Episode 263: Chat is Dead

0:00 Podcasting 2.0 for June 12th, 2026, episode 263. Chat is dead. Well, hello and welcome my friends into the boardroom, the board meeting of Podcasting 2.0. Just a bunch of teenagers here, pay no attention to us. what the future of podcasting is going to be because we're creating it. I'm Adam Curry here in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and in Alabama, the man who's so far underwater he needs a snorkel. The reverb on the end, I like it. Come on, man, come on. I'm a radio pronosticator. You are. That was impressive. I like it.

1:00 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's Friday once again, everybody. Welcome to Podcasting 2.0. Dave, how are you doing? I saw notes on the podcastindex.social, and whenever you say, I'm so far underwater, man, I'm like, oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. I live in that state perpetually, so I'm used to it. I just want to say that sometimes I need to say. Sometimes I need to set expectations about how fast code or something is going to happen because I'm like, you know, eh. A lot going on. There's a lot going on. I don't, I just don't, I don't, I always feel bad because people. Email me or... post something to me and want something. And I'm like, you know, I really want to give that to you quickly, but I just, I only get about an hour and a half a day max. It's crazy to see how much output you have actually based upon that hour, hour and a half a day. I've been able to. Increase the output a little bit with AI coding. Ah, there it is. Increase productivity. No one's replacing Dave. He's just getting more productive. And when you get more productive, there's less time for your wife. Yeah, that's really what it is. I know. The, um... The end. I think the AI coding... has worked pretty well for my use cases

2:31 because There was already a large existing code base. Witch. it can draw patterns from. So yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure. I mean, there's, there's, there's, There's already a hundred thousand lines of code. you know, in the podcast index. repositories in which to just sort of like root around. To root around and delete stuff. Yeah, I say I need a new endpoint that does this on the API. And it can just say, well, it can go look at the existing stuff and all the SQL statements and all that kind of stuff. I mean, that's not hard.

3:15 But wait, when you say that, do you let it build it? I always go through the spec driven development process. I always have it create a spec. A plan. Well, yeah, this is... Yeah, yeah, it is. It's a plan, but also like a... My typical pattern is... I take... I don't let, I never let the AI agent. touch the code base. without, excuse me, excuse me, touch the repository. So everything, it is prohibited from. writing anything to get. Except for when it does it. Except for when it does it and then apologizes for it after the fact. That's my favorite. Oh, man, I'm sorry. I'll write this down so that'll never happen again. And then it'll do it and it'll say, oh, you know what, you're right. You're right. I should have seen that. I have a note about that. Oh, yeah. How many times have I been through that? It's a lie. It's just a lie. It's a lie. Unless you specifically say in your prompt, and remember. Don't do this. You've got a memory file about it. It will do it. Eventually, it will just do it. You've got to, you have to be. These things need a human to drive it. It needs a human. When it comes back from if you clear out the context, which I do a lot. comes back from context, and then I'll have to remind it,

4:47 okay, remember, we have memory about this. Go look for it before you, oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, you're right. I don't actually know any of that. Let me go check it out. Because it just doesn't know. It's not intelligent. It's a robot. And... That's why I never let it touch Git. Of course, you have to have your stuff backed up. I mean, you have to. You must have back up to everything. No matter what. And I never let it touch Git. And then. have essay I think. I think coders who... are very successful. with using AI agents to do coding. are people who already think in small... bite-sized chunks about projects. Small-minded people, yes. Small-minded people with small windows of thought processing, yes. Because the process you already take is one where you take a large... thing and boil it down into a small series of steps. And so you just, you naturally sort of think and talk that way already. And then... you take that and apply it to a very. a A code repository that's been around for years. and is very mature.

6:20 mature in the sense of it has established patterns, not that those patterns are necessarily optimized. But it does have a set of... patterns already. Yes. Because then, like, I mean, adding a new endpoint to an API is typically not... that difficult if all you're needing is data presented in a new way. I found, you know how skills work, obviously. I found that I've been able to make something called Doctrine. or what Claude calls doctrine. So an example of doctrine is my example of... do the credits. So it's all uppercase credits and then now depending on what show I'm working on, that's how it would adjust it so it's not just a skill specifically for No Agenda for Podcasting 2.0. And it understands doctrine so it kind of handles it as a skill and has the scripts already built. It just knows the variable is where I'm at at that moment. And that's worked out pretty well for me. I th- so... I think obviously AI.

7:31 is dominating everything in life everything life life all of our lives are just so sad saturated with it. I don't think I've ever. I don't think I've ever been so split-minded about a single piece of technology as I am with this. Wow. I mean, on a daily basis, I... get tons of use out of it but i also just dis buys it down to my core of who I hated. Write down your backbone. I hate, yes, my very cerebrospinal fluid. quivers with disgust at AI-generated output.

8:19 Well... I cannot stand it when somebody sends me like a document or an email that starts off and you immediately within the first two sentences know that it's AI. And it's like 12 paragraphs of thing. And I'm like, man, I can't read this. Well, we had a, this is interesting. I know you followed the Godcaster chat that we had this morning. There was, it was kind of fun how it came in like, it's off air, it's broken. And that was kind of the message that we got. And so I go to investigate, let me see what's going on. It was a live stream and I didn't know. if it was broken, I didn't know if it was not, you know, what off-air meant. And so.

9:05 After probably 25 minutes, I figured out that what was happening is a Godcaster livestream station. We have a product called Your Town Livestream. was being relayed by Live365, which is correct. for licensing. But it was actually Live365 who, for whatever reason, their system was just putting out metadata saying off-air. without passing through the metadata which comes through What is it called? CTY, I think it is. uh you know that's the the metadata that comes along with ice cast And so... I told the robot... write up a document for the help desk on that end if the user can't figure out how to restart their relay or whatever it is. And so it wrote a paragraph.

10:00 I don't know if you saw that if you had time to look at it. But I was curious if A, if you thought, oh, wow, this is an AI-generated thing. So did you see it or you didn't see it? I don't, I was... split-minded with our split brain with work so let me let me go back and see if i can yeah well And oh, is this, is this the one? No, I did not see this. Okay, you said I've debugged everything. I haven't read any of this yet. Here's a template. Does it scream? AI to you? The one that says, okay, I've debugged everything? Yeah, what's underneath that. What they would have to give to the... to the help desk at Life 365. Um...

10:47 Curious Curious. Please restart. Not necessarily, no. So as I was posting that. I thought to myself. Well, what we need here is the world where my robot talks to the robot at the help desk at Live 365, and they just resolve it without two other people sitting in the middle. That would have been a beautiful thing. Because now Gordon has to talk to the station guy. The station guy has to go talk to Live 365. If he can't figure it out, he has to email him this document. I can see a world where that would have been very handy. I'm going to have to think about that one. I mean, you know. handy and Well, less... That would be more productive for everybody involved. We could do other things. things with that time. It def- Mmm. It depends on what. You mean, like... Productivity has...

11:55 a lot of consequences. I am not going to. make you feel good about this at all, I can tell. Um... So... I'm with you on emails. I'm with you on songs. I'm with you on images. I'm with you on all of that. I mean, that's annoying. Well, it's because I live my life in... 50% of my job on a daily basis for the last 27 years has been tech support. Right. And now you're getting just longer emails and with superlatives that you don't need. That is more work slop. Work slop. Yeah. And less help desk.

12:39 Mm-hmm. On the help desk side of things, The issue, I think, is that. The way software – I think the reason I'm having a reaction to what you're saying about just let my support bot talk to that support bot and then let them resolve it. Errors in... in systems. have mini They look the same. You can have a large number of... of problems that manifest. themselves in the same output sure The same dialogue box. Exactly. And so like if. if the customer is not involved or the end user or whatever is not involved. Or if they're the ones that trigger it. themselves. Yeah, I understand.

13:43 It just all falls apart. It's kind of a false equivalency. Let me give you a podcasting example of productivity. So... Every month or so, Pastor Jimmy records 23 daily grinds for me. um This is a one-minute devotional. I have a script that... that takes the most, you know, I dump all 23 of these into a bin, and then the script, you know, it's a cron job, it runs, it says, okay, let me get the next number in the sequence. It actually does some fun things. It whispers it and then figures out what the scripture is about. And then it does the ID3 tags, uploads it to the server, adds the episode to the RSS feed.

14:32 So that's already kind of cool. The fact that it's, you know, this less work because who wants to be titling? You know, all of this, like 23 episodes. So when he sends it to me, he sends it to me as one big file. And he's got flubs. He's got pickups. And so that used to be about a two and a half to three hour job. I'm pretty fast at editing. So, you know, I pick up, I can see on the waveform. Oh, he picked it up. Okay. I'll set an out point there. In point there. Click. Let me listen. Okay. The edit's good. Then I'd have to put music blocks on each of those. Then I have to cut each one, output it, and then it goes into the bin. So about 23 minutes. So I did an experiment. I said, robot. Here's a file.

15:13 There's 23. Daily grinds on here. They're pickups, they're flubs, they're restarts. I want you to cut each one, put the music under it, make sure there's no flubs, title it, do the ID3 tags, and then put it in the bin. brother It had, out of 23... There were two, because all I had to do was just audition them in real time. listening to them. There were two that had a little audio flaw. the beginning, just a little glitch of, you know, a little snippet of audio. and one where it did an edit but it picked up a double breath. otherwise flawless. Total time for Adam, about 30 minutes. Most of it just spent listening to him to make sure the output was correct. This was mind-blowing to me. Okay, so... What you're describing is a process that you could have written code for yourself by hand. Yes, it wrote code for it, exactly. Exactly. That's exactly right. You could have written code that does this yourself. Any process that you can envision as a automated code-based process. The LLM can do it and just do it very, very fast. Yeah, exactly. And then it has this built in and now I'm able to reuse that code because we've made this into a... a doctrine. So now it understands that code. And so now I'm taking the next step. because I'm setting up a studio at

16:47 the church. They've given me an office, and it's already soundproofed and everything because people want to do podcasts. I'm like, you know, the last thing I want to be is the podcast engineer guy. Right. this now The beautiful combination for me is Claude with Omarchi. So it's Linux. I'm running it native. I don't buy software. I don't look for software. I just say build this software for me. So I said, I need a piece of software that is idiot proof. You click on the button, you select your podcast, you hit record. If you... flub, mess up, you know, take it, do it, do over, etc.

17:29 People don't have to worry about that. They just keep recording. And then when they're done, they hit stop. And then you go and you detect all the pickups, anything necessary, cut off. the beginning, cut off the end, have them give an audition of any edits that were made, and ultimately just ID3 tag it, put the image in, boom, good to go, and the next step will be... you know, poop it right up to rss.com. I mean, this is... the three tools I have. which is FFmpeg. Support those guys. Send those guys money. FFmpeg is just one of the most beautiful tools I've ever seen. It does everything. Um... Whisper. Which I do on, you know, just to get transcripts of everything. I live in audio, so that's... That's the next tool for me. And I use together.ai for super fast. You know, it can do an hour in like 45 seconds. and Python and then the bot, the robot. And it's changing my life. So I understand where you're coming from. I also see how it's... Because I can't write code like that. I mean, yeah, maybe I could kind of get somewhere. But no, not really. But I understand what it's doing and I understand how to tell it to go reuse that code.

18:48 And it's just, it's blowing my mind how productive I've become. This is... This is the issue with the with the current state of AI psychosis. that has just gripped the entire known world. is the conflation between the... incredible gain in productivity that you just described. and And I would say, I would describe it as not even really a gain in productivity. so much as a as an erasure. of the things that you used to just dread.

19:34 Like, so... You get to a point in a code base. where When somebody describes where you begin to build out a feature and what you see as the developer is just a whole lot of copying and pasting. You're like this. This feature shares so many things. common with this other feature. And I'm just going to have to go in there and I'm going to have to build a different version of the same class. I'm going to have to import these same methods. I'm going to have to build the same unit tests. You're just doing the same thing with slight tweaks over and over and over again. Which is exactly the process you're describing. The going out and getting clips, the automatic edits. These are just things that you... It's not. But then that process, which is completely valid, that an agent can take. a process like that. and Write all the code that automates it for you. Which is code that you would have never taken the time to write because it would have taken 100 hours. No, you used to write it for me until you got busy. Yeah. That's how it is. This is, I'm using the exact same process as you and I have used for 16 years. You're just talking to the agent instead of me. Yeah. But I call it

21:05 Dave, just so you know. Hello, Dave. Hello, Dave. So that, but the problem, when the problem comes in is... That gets conflated. with actual Customer-facing products that are supposed to be good. Yeah Like you described customer support. Everybody despises AI agent. customer support. Sure. It drives you, it drives you mad, which I wasn't good at it, which I wasn't suggesting. Oh, I know what you're saying, but I'm saying like that's where there's a – you have completely – streamlinable, automatable. Code production on one end. that is getting rid of rote copy paste work for developers and content producers. Well, also when it comes to help desk. People hate help desks and help desks hate people searching for help. I feel we're just removing human to human friction. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I book travel. I call American Express. And I talk to a human being.

22:22 And I joke with them. And I have a good time. And I always tell them, please put me through to your robot so I can give you a good review. And for those of you listening to this recording, give Jacob a raise. This man deserves a raise. I'm always doing that. And it's very enjoyable to me. Win. Wait, peep. People don't know, technically oriented people do not understand. that non-technically oriented people don't know how to describe problems. No kidding. They don't know. And what you get is. Hey, this thing doesn't work. Well, no. And thus starts the question and answer session. Yeah, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. It's like it takes it really takes it takes a human to understand the flow of the conversation that happens during a support. encounter and sort of glean out because every person that you talk to is also different. Like this person describes things in this way. This person could describe the same problem in a completely different way. And it takes a human to understand. this person's lingo and pick up on, oh, I see, when they say this, what they really mean is this other thing. And there's some people you talk to on a support encounter where you know that they

23:54 are lying to you. You just know it. The first thing you say is. did you reboot your machine? Yeah, yeah, I did. And you're like, no, no, you didn't. You're lying to me. You're lying. That's the worst. You go and check their... Their logs. Yeah, you pull up their machine in real time, says, it's been up for 12 days without a reboot. You're like... And so the bot will never know this, but you know it because you have an instinct about the way this person is talking to you. Okay. Now, I'll just say from a business, a buddy of mine sells. AI-based systems to call centers. I'm not sure, you know, these are US-based call centers, but they're basically sweatshops. And those guys are firing, you know, 65% once they, you know, have the agent or whatever figures out the corpus of the company. And they're very happy with it. I personally, you know, depending on what the company is, I think there's levels where you want a human being. It actually took me longer the other day to get through to an... operator, you know, human being. The bot kept cock-blocking me. um But I see from a business perspective where that's like the one instance where I say, okay, depending on what your company is. You know, like for travel, American Express travel, I think I pay fees. I want to talk to a person and I. I feel good about that. A concierge, I'm sorry, a travel concierge. They bill it that

25:24 way. And I don't mind paying the fee for that. But all this other stuff. There's so many different levels. that I just find super enjoyable. My creative mind is, I mean, look, we built the freedom controller. It took us years to do. And it was also, there was newness for you because, you know, you would, I don't think you'd ever really built something like this. And it was, and it was a lot of, you know, trial and error and me testing stuff and breaking stuff. That process for me, I now have. you know, Well, the Freedom Controller could be vibe-coded in in an hour and a half now. Today, yeah. Complete, I mean, you know. But that's the point. And with higher code quality. Possibly.

26:08 Although that thing is rock solid, man. It's been running for eight years. Like never a reboot. The uptime on it's like 1900 days or something like that. It's nuts. So. Anyway, I mean, I'm just saying for what I do. I mean, like, and just the other example. I did this. I think you saw that. We did a Godcaster U. It's a Zoom call. Zoom, by the way, teaches me a lot about. changing features and removing features? Whoa, those guys change stuff all the time and it Bennett throws you for a loop, man. It's like, ah. Now I can't share. How do I share my, you know, so we go through these horrible loops of things.

26:49 Um, But at the end, it spits out a video. And then we want to put that into our Godcaster URSS feed. And I did the same thing. I said, hey, this video starts at 38 minutes. It ends at one hour and 59 minutes. or whatever it was, 127. I want you to cut off the beginning, cut off the end, put a Godcaster U logo in the top left-hand corner. I want captions in the lower half, in the lower third, and output it for web format. And it did it. That was amazing. That's all SFM picked too. Yeah, of course it did. Yeah. Yeah, of course it did. Yeah. Because it's a script, because it's a known issue that's clearly scriptable. Yeah. But do you see how me as a... as a frustrated non-coder, just enjoys that so much? Oh, 100%, yes. Yes, absolutely. I want you to find some joy like that, Dave. Can I give you some of my joy? They- The... I don't know that... People who've been writing code for a long time. really find any joy. in the AI coding experience.

28:05 Like, I think that... Because it's not some... Because what you've done is you've replaced copy and pasting with just a chat session where you're saying yes. Yes. Yes. It gives me multiple choice questions. No, no, yes. And then you say. write this spec document to an html file so i can print it yeah no i i i understand i understand but for me it's like i go from concept and idea and brain fart to product within half an hour. I mean, that's mind-boggling. And it's just for me. I'm not going to sell this. I'm not going to put it on the app store. That's a whole different level. I don't think that would work. The idea of, we'll have one person, billion dollar companies. Yeah, I'm not so sure about that. I... Yeah, I think AirPP, I think I agree with you 100%. It does take the fun away out of coding. And it's not that there was a ton of fun in most coding already, but most coding was just a lot of. rehashing of the same patterns over and over. But you would have moments of fun where you had... Yeah, you know, where you would run up against a real problem. And then walk around the block for an hour and like, what am I doing wrong? You come back and I know I've been there too. And now that's gone. With

29:39 AppleScript. Now it's just an answer. Now it's just a yes. Yeah, I know. The challenge is a bit gone. I understand. But I guess I think the bigger issue, though, is that. I think I said like a couple of years ago in the boardroom that. Podcast companies that have... Bait. API calls to LLM providers into their process. At some point, that is going to become, you better have a plan B. and well yeah sure again the customer facing product there's all kinds of risk there. Well, no, did you see what... Did you see what OpenAI said this past week? They said chat is dead. Did you see that? No, no. That's their main thing. Uh, let's see. Should have pulled that article. Yeah, chat is dead. OpenAI preps an overhaul of chat GPT. So basically they're saying... that The chat bot aspect, let's see, OpenAI is preparing the biggest overall chat GPT since its launch kicked off. Blah, blah, blah. The company intends to transform the chatbot into a, quote, super app, unquote. They're using the Elon Musk super app moniker. Oh, very fun. Yeah.

31:10 That combines coding tools and AI agents adding products that executives believe will generate more revenue. More tokenage. Yeah, so chat is dead, said one senior OpenAI employee. OpenAI executives increasingly view chat GPT, which has attracted nearly a billion users, as a gateway to introduce users to higher value products. Chat is dead. Long live Fireside. So. Zik. The issue that I see after the WWDC stuff this week, which seemed pretty underwhelming, it didn't even, what I was reading about it, I didn't even want to look at the keynote or what used to be a keynote, which is now like still a COVID era based video. My...

32:02 takeaway from that from WWDC was Totally different than yours. Okay. Well, I didn't see it. I didn't see it. So this is just the reporting that I got. I didn't see it. I look what Spurlock said. I'm like, well, that doesn't sound very exciting. Well, a lot of people were saying that it was boring, but... The boringness of it. that may have been true, but the... The impact of it, I think, is going to reverberate. It's... I think we just... What, I think we just witnessed? with what Apple is doing with AI? Can I tell you what I hoped for? And then you tell me what happened. What I was hoping for. was for them to say, look at our machines. These are the best machines with unified memory. You'll run our MLX LMNOP agent.

32:52 It will create anything you need, software. It'll be your all-in-one box. That's what I was hoping to hear, and I didn't. get any takeaway from the postings or articles. There's a lot of that, what you just described. A lot of that is in the individual developer sessions, which you can watch on YouTube. Okay. There's a lot of... dedicated sessions. that show you how to get the most out of MLX. for local models, even going, there's even sessions on. chaining Mac minis together to get parallel processing. They went pretty in-depth on that, on local model support.

33:32 So I don't think that that part was a disappointment at all. Okay. I think the... The takeaway that I had overall... is that they just rug pulled. big LLM model providers. Ooh, well that's good. Because what did they just-- so they are hosting their own models in Google's cloud. And... with privacy, they say Google cannot even access the data. And so there, if what they demoed. actually works? and worked well? Nobody will ever use... chat GPT.

34:22 chatbot again. Why would you? Wow. Can I play some clips about this when you're done with your... Your analysis. Yeah, so if... If the... Hundreds of millions of iPhone users suddenly can just pull down their Siri button and say, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The thing they would say to a chat GPT chat bot in the past or anthropic or whatever. Which is still the predominant way that most people interact with these AI model providers like Anthropic and OpenAI. If they can do that, Why would they ever pay for ChatGPT or even think about it? It's over. It's just over. Because Android will then do the same thing. And it's done. You have no more reason for open AI. And Claude and Anthropic to even exist. So Jensen Wang, who for purposes of this discussion I'll call Jensen Jobs. Because, man, he wears the leather jacket and he tries to do one more thing and he says, but there's more. So he did this big thing in Korea, I think. It's a big computing conference. And he went through. 87 minutes of this chip and that chip and this partnership and this great and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

35:52 blah But then the last three minutes. He does this. But that's not all. That's not all. One more thing! RTX Spark is a reinvention. of laptop. But in fact... Laptop. It's a reinvention of laptop. Not of a laptop. It's like iPhone. It's like iPhone. It's laptop. Laptop. Of laptop. But in fact, Microsoft NVIDIA is reinventing all of PC. And today we're announcing... A whole new line. Three revolutionary Windows machines covering desktop. laptop, and workstations, all 100% Windows compatible, 100% CUDA, 100% NVIDIA AI TensorCore. Everything that runs that you see that runs on NVIDIA and all these different platforms around the world runs here. This is the first completely re-engineered, re-invented line of PCs that has happened in 40 years. Okay, so this had my attention, although I'm like, okay, right, you've got a partnership with Windows, blah, blah, whatever. But then... This agent... could run 24 seven meter free. And you could download your agent.

37:05 You could raise your lobster in here. This is your claw. It's running all the time. No meter anxiety. And it's sitting here connected to your whole house, connected to your laptop. Now, so this I'm like, wow, okay. That's exactly what I've been waiting for. No meter anxiety. It's running locally. But then the guy, he gets nutty. Connected to your display, all the cameras, your dryer, your water cooler. What? You're trying. What? What? My water cooler? What? No, what? Everything, whatever you want. Your security system. all connected to this. Who gives a crap about that? And this becomes your personal AI, your personal AI agent. And it gets smarter and smarter and smarter over time because today we have Nemotron 3 Ultra. Tomorrow we have Nemotron 4. Nemotron 5. Nemotron 6. And we just keep getting it smarter and smarter and smarter. And meanwhile, this is sitting at home helping you do things. If you want to book a travel, no problem. Book a travel. And.

38:08 If you want... an incredible system. This is a DGX station. for windows okay so he goes on about windows blah blah blah so i'm totally in on the whole idea And I don't know if he did this on purpose. But if he's an idiot? Or it just doesn't see an act because you talk, oh, I see your future. Oh, I see your future. And here's the, so I see your future. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I want something that just runs locally. No media anxiety. It big programs. It does stuff for me, creates applications. Oh, I can think of a million things to make my life better with that. But here's his vision. Something is happening here. Yes. Remember. 15, 20 years ago, we used to have an idea called a phone. Today, we have an idea called a PC. Today, when you think about your phone, the one thing you don't do with it is make phone calls. You do just about everything else. And so that phone means something very different to you than a phone of the past. It's kind of insulting to technical people, but okay. I am certain what's going to happen here is that the PC 10 years from now and the PC that you think about today, a tool where the you. Launch applications. Click and type. And this PC is going to be completely different. Here's my theory.

39:31 I can totally imagine Just as every house today has a home theater. Do you have a home theater, Dave? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I got three. Do you have like seats that recline with the. cup holders and everything. Yeah. I've got a podcast room with my food that is currently sitting on the floor. I have a big TV. I don't know if that counts. Where many houses have home theaters. Big TVs. Lawnmowers. Dishwashers. Dishwashers. I could totally imagine that someday there's actually an AI supercomputer in your house. Uh-huh. running all of your agents it's running all of your assistants what's it doing and they're doing all kinds of things for you all the time and you have to have it in your house just like you have a home theater in your house you have stereos in your house you have game consoles in your house computer in your house brought to you by rss.com the only thing he's missing is saying it will know when your milk is out in the refrigerator, it will order the milk and it will automatically get replenished, which has been the promise since 1997. This is dumb. It's dumb, but... But he is showing us where they're going. They're already thinking, hey, man, we're not going to be relying on these local models, on these large language models. what do they call them? Model labs. Foundation Labs. You know why they did all that? I think they are pivoting because... They, because the bubble's already popped. Ooh. Ooh. It's already, Apple popped it. Mmm. Apple popped the bubble. They

41:01 knew it was coming. The open AI and chat. So in order to be, Ed Zitron has done this work. Zitron is awesome. He's hilarious. So he's done this work in the financials of open AI and Anthropic. They need to have 200 billion. year in revenue. Yeah. by the end of 2027. To be sustainable as companies. They have $1.1 trillion in compute commits. And that is our, that's money that has. already been spent. Yeah, right. And so...

41:47 What NVIDIA sees is that that model of being a large inference provider is no longer sustainable. That is not a valid business model that will proceed beyond the next two years. Right. And so they are. pivoting to PCs. They're pivoting to cram AI into laptops. Laptops. Yes. What do we need? Laptop. That's what we need in order to keep this thing going because NVIDIA is the one that comes out. smelling like a rose every single time because they make the chip. Yeah, of course. And they can just stick it anywhere. They can stick it in laptop. They can stick it in refrigerator. They can stick it in washer and dryer. In dryer. Yeah, they can stick it in bicycle. They can put... They can put chips everywhere. I love that. They don't care what it is. We just got to keep talking like this. They can stick it in app. App. They can stick it in keyboard? Mouse. Stick it in mouse. Mouse. AI mouse.

43:01 Reinventing mouse. And that's all they need. That's all they need is a place to stick a chip. And they'll do it. In head, we put a chip. We're going to reinvent head. Which is what the 80s did, but that's another story. you I make the jokes around here. But the bubble has popped. That is a bold statement. Bold statement. And Apple, mark my words, when they... Release.

43:46 the the ai enabled siri That's the end of this whole experiment. It just is because then the only people that will be left who are paying. for inference are going to be API users. Right. Idiots. Which is not a sustainable business. It's not enough money. No. It's just not. No. It's not. It's like... I just... I cannot wait for the bubble to, for this whole thing to unravel. Because the sooner we can just... Get rid of all this nonsense. and all the marketing Prap. and just get down to brass tacks. So are you currently doing any coding that you're using AI for? You're doing that with laptop? You're doing that with RSS? RSS-DGX computer. Yeah, with the desktop. So I'm doing, it's about. I'm using the DGX for Inference for everything podcast index related. Wow.

45:00 That's code as code. That's Quinn three six. 20 billion. Quinn3635B. A3B MOE model. What agent? Pie. Pie, right. And you've customized that. Right. Everything else I'm still using just... clawed just because I've already got stuff. built up in those memory files and all that kind of stuff. But, and, and honestly it's get while the getting's good. Yeah. Because this... I think the anthropic strategy is clearly. Go public, put money in pocket. But yeah, NVIDIA put chip in laptop. Yeah. Anthropic, put money in pockets and get the hell out of Dodge as fast as possible. But.

45:55 Their model – model, bad use of terms – but their strategy is – to me is clear. They're going to, they introduce more and more big scary models that we can't let you use for very long. Because they're so powerful, it'll, like, kill children. That was the stupidest marketing ploy ever. Well, they did it again. They did it with Fable 5. Well, Fable 5 is the artist formerly known as Mythos. Yeah, they're going to dump the fable. So they released fable five and they're like, well, this look, this thing is so powerful. You got to pay extra for it. You got to switch to let you get a switch to API based billing. Oh, is that is that the only way to access? You have to use it via API. You get two weeks free and then it goes token-based billing for Fable 5. Wow.

46:52 Yep. Yeah. Well, API. They're going to push everybody to token-based billing, but they can't come out and say it because they're going to lose customers. So what they have to do is say. If you want our best model. you got to go to token-based billing. And really their quote best model. It's just sort of like a rehash of the existing model, except it uses more tokens. But cyber. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Now this, this whole thing's a joke and it's the, I'm so ready for it to be over. But the warning stands. If you have built a podcast product... using APIs. You better be using some sort of flexible. API router where you can switch over to different providers. or find a plan B because if you're, if you're, if your backend relies on chat GPT or Claude. Boo. It's not... You better have a plan B. Right. Because those are not sustainable business models.

48:02 They're just not. Okay. I mean, I... I think we've exhausted the topic. I'm tired now. I I mean, I've got, I had some clips on it, but I think I'm just going to jettison those clips because it's the same crap that everybody already knows. Okay. you know and And, you know, like me and you talked about. The real issue here is not... The real issue here is that these large companies. These large tech companies, they need this thing to work for themselves. You know, because they have financial... Their financial life is wrapped up in being able to fire people. Yeah, that's what they do. Yeah, they have to. Because the Google $80 billion equity raise, nobody talked about the fact that $40 billion of that was for payroll. Well, the No Agenda Show talked about it. about it because you told me about it and I talked about it so not nobody we're not anybody but or nobody 50% of the $80 billion was for payroll. Yeah. Does that make any sense for a company that... Literally Prince money. Money? Yeah. All is not well in the tech- in the tech financial world. It's just not. You want to talk about 30 seconds versus 60

49:36 seconds? Oh, is this the amp thing? Well, Spotify has adopted it. That changes everything. You know, the super secret WhatsApp group is hilarious. Everyone keeps posting. Why? Because there's no actual conversation. I mean, there's still an ongoing thread about some doofus who says, I'm the podfather. And I haven't even said anything in this thread. Everyone's like, this guy's an idiot. This is no good. We already got one. We don't need another one. You know, it's like this, like all of these groups. And I say it with love and respect. They go nowhere. It's just like, you know, opinion, opinion, opinion, opinion. It's like a, maybe I should turn it into a podcast. Let's see what that sounds like. Turn that WhatsApp thread into a... podcast, but they're not really discussed. Well, I got to add this guy. Hey, someone's over from Amazon is here. Okay.

50:30 Well, that's going to fix the problem. you know, the Podcast Data Collective, which... It was interesting to hear. Um... Sam and James' thoughts on that. I don't know if you listen to power, you probably don't have time for power. I listened to a little bit of it. I don't know, man. I've got... I've got mixed feelings on it. On what? On the whole idea? On the collective, yeah. Well, if you're not going to do it, it won't happen, so that's fine. Well, no, no, I'm... No, if you don't do it, it'll never happen. That's just... And I'm okay with that. I don't have ads. I don't care. But I also understand why you'd be like, I don't feel like getting into it or doing it.

51:16 I get it. I feel like it's a worthwhile thing to do and I'm open to it. I keep. having I keep having these thoughts like you know, is I don't know, I just, I'm afraid. I'm afraid participation is just going to be so hard. I mean, we have developers. It's like hurting cats. you know, and... I'm afraid it's just going to be like a huge. endeavor to try to get people on board. I think I'm just, I think I'm sort of like, A little bit down on life. No, no. No. I think I'm a little bit down on new... pushing new endeavors because of The reaction to the HTTP signing thing. Oh, I like everything that was going on. Oh, what was the negativity? I like the whole idea. I don't know. What is the actual... Negative pushback. Why am I in the minority? What is the... What is the... the issue. Well, I mean, nobody wants... Nobody wants signing. Not nobody, but I mean, a majority of people... Because they're afraid it will be used to block certain hosts and or apps. Is that the bottom line? Yeah. Oh, okay. Well, I mean, one

52:48 big thing I did this week was I put... put signing into our aggregators. Now, signing is something that Cloudflare already uses, correct? Yeah, because say, okay, so what I did this week. Um... What Dave did this week. Well, Eric, I mean, what you're saying, Eric said, was it negative? There was criticism of the idea, but I don't think it was negative. I mean... It's hard to not take it negative. What I mean by negative is like. is the fact that when you... When the proposal came out, it was like... I will die before I will put this in my app. Who said that? Marco and then other people shared. Other people sort of shared the...

53:38 I will die before I put this in my head. Yeah, and other people shared the sentiment, and I'm not. They are welcome to their opinion. That is not the problem. Was this a GitHub thing? Oh yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. See, I'm a happy guy because I don't go on GitHub. *laughs* I think the The issue, though, that was. that It was just... There was such a, like, there was no discussion, really. It was like, not doing it, see ya. Right. And so. I mean, there was lively beneficial debate back and forth, and just like we talked about with Spurlock last week. But there was this strong sentiment from... you know, John and Marco and others that were like, this This can't, no, we're not doing this. This is just not a good idea. So... I was, so then we've, I've been fighting this problem with the aggregator. Yeah. People don't understand your particular pain. They don't have your pain. And I don't have theirs, to be fair. You know, I don't have their pain either.

54:49 You mean they're actually making money and you're not? That's painful for them? Well, Spurlock's not making a dime. He's losing money just like us. Yeah. But... So The problem we have with the aggregator... is that we get... We get blocked through Cloudflare sometimes. Now, I don't know if that's what this latest issue I've been fighting is because part of it makes no sense. That's the 415 error. Yes. an invalid media type, which is a very, that would be a very strange error to give back. If it thought that you were a bot, like, why 4.15?

55:34 There's like 403s, 401s. What does 415 stand for? Invalid media. Invalid media time. I want to ask the book of knowledge. Book of knowledge. What does the HTTP error code 415 stand for? I just like listening to the book of knowledge. Let's see what the book of knowledge says. According to the book of knowledge, HTTP error code 415 means unsupported media type. The server cannot process the media format of the requested data, such as when a client sends JSON, but the server only accepts XML. Hmm, there it is. Thus... It has been written. Well, see, and a 415 usually shows up with a post request.

56:20 But I'm getting 415s on GIFs. requests. And so there's not even a media type that's included. There's no body. There's no body at all. So it's just a URL. So the whole thing's very strange, and... And John, as Spurlock goes, I will. Maybe ACF, maybe Cloudflare considers you to be a bot. You're no good. You're just a bot, man. You're a bot. A malicious bot. A bot, yeah. I'm like, well, I mean, maybe. But 4.15, that's a weird one. So I was like, well, okay. Why don't we do this? If there's a chance, so I did some. I did some checking. I did some curling.

57:05 What user agent? PHP library? Various user agents impersonating all kinds of things. And so I did the same set of curls from my local machine. And from... the one of the aggregator boxes at Linode. If I set my user agent to be a browser, from a local machine. I got a 200 and not a 415. And this is to one specific, this is, this happened on two different feeds. One of them was cast a pod. And one of them was a WordPress install. So they're different platforms. So this is, I think, what led John to think, well, maybe this is Cloudflare giving you a finger.

58:01 Yeah, he's giving you static. Mm-hmm. And so then I did the same set of tests on. The Linode host and everything produced a 415, no matter what I did. And so I was like, well, okay, maybe it is Cloudflare. and So I submitted. the podcast index aggregator to their verified bots program. Heard nothing back for a couple of days. and then found through some google searches that People routinely submit to the Verified Bots program and don't hear anything back for quote weeks or months. Oh, brother.

58:44 So I was like, well, okay, maybe let's try a different approach. You can, you can have a, their verified bots program has two, has two different routes you can take. You can submit your user agent plus your known IP addresses. as a combo. And saying, you know, here's my bot. Here's what the user entry is going to be. Here's all the IP addresses that the traffic is going to come from. This is how you know it's me. And in order to do that, you have to have public descriptions of your bot, public IP lists, all this kind of stuff. I did all that documentation, got all that stuff submitted. Well, that didn't work. The other option is to do signing. You can do a verified bot through what they call their web bot auth. Off.

59:29 Program. Off. Off. Auth. Yes, got it. A-U-T-H. Yeah. Which is just HTTP signing, which is what we brought up in... Yeah, it's exactly that. Yes, got it. So I thought, okay, well, let's see how this works. So I will eat my own dog food since I support the idea of HTTP signing. I will. Harm myself. For the benefit of the cause. Yes. For the group. For the group. For the team. I will take one for the team. Yes. And I will... do the signing stuff. because I've already written signing code before. That's in the podcast index. Copy paste. Just a copy paste. Another copy paste in your life. Yes. In the Activity Pub Podcast Index Activity Pub Bridge. Since Mastodon requires... HTTP signing. I already had all that code. So I'm like, okay, this is pretty much, it's pretty much the same thing, but with a little bit of, with some wrinkles. So I got...

1:00:42 I got the coding agent to go out and Look at all the code for the podcast that I had previously written because I'm like. This was the aggregators written in rust that other codes written in rust should be just a. You know, rut the rust to get in there. Buttabing. Yep. Right in there. Uh, it- It sucked it in, did the thing. looked at the Cloudflare documentation, and then made all the necessary changes so that we could publish the public keys and the correct... format that then Cloudflare could verify against. So it did all that work. I then had to go and... Stick the public keys into a .wellknown URL location on podcastindex.org website. Uh, that is... functioning now. Uh... for key verification. So now the aggregator. is signing all of its feed download requests.

1:01:45 Submitted it again to Cloudflare, this time choosing the web bot auth. Keep signing. And since this all follows their proposal... This is what they want people to do. And it's all public and it should be. Immediately Automatable. I thought this must go pretty, this is probably gonna go pretty quick. It's been about a week, have not heard a peep. I was worried about that. We still do not show up on the verified bots list. for Cloudflare. Overcast is on there. Other podcast aggregators are on there.

1:02:29 Oh, man. Not us. You're not in the app store. We... I don't know. So. But I do know... that We are now signing all of our HTTP requests. So all that code is, and of course, our aggregator is public. Our website code is public. Anybody can go and grab it. And start signing your traffic. Right. Because now all that code has been published. And you can do it. The next thing I'm going to do in order to continue eating my own dog food. is place HTTP signing for media downloads into. the Podcast Index website. So if you play an enclosure from our website. That request will now be signed. The reason I'm doing this is because... The most difficult. Um... Most diff- way to do this is in a web browser because You have such limited options when it comes to... signing, excuse me, when it comes to adding headers to. to an Ajax request.

1:03:57 The browser does not want to let you have access. to add custom headers to those things. It's very limited. But you can. According. To the research I've done, you- There's a couple of ways around it. One of them is through a service worker. And so that is my next. project is to attempt. to add support. for HTTP signing, for media, for enclosure requests. to a website ours. in order to just prove that it works. I'll reintegrate, I'll reiterate what I said last week. I'm not gonna die on this hill. it's a thing that people seem to not want. bullet. If three years from now, abuse, abuse, abusive traffic becomes such a problem. Yeah. That, that, that this topic gets revisited. At that point. There will be working code that's out there that we can all just... Oh, I thought you were going to do an I told you so. No, I mean, I may, but that'll be a game time decision. Well, I think in general, the AMP group got what they wanted. They want more money. So they found the perfect solution. Let's take a play from 60 seconds to 30 seconds. So you'll have more plays. Butter bing. Everybody got more money overnight.

1:05:28 It's perfect. It succeeded at its initial mission. I think James had... I think James was right that the play... I think he- I think he's right in his instinct that what this really was about was not about getting accurate download numbers. No. accurate listen numbers is to try to somehow judge the size of a show so that you know whether the advertiser is going to want to buy it or not. Yeah. If you can get a play count. Yeah. Oh, well, that's fair. But listen, so May numbers for Pod News. 2,093 Apple downloads versus 3,200 Apple plays. Boom! Money in the pocket! A number go up. A number go up. That's all you need. Yeah.

1:06:17 That's not spoofable. Yeah, let them do whatever they want to do. It's fine. really let them do whatever they want to call a podcast whatever you want to call it yeah that's fine it's all good I tried. Yeah. I mean, I still think it makes... I still think it makes sense to do something. I'm just not sure how to... No, it's... I'm just depressed. Don't be depressed. It doesn't really matter. It's not going to affect anything what we're doing. You know, I'm getting offers to sell the index. Did you know that? Why? I don't know.

1:07:02 Who would want it? Yes, there's people who say they want to buy it. Like, it's not for sale. For what? I don't know. I'm like, do you need Dave with it? Because, you know, without Dave, it's kind of nothing. *cough* That's the weirdest thing I've heard in a long time. Why would somebody want to buy an open source project that doesn't make any money? Let me tell you. I don't think they exactly know what it is. I hope not. Let me see. I'm going to get one of these emails. I think I can find one somewhere. Hold on. Yeah, I hope they don't know what it is because otherwise they have a bad decision. What it is, it's... private equity That's even better. Isn't that great? Let me see. Let me see if I can find this real quick. may not be able to find it but you know private equity and uh like a home office type private equity. And we really want to put some money into podcasting. And so we're looking at everything that's out there. It's like someone trying to do some Spotify buying, I guess. Chad says sell it and launch podcasting 3.0. We'll probably have a non-compete. What? Why would anybody want this dog? Is what I want to know. It's not a dog. It looks very... Hey, look

1:08:34 at what... We can go public. I mean, come on. We can IPO. We can IPO. Just podcastindex.ai. And we're billionaires. That's all. You just need to change the... What an oversight. I know. I know. I know. Let me see. Here it is. um We have a family office is actively investing in companies in podcasting. Are you available to discuss? No. Edith, VP of Growth Equity. I'm like, yeah, sure. Send me, we want everything in Bitcoin, please.

1:09:15 Yeah, but not right now. Wait till it keeps going. Not at this very moment. No, actually, we want it now. We want it now. Now all this equity, there's going to be liquidity everywhere pretty soon. Once these... once people get out of the open AI and, uh, anthropic, uh, you know, the, the insiders. Oh, Nathan said, in my experience, the buyer will give it back to you in about five years. Well, we had to have Nathan representing us. Yeah, you're an agent. You made an agent. He knows how to do this stuff, man. Yeah, he probably already knows the people. We're no good. Nathan knows how to do it. Exactly. Exactly. If y'all were boosting, I'm sorry. I hadn't brought up my... My helipad. And looks like my... Start 9 has been down for a couple of days. I wonder if I even have channels open. Yeah, I need some kind of alert for this.

1:10:13 Let me see. Though I still have channels. Oh good, I have channels. but You didn't get an alert email. from IPFS podcasting. That's interesting you say that. No, no. Well... No, because my IPF, wow, that's interesting. Is Cameron alive? Has anybody checked the cabin in the woods? That's, you know, that's a good point. Normally that was my canary in the coal mine when I got an IPFspodcasting.net email. Hey, your node's been down for 24 hours. Like, oh crap, I gotta go reboot that thing. Somebody do a wellness check on Cameron. He may not be okay. Yeah, that's a good idea, actually. It's a good idea.

1:10:55 Um... Let me see what else did I have on my list. I had... The user agent war. Okay. Podcast standards project. We're the teenagers. They're the boring adults. We got that. Apple WWDC, okay, woo, video on everywhere, okay. Everything. I think we've kind of covered all the things, you know, people need to understand. This is just a moment for Dave and Adam to catch up. We used to do this just on the phone. We just decided to record it. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's how some of the funnest things have developed. Did you have anything else you wanted to bring up? I got a whole bunch of stuff in my, uh... my notes here, but I'm really struggling to make any sense out of it.

1:11:49 It looks like I just brain dumped onto the... onto the page. You need a system, man. You need a system. You need a system. The, uh... I did. I'll see. Yeah. Oh, yeah. James talked about. The other day about deprecating. Non-VTT formats in transcript tag? Yes. He keeps one. Yeah. Anything but VTT, yes. He wants to kill it. I'm still doing SRT. by the way. Yeah, and this is... Which I could switch it, but... It's kind of like me versus the, Curry versus the Criddler at this point. I'm like, I'm not going to switch that.

1:12:37 Go ahead, Criddler. Don't try and ban me. I'm publishing my SRT files. That's what I've been doing for a long time. The I don't think we can... do that. No, deprecating is gay. Can't do that. We can't deprecate. formats because Because James doesn't like it. Well, no. I'm sure he has very valid points, actually. No, he always, he's always got a good... He's always got a logical flow of his reasoning. But I think sometimes he misses.

1:13:23 Just the fact that this... that open source just really can't dictate what people do. Because, you know... Apple says we only take VTT, but other apps take other things and other people. Create different things. Oh, Apple doesn't recognize my SRT? No. I didn't know that. I have so many pipelines written for SRT, it's kind of... It's an easy swap. Yeah, I guess. Your bot can do it, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah. uh The... This, I've talked about maybe, I think I've talked about this before, but like one of the problems with namespaces in the past. It annoys him when we have very open-ended tags that don't narrowly define a format. It's a form of OCD. Yeah, well, it's like... well you should have one format that you support. I am. Maybe the namespace is... Maybe the reason the namespace is this way is that it's an expression. belief pattern within open source. It goes back to that, was it Bill Joy that said, be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send? That's

1:14:54 the... Either that or Dave Weiner. I don't know. One of the two. No, it wasn't Dave Weiner. It wasn't. It wasn't day one. It predates him. But it was, I think it was Bill Joy. But that ethos of... be very be very open with the formats that you accept. but very strict with the formats that you publish. allows for a loose coupling. that is really important. So Like the internet itself works. It's built on this foundation.

1:15:35 Because if you publish... The robustness principle. Okay. Uh, yeah. So the John Postal, that's right. It's John Postal, the guy that invented SMTP. so If you, um... So the internet itself is built on... This idea that you... Ex... Like when you're sending packets and they travel across a router. Routers are expected, if they cannot deliver it in a quick, timely manner, they are expected to drop packets. Yeah. It's not an error. Dropping a packet is not an error. It is the way that the network is designed. You drop, if you, under a certain set of circumstances, it is the correct thing to do to drop a packet because then the sending entity knows to just, they don't get an acknowledgement and so they just resend it. It's not a problem. That is sort of the ethos of open source in general. that When you... that you are very accepting. of all kinds of things being sent to you, and you just do the best you can to handle it. because When you try to dictate strictness... to a sending party. There is, it only goes

1:17:06 so far. You get to a certain percentage and you'll never get beyond it. So then the onus gets flipped back on you. As the consumer of that format or of that data, to then make adjustments. And this is the way RSS works too, I mean... Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, aggregators make all kinds, they jump through all kinds of hoops to deal with non-standard XML stuff. We're used to it. That's just the way this world works. so otherwise it wouldn't work that you're absolutely right that's perfect example. Yeah, like what about somebody who publishes a – blog, they got a WordPress, let's say they got a WordPress site. and their WordPress site. Only they're doing, they're reading their blog. And they're going to turn that into a podcast. So they're just going to record their voice reading their blog post. And make that a podcast. They upload it as an MP3. They're using WordPress built-in enclosure support.

1:18:16 and then they download a plugin that will take, that will modify their RSS feed to also stick a link to their HTML link to their HTML page in as the, as the transcript, because all they're doing is reading the page. Right, right, right. So the transcript is just a link. back to their HTML page. This person's not an expert in podcasting formats. No. They... Do we want to say war? You have to publish that in VT. You're banished. You're banished from podcasting. Your HTML is no good here. I'm Adam Curry, the podfather. You're no good.

1:18:59 Go away. So that's, and I think the answer to that. From my perspective, is no. We need to be accepting of other formats. And other children and other cultures from other lands. Yeah. Yeah, don't be so Australian-centric. Oh, wow. Be open-minded. Oh, you just hit a hot button there. He hates that podcasting is so U.S.-centric. He doesn't like that. That's true, yeah. Which it is, of course. It is. It is. It is. Yeah. It is. You guys got Mel Gibson. Be happy. Olivia Newton-John. No, Hugh Jackman. They got Hugh Jackman. Hugh Jackman. You got Kidman, Nicole Kidman. Chris. Chris? Chris, the guy that played Thor?

1:19:56 You got Thor. What's your problem? You got Thor. You got Thor. Chris Hemsworth. Chris Hemsworth, yes. All kinds of people. They got all kinds of people. Did you say Olivia Newton-John? I did. I did. I got three! Yep. Xanadu. Xanadu. Yeah, baby. Yeah. Well? I wish I could. I hope I've put you in a little bit of a better mood. I don't like it when you're down. I can tell. I can always tell when you're down. Not really. No? It didn't help? No, not really. You got to go camping again, man. Go back into the woods. It's good for you. Well, you know, our air conditioner's been broke for about two months. Oh. Ooh. And it's just so you don't have air conditioner on breaker guys. We have We had two sort of mini split systems, sort of like toward two zones down here on the bottom floor of our house. Yep. The back one is broke. The one at the front of the house works. It's the capacitor, I tell you. It's always the capacitor. I walked out one day and I could smell a horrible smell. That's the capacitor burning. No, it was the main board. No, that's not good. It melted itself.

1:21:10 Yeah, that's an automatic $3,200 repair. The, so it was going to be more than that because. fur For people who... Maybe not for me with mini splits. The mini-split world... is The compressor and the internal air handlers They're sort of married together. You can't mix and match. One is sort of tied to the other. You've got to replace both. You've got to replace them all. Ours were like seven years old. That's not very old. It's not very old, but new mini splits come out on a yearly basis. So ours, we had no hope of finding any parts for our old one. So they would have to put in a whole new system. It was going to be like $10,000. And so I was like, well, for that, we can just replace the whole downstairs with a whole new central system. And so it's going to cost a lot more than 10 grand. No. But, oh yeah, it's going to be like $16,000. Well, why don't you take $10,000 podcast index money and we'll call it a day and then you add the other six. I'm fine with that. I don't need any money. No, no, no, no, no. Everybody will agree with me. You need air conditioning. This is critical. Look, listen to your attitude today. This is critical to the future of podcast index.

1:22:41 I'm telling you. The air conditioner? Yes. No, it's not. Yes, yes. You need to have cool air. You need to keep your blood at the right temperature, blood, bro. Yes, yes. No, no, this is not happening. Just know I approve it. Uh, that's... I'll just wait for the private equity money. Oh. I'll wait for the exit. We need $1,016,000 for the podcast index. Yeah. No, I'm going to wait for the IPO. Wait for the IPO. I'm sorry, brother. That sucks. It really does. I mean, whatever. No, it's not. Living in an old house, it costs an arm and a leg. Living in a new house is the same problem. I've had my air. units i mean the cat it's always the capacitor and that's usually what it is Oh, that capacitor thing is a total scam, too. Oh, is it? Oh, man. So... Really? It is. So when you take the main way mechanic shops make money. is by with oil changes and brakes yeah sure They'll take a $50 set of brake pads and charge you $350 to do them. One of the ways that HVAC companies, one of their cash cows is start capacitors. Yeah. It's a $35 part, and they will charge you $700 to replace it. No, no, no. My guys

1:24:12 do not charge me $700 at all. How much do they charge you? I'd have to look, but we have a... We have a service subscription, so we don't pay anything extra for them coming out. I think it's probably $70. I think they're probably charging $70. But now I understand because I'm the guy that's like, hey, here's $20. Thanks for coming out, man. They always look at me like, you don't have to do that, bro. They're probably feeling bad about themselves at that point. Like, oh, man, he's tipping me. He just ripped him off. I can't believe he's doing that. I don't feel good about this. He's so nice. My dad used to work for an HVAC supply company. And so we could always get, I could always get the parts wholesale. So I could get a start capacitor for like $15. And I just plop that thing in myself. And then one day I got real busy and I was like, you know, I. time to handle this. I'm going to call the company. I was expecting them to charge me $200 for the service fee and all that kind of stuff when they come out. $700 is what they charge for a start capacitor.

1:25:13 And for just replacing it. It was just simply a wire. I was like, nope. No, they can't do that in Texas, man. Not in the Hill Country. You can't get away with that. People will shoot you. No. No. I literally got this text from... We have... Is it called aerobic septic system? Are you familiar with this? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's where it is, where you got bacteria that eat your poop. No. Nice visual, but no, that's not it. The aerobic, aerobic? I think it is. That's probably the wrong word. So you basically, you have your own little mini water purifier. So there's a little pump there, a CO2 pump, and it just shoots in CO2 at high speed. And, uh, So after a while, then sprinklers pop up and it just shoots this clean water all over the grass. So it's really purifying your poop into stuff that you can, you know, just water.

1:26:19 So the guy, you know, Paul comes out, uh... Let me see if I can find this. Oops. What is this? That's not what I wanted. Paul comes out and, oh man, let me see if I can find this. Find his text message. Hold on. And he texts me before, here we go. He says, Please have all trip mines and explosives secured and disengaged. We will be on your property shortly. See, that's how we talk in Texas. Whoa! Are you serious? Yeah. Yeah. Holy crap. And I said, it's all right, Paul. All booby traps are disarmed.

1:26:59 Phoebe's indoors. good you're good to go did he think he was going to laura logan's house no i don't know i think they just keep their poop in the ground i don't think they'd do anything with it the guy that uh the guy that's doing our hvac though is really is he's a cool dude he's uh we we used to live about an hour north of birmingham in the in the wilderness and he's from that same area and so he He rolled up the other day. And he saw the old 72 4x4 Ford 4x4 in the backyard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was like, hey, man, I got Ford trucks too. He's like, you want some mirrors? I got a set of mirrors I'll give you. I was like, yeah, I'll take some mirrors. You never know when my wife will rip one off. I was like, I'll pay you for me. He's like, no, no, I just want to forward God to another. I'll give you some mirrors. I was like, okay. Need a tranny? I got a tranny here for you. It means something different in Austin than it does in Alabama. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Alright brother, well, um... Alright. What are you gonna do this weekend? Well, I was going to go climbing yesterday. Yeah. I mean, tomorrow, tomorrow, but it's going to be like 92 degrees outside. Oh, no, it's better to sit indoors without air conditioning. Enjoy that. That's going to be much better. No, just sit in the front of the house. Where the air is closed. There's still air. Oh, man. There's air in the front of the house. Just don't stay in the kitchen. That's where, God, it's like a thousand degrees. You got fans? You got

1:28:31 fans going? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Hmm. All right. Well, there it is, boardroom. We have solved nothing today. Well, we had a nice chat. I hope you all enjoyed it. And as always, would you please join us next Friday for another episode of The Board Meeting Podcasting 2.0. you you You have been listening to Podcasting 2.0. Visit podcastindex.org for more information. Go podcasting! has been