice cream day.
If that's all we really want is ice
cream, ice cream for the boardroom, beef milkshakes
for everybody involved.
We want, we want, I think we want
new experiences that make things either novel or
convenient, meaning like they like less friction in
our life.
Um, you know, and like I said, that's
not just, that's not just something that look
like users and customers want.
That's what we all want.
And I think it's human nature.
It's that, that experience of, uh, that's the
experience of marginal utility.
I mean, this is just the thing that
we, that how we assign value to something.
If it, if it, if it introduces a
novel experience to our life or it makes
things more convenient in some way, but, but
that trade-off there's like this fundamental paradox
as there is so often, it's just, it's
just almost baked into realities.
There's this fundamental paradox where you have an,
where a novel experience means more friction, you
know, because it's, it's a new thing that
you haven't, that you haven't encountered before.
And there's, there's a spin up period, a
warmup period where you have to get used
to this new thing, like whatever this thing
is and get some sort of adaptation into
your life of to make it fit.
And there's so many examples of this.
Like, I mean, video podcasting is a perfect
example.
There, there is this new novel thing, this
HLS video in, in, in the app thing.
But man, is it a, that's some friction
right there.
It's, it's hard to get that up and
running.
And like, when you think about things like
Windows 8, I mean, there's completely a new
novel experience, but man, was there a ton
of friction.
Because I think the truth probably of all
this stuff, it probably falls somewhere in the
middle as it usually does.
Like these new, new features, if they're not
too disruptive and frictiony, they touch that desire
for novelty.
You know, and having a standard, like an
open standard at that point is not even
really like, you don't think about it.
It's, it's not even a consideration, but like,
so you always, there's always this weird trade
-off where, and I think that's, that's probably
podcasting is always existing right there in that
weird area.
So like in your, in your article, when
you introduced, you know, you're like, Hey, why
don't we use, you know, why don't we
use schema.org snippets?
Why don't we use that for discovery?
I think you're just, this, the sense I
get is that you're embracing that this is
going to, there's going to be a friction
that's going to be encountered, but it's also
a way that can move things forward.
If we just sort of ignore that part
and do it, like you said, you did
with, you know, with, with your product, we
just move forward and act like everybody's already
doing it.
Let's just build in, build it with our
head down almost.
Yeah.
I think in general, there's not one right
answer.
That's why there's not only a single email
client out there.
That's why there's not only a single task
management, you know, to-do list app.
Everybody has a different theory of the case
and everybody's partially right because everyone's brains are
different and are more suited towards one UX
or another UX.
And this, everybody's just trying to build something
that actually feels right to And this is
what is so exciting to me.
As a complete user, dangerous in every way,
I am building the things I want.
I don't need your Excel spreadsheet.
I don't need Libra office.
I just need to be able to read
my donation sheet.
So I built it myself.
Now this is, this is the revolution if
you ask me.
Yeah.
I think like the live item tag is
something that works, you know, for the shows
that care about it and they don't need
for it to be universally adopted.
They just need a sustainable amount of audience
that they find it fulfilling.
Right?
Yeah.
And then, and in, in a, in that
world that you described, you always have the
option for something to later take off and
become more broadly adopted.
You have, you have this, I think maybe
that's, you know, maybe that's the thing that
we haven't really understood about what's been, what's
gone on over maybe the last few years
is that, and I think AI, that whole
AI stuff just kind of really threw gas
on this fire, but it was already burning.
Is this idea that scale and massive adoption
is just not as important as it used
to be?
Amen.
Like, you know, and, and, and it's, you
can have, you can have a feature or
something that is really only used by a
small subset of people.
And then later it, it can just exist.
And it has, I mean, look at Nostra.
I mean, there's what, 10,000 people on
Nostra, maybe, I don't know.
It's not very many active people that are
on it, but that thing just keeps on
ticking.
It just keeps on going.
And because the people who are over there
and are, and are like locked in and
engaged with it, they just, they just like
it and want to be there at this
point.
Right.
I don't think it's any more complicated than
that.
You know?
Yeah.
I wrote a post at some point when
people were sort of talking about like the
lightning address versus, you know, putting the node
right in the value tag, things like that.
And, you know, seeing the donations fall off.
I think there is just some amount of
confusion about like, okay, what is the, who
are the constituents that are in your, you
know, your early adopter group?
Are they all people who love living at
the bleeding edge?
There's some amount of people that just love
getting in the door early.
They love just being first.
I like claiming my username on brand new
social media sites.
It doesn't mean I'm going to become a
heavy adopter of that platform, but I just
like being in the door first.
Right.
And as a runway runs out and you
realize, oh, this thing isn't taking off.
There's not hockey stick velocity here.
I thought there would be, but there's not,
you know what, I'm just going to Irish
exit and say, say goodbye.
And you see some people drift away from
the community and you thought they were on
board with you because they were also like
an innovator in the very, like, you know,
far end of the bell curve.
But they're like, no, I was here expecting
this party would get bigger.
And if the party's not going to get
bigger, I'm going to go put my efforts
elsewhere.
So sometimes that 10,000 is all 10
,000 that are happy to just be the
10,000.
It's, it's your secret club.
But sometimes you need to realize, oh, some
amount of people here were like waiting for
the big acts to show up and there's
no headliner.
Interesting.
That, wow.
That gives me a lot to think about.
That description is, is so true in so
many ways.
What does the term Irish exit mean?
That just means like leaving without saying goodbye.
Like they don't necessarily make a big, big
to do of it.
You know, they don't say goodbye to the
host.
They just disappear quietly and say, oh, when
did, when did Nathan leave?
Okay.
I guess.
Podcast.
So the, the re let's go ahead.
Before we talk about your article thing, I
want to, the reason I asked you here
is to get your thoughts on, on this,
the, the styling stuff that we talked about
recently that we've talked about recently, specifically around
the publisher page, but also just in asset,
asset delivery in general.
And you, you really, uh, designed the podcast
images, uh, podcast image tag to, to sort
of fit this, this idea of, um, allowing
a tag to specify the format of a
thing so that, uh, so that you can
deliver assets other than just, you know, standard
stuff.
What I guess my general question is, I
just think I want to push this forward
because I have a need for it with
the product that we build.
And I just feel like there's such a
huge opportunity here for publisher, like a not
publisher, but platforms to design their own spec
and then have it delivered through a tag
like this.
From a design standpoint, you're, you're just, you're
an amazing designer.
Like, what do you, what do you see
as the perfect, um, what do you see
as the perfect, uh, delivery mechanism to give
you all the stuff you need as a
designer to have this sort of brand kit
experience from the creator?
Yeah.
I think, you know, if you're the designer
slash developer of your own user experience, like
you are responsible to your users, right?
And so you have to say, all right,
uh, if I had all the assets I
absolutely wanted, uh, you know, here's the, if
I had the perfect assets, here's what I
would design exactly.
But now I also have to handle all
these edge cases.
And I'm also taking on the support burden
of, all right, if I don't get one
or more of these assets, uh, what's the
fallback scenario?
And is that fallback scenario something that I
would be proud to show to people?
And is that going to be the experience?
Actually, it's, I'm going to call it the
fallback, but is it the experience that actually
99% of my, uh, my listeners will,
will get?
And so you have to say like, oh
yeah, am I comfortable shipping that as my,
really my default experience and everybody else, you
know, and a small, small number of people
get a like progressive enhanced version.
What am I willing to do there?
So like I launched episodes FM with, all
right, I'll do background color pulled, you know,
from the dom, the dominant color of the
artwork.
And then I will set the text color
to black or white, depending on what is
the more accessible contrasting color.
But they don't get like the text as
the secondary dominant color of the artwork.
Like I'm not letting, you know, I'm not
going to listen for some tag for the
podcaster to provide a whole little, you know,
color, color palette and fully inherit all of
that because I care about my listener's experience
more than I care about the podcaster's opinions
on like, oh, I know I really like
this, uh, like middle gray on this soft
gray background.
I'm like, that's not accessible.
I'm not going to respect your, your style
guide over the accessibility that I care about
for my own users.
I, I want to, I take pride in
the experience I'm delivering.
And I, I think I just fundamentally don't
think that podcasters get to dictate that to
apps.
And I think some of my tags, uh,
have confused people around that because they may
be disagree with that premise where podcasters really
get to provide content and every podcast app
developer on the sun has their own opinion
of the good UX and they can use
that content.
And, you know, there's the people who are
thinking that like transcripts themselves are, uh, you
know, altering the content and things like that,
but it won't get into that.
But I think, isn't it true that, uh,
at least I think that's what I'm seeing
is when a podcast app has additional features
that you pay for premium edition, isn't that
kind of all the extra stuff that people
want?
Like if only you did this, if only
you did that, if only you could do
this, is it, or am I mistaken?
Is that, I mean, and I really don't
know.
I mean, because we have a lot of
podcast app developers.
I'm just curious, like where, what are you
putting the premium on?
Is it stuff that if it's resource intensive,
I get it.
But is it also just edge cases that
we, that we throw in there?
I think it ends up being what they
can get away with.
Right.
I think, um, you know, uh, Overcast has
had like their smart speed feature and that
was initially a paywalled thing.
And as time went on, that became a
free feature because Marco didn't want to, you
know, to have the, the normal experience, um,
smart speed and voice boost, both of them.
Um, but that was our initially paywalled and
then eventually he made it free and it's
just what's table stakes among your competition.
So, you know, I think anybody who is
putting anything behind their premium paywall is trying
to make sure that their project is sustainable.
Um, and I don't begrudge them that.
Um, so they can put normal, you know,
Hey, I'll put the sleep timer behind the
paywall.
Sure.
Whatever you want.
Um, and I think, you know, developers may
be CEO of like, Oh no, that would
be hard to write.
Yeah.
I can see why that's behind the paywall.
Oh, that's resource intensive, but really customers are
absolutely willing to pay for, you know, to
support your project and whatever sort of fig
leaf you put over it of like, yeah,
I'll put this behind the paywall just because
enough users who care enough about it are
willing to pay for it.
Okay.
Yeah.
I think I remember it, uh, when I
was working at Spotify, um, I was, you
know, talking with the team that actually cares
about the podcast listener experience and was talking
about, you know, features that are available in
other apps that were lacking in Spotify.
And, you know, I'm just in some public
channel on Slack and somebody else who's from
the super premium team said like, Oh, that
would be a great thing for the super
premium bundle.
I'm like, it's free in literally every other
podcast app.
And they're like, yeah, but we could put
it in our $20 a month tier.
I'm like, or we could give it away
for free.
I don't know why you think that this
is going to be a differentiator that people
will pay for.
Yeah.
Podcast artwork, 20 bucks a month.
Yeah.
I just, I wonder about, um, it's interesting
because you, what you're saying really, I think
lines up with what, um, Brendan from pod
page was saying as well, there is this
synthesis that you have to achieve between what
the creator is, what the creator is presenting
to the world, because it's not just the
podcast, it's also the art, um, and their
brand to a certain degree.
But then there's also like, you can't just
take, you can't just take it because so
many times those, those creators, you can't just
take it as is all the time because
the creators, they, they, they F it up.
You know, they just, they, they make a
really bad choice.
Do they?
Yes.
You know, they make really bad choices.
So you have to like, you have to
massage this thing you're given into a thing
that you can present to your customers that
makes sense.
Um, you know, that, yeah, go ahead.
If you look at Apple's, uh, specs for
all their additional images, they actually request lay
layered PSD files, and I'm a hundred percent
sure that they go in there and tweak
things, uh, to their heart's content before actually
pushing it into the, you know, CMS or
whatever.
Okay.
That's it.
So, okay.
So in light of that, is like, maybe
I should ask it this way.
Do we already have what a sufficient set
of tags that we can deliver these things?
Do we need anything else?
I think we're sufficient.
Um, we need the booking tag.
We need the booking tag.
Well, yeah.
Well, I mean, yeah, that, that, that, but
for, for style guide, you know, for the
equivalent of like a style guide, style guide
or a theme color, I think it will
come down to, all right, is if we
were to add one more tag for the,
all the shows that don't have it, they're
going to get some fallback experience.
Who is going to be blamed for how
poor that fallback experiences?
Is it going to be the podcaster or
the app developer?
If a show is missing its primary image,
I don't even think Apple like lets it
into the directory.
Yeah.
Right.
Um, and so you don't blame Apple for
that.
You blame the feed for not knowing what
the bare minimum is.
And I just don't think any new tag
can, uh, any developer like feels like the
burden wouldn't be on them to handle the
fallback thing.
They wouldn't just be able to say the
podcast is not me.
And they're like, no, this is your UX.
You own it.
You own, you know, the visitors are coming
to your website or your app.
You need to handle, you know, that the
very dominant edge case of nobody's supporting this
brand new tag that was invented two months
ago.
So in the case of like a publisher
page, which is pretty net new anybody, you
know, you can build your own hosted Godcaster
publisher pages with or without a tag in
the feed.
And you could make it required for your,
to even publish the, the, the fee, the
publisher feed in the first place to actually
fill in all these values on some, you
know, webpage.
Uh, but it doesn't necessarily mean that anybody
else is going to launch publisher page support
that uses all those values if they can't
build a good fallback experience as well.
Yeah.
I was thinking about like, I guess in
my mind, I just see this, this, I
have this vision of, of, of, of, uh,
of a way that somebody can specify that,
uh, let's say pod news weekly review could
specify all these different assets.
And then whether it shows up in true
fans or, uh, Castamatic or Apple podcasts that,
that all the, the look and feel is
generally the same.
They have now, I mean, each app is
going to have its own flair and its
own design.
You know, that's not going to change, but
that, but that your, your brand is right
for the, for the brands that truly care,
like, you know, that actually have a team
of people working or, or at least one
really good designer that spent a lot of
time trying to get these things right.
Then that they could deliver to the app,
something that would let the app like faithfully
represent what the creator was trying to do.
I know that, I know that's, I know
that's probably not.
You have, you have so, so much faith,
more than a mustard seed, David, more than
a mustard seed.
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
You're going to get five.
I think to some extent that's interfering with,
um, the relationship between the app developer and
their consumer base, their user base, their whatever,
you know, keyword you want to call everybody
who uses a given app.
Is it though?
Because we have the, like, because the, the,
like the episode artwork is essentially that contractor
already.
This just extends it a little further.
But who receives the support requests?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I get you.
Like, who has the support burden?
I get you.
I think if the podcast wants a fully
branded experience, buildyourown.com.
Like, there's, there's nothing stopping any podcast from
building the perfect UX.
I know several design podcasts that they're, they
have some very bespoke UX exactly for their
thing.
I was, I was listening to a designer
focus show that was publishing on SoundCloud, but
years ago supported transcripts that jumped the player.
Like you could tap the keyword and jump
the player forward and back.
It's always been possible if you own the
listener experience, but if you don't own the
listener experience, you're, you know, you're shouting through,
you know, two cans over a wire to
try to communicate the experience you want those
listeners to get.
But that's not even really up to you
because the, the app developer has their own
theory of what makes the best listener experience.
I feel like we, I feel like we
just talking from the Godcaster standpoint, and I
think, and I think this is true for
other podcast products too.
I feel like we also just, we also
get a lot of support requests that are
coming from just simply the podcaster, like the
podcaster not putting the right kind of image
and that kind of thing in there.
You know, it's, I feel like it kind
of cuts both, it cuts both ways a
little bit.
It's like, well, the podcaster is telling you,
Hey, I wish my podcast looked better on
your platform.
And then you have the listener saying, Hey,
this doesn't look right.
And it's really, it's like both you're in
the middle and both sides have a problem
with something.
And I think I'm probably just being naive
and thinking that if we had better specs,
that it would be that all that would
smooth itself out, which it probably won't.
Yeah.
I think it's just down to, there's not
one universal right answer of what the best
listener experience is.
And everybody is, it's essentially, you know, the
marketplace of ideas in the early App Store
days, you know, pull to refresh was not,
you know, ever present across every feed-based
thing.
And then, you know, Tweedy discovered that and
then everybody else decided to get on board
and follow that UX, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
So your blog post touched on a thing,
the podcast missing link.
It touched, it touched on this, this thing
that, that I had thought about a while
back, which was the, the, the, the reason
why there is no sort of like Google
for podcasts where you can find, because there's
no, there's no good source of SEO backlink
like type material from one show to another.
If nobody's, if there's nothing to rank.
Yeah.
And so you, you kind of flesh that
out into some real thoughts.
Do you want to like generalize that?
Yeah.
I think podcasting has not actually faced the
same evolutionary press pressure as the web.
So that's why I'm calling it the missing
link.
And why the graphic was that the evolutionary
March, the like, there's no search engines, there's
no social feeds, very little algorithmic type things
that force the content to adapt to, you
know, find, you know, to, to match with
whatever the algorithm is prioritizing, whether length or
punchiness or how many people, you know, do
three or three minutes of pre-rolls and
don't expect their audience is going to click
away, right?
Because it's not a YouTube video.
It's not something that exists in these other
environments.
So I think, you know, this in some
way ties back to the YouTube conversation about,
oh, why are these podcasts doing poorly on
YouTube?
Why aren't they seeing the numbers that they
see elsewhere?
It's like, well, because the, you know, it's
not evolutionarily fit for the environment.
It has not evolved under the same pressures.
It's, it's had the stability of just being
subscribed once and Apple podcasts will keep auto
downloading it forevermore, you know, up until relatively
recently.
Right.
And so I was just sort of saying
like, all right, if it's basically, if you
treat podcasting like it's not the web, it
has its own separate browsers, shows, our websites,
episodes or articles, why don't we have links
between things?
And some of this was really inspired by
the Apple timed link feature where they're supporting
timed links for books and TV shows and
movies into Apple owned apps.
Not, you know, if an overcast link is
in the show notes, they're not surfacing that
in the same way.
And I said, okay, what's the open version
of this?
And I think there's, there's ways into Apple's
systems.
I, I think I understand a little bit.
I can release something with pod link that
will work with Apple's time links at some
point.
But I was really just saying like, you
know, it's really just this sort of the
shame that we have not really supported podcast
episode sharing or even podcast show level sharing
inside our own little siloed ecosystem.
We have not deep into people's relationship with
the entire podcasting community as well as we
could have over the years.
Because I think, you know, hey, we don't
have this fundamental link that keeps you inside
the podcast app.
And every decentralized ecosystem sort of has this
problem.
But a bunch of the other ones that,
you know, grew up after the age of
Twitter realized, you know, it's really nice being
able to click a link inside this thing
and we're just staying inside our app or
we're staying on platform.
You know, any, any news article out on
the web can put a bunch of share
buttons on next to their article to try
to get some viral attention in these feeds.
But the Mastodon one is, you know, all
right, like here's three steps.
I know they recently announced some things to
simplify that UX.
So at the end of the day, it's
really about, okay, what could we do to
improve linking between shows so that this ecosystem
could maybe mature a little bit in terms
of deepening people's interest in other shows?
I mean, Podlink sort of fills this niche,
but not everybody knows Podlink and it's, you
know, a huge burden to ask everybody to,
all right, go.
I know you just want to link to
this show that you have right here, but
you don't want to share your pocketcast link
because, you know, you're going to have to
feel the support burden of half your listeners
or half the people who click on it,
not really being able to do anything with
it.
So they just end up saying, find it
wherever you download your podcasts.
And that may be, that call may be
a radical statement according to Anil Dash.
And I think so I've come around to
thinking that it actually is something important for
us that we can still say something like
that.
It's huge.
Yeah.
And so I was like, all right, well,
how do we solve this?
And so I think the schema tag would
allow basically if anybody links to Podnews or
Podlink or Apple or Spotify or anything in
a show note, that that app could give
that listener the option to just open that
link right inside the app.
So how, so this would start by being
able to, this will start by maybe some,
an app or multiple apps crawling through, maybe
the podcast index can do this as well,
like crawling through show notes, links, any, any
link it can find in the, in the
RSS feed and trying and then trying to
do a deeper discovery on what, on this,
the content of that link, trying to find
an RSS feed that may, that may be
embedded in there in the alternate or trying
to find the JSON-LD metadata tags, that
kind of thing.
Is that kind of how you envision that
working?
Yeah.
And there are ways you can, Cloudflare recently
announced that they were doing the, you can
pass an accept header asking for text slash
markdown, and they'll deliver the whole site just
as markdown.
There's similar mechanisms for just saying pass like
an accept profile schema.org header, and I'll
just return the JSON.
So if websites really wanted to get on
board with this more than just, oh, we
put the schema in there because it helps
our SEO, they could.
And the, the apps could make, you know,
special requests specifically for this data against a
given link.
So is that, is the markdown accept header,
is that to be more agent, like you,
AI agent friendly, I guess?
Yeah, yeah.
They're, they're pushing that so that models don't
have to tokenize, you know, you know, multi
-megabyte pages when instead they just want like
the text content of something.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
Well, I mean, it would be an interesting,
so if nothing else, as a start, to
me, it would be interesting just to do
a crawl of all that content.
God knows how long it would take.
It may take many days to do all
that crawling, but it would be an interesting
experiment just to find out how much of
those, how many of those metadata tags of
what formats actually exist.
For sure.
You know, because I think that's a question
that none of us can answer.
Is it, is it?
Yeah.
And I think I have a lot of
the, the data that would be interesting to
actually like maybe provide a backfill API.
Like if I know, you know, what, from
what I know about all these various platforms,
if some of these links aren't just, you
know, the podcasterzone.com, how can I actually
provide the context that actually isn't on that
web page as an API?
So in the same way that there was
the shim for the value tag providing some
endpoint that says like, yeah, you could go
crawl it yourself and it may not be
there, but if it's not there, I'm gonna
maybe have an alternate value.
I mean, have you done any of that
kind of crawling at all?
Yeah.
I've done it.
I've done a bit of that work, but
this came up a little bit more suddenly.
So I was like, oh, you know what?
I'll just, I'll just tease what I think
could be built here.
Oh, okay.
All right.
So you have, you have a, you have
more than just an idea.
You have actual code.
Yeah.
This is in general, I'm you know, I'm
primarily a designer, so I'm not actually somebody
who ends up caching a bunch of things
in databases and saying like, yeah, I'm building
my own database of all these things, but
I am building a, you know, sort of
like a stateless version that would, you know,
go make that request on your behalf, but
then use the information that I have collected
over over my time running Podlink to figure
out, you know, go hit other API endpoints
or things like that to figure out if
this episode actually is a podcast episode in
some way.
Watch out when you start building something, you're
going to end up on deathbyclaw.com.
I visited that for Podlink and what is
its cutting summary?
A podcast link aggregator so simple it couldn't
even load its own homepage without Vercel's security
checkpoint asking if you're a bot.
Ironic since it replaced the entire product.
But it totally missed, it totally missed the
undefined in the title.
Well, I mean, you just visit the homepage.
You don't run into that issue, but yeah.
Yeah, that's, that's to me, to me, every,
every product that you ever build, it must
say undefined in the, in the tab of
the, that's how I know you built it.
No, I think this, it's an, it's an
interesting idea and I think that, I feel
like probably some of the comments you got
on there are also right, that in some
ways this did protect podcasting from becoming just
like a junk drawer, you know, SEO junk
drawer.
But that doesn't mean that it's, that doesn't
mean that it's not useful.
You know, cause the, the thing about Google
and that I've thought about for a long
time is that they, it's not just that
they built a better search engine.
Yes.
Initially, initially the ideas of page rank and
backlink ranking, yes, that was the better mousetrap,
but it did, that's not, that's not why
they became what they are, what they did
later.
You know, that, to me, the primary reason
they became the dominant force in search that
they did, because everybody could have taken that
approach, was they did, rapidly they came out
with the webmaster tools and what they ended
up doing was getting people to go in
and give them the metadata for their site,
for their website structure.
And those became signals as well.
They, they got, they got the actual producers
of the websites themselves to get involved in
the process.
So they just ended up with more initially,
at least they ended up with so much
more metadata about a site than anybody else
had.
And I think that also had a lot
to do with their dominance.
And so those, like what I'm saying is
the metadata, just the existence of it has
the chance to become a very strong signal
that somebody cares, you know, and if somebody
cares, then it's probably at least partially a
signal of the quality of the content.
I don't know if any of that made
sense, but.
Yeah, no, I think, I think the stability
angle, like I absolutely agree with some of
the comments I got basically saying like, yeah,
it protected it.
It was, it's, it was its own little
Galapagos islands of isolated development where podcasting could
flourish without facing some of the, you know,
JavaScript ad ecosystem pressures of the rest of
the web.
And, you know, we can be grateful to
people like Apple for holding firm on, you
know, supporting this product at all and not
bowing out, you know, whenever the rest of
their business, you know, ballooned massively and said,
yeah, podcasting, that was a fun side project.
We're going to deprecate that.
And there's enough third-party apps out there.
Like their presence stopped a bunch of VC
money from coming in, you know, taking it
over and turning it into a complete, you
know, ad infested, you know, user experience where
they say like, well, really, you know, only
if you're paying $20 a month at minimum,
you know, will anybody have a, as pleasant
of user experiences they can have today.
Yeah.
I feel like that just, that's a whole
different discussion that I don't really, but at
least the ad part of, of what podcast
that's becoming bad on its own.
You're, you know, regardless of what, of, of
whether of the discoverability issue, the ad load
in the ad, my wife sent me a
podcast the other day and gosh, man, I
don't listen to podcasts with, with many dynamic,
with dynamic ads and I'm very often, it's
pretty rare.
And every time I do, it is such
a jarring experience and it's the same ad
four or five times.
This was an, this was a podcast about,
uh, like Jeffrey Epstein.
And it was like about, they were talking
about his victims and all this kind of
stuff.
And then out of nowhere, I wish I
had clipped it.
It was like this crunching sound.
And then a woman crying.
I was like, what the hell am I
listening to?
What?
It was so jarring and frankly kind of
upsetting.
And then it was like, it was an
ad for like a, some kind of for
like snack chips.
What are we guys, what are we doing
here?
This, this is just, yeah, it's horrible.
So I don't think at this point it's
going to be anything to do with podcast
discovery metadata that makes or breaks whether podcasting
becomes ad infested garbage.
I think that's happening well enough on its
own, you know?
Oh, for sure.
Yeah.
All right, Dave, shall we thank a few
people since we are, I gotta get you
back to the day job on time.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, let's do it.
Uh, I have nothing because I still haven't
even had time to open up a channel.
Oh, okay.
In fact, I tried to open a channel,
but the, um, you know, with, with several
different wallets, I was trying to connect to
our node with, um, uh, what is it?
Uh, what's the connect?
Um, no, no, no.
You're supposed to be able to just scan
a QR code.
It kept telling me macaroon invalid, macaroon invalid.
I'm like, ah.
So, you know, I tried going in setting
up, uh, cause I know how to open
channels with other programs.
Oh no, no, no.
That node is so humongous.
Everything crashes.
Every helper apps like, nah, you're too big.
I can't do anything.
Some of this lightning stuff is really still
kind of buggy.
So, um, let me see maybe if I'm
lucky, let me just see.
Uh, I might be able to, let me
just see if I can get the, um,
maybe I can get it from run runway.
Let me see.
Can you, otherwise, can you, can you run
your, your bot?
Yeah, I've got stuff.
I extracted a bunch of stuff out of,
uh, I've got some software now that'll take
everything out of the boost, like the messages
and stuff that we get from the Albi
hub.
Uh, let me see if I can, cause
here's what I have.
I have, I got a lot of manual.
I got, let me see.
This is odd.
Oh, here we go.
Oh, actually kind of worked, I guess.
That's strange.
Why is it?
So I got three, three, three, three from
Hay Citizen with Castamatic.
Okay.
And he says, hello, fellow fellow computer scientists.
If I want to use pod ping.alpha
to replay pod pings from its archive.db
for my app, should I just read from
the DB directly or should I change something
in pod ping.alpha's code?
Read that again, please.
Okay.
I was not expecting a technical question.
Right.
If I want to use pod ping.alpha
to replay pod pings from its archive.db
for my app, should I just read from
the DB directly or should I change something
in pod ping.alpha's code?
Well, I'm not clear on if he's talking
about he's archiving or he's getting the archive
from another node.
So the way it works is the way
it works is you, if you start the
pod ping gossip listener, but with an environment
variable enable, enable catch up equals true, then
your listener is going to go pull the
rest of the swarm and find a peer
that has archiving enabled and it will grab
all the stuff you missed.
And the assumption is that when you're doing
this, that you're piping this output, this standard
out output to some other process.
So you're going to get them.
I mean, you're not, I mean, you, you
could be storing them too if you had
archiving enabled.
Right, right, right, right.
And so, so at that point you could
go do whatever you want.
I mean, but you know, you can get,
you can hit, if you're archiving them to
have them and then you want to just
access, access them out of your database.
Yeah, that's fine.
I mean, yeah, that's fine.
You can use that.
See, but, but that's not going to be
the way this goes in the future.
And the, what the, the goal we're going
to hit is we're going to be creating
a, is that the listener will open up
a socket that you can hook into and
you can just read it out.
You can read it out and from some
other app.
So there will be a way to pump
this stuff out into, into a different place
programmatically rather than just necessarily like screen scraping
the standard output.
I hope that answers the question caller.
I hope that helps caller.
Caller 1000.
So I'm, I'm, I'm using the, I'm using
the runway from podnews.net.
I see that.
That's, I don't know if we got any
more boosts.
I got manual payment from Seth colon.
I agree.
All the best, Martin.
Another manual payment.
Great conversations.
I don't know where these are coming from.
And then I hit the, Oh wait, here's
a Chris, you know, using Castamatic.
Okay, here we go.
Huge.
More than 20 different wallets can now be
connected to Castamatic by Nostra Wallet Connect.
Pick whatever works best for you.
iOS wallet apps, Android apps, PWAs, command line
wallets, non-custodial options, custodial options, most requiring
zero sign up.
There you go.
And then I have a, this is a
super comment using the newly refactored TrueFans API,
which supports both keysend and LN address.
Test super comment 555.
So there's all kinds of stuff in here.
I am sure I'm missing something, but that's
what I got.
Cause now I hit the delimiter of comics
for blogger.
I have so many windows open.
I'm going to try and make sense of
this.
Wait, are you using Linux again?
Are you still on a windows windows?
No, I'm on Linux.
Yeah, this is a, yeah, I'm on Linux.
Are you using your Hyperland?
No, no, I'm, I'm just still on Ubuntu
on this machine, on this machine.
Wait until you start using Hyperland.
You're going to love it so much.
Coming soon.
Yeah.
Cause it's, it's for OCD guys like you
and me.
Yeah.
Window fiddlers.
Yes.
We got some, we got PayPal's.
Let me see here.
We've got Michael Goggin, $5.
Thank you, Michael.
Jorge Hernandez, $5.
Cohen Glotzfog, $5.
Christopher Reamer, $10.
James Sullivan, $10.
John's Creek Studios, $5.
Thank you.
John's Creek Studios.
Dreb Scott, $15.
Very nice.
Dreb in the boardroom earlier said he also
has been having sleep issues.
Ah, boost, boost, boost.
It happens.
Chris Bernardik, $5.
Michael Kimmerer, $5.33. And that's our monthlies.
Okay.
Thank you monthlies.
We do have some boosts.
Let me do, let me try to do
this spreadsheet first.
I hate this.
I'm going to have to use your spreadsheet.
I'm going to put it on the GitHub.
I'll put it on the GitHub.
Oh, this is terrible.
Libra office blows.
Yeah.
Yes.
So does Excel.
They all blow.
You want the Adam Curry donation tracker.
Yes, I do need the donation tracker.
Let's see.
There is, Dave, you've gotten so close to
the solution in describing your security now issue.
Crowdsourced chapters are a thing on YouTube with
the sponsor block extension.
I pay for YouTube premium, but still always
use it.
If something like this were implemented in podcasting
2.0, apps incentivize the chapter making with
the feeds that encourage it.
And for the feeds that don't, someone will
likely take care of it out of spite.
That's from Jay Moon through Fountain.
And this spreadsheet is so bad.
I cannot even tell how much stats they
sent.
Wow.
That's a very bad spreadsheet.
Wait, no, I'm sorry.
1422.
There you go.
I figured it out on the fly.
Let's see.
Oh, I'm getting things for stuff that is
not our podcast.
There it is.
Oh, that's it.
That's all we got.
So now I have, this is, this is
horrible.
Okay.
More work, more work needs to be doing,
but at least we, that is one we
would have missed though.
So I feel better about this already.
Circus media, 3333.
Through Podverse, another productive meeting.
Thanks, Adam and Dave.
Circus media.
Yes.
Thank you.
Happy, happy, happy, happy.
2222.
That's Bruce, the ugly quacking duck through podcast
guru.
A new body is on the list of
many people.
Open source that.
LOL.
Thanks for the episode.
73.
73s.
Not sure I understand what you're talking about,
Bruce, but...
It doesn't matter.
73s.
That's, you just said 73s.
You're good to go.
5170 from Anonymous on True Fans.
Thank you for episode popping a termie.
Yeah, baby.
We popped that termie.
And a delimiter.
Commissary blogger, 23,000 sets through Fountain.
He says, Howdy, Dave and Adam.
Today, I want to recommend a micro podcast.
Quote, The Credibility Minute is a micro podcast
for consultants, coaches, and professional services providers who
want to build authority online without becoming full
-time content creators.
End quote.
Get it at stereoforest.com slash minute.
Thanks to Martin Lindeskog for proposing it.
Yo, CSB, the AI arch wizard.
He is the AI arch wizard.
I still owe him an interview.
Sorry, CSB.
He's getting all puffy now.
Now he's pumping, now he's hitting me up
for it.
I know, I know, I know.
Because you're not responding to him.
Well, no, because I'm just, it's been crazy.
And, you know, and he doesn't understand that.
And so he'd be like, Since Adam refuses
to do interview with me.
Delay is...
Maybe Nathan can do it and pretend to
be you.
Delay is not denial.
Just get 11 labs to CSB.
Just ignore real Adam and have AI Adam.
If only that were true.
If only it actually worked, it will be
dynamic.
Was there a 12 second delay between the
question and every answer?
Yeah, exactly.
Is that it?
That's all of our, that's everything?
That is it.
All right.
Well, thank you all very much for supporting
this value for value project.
Everything that you support, support us with, go
straight into the podcastindex.org bank account slash
PayPal.
You keep stuff in the PayPal, move it
back and forth so we can pay things.
And that's what we pay the bills with.
That's what everything is used for that.
And that allows everybody to enjoy the API
and everything else at no charge, which is
part of our mission.
We don't have a mission statement, but the
mission statement is kind of like use it
at no charge.
Don't, don't, don't scrape, don't scrape.
You don't bother us and we won't charge
you.
Exactly.
Hey, Nathan, thank you so much for joining
us in the boardroom today.
Really appreciate you, brother.
Thank you for having me.
And thank you everybody.
And thank you for, for writing.
That was very helpful.
I'm glad that Dave invited you so we
could talk about that today.
Actually, you guys were talking more.
I was just sitting back and relaxing.
I'm like, this is interesting.
I kind of like this podcast.
Wait, I'm on the podcast.
What am I talking about?
Thank you very much, boardroom.
Everybody have yourselves a great weekend.
We'll be back next Friday with another board
meeting of the Misfits here at Podcasting 2
.0. Go
podcasting.
We want ice cream.