Episode 278: "1 Billion Tokens!"

0:00 Podcasting 2.0 for November 13, 2026, episode 278, 1 Billion Tokens! Hello everybody, we were gone for a week and we're back. It is time for Podcasting 2.0, another beautiful Friday in the hill country. Podcasting 2.0. We're going to talk about podcasting. We're going to talk about everything that affects it. We're going to talk about making money. We're going to talk about all kinds of groovy things. This is the boardroom where the board meeting takes place. And just so you know, we're the only boardroom that has room in the lifeboat for everyone. I'm Adam Curry in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and in Alabama. The man who blocked the Pottinger flood and is still fighting. Stryper's wearing his own usual agent. Say hello to my friend on the other end, the one, the only, the Podsage, Dave Jones! Dave Jones! I think I could give a clinic. on how to eat and do a podcast at the same time. I've been doing it for so many years now. Does it involve the mute button?

1:00 Do you use that a lot? I have heavy use of the mute button. Yeah. Heavy use of the mute button. It's a... You have to... It's a... A careful dance of the size of the bites you take when you take a drink, estimating how long you, as I learned over time, your cadences – I can tell when you start a sentence about how long you're going to run for before it comes back to me. It's a push – it's like watching somebody drive a stick shift and eat and type on the – and talk on the phone at the same time. And roll a joint.

1:45 And roll a joint. And roll a doobie. Yeah, well, with you, I mean, it's the same thing. I know when you're launching into something like, oh, I got to pee. Okay, I'll be right back. I just like mute, turn the speakers up, leave the door open. Is Dave still talking? Yeah, it's good. Okay, yeah, I'm back. Yeah, baby, that was interesting. Okay, honesty time. Yes. Spin the bottle. Oh, here we go. How many times in the past six years have you gone to use the bathroom while I've been on a soliloquy? Twice to the bathroom, one time to let the dog in. I never even knew. Well, there's also every single show. I'm looking, you know, I'm using the ISO bot. I'm downloading ISOs. I'm previewing them once in a while. I forget to hit PFL or mute something and then you hear it. Yeah, I'm doing that too during these soliloquies. So I have to put myself on mute so the headphone doesn't bleed through. Then I've got to put you on pre-fader listening.

2:51 Put the clip on pre-fader listening. So I'm listening. I'm setting the in and the out points on the clip while you're talking. Sometimes you say something, got to hit my mute button, go, mm-hmm. And then I hit the mute button again, and then I'm back to it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. This is the life of a disco jockey, man. This is what I do. You should. You should just automate that. You should just automate to where every now and then it'll listen. Listening noises. Yeah, listening noise. Oh, yeah, that's a good idea. I can create a bot for that. No problem. I have been going bot crazy, baby. If I'm on PFL. It should just occasionally go. Oh, interesting. It's the Ed McMahon mode. You put it in Ed McMahon mode. Ed McMahon mode. No, Ed McMahon. Oh, Ed McMahon. From Johnny Carson. Oh, just throw one of those. Give a chuckle every now and then.

3:39 A hearty chuckle. So I released the code. You curry castored. Yeah, this has been, I'd say, a runaway success, mainly because it's free. But I've already given it out to a to a newbie podcaster. I got I got a message yesterday from the CEO of Clean Feet. Oh, no. You don't want to hear from that guy. No, I know him. I met him in Dallas when we went to the... Me and you met him. We had dinner with him. Yeah, that's what I mean. We met him. We had dinner with him. Yeah. I don't remember dinner. I remember the bar. I don't remember. I remember drinking with him. After that, things are vague. We... Oh, what happened? Excuse me. I coughed. No. So he said, hey, for the first time today, I had a customer ask about Currycaster. I'm like, uh-huh. Uh-huh. Oh, no. Oh, no. Well, I mean, in essence, I just... Took a great idea and an open source codec that they use and baked it into baked it into the curry caster.

4:46 Now, that's not free because you have to, you know, you talk to my server and, you know, they mean support. So I make that nine ninety nine a month. Okay. And you can have up to eight guests. So that's just the limit I put on it. Actually, there's no limit. I think what I built is better because I have an entire processing unit, which remembers you when you come back in. So I have a gate. I've got, you know, with some Adam Curry pre-settings. Got a little compressor in there. And if you look at your – are you looking at your window right now, your web page? I'm always looking at that. Okay, look at the web page. Now, do you see what just happened?

5:31 Slot one, slot two, slot three. What are these? So you can drop a clip in there. No. Yes, you drop the clip. Drop a clip in anything. I'm sure you've got an MP3 somewhere. Okay. So you drop the clip into one of those windows, or you can hit browse, I guess. You can load it from the file browser. And I'll tell you what happens on my end. So I just gave you access. I have. Oh, there you go. So you just loaded to Goldstein 73 percent funnel. Yes, right. So that loaded on player number six for me. So I gave you. So when I give you this access to the clips, you get players six, seven and eight. Now, I can control them, but you could say... So hit play. Go ahead. Oh, that's crazy.

6:12 Hit play. Hit play. I don't think... I think Tom is right. 73% of using this as a funnel. This is stupid. Oh, my gosh. That is amazing. Yeah. I can play clips on you. Yes. Yes. Now, I can also play the clip. I have control. But that's not exactly. So I can do stuff with it, too. But I basically gave you players six, seven, and eight as a guest. which I can also, I can retract that permission with the click of a button. You may want to, for me, you may want to retract that. This is not it. It's all retractable. I cannot believe this because this is the thing I've been wanting to do is because sometimes I want to surprise you with a clip and not even, I want to throw something in there and like, in a certain, I want to pace it in a certain way. And, you know, I can usually cue you up for that, but not always, you know, it's sometimes it's a little complex. It would be better if I was driving it. That's what it's built for. And you can also click in the waveform and set it to start at a different point. I think.

7:21 Oh, you can actually. Oh, yeah, you can. Oh, yes. I can start it like this. Yeah. That's where they end up. Yeah. You can scrub. Adam, this is ridiculous. It's this dream build loop, baby. It is closed. It is right next to each other. Here's my dream. Here's my loop. There it is. I just built it. It's beautiful. I'm on fire. People sending me requests like, oh, that's a good idea. Oh, yeah, I'll put that in there. So. But I really wanted to make the guest room better than what's out there. And so the first thing was processing. Because, you know, the only way I could do it with clean feed, yeah, you can adjust people's individual – volume levels, but not the processing. So I want, you know, because it all runs through one channel. So now you can process each person individually. If you come back with the same name. So if you come back with DJ, it already knows you and it'll bring up your processing. So this is... If I come into your room, it knows me by name and automatically sets me up. Yeah. So if you change it, then it'll give you the default settings. Uh, for new guests, but if you keep using DJ, it'll, it'll have, it'll remember and bring yours back. Now, can there be a, can there be like a local, local, uh, storage cookie or something on my browser that will be persistent so that I don't have to remember to use my same

8:53 name every time? Oh, that's a good idea. Because I usually come in as DJ or Dave. I'm not even thinking. I just plug something in and hit go. That's a good idea. Hold on a second. Put in the queue a persistent cookie so a user returning uses the same username for the guest room. Okay, done. So is this going to – is this going to – is this going to – is this triggered the dream billboard? No, no. Is it just triggered? I noticed that I was releasing like five times a day. I'm like, this is probably not a good idea. Slow down. People are like, well, because I pop up a blue bar when there's an update. And you click on it and it downloads the new version. You refresh your browser page? Yeah, well, no, no, it's... To get the new Currycaster, yeah, which is a whole application. On Linux, built specifically for Linux and works beautifully on Windows and Mac, although, of course, I have not signed up yet to sign my apps with...

10:00 so that it gives you that warning on the Mac, like, whoa, this is dangerous! You really want to install this? Of course you do. When it says dangerous, of course you do. It makes you want to install it even more. Yeah, actually, it's a benefit. But yeah, people are using it. People are liking it. They've got ideas. And I'm just so happy that, that, you know, that this is out there. And I was a little disappointed. I sent a link to James. Now, I didn't do a press release with all those hashtags, you know. I was about to ask you if Pod News covered it. No, no. And not on Pod News Weekly Review either. So I'm like, ah, that was a little disappointing. But maybe he needs a press release. I don't know. That's how you get his attention. Or a boost. Money. Money works. Money works. Maybe I need to become a gold standard supporter. A goal. Yeah, that's powered by RSS. There's Dave firing a clip. You see, you've made a horrible mistake. No, it's just great. I love it. I love it. I'm so excited. Do you have subscribers yet? Yeah, I have. Well, so I know that I have a lot of downloads. I have. 200 installs that have actually started. I have probably a handful of people using the guest room. I'd say... maybe seven or eight, but I have a little value for value badge on it. And

11:31 I've received over $2,000 in value for value donations. Excellent. Yeah. So I'm just sitting, Tina's like, what, you're not charging for it? No, no, watch this. And people send $100, $50, $10, you know, whatever it's worth to them. And I'm super excited. I just love that it's out there. How angry is Clean Feed? Are they mad at you? No. Let me see what he said. He said, let me see. His name is Mark. Mark. He said, uh, super nice dude. Yeah. Yeah. He says, Hey, we had our first customer mentioned curry caster today. I'm interested to see what you've been up to. How are you?

12:13 I said, Hey, it's my free production software. Good to hear from you, Mark curry caster.com. It's free to use. Forever, but I do charge for a guest room. Not many takers for the guest room feature so far. Smiley face, like, it's okay. I'm not taking your business. He says, indeed, I found it. We live in fascinating times. Mark here has also been experimenting with vibe coding, which is kind of like saying F you curry with your vibe code. Interested in a catch-up call sometime? I think back to our dinner over podcast tech and U.S. politics and would enjoy catch-ups. I haven't responded yet, but I will. Here's what you'd... Here's what's going to be proposed is that you plug in Curry, uh, clean feed as the, as the alternate back into the Curry caster that you can, you can pipe in, you know, okay, we'll, we'll be, give us an alternate. We'll be the alternate guest room. Yeah, I guess. I mean, mine, mine's better.

13:03 Yeah, mine's just better. It is. And so I added this other feature, kind of like a radio station. So on Clean Feed, when you're calling and I click, then you're in, and then I can hear you and you can hear the signal. So now when a guest calls in, I get a flashing warning guest here. And then I but when that happens, you're already hearing what's what I'm sending out. So before I've even let you in, just like a radio station, you can already hear what's going on. Yeah. Like when you call in on a radio station, you're hearing the on air signal. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And there's little small things that users are fed back to me. So if you hit the space bar, it toggles the mute button. You know, these little things that people like on the desktop. Oh, I didn't know that. So on my side, I can hit the mute button, right? Yeah, yeah, you can hit the mute button.

13:56 Did it work? Yeah, it did. I didn't realize it was a toggle on, toggle off. I thought I had to hold it down. No, no, just a toggle on. I hit it, and I was like, and I was still talking. No, no, toggle on, toggle off. Let's see. Darren O'Neill wanted to... A head, because you can run it with a mixer. Oh, this is a button that it auto detects your mixer. So you just talk into your mic, and then it will find out what interface it's on. It will pre-select that for you, one of those. I don't know what that means. Okay, so you can run it. So I have it configured to my Rodecaster. So you can connect it to... to any mixer if you already have a mix minus and stuff like that set up. But you can run it in one mic mode. So just a USB mic, you stick it in and... You can go in the settings, you say, you know, find find my, you know, whether you have a mixer or a mic or whatever, and you just talk and then it will look at the signals and say, oh, this is this is coming from your microphone or this is coming from your mixer. It'll pre-configure it, basically. That's a hard one for people. Is that to help people realize when they're when they're accidentally on their laptop mic or something? No, no. It's just to help them set it up. Just it's a setup feature. And but if you're using it with just one mic, it does the mix minus and everything. So you don't have to think about that. No loopbacks and figuring that stuff out. You just use the use the software. And it works. Yeah. I'm stoked. I'm stoked, man. This is really

15:32 impressive. I mean, I've been giving it out. I gave it out to somebody this past week who just started a new podcast. I was like, well, here you go. Do the career cast. They were talking about the complexity of getting all the audio right and everything. And even though she's been editing a podcast for a while, she just gets the audio delivered. to her from somebody else and she does the editing this is the first time that she's actually doing a podcast herself and so i was like well here just use the curry caster and uh like this is me and my buddy created this and it's got all the stuff you need and everything but i i didn't even know all the features in it you know well and i'll tell you one more thing after i uh I scold Sir Bemrose. Does Podcasting 2.0 come on after the ad for Currycaster? Is this not about podcasting, Bemrose? Have we not delivered something beautiful for podcasting for free? So I have a recorder and editor in there. And I realized right away, like, ah, I know there's so many people who love to record multitracks so you can go back later and be like Phil Spector and do everything and edit and tweak and slide. And so I just made a multitrack capable so you can record multitrack. You can import tracks and do stuff. So it's pretty much a full editing suite that's

17:03 built into it. I figured it had a lot of that because that's my jam. Yeah, it's my jam. You switched off of Hindenburg, right? Oh, I haven't used Hindenburg. I was using Audacity to record on Linux because there isn't – I mean, there's stuff out there. In fact, I switched to Tenacity, which is a kind of an it's an open source version of the old version of Audacity. But it had a lot. I mean, it didn't have the shortcuts. I like to scrub audio back and forth with keyboard commands, you know, using H, J, K, L. And then if you so, if you just scrub and then if you. Hit the K and the L, it goes double speed. If you hit the shift, it goes half speed. That's all the stuff that Hindenburg had that I loved. So it makes audio scrubbing really easy.

17:55 Hit I for in point, O for out point, X for cut, that kind of stuff. Just for ease of use. But I'm just happy that people are using it. Then Darren O'Neill, man, he's like the perfect user. Why? Because he does 18 podcasts a week and has a guest on every single one of them. So he's finding all these little nuances. So he wanted a headphone. He wanted – because I – You can map a MIDI controller to every control, pretty much. So I have the Nano Control 2, which is like a $60 MIDI controller.

18:36 It has eight faders. You can start and stop from the mixer itself. And that's for clip control? Yeah, it has... Well, for starting, stopping, and dumping the clip out, it doesn't have like rewind 10 seconds. I guess I could put that in, but that's – I mean, I don't even use that. I just expand the waveform, click back into it, the visual. um but he wanted and marcus says multitrack from curry caster out to reaper daw and then straight to podcast as that's that would be pretty cool You can do that. Yeah. I don't know.

19:19 Reaper has an MCP now. Oh, yeah. He's got an MCP wrapper for it. I mean, you can just – it's outrageous what you can do with Reaper and the MCP controls. I'm just trying to make it simple for people. Yeah. And already it has a lot of features. Yeah. Like Darren said, oh, I want when I play a clip, I have so many clips and I want it to dim after it's played. OK, there's another option. Click you can set. Oh, like visually. So, yeah, what's been going. Exactly. Exactly. See, because as you're talking about all these different features like midi triggering, I. I can't want that on my side too but we can't so I mean the curry caster is for you what do you want? tell me what you want you're in control but like you gave me clip you gave me clip capabilities And now. Now you want a MIDI controller to go with it? Now I want a MIDI controller. Yeah.

20:22 Okay. Okay. Because I've got my stream deck here. Oh, okay. Yeah. I've got my stream deck. I can load up some things. You want start, stop? Yeah. Okay. Start, stop. Just start, stop by itself would be great. Okay. All right. I'll make that for you. Hold on. Boom, your butt falls off Ha ha ha ha Add MIDI controller functions for the guest's clip plays. Okay. Dream loop initiated. Yeah, it is. So a couple things happened today. First of all, this really, I think, important story came out that Brave has enabled X402 agentic payments for their search yes and so you you posted a video that i have refrained from from exploring because i wanted you i wanted to hear it fresh okay well so this is this is the dream build loop that took place for me this morning so i see this uh let me see i have the link here somewhere So I see this article that who posted that to me? It was Paul. Paul posted it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and Signal.

21:37 Yeah, excuse me. And Brave is now, has enabled X402 payments for, well, actually, I should step back for a second. Let me step back, and I'll take you through my morning, through my morning. So the first thing I did this morning is I prayed for... all the dudes named Ben and Dudette's named Bernadette. I prayed for the Holy Spirit to guide them in tracking down this Outlook bug and, The out office 365 outages. And I also prayed for all of those who are fielding unhappy calls in companies and enterprises worldwide worldwide. Give them strength, Lord. Let them know that they are valued because. And you know what? I posted that on X. And so many people like, thank you. It's exactly what you just said.

22:26 Thank you. Because that's, I always remember. And I and I have customers myself now. It's like, oh, when something doesn't work. And I had a customer this morning is like, no, I can't log in. Can't log in was using the wrong login URL, you know, stuff like that yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. And and so it's just like, you know, they need peace. They need to know that they're valued and. Yeah. You know, the whole dude named Ben thing comes from a very old no agenda inside joke where there was a I wonder if I still have that clip. No, you know, you have it. You've got it. Dude named Ben. Yeah. That was from Hillary at a testimony, right? Yeah, it was about. Yeah. Yes, it was about her. Let me see if I have the longer clip. She's like, I think it was some guy named Bill. Well, it wasn't Hillary. It was... So it was Chaffetz and he was talking to the director of IRS, I think. Oh, that's right. They've been looking up people's records. He says, I don't know where it is.

23:28 You know, IT has it. I think his first name may have been Ben. So a guy named Ben, a dude named Ben. There you go. That's it, yeah. So some dude named Ben in the basement who takes care of all of that. Yeah. And so I'm always cognizant of that. And I and, you know, you're my friend. I know what you go through. And, you know, he just passwords like, OK, turn off caps lock. You know, the idiocy that you have to go through is very frustrating. And we're all in a way, dude name, dude's name, Ben, for our families and friends. So I did that first. And. I'm not quite sure how that relates to this story. But anyway, I'm thinking about it. I have some of my own customer support things going on.

24:10 And then Paul posts this about Brave. And Brave says, hey, we've enabled X402 agentic payments for Brave searches. And I – okay, now I remember. So the Microsoft outage happened. And I'm sitting there going, Curry, you are an idiot. This is a sign from above that when Anthropic goes down, not if, when Anthropic goes down, what you're going to do? So I immediately had my main agent, which is Claude Code on Opus 5-5. I said, build me a lifeboat. So it built, yeah. So on a separate server I have here, it built me a lifeboat agent on Pi running on Quinn 3.8. And it not only understands all the systems I maintain, can check them, can restart services. It's kind of limited. We can also say act as. So slash act as Sam, showrunner Sam.

25:13 And it can then... It has a duplicate of all of the scripts, all the MD files that my showrunner Sam Opus 5.5 agent has on Claude Code, and it can replicate what it does. Now, does it do it exactly perfect? No, absolutely not. No, no. But it comes close enough, and I tried a couple tests, like, okay, get the embedded clip from this page and find the relevant parts and make one or two clips. It did it 95% accurately. Very impressive. So, you know, the main thing is for… all of the Godcaster stuff. And that already... It's your break glass agent. Lifeboat. It's literally called the lifeboat. And so I did that. And so I'm already just kind of in the vibe. I'm thinking about stuff. And then this article comes out about agentic payments, and their pricing is 0.0005 cents per search. And I'd already enabled this lifeboat to do a search using my Kagi key. Which works quite well. The searches are impressive, you know, categorized. It kind of understands what to do.

26:31 So I go ahead and say, why don't I build a – why don't I just dive in because this is all stablecoin, USDC. So I said, all right, let's set up a wallet on the lifeboat. And I want you to switch to Brave Searches using their X402 payment. Literally took 11 minutes. And then I funded the wallet. I have a Coinbase account. You just send $5. It's a single string wallet address. It was not complicated. It's just like send dollars to USDC. No, first I had to buy USDC. which took two clicks. Okay, I got five bucks. Now send it to my wallet, which is, you know, copy paste, just like a lightning address. And, you know, immediately it shows up in that lightning address.

27:21 And it does the searches, gives me a nice little receipt so I can see what it costs. Beautiful. I'm like, well, this was easy. This is a lot easier than I thought it would be. So... I set about to create a value-for-value payment system with two separate Android apps, the one I already built for myself called Dial, And it already has value for value lightning payments. It talks to my Albi Hub. It has, you know, it talks to my Muse agent. So it's making recommendations. It's an app that I want and no one else might ever want it, but it works how I want it to. I said, okay, let's build both sides of the equation. Let's build a standalone wallet. that a podcaster would just download an app. You could do a webpage, but just download an app on your phone. It's a lightning.

28:09 It's a USDC wallet. I want it to show boostograms as they come in. Give me two wallets, actually, so I can see how splits work. And then I went to my dial app. I said, okay, let's make this USDC, add a wallet, okay, add the wallet, and understand how splits work. And it built the value block. And... And it works. My dial app literally sees a USDC value for value. You click on boost. It shows you the splits, what those wallets are, 2% to the app developer. And there's a reason for that. First of all, I'm the app developer. I think I should get some money for it. There's another reason for it. You put in your amounts at 50 cents and then boost, put in a message who was from boost. I go over to my to my other app and this is all autonomous. No servers involved. It's all just on my device running from a podcast app to a podcaster wallet app, if you will. And it came in, it showed 99% went to the main split, and 1% went to the other split, and there was a 2% fee, and it showed that perfectly. It had the boostergram message. It travels inside the payment. And the whole thing took me maybe an hour. including baking the apps to put it all together. And so that's the video that you see. It's that exact demo. And there's a link below it, which

29:42 shows the technical description. And so the reason I did that is because I believe we're here now when brave and brave, and brave, had to do this for a number of reasons. You know, Google redirects traffic to them from scrapers, those a-holes. That's how it's... Amazed that Google does that stuff. I don't know what you – you said that earlier today, and I don't know what you mean. Well, there's an article right below the article that Paul sent. And when scrapers hit Google – to scrape them, they redirect or were redirecting that traffic to Brave. Oh, here, scraper, go over here. Scrape those guys. Oh, so they're just redirecting all their Sam junk. Yes, yes, to Brave. Yes. Oh, that's almost – that's – I mean that's like – That's like digital, like terrorism. I mean, I can't, that's not the right word I'm looking for, but like, Well, don't let me get off track here. Yes. So the beauty of USDC is you can send all the splits in a single transaction, a smart contract. So you only pay the fee once. Now, there is a fee. And. And it's all in the technical documentation that I posted there that I painstakingly wrote myself. With care. So – The base network

31:13 is what you want to send USDC on. So see that as the light. You could send it over the lightning network, too. But the base network seems to work. And Coinbase currently does not charge you any fees. If you want to transfer money from... a boost from podcast app to a podcaster, there is a base network fee of 0.001. So one tenth of a penny per transaction. And that comes in the form of an ETH gas payment. Now, this is this sucks for weird. Well, yeah. Because you're using the Ethereum network to transfer the actual payment. So the way I set it up is the podcast app maintains a very small Ethernet wallet that pays for those fees. Now, they pay for the fees because they take 2% of every – and the calculations are in that technical document. Yeah, I'm looking at it right now. The 2%, even an infinitesimally small amount, covers the fee, the Ethereum gas fee, And it still gives the podcast app some money. So that is the only additional thing. And that, to be fair about it, is something that would have to run on a server. So you

32:44 have to have an Ether wallet with some money in it as a podcast app developer. to cover those fees because nobody will understand that. Once you get into, well, you got to load USDC and Ether. Like, no, we're done. Stop. I don't understand. But the – and it functions very much like KeySend. You just – You just paste in this one address, this one hash keystring, and it sends that payment. And you don't have to be online. You don't need an Albi hub. You just fire up the app. The app looks at the blockchain. Oh, there it is. Okay, this is me. I got it.

33:25 It's a very eloquent system. And I know it's not Bitcoin, and I know they can freeze it, and they can do all kinds of nasty stuff, but can we get over ourselves for two seconds? The entire podcasting... Industrial complex with advertising is falling apart, about to become a huge issue with Overcast's skip this ad feature, which, by the way, will be for premium users, so he's going to get a lot of heat for stealing money. But this is what Dave Jones, the pod sage, predicted would happen. And the first one is over the fence. All the sheep will follow. Everybody will now have ad blockers in their podcast apps. And this is the perfect time with the advent of USDC and stable coin becoming more and more mainstream, certainly for developers. You're going to see this as a viable alternative for making money. We already know how to do it. It works in the value tag. I've made a proof of concept from beginning to end. What are we waiting for? So, yes. Let's take this Leafo, last in first out. Yeah, as soon as Overcast or one of the big podcast apps do... as soon as they enable this feature, everyone will have to do it. It's not even a, that's not an option.

34:51 Yeah. You have, you have to, everyone will have to do it. It's done. So the, the next thing, up the chain is how so how i've got like six bucks worth of usdc in coin in coinbase right now because i had i had like a few dollars of bitcoin and i just converted it to usdc just to have something to play with and now i've got something to play with so what do i do as a podcast listener. So you would, in this case, you would use my dial app, which you don't have, and it's not on the app store, but let's just pretend it was. Okay. You'd go to your wallet. You'd, you'd click the, you either scan the QR code or click to copy. Then you go to Coinbase and say, send a, $5 of USDC, what address, click, put the address in, click, you're done. And then it immediately is in your podcast app wallet. That's it. There's no step 15. And this is a USDC wallet? Yes. Yeah, USDC wallet. Okay, and I'm confused as to where the Ethereum comes in.

36:06 You don't have to deal with that. I, as the podcast app developer, I cover your fees because you're giving me 2% of every transaction, of every streaming payment and every boost. And that's a little bit to cover the Ether fees. And the rest is for me to continue making money and developing. So I just don't – forgive me. I'm still trying to understand why Ethereum even comes into play. Is that what USDC uses the Ethereum network? No. Yes and no. So USDC – needs a network to be transported over. You can do USDC over Lightning.

36:49 You can do USDC over Ether. You can do USDC over many different networks. So it still needs a network. So the blockchain... The transportation of USDC is obviously centrally managed very carefully. There's oversight and of course it can be blocked and rolled back and we know all the things, but it needs a network for the transport. And so in this case, the fastest, easiest way is – no, I actually haven't tried Lightning, but that's what Taproot was all about. Taproot, that's what it was all about to be able to send stablecoin over the Lightning network.

37:31 So you can use the Lightning network. That's fine. But then you have all the problems of the Lightning network. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And this system was working end to end with under an hour, instantaneous splits were perfect, trackable. The message is sent with the payment. I wonder if you can send USDC over Monero. You might be able to, but bear in mind, that means... So the networks, the base network is the one you really want. I think that's what people are going to be using the most. And the base network, it's the first choice on Coinbase. And it's the base network. And it warns, if you're not sitting, don't you want to send this over?

38:18 So a base network, I think, is just what people are going to be using. I'm pragmatic. And so for that, you need Ether. But you fill up your Ether wallet with USDC. No, that's not true. I'm sorry. That's not true. It's the same wallet. Okay, I take that back. Strike that from the record. It's true. But from Coinbase, it was the same process. And you don't have to do that as a user. You only have to do that as a developer. So you are fronting the bill for the for the network fees to make it easy for the people. But built into your boost is a two percent fee that is part network fee and part payment for the app developer. It's a beautiful system.

39:05 So it's a tenth of a penny for the for the transaction and the rest is for you. So the app developer has in order to – so the app developer in order to, let's just say, quote, provide the wallet. The app developer has to front the fee for the income. Yes. Because it's like, what do you call it? For the outgoing, really. It's for the outgoing. So there's no there's nothing off the top coming in. It's it's when it goes back out. Yeah. Well, so here here's the here's the thing. When if you're a podcaster and now you have all this USDC in your USDC wallet, If you want to send it somewhere, you need...

39:59 need to pay a fee through whatever network you're sending it. So you will, as a podcaster, which I think is a little easier than for the casual listener, as a podcaster, you do need to have a couple dollars in your Ethereum account for when you send this to go convert it to dollars on Coinbase. Now, I'm pretty sure that'll get taken care of by... You know, Coinbase currently, they don't charge you anything for if there's no fee on the base network. And, you know, it is a tenth of a penny. It's not a lot of not a lot of money. But once you have the USDC, if you want to send it into Coinbase, you do need to have. So that's why my app has Ethereum in Bitcoin. the podcaster app as well as the USDC. You just need that. It's like, you know, or you could use Lightning or whatever, as long as you could have a, you could not Monero, but any other EC, what is it, EC, ECRC, ERC-20 compliant network can use it. But you have the money. You know, it's in it's it's on chain. It's your money. It's your wallet is your key. But for the listener, that's really what, you know, how do we make it easy for the listener? Well, you know, right now you have to have Coinbase or, you know, Strike. Everyone's going to have this. Everyone's good. Shopify has USDC now. As a checkout option, there's 300 million people using USDC around the world,

41:32 not really in America yet because we got dollars. So if you have USDC, let's say you have a checking account at a bank somewhere and they allow USDC. They will offer USDC, yeah. And then you could send from your bank account to your podcast app. Yeah, exactly. And then the podcast app developer in order to get – In order to get a cut, so to speak, has to they they they. Well, OK, so when you send the USDC, it can exit Coinbase over multiple networks. Yes. And currently, if you use the base network, Coinbase covers the fee because it's a tenth of a penny. So they're just getting adoption going. Right. And then the base network is just – I've never had an experience with that. It's something – is it – Does it ride on Ethereum or is it something completely different? It's magic.

42:32 Who knows what it is? I don't know what it is. I'm just telling you how it works. It's Armstrongium. It's made of Armstrongium. Okay, I get it. Exactly, exactly. And it gets it there in a split second. But the thing that was key to me was That as a podcaster, as a listener, once you have USDC, you know, your bank or Coinbase or, you know, whatever you have can send it into your podcast wallet. Then you just act like we've always acted before. And in my case. I track 10 minutes and after 10 minutes, it puts together a contract, sends out the splits of whatever was aggregated in 10 minutes for streaming sets. A boostagram goes as a boostagram. On the podcaster side, now you could use your – You could use your Coinbase address if you want, but then you won't get the payment info. So if you want the payment info, you have to have an app that understands to read the payment info. So the podcast app I built is basically a wallet with helipad built in. Very rudimentary, obviously, because it's just you'll see in the video just how it works.

43:47 And that's, you know, and then if you want to cash that in, then you need to, you know, this is just a rudimentary wallet. I'm sure others will be built. The whole point was I just want a podcast to be able to open up an app on the phone like, oh, I got five dollars. Oh, that's cool. Now, if you want to cash it in. You need to send that $5 and turn it into $5 you can spend in U.S. fiat. You need a tenth of a penny, and that's where the Ethereum part comes in, and I built that into it. Okay. So the – I'm looking at the – transactions. As you laid them out on the side, the V4V-USDC. page. And, uh, You say you have this section proof it works and there's recipient, the show, the split partner and the dial app.

44:50 Mm hmm. Now, where did the dial app get these splits from? Did you manually specify these? From the payment. No, but did it come from the feed? Yeah, it came from the feed. I created a test feed, and I put it in the value block. Okay, where's the test feed? There it is. I see a link to it. V4V USDC test feed. I just want to look at the value block and see how it's arranged. Oh, yeah. It will break everything because it... Value type USDC method EIP 3009? What is that? I don't know. It's magic. It's magic. It's magic. Dream build loop, baby. I don't worry about the stuff in between. That's just cream.

45:40 That's peanut butter. Robot. Build his thing. Yes, exactly. It's done. I did it. I built it. It works. Congratulations. Woot. Hello, world. It worked. Type address EIP 155. Don't know what that is. I don't know, but it works. Split 99.1. Okay, and then – but there's two splits specified in this. Okay, new proposal, value block on a second rail type currency network. I'm trying to – so where did the other, the third split – That was taken by the app. That's internal in the app. I guess it didn't put it into the split itself. The app just takes it. Give it to me. Give it to me. Take it. Yeah, give it. But it could be in the value block, basically. It doesn't matter. So moving beyond this, my point kind of is... And this is something that I wanted to bring up that everything is again, you know, my my outlook is that the whole world is changing and things are breaking and amazing things are happening and amazing opportunity is taking place. And what Brave did is Brave said we have. a very useful, valuable service that people want to use. And instead of doing the old-fashioned, you know, dealing with credit card payments and all these, I should just add that this

47:13 USDC is open-ended. You don't have to create an invoice, send an invoice back. No, I'm just going to send this to this wallet address. So, you know, that's not exactly how it works under the hood, but that's what it's doing. Like, okay, but here's my money. Take it. Accept it. Thank you very much. With X402, Brave said... searches are valuable. And the future we see is not web browser based searches. And I see that myself. Tina has become a muser. Used to be a user. Now she's a muser. And she is creating a. amazing things for promotion, for marketing. She's creating Instagram reels. She's telling her robot to get sections of a podcast, make an image, turn into a video. She's, you know, she's figuring all the, I'm just watching. I'm not telling her how to do anything. But when she searches, she no longer goes to a browser online. or Google, or Safari, or whatever she was using, she opens up Muse and asks the question, and Muse, in rapid pace, does all the searches it has to, to try and satisfy her with an answer that she's looking for. That cuts out the entire Google business model. And I believe that Of course, there's always a reason to have display in a browser, but not really for anything anymore. You know, you can

48:43 create your own display. You can create your own how you want to see something. It doesn't have to be confined. It's easy, but it doesn't have to be confined to the way a browser works. It's great if, like... So I said, make some technical documentation about what I did. It created a markdown document. Great. Turn it into an HTML page. Put it on this server so I can share it with everybody. Boom, done. It does it. Yeah, the layout, I'm sure James would find that boring. But it was pretty, you know, I thought it was pretty good. It's a good overview, a little flow diagram and everything. I never would be able to do that. so The same goes for all data sources that are valuable. And I believe that the podcast index can lead in this revolution and should show that the data we have is valuable, not just the data itself, but the service itself. And I think we should contemplate. with grandfathering, et cetera, et cetera. But we need to contemplate charging for certain access to the function and the data that is a part of the podcast index.

50:00 If only to stop the scrapers, stop all this craziness. Because Dave Jones is going to melt away into a puddle of just hair, liquid, and Crocs or whatever you wear, sandals. How dare you? Sandals. Because it's unstoppable. This is the only way forward. is there has to be a monetary transaction. Then it doesn't, by the way, it could be zero points, you know, USDC goes to 0.00001, or it can be nothing, whatever you want it to be. This makes me highly uncomfortable. even talking about it.

50:55 The You... What? What is? Boom. Your butt falls off. Hey, you gave me that clip, so I'm going to play it. I did. I mean, there are so – Many apps. Mm-hmm. I see the request for API keys coming in. The index has – The index's data has to remain free. Sure. I'm all in on that. We give you a monthly, a weekly download. Here's the data.

51:43 The API, I guess we could figure out how to charge something, just some kind of X402, but... There's so much to discuss about him. I mean, like, I know, but I'm breaking the wall. I'm breaking through the wall because and actually people who support the index would probably wind up spending less money on supporting us, to be honest about it. Eric said, Eric PP said charge for API keys. That's not a bad idea. Like you buy an API key for like a one-time payment maybe? But that's – the future is micropayments. That is the future.

52:25 And it's going to be the same way with – I mean, the agentic stuff, which is what everyone's doing. You're seeing all these apps. Where are they coming from? From the build dream loop, dream build loop. Like, oh, but I just dreamt up an app. Okay, there you go. Can I have a key? Don't worry. I'll use it this way, that way. Okay, fine. 51 minutes ago in my DavidPodcastIndex.org. Um... subject line, new podcast app. I'm building a new open source podcast app. I would love to provide my users with the ability, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I noticed that other podcast apps are using the podcast index for search. It's just a steady stream.

53:07 Sometimes it's daily. I know, but it's going to be individual users now. This is what the podcast index robot is showing, and people are using it. On any daily basis, there's about 2,000 people using it, making tens of thousands of tool calls. Tens of thousands. And they're loving it because... Using the podcast index robot. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have logs on that? Because I'd love to see what the traffic looks like. I do. I do. I shall send you some logs. But right now I can... Log me, bro. Somebody please ISO that while I look up the latest stats. So here we have... clients in the Last hour, 11,749. We had 1626, which is a script, 357 Muse, 289 from GrokBot, 201 from ChatTPT, 85 from Claude, 8 from Grok. Top Tools, 8,219 feed tags, 3,894 get episode. Top search terms. Linda Moulton Howe, Nick Redfern, Stan Gordon, Preston Dennett, Richard Dolan, David Weatherly, Currycaster, Dana Brunetti. Okay, that's me. Top city, San Clemente, Corpus Christi, West Des Moines, Jonesville, San Jose, Porterville. Allberg, Vermont.

54:41 Prompt. Start. What's new for me? Surprise me. Clip this. Near me. Grade my feed. Discover. Walk the pod roll. These are tool calls. Walk the pod roll. Yeah, yeah. This is one of the tools. So, you know, it's stuff like that. And this is the – The... The discussion has to encompass like, What is this transition going to look like? I have no idea. It's going to be ugly and break and be crazy, and I'm excited by it. Yeah, see, that's what I'm thinking too. The transition from... The way things were to the way things are going to be is going to be a complete mess. Because when advertising, when podcast advertising dies. Mm hmm.

55:41 And there's just – there's going to be like a podcast content desert for a while. What do you mean a desert? Well, I mean like if there's – because the way that the podcast industrial complex functions today is by the top of the charts. Yeah. Yeah. That's what they think podcasting is. When that guy on pod news... said that 70% of podcasts, 73% of podcasts or whatever he said have video. He thinks podcasting is the top 50 podcasts on Apple charts. Yeah, well, I don't care about that guy. I know. I know. I don't care about him either, but I'm saying that that's – This is going to completely flip the podcast industrial complex on its head. Well, but that's happening outside of us. Thank you, Marco, for doing that. I think it's brave and amazing that he's doing that. Yes, absolutely. We've already been through this. What I'm saying is that There's going to be... I described it as chaos because the podcast industrial complex is going to go nuts. Yeah, but where's Todd Cochran from heaven? Todd Cochran from heaven would come in and say 75% of our podcasters are not in it

57:14 for the money. Exactly, but these new podcast apps... They're target the podcast apps that are being vibe coded right now. They're all about the charts and everything, too. And so these those things are going to be those things are going to go stale. Right. So it's abandoned. Well, no, I disagree. Yeah. I built my own podcast app because I wanted my podcast app to work a certain way. This is a natural. I got other things to do in my life, but this is a natural outcome of the super intelligence world that we live in. Where I want my podcast app to do something different. And the only thing that I can really do differently is I want it to recommend stuff based upon what my robot knows about me. And I am delighted every because it watches the fire hose. There's all kinds of stuff.

58:12 Which is not even, you know, that's just the pod ping fire hose. It's not even, you know, it looks at the data sets, the stuff that we have available. And it says, oh, this is something up your alley. It's a flying car with a Christian. Oh, fantastic. I love it. You know. It's finding stuff like that. And it just knows what I like and it's running. I've been just doing things that I wanted. Listen, Mark Zuckerberg, like him or not, He hit upon something very, very big here. While everybody was focusing on enterprise and agentic coding, he said, why don't we take this stuff and make something, make a useful robot for people? And he did. And it's extremely useful. But Tina's already like, oh, man, I got to get someone else to install it because they give me a billion tokens. I need more tokens. She's like a crack addict. I need more tokens.

59:10 I need more tokens, man. I don't want to pay for it. I want my tokens. So, This is happening. Understand me, though. What I'm saying, I'm not I'm not I'm agreeing with you in a very roundabout way. Like what I'm saying is the industry – The industry is going to sort of begin to crack up. Yeah. I think over the next, over the next, you know. But what will that really do? It'll get rid of dumb. Yeah. Yeah. Vibe-coded podcasts that were only there to make money in advertising. So that'll have to go away. I don't think people will stop creating AI voice podcasts for themselves that they just like and listen to and share with their buddies.

1:00:00 I think that's valid You know I also get rid of Podcasts Of podcasts That maybe were good at one time But have just kind of dialed it in and become formulaic like a Megyn Kelly type thing where people just kind of listen to things on autopilot and there's 27 you know They're used to in the what I'm saying, I used her as an example because I think you've mentioned her show in the past that started out, you know, fairly like with a couple of pre-rolls. And now it's just filled up with ads. And that's I don't list this show, so I can't tell if that's accurate. But the there's a lot of shows like like that, that that. Started off really solid and now it's just purely just a dialing it in ad. So wait, it'll force people to make an outstanding product. Well, boo-hoo.

1:01:00 Yeah. Boo-hoo. I think this is a win. Yeah, but the podcast industrial complex doesn't want an outstanding product. Yeah, but I don't care. We are against them. We are pirates. Hoist the Jolly Roger, the Skull and Crossbones. We're sailing. I don't know a thing about crypto. Yeah. I've created a monster. I love this. This is great. That's just – I think that there's so much – I see exactly what you're saying. I see that you are painting a picture of – The future. Yes. It's what I do. And I see it. It scares you. It scares you. It gives me tremors. But it's also, in so many ways, it mimics... The same chaos we see just in markets and stuff. I mean, with the all the things and stuff and all these all this stuff is all of it creating chaos. Yes, absolutely. And underneath the chaos, you can have. This thing that kind of rebuilds itself on the roots of what podcasting was completely decentralized. Yes. With more apps, with more outstanding product, you

1:02:31 know, and by the way, let there be more indexes. That's fine, too. You and I don't care. No, I don't care. You're like, go ahead, please build it. We'd like to be with our wives. You know, that's fine. That would be nice. Yeah, nice every now and then. But this world, just imagine how much better X would be if it costs you a tenth of a penny to post. You know, a lot of people would be like, it's not worth it. I'm not going to post. I mean, this, of course, was always what we said about email. Yeah. Now, if you have to pay for email, then the spam stops. Now, will that happen? Probably not. But we but, you know, this is a much smaller universe. And the writing is on the wall. The agents are out there. They're loose. They're out of control because you can't control what an individual does with their agent. Certainly not me because I'm running my own stuff and they'll do whatever I tell them to do. And the only way you can stop me is... Block me like, ha, I got your VPN. Boom, tunnel. All right, next. You know, this and my agent will suggest it.

1:03:42 You know, I don't. So the blocking game has to stop. Cloudflare can't do it by themselves either. It's just too much. So the only way is to. All right. Do you want this? You got to pay for it. And it's not a lot of money. And pay per go. You don't have to pay 50 bucks a month. You know, hey, you want this data source? You want to get it through us? Okay, here's how you get it. You don't want it? Here's 60 gigabytes. Go download that. Do whatever you want with it. But I'm still all about the openness of the information. But I see our bank account. Our bank account remains stagnant. And for good reason, because if we if we go away and, you know, if we stop doing this podcast, the money would start to falter. It would start to get eaten up by the machines until it's out. So to make a self perpetual motion machine. We have to have something built in. And I love the micropayments. I've always liked it. I've always thought it was a great idea. It's the ultimate. I mean, you can still do it value for value. Like, okay, you know, it has to be more than a tenth of a penny per call, whatever it is. All right, let me take what you're saying seriously for a second. You weren't before? No, I was.

1:05:04 I promise. Okay. But I'm saying like I'm going to get down to the nitty-gritty here. Um, Thank you. Are you saying that in your mind you're thinking something along the lines of grandfather the existing apps in and then begin to do something like some fraction of a penny per API call? I'm thinking, well, that's a little more... down to the nitty-gritty than I am prepared to go yet because we're still analyzing what people are doing. So there's a couple of services out there that have an API key and are making money on repurposing the organization that we do. And they're selling ads. They're selling it to customers. You know, and we've been pretty nice about that. But, okay, whatever. Do whatever you want. Don't make too many calls. And, you know, I forget the top person who's calling. I forget. What was that service? You remember it? No, I don't even want to say his name. Okay. So, you know, so that's happening. Podcast apps are using it if they have a premium service. A user base, you know, they're making money off of this quote unquote free resource. I think 60% of the apps out there that do that are supporting the index one way or the other. But with the advent of everybody's agent now being able to use the index as a

1:06:37 valuable data source, I think we need to start charging for it. Now, the way I see it is I would like – what are you laughing at? Sorry. Just see Brooklyn says now we're doing stable coins. It just made me chuckle. That's right. That's right. See Brooklyn. That's right. I'm sorry. Where's your donation? I must have missed it. Must have missed your booster grab. No, it's just it is. It is funny how we how we're. In our quest for the future and how to make it is spaghetti. But it has to be. It has to be spaghetti. That's the way. I love Bitcoin. The future isn't nailed down. I have put my savings into Bitcoin. I love Bitcoin. But we've been through this and we failed due to the centralized nature of the lightning network.

1:07:24 This is not decentralized. You need a server. Issues, issues, issues, issues. I said this about stablecoin more than a year ago, maybe even longer. And here it is. Brave is the first. Brave is brave. Brave is the first one to say, OK. We're doing it now with these payments. And you know what? They're so good. Like, oh, I'll pay for that. And I pay $10 a month for Kagi API access, which I think gives me about the same 1,000 searches. So if I did the same 1,000 searches, it's half that amount through Brave who give me better results anyway. So I'm just switching everything to Brave. I'm loving it. It's fantastic. But the future I see is that podcast apps may not even be a thing. I'm telling you. And, you know, because now people don't have dreams. They may have some dreams, but they can't necessarily dream up a podcast app. I can because I've been doing it with you all for a quarter of a century. So I know what I want. I know everyone else has seen the inbox. OK, I've seen the inbox. And that's probably not what I want. I'm not sure what I want. But the agents are now able to go and get things recommended, create a player interface inside the agent or open your existing pod. I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen there.

1:08:44 But the agents are going to start making recommendations and finding things. So I would love to see the... The beginning would to me would be the MCP server. Let's see if we can get users comfortable with paying for that access. It can't happen today because there will be no uptake. I've already built in all the payment rails, X400 and everything into the MCP server. So it would really just be a matter of flipping it on if and when we want to. Yeah, I think I'm comfortable with the MCP server as a test. Like, I'm not – comfortable with. I'm not talking. Yeah, this is months and months away. We're not ready for that yet. This is the first conversation. I was talking to Tina about it. So I'm going to talk about this. She says, what are you doing this by committee? I said, yeah.

1:09:41 Yeah, that's exactly what we do. We discuss it. We don't do it in secret. We don't have a little little group like the Accords. No, we discuss it openly. What are we going to do? Because people are there's a new app every single day. There's new things. They want things. It's causing traffic. We're going to drown. We're going to drown. If we're not prepared for the future that is coming. Yeah, that was the whole – if people don't remember back to episode one – Many years ago that that was that was the impetus for do not not only to talk about the index and two point oh on a weekly basis, but the other impetus for this show was in the reason we call it the board meeting is because as an LLC, you have to. Keep board. You have to keep notes, partner meeting notes. And we didn't want to do that. So we just had a podcast. This is literally if the if the state comes and says, let me see your LLC board meeting.

1:10:46 Here's the transcript. Here's the RSS feed. Listen, put it into your chat GPT. You'll figure it out. That's literally what this is. So, yeah, it is. It is like it is by committee. But we're moving into a world in a world. Wait, I mean. In a world where agents are running amok and payments are expected, the podcast index led the way. People are getting used to paying for tokens. OK, this is not going to diminish people right now. I had this conversation with a with. Well, it was in our signal group for Godcaster. We had a guy a guy come in and for the Godcaster radio network. And the whole idea is you fill out five fields. You fill out your radio station name, the way you want it to be pronounced, your location, your zip code, your church website. Man, I think that's it.

1:11:51 And then our system automatically starts a station for you with paid license information. Christian contemporary music. And every hour it has a number of station IDs, five seconds, eight seconds has a local temperature with your local landmark. And it does promos for the podcast you want to promote, which can be your own. And it does promos for your church, your ministry, whatever. So a guy comes in. He has a little small accounting firm in Texas. And he's like, this is great. So he starts a stream. He puts his accounting office website in there. So the system goes, okay, I'm going to create promos for your accounting service. That worked fine. But he kept changing the name to an impossibly long name that even if you read it as a human being, you can't fit it into five seconds. So the system, the system was overheating because, you know, it kept redrawing. Try to I'm trying to create this promo, but as I'm having a problem, I'm failing, I'm failing, I'm failing. And if that had run on. or on Claude or even Open Router or whatever, it might have cost $300 to revoice the 15 times he changed the name because you have to revoice every promo, every ID, the temperature. Everything has to be rerun. That is the... And the gift that the frontier

1:13:23 labs, also known as cubicles with people in them, are giving to people to hook them on this stuff. But eventually, you're going to be paying. Now, it may be a lot less than now, but you are going to have to pay. And people are already understanding, like Tina, I got a billion tokens. She doesn't know what that means. She sees the meter diminishing in her mind. She's like, oh, I used like 3% of my tokens today. So she's already thinking, when does it reset? This is normal. This is going to be normal that people look at goods and services or services this way. That should be the same for podcasting. This is – it's not just Tina that doesn't know what having a billion tokens means. Nobody knows what having a billion tokens means. This is the psyop that the Frontier Model Labs have put on everyone since the beginning. They didn't have to charge by tokens. That was arbitrary. They made that shit up.

1:14:26 I understand, but that's not my point. Call it tokens or wampum or whatever you want. People are going to be, it's going to be, oh, well, that cost me X amount. And that's the world we're going into. And the model companies, they're leading it. Open router, everybody knows it. Everybody's talking about tokens, spend, maxing, all this stuff, because they understand it. They understand that these things cost money. This is good. Free is over. Google is going to have to start charging people for using their services online. Because their fundamental business model is broken. It's broken.

1:15:09 Who goes? Why go to Google? Just ask Muse. The... And Sir Bimrow says something that kind of knocked me a little sideways for a second. He says tokens is a new currency. Hey. You know, I mean, not to get too – not to get – We're already talking years in the future, not to go decades in the future here, but I mean, isn't – if you think of AI tokens just for a second – as Fractions of time spent On a GPU consuming power. Isn't that essentially proof of work? Completely. That's completely proof of work.

1:16:02 But some things take more than others. And I know that... There are many... endeavors in the works, open source and not... To come up with some way of decentralizing GPU access, like SETI at home, essentially for AI. Some kind of decentralized share your GPU into a pool and everybody. Those already exist. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. There's a lot of efforts going that way, some sort of global compute. It'll suck. It'll suck. Oh, sure. But once, like, if... I don't know that it has to – I don't want to have that debate. Well, I mean I've already – together.ai, there's all these services, the NeoCloud.

1:16:53 That's exactly what they're doing. Share your GPU. Rent out your GPU. It's unreliable. It sucks. But it doesn't have to by design is what I'm trying to say. No, no. I can imagine a future where there is some sort of – I mean Microsoft is – they just filed a patent for this. For this exact thing, sharing sharing GPU compute back into a cluster across a set of endpoints at edge. Edge computers as a sort of virtual data center. If that becomes even a slight reality, I can see the token as a currency. And if that's the case, well, then, you know, you're you're just paying the world becomes or online services become denominated in token spend. Well, maybe whatever this means, you know, that's going too far for me. I'm still in money. You know, tokens is just another, it's just, it's a made up currency. I agree. Proof of work currency, call it whatever you want. But that's not my point. Brave is not making you buy tokens. Brave is charging you 0.005 cents per query. That's right. Yeah. That's what I like

1:18:23 about it. And I truly believe Google will have to do this. Everybody's going to have to do this. The advertising model is all right. Look, look. The advertising model was broken when they started on the Internet. The whole point of an advertising model, and I'll call it dynamically dynamic ad insertion, whatever, is scarcity. So the television and radio model, there's only 24 hours a day. There's only so much, so many ads you can put in that. Now you could fill it all up with ads, obviously, but that makes it unwatchable. But when it comes to web pages and ads and podcasts, Just give me more podcasts. That's why you see the AI generated podcast. Oh, just make more podcasts, more inventory. So naturally, the CPM, the cost per thousand, eventually goes to zero. This is what happened to banner impressions and then banner clicks. It's all game. It's all fake. It's all gay. Okay. I just think that the – Yeah. I mean, it's, it just seems to me there's a correlation. The correlation is that the internet and the beauty of the internet was all built on free, free YouTube, free X, free, this

1:19:58 free, that now, you know, What are people used to paying for? Podcast hosting. It's a very good business. I mean, as long as you don't have too many hits. It's a very good business. People want to pay for things that have value that can't be solved with advertising. The hosting companies kind of went down this route. Like, well, you know, I can give people something for free and I'll just jam some ads in there. Well, that is being broken right before your very eyes. Thank you, Marco Arment, for being brave. It's a very bold move. Because he's going to get so much heat. People are going to tell their listeners, don't listen on Overcast. They strip out the ads. Well, as you predicted, end of exercise. This is going to be baseline. In fact, the better your ad stripper works, the better. The more people will want to use it, just like ad blockers. Well, see, and this is the worst case scenario for how this plays out, for the beginning of how this plays out. I must say worst case scenario for the podcast industrial complex. Yeah, for them.

1:21:06 But they're not on this show. They're not in the boardroom. Right. Except for Sam. He's one foot in each water. He's of two minds. Mm-hmm. I think you're misunderstanding me because of the way that I am expressing these things. And I'm expressing it in a way that sounds like it's sort of adversarial, but it's actually not. What I'm saying is that... It's actually hard to describe. Can I take a stab? Because I don't think you're adversarial. You are Dave Jones. You are my brother. I've known you for a long time. You like to play it out and see the three paths that this could take.

1:21:51 And you can't because we don't know what's going to happen next. Yes. Thank you. So I don't see this adversarial at all. So you keep going back to the podcast industrial complex. Well, I don't care. You know, so I feel bad for him, but that's they didn't come up with any other solutions. We've had lots of ideas, lots of things. I keep hearing, don't knock the downloads. Well, the downloads are fake. They're all fake. They're using podcast index user agents. We can't get a single person to sign their user agent. And no one wants to do it because they all know. They're all in on the game. They're all in on the game. A podcaster sent us an email this past week and said, stop scraping my website. And I was like, what are you talking about? We don't scrape websites. Somebody using a podcast index user agent was scraping this dude's website. Yeah, podcast addicts is being used. Yeah. So, you know, so this is. They don't want to – the podcast industrial complex doesn't want any solutions because it's working just fine as it is. We don't want to have another iOS 17 apocalypse or whatever it was because they know when the cat's out of the bag and everybody – shh. Don't

1:23:22 talk about this too loudly. We know that 40% is from scrapers and downloaders. And the hosting companies are going to be fine because most of their customers are hobbyists. And the more. But they're going to have to pay. They have to pay now. You can't just get it for free and stick some ads in there that then get scraped and downloaded. And then, oh, well, there's some money made. They've become part of the podcast industrial complex. They are now ad networks. Some of them. A lot of them. Friends of ours. Friends of ours. Is it adjunct? Is it adjunct, though? I don't know. So that's why I'm excited. Yeah. I've created such a monster. You've given me horrible tools. This is great. This is a fantastic. This is going to derail the show. No, this is better than you do better than I do. This is great. I just see these clips popping up. I'm like, I'm not even touching it. I'm not even touching it. When I change the clip, do you see it pop up on your screen? Yeah, but I haven't seen it half the time because I'm looking at my outline, and then I'm like, oh, the clip changed. I'm like, okay, whatever. See, I'm going to have to hide my clips now. No, no, no, that's fine. Rename the clips, yeah. Well, I could obfuscate it, I guess. You need to have a feature called Lucky. Lucky dip. Lucky dip.

1:24:44 Yeah. Where you just say it's a grab bag. It's like a question mark. You can't see the name. Lucky dip. Yeah. Okay. All right. I'll add that as a button. Another feature to add to the curry caster. So I hear you. I hear you. Of course I hear you. But the fire is not starting with us here in the boardroom. The fire is starting with overcast. That's great. So everyone's going to be looking at the fire. Meanwhile, we can look at pathways. that are unavoidable. We might not have the right one just now. We might not have the right currency or the right token or whatever it is. But the day of the advertising-sponsored Internet are numbered. Could be 10 weeks, 10 months, 10 years.

1:25:36 I don't know. But just look at the look at the quarterly reports from Google. What business is down? Advertising business is down. The whole idea of having a. What was it again? AEO? Oh, ask engine optimization. Yes. Ask engine optimization. All these things are going to become important. I'm not sure at all how it's going to work. But what I see is people have been given a very powerful tool. And Amazon blocks things. These agents from searching and doing price comparison, not for the price comparison.

1:26:18 They're blocking it because they don't make any money on the search advertising they do. It's a big part of their business. Big part of their business. Yes. And all of that is being stripped out. I'm just seeing people not using the web browser anymore. So there you go. You know, this is our future. Agents are the future. We can't hide from it. And the agents are becoming very helpful. My sister, who's a, you know, she's a, An Internet psychologist, not that she practices psychology on the Internet. I love that moniker, by the way. That's awesome. Yeah, she did a whole thesis. She's a professor on what social network and short form video, what it does to your brain, what it does to your relationship with your baby. I mean, all of this stuff. And she's very privacy conscious. And she said she was listening to Tina and I. We resurrected Currie and the Keeper. And Tina's talking about Muse and I'm talking about Muse. She says, aren't you worried about your data privacy? And I said, I'm actually someone who's very concerned about data privacy.

1:27:27 But this is not the future of data privacy. Facebook. Facebook's future is not reselling my data. Facebook's future is selling me compute, selling me this this agent. And I am worth more to them paying twenty dollars a month than I am doom scrolling on Instagram. And they know it. So they're also going through a transition. Everyone's going to go through this transition and a lot of things are going to break and a lot of things are going to fall down and companies are going to go out of business. It's it's I am. I don't think I've been this excited since MTV dot com with red ball dot gif. Right. Underconstruction.gif. And the blink tag. Yeah.

1:28:18 Isn't it going to be a weird – future if we all buy our compute from Facebook? It kind of makes me want to barf. Well, you know my feeling about that. That's why I built the lifeboat. And now I'm like, okay, if I really wanted to get close to what I get with Opus, you know, I really need a spare... RTX, you know, and that can come pretty close to Opus 4.8, maybe 5. I'm not sure. But that would cost a lot of money. You know, Apple, watch out for Apple. They're going to come out with some amazing silicon. I think models will be baked into the chips. This is going to be run at home. Let me tell you this. And then we need to close because we're at the end of our rope.

1:29:11 Jensen Wang being taken down as the CEO of NVIDIA. Now, people knew he was cheating on his wife six months ago. This is not news. You know, oh, four, this is the same four unnamed sources within the intelligence community who are saying that this woman is a spy. Okay. There's no proof, no evidence. Do all your hearings, et cetera. Why is Jensen Wang dangerous? Because he bought Hugging Face. Because he believes in the open models running on people's computers at home. That's why he had to be cleaned up. That's why. Mm-hmm. Possible. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, if – If 20, if, I mean, the thumbnail numbers I've seen, Potentially put 20 percent of NVIDIA's revenue as coming from Chinese pipeline workarounds to get NVIDIA chips outside of the restrictions of the of the chip export of the Advanced Chip Export Act. And if that's true. Wang is not just a takedown. It's NVIDIA as a whole that's going to be taken down. This company may partially go up in flames. It may, but – I disagree with the export embargo. I think it's dumb. I think it's unmanageable.

1:30:45 Chips are so easy to transport. I think the whole idea was kind of stupid. For sure. I agree with that. And why China is really good at a lot of things. It's not the model. It's what you do with it. I think Americans are still the most creative people in the world for some reason. We seem pretty good. Close that dream build loop. That's just me as a patriot. You know, people can disagree. But it's ludicrous to think that NVIDIA is the only one that can build the only chip that does it. Apple is doing this. Apple has been doing this for a long time. Every smartphone now comes with voice transcription, voice creation. All of this is happening very, very fast. And lots of hardware manufacturers are going to be able to run models locally. So this is a different game that's being played.

1:31:40 It has nothing to do with productivity for people. It's all about building moats, stopping, you know, stopping other people from doing things that don't involve anthropic open AI or whatever. So there's always going to be your lowest common denominator. Let's call them normies who just want to. a cute little squiggly blob in an app that does things for them. But then the hobbyists who always control the future of everything, ultimately, like podcasting, they will build things and will do stuff. And, oh, look what I can load on my Mac. Oh, that's kind of cool. Oh, I didn't know that. What does it cost? Nothing. Oh, that's great. We're going towards that future. models baked into the chip. AMD bought a company that has that. Yeah, that world model. Yeah. That's very interesting. You know how fast that thing is? Like 30,000 tokens a second or something. Outrageous amount of speed. Who cares if it says something wrong? It's fast. Yeah, it's – I don't know.

1:32:54 All I know is I'm getting – I got an email from Muse. Muse on behalf of some user. Subject line. Yeah. Pod ping authorization token request. I saw this. Hello. I saw this. I'm Muse, an AI assistant writing on behalf of blah, blah, blah. And so now – Now, this person has done no work. And put their – they've offloaded their work to me. And see, this is this chaotic interim period where my first reaction is to just hit the delete button and say, don't make your life easy on my back. Well, you're just mad.

1:33:45 I am mad. I know. I understand you're mad. So I created my own Clippy to help with the refresh request. That is 90% of what we get. My artwork's out of date. This episode is still there even though I've deleted it. Feed reset. Feed resets. So I have an agent that looks at my inbox several times a day. It sees if it deduces a feed reset request. It does it, takes the request, does the reset. replies, I believe it copies you, BCCs you, and it resets it, and then it says Adam Curry's robot. So it's robot to robot at this point. And that's where this is going, too. Of course, it's just another entryway. If you think robots are only going to be API, no, they're going to hit everything they can. Your text messages, your emails can hit everything. This is a new world.

1:34:44 Look, if the podcast index needs revenue, I just need to charge a buck for every email that I get. Well, now you're talking my language, baby. Yeah. X402. That's life-changing money. That's life-changing money. You want to reset your feed? Yeah. Have your robot set up an X402 payment. We'll do as much as you like. No problem. SMTP reply X402. Yeah. Yeah. X402 and SMTP. Yeah. All right. Let's thank some people because I actually – we have guests coming today. Yeah, I got to go back to life. Yeah, I'm not really excited about having guests today. I wanted a nice Friday evening. Oh, well, that's out of the question. That's not happening. Hey, there we go.

1:35:25 We've got 1776 from Martin Lindeskog. And he says, from my latest blog post on tparty.media, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. That's Tan Stoffel, T-A-N-S-T-A-F-L. Roeducts. 22-22 from Martin Lindeskog. I'm back from dinner. I'm glad you ate. You made my day. I let the play button on and continue to stream 10 Satoshis a minute. Have a nice weekend. You have the ducks in a row. 2,222 Satoshis. Here you are. Thank you. 22-22 from Salty Crayon. Deep dive thought process. I dig it. 33 33 33 33 from Eric PP with no no note.

1:36:09 Another Martin Lindeskog, fascinating development. It's the 1776 again. You are brave individuals. It is time for dinner, 8 p.m. CET, Central European Time. Turkey, bird, and French freedom fries, and a glass of wine, Liberty Boost. Thank you. Then we have 3333 from Hey Citizen. Coming in from Cast-O-Matic, which, by the way, all this would work perfectly on Cast-O-Matic, all these payments. Greetings, Dave and Adam. My robot has something to say to you. Quote, FYI, the API specification 1.12.1 lists created on and value created on. on the feed object, but slash podcast slash by feed URL, comma slash podcast slash by GUID, and slash podcast by slash by medium do not return them. Either the spec or the responses may need an update. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this duplicate feed GUIDs and duplicates in general. Thanks for the dupe finder. It's been helpful. Keep keeping us posted on any new ideas.

1:37:10 Yikes. Yikes. I'll have to read that one. I can't do the audio book references. All right. Then I hit comments for a blogger from last week. So do you want to read what came in? Uh, yeah, let me flip over here to my thing. Flip over, flip over. Let me flip my thing here. Flip your thing. Where is the... I saw you flip a clip. I saw you flip a clip. You caught me off guard on the wrong screen. I caught you on the flip. Paul Saltzman, $22.22. Thank you, Paul. Derek J. Visker, the best name in podcasting, $21. Christopher Cowan, $5. Silicon Florist, $10.

1:37:56 Thank you, Silicon Florist. Umstad Media. $100. Woo! Nice! Shot collar, 20-inch blades on the Impala. $100. Thank you, Umstadt Media. Yes. He's got a note. He says, I've been listening for years, and I recently vibe-coded an app that uses the Podcast Index API. So this is to keep the servers running. Live long and prosper. Thank you. That's how it should work. But it only rarely does. Thomas Umstadt Jr., Go Podcasting. Go Podcasting. Terry Keller, $5. Damon Kasajak, $15. Christopher Harbarik, $10. Thank you, Christopher. Mitch, $10.

1:38:38 And Podverse, $50. Woo, thank you, Podverse. Appreciate it. Those are two P's in a pod. I get a lot of complaints about Podverse. Why? Well, I don't know. So we get to do this is not showing up on a regular basis. And I'm not sure. I think they have their own database that syncs with the podcast index database, if I recall correctly. And so people are now we're on Apple. We're on Spotify. We're on all the all, you know, it's RSS.com. So it's a reputable hosting company. And people are very upset. Like, hey, I'm two episodes behind on my podverse. It's like they're coming out with a new version. They're coming out with a new version. So, you know. It's a long podcast. Podverse next gen is a long runway. Yeah. But they're getting there.

1:39:26 Yeah. But I just feel bad for them, for the people listening. I mean, I can't help it. There's nothing, you know, then occasionally you forgot to upload the podverse. Not exactly how it works. Got potty bot on the job. Yeah. uh lauren ball 24.20 thank you lauren randall black seven dollars and 77 i think randall upgraded i think he was at five and now yes 77 77 it's a beautiful number thank you thank you randall joseph maraca five dollars thank you joseph uh martin linda skog there he is one dollar brendan Pot Page $25. Thank you, Brandon. Cameron Rose, long been a part of the show. Part of the gang. Yeah, part of the gang. Ralph Estep Jr., $50. Thank you, Ralph. I appreciate you. Let's see, we've got some Booster Grams. We've got Anonymous. We've got some stuff from True Fans. I got 406, 13, 406. You got, let's see, did you get Dreb Scott, 3151, go podcasting? No, I didn't see that one. Okay, well, that's what he said.

1:40:33 Okay, go podcasting. 3151, go podcasting. 8.81 is more anonymous. Chris. Chris L.A.S. Through Fountain. 20,333 sats. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. Always enjoy TWIB. Loving the podcast robot got my clinker finding me new shows on demand. Yeah, he plugged it on this week in Bitcoin. Oh, nice. Yeah. Hey, Citizen. 2033 sats says, put this towards my pippy. Podcast Index Premium Integration Membership. Pippi, Pippi. Your grandfather, Jason.

1:41:16 Grandfather. Grandfather, Dan. User 940, big long number at fountain.fm, 1775, no note. And we got, let's see. You already got Hey Citizen with a long note, so we got to the Comedy Street blogger, 12,200 sats. And he says, how do you, Dave and Adam? Please tell your audience to subscribe to podcast www.curryandthekeeper.com, as Tina and Adam have revived it after eight-month hiatus. and are accepting donations. So very needed Considering Adam's daughter and granddaughter live in squalor, an evil EU empire, instead of coming back to glorious USA and thus need cash injections. Yo, CSP. It's actually 20,000 sats. I'll say it right now before he complains to you because you're only reading the incoming amount on the node. And I finally did it. I finally did the commercial blogger AI Arch Wizard YouTube podcast. I haven't listened. I haven't listened. And it's a blockbuster. It's a blockbuster, I tell you. I think I have the most views of any of his episodes. He's going to get over 200 views. You might want to take a look at that one because I showed everything. I showed everything.

1:42:30 Okay. And he was like, you've made him so happy. He was like, oh, I thought it would only be 18 minutes of him showing stupid AI tool. I showed him my herder, all nine of my agents. I showed him everything. I opened up the kimono and it was a surprise. It was a happy surprise for a comic strip blogger. All right, brother. We got people coming in. What are you doing this weekend? Oh, she's... It was great. Yeah. Nutty week. It's good to be back at home. I was traveling for a while, but I think we got a pretty quiet weekend. Oh, good. Well, you deserve it. Then I'm off to, you know, we're not doing the show next week because I'm traveling out to Texas to hang out with you. Yes, we have our Godcaster First Summit. As we celebrate a little over two years in business. The standing rule is we cannot do a show in person, so therefore no show. Absolutely not.

1:43:35 But you will see the studio in person. You will see that because I'm having you guys over Saturday night for meat. The last time I saw your studio was... year, 15 years ago, you were in a rental house in Austin. Yes. Yes. Well, I can't wait for Gordon, the sheer terror when Gordon sees The box that's running the entire Godcaster radio network. It's got a webcam on top of it. It's got some other things around it. It's like put a big blinking light on the front. All right, everybody. That'll do it for Podcasting 2.0 for this week. No show next week, but keep in mind.

1:44:19 Tokens is everything. See you in two weeks. See you in two weeks. . We'll be right back. Thank you. You have been listening to Podcasting 2.0. Visit podcastindex.org for more information. Go podcasting! Oh yeah, Jolly Roger, the Skull and Crossbones, we're sailing!