Episode 272: "Is this Y'all?"

0:00 podcasting 2.0 for september 25th 2026 episode 272 is this y'all hello everybody welcome once again to podcasting 2.0 this is your weekly board meeting The boardroom is filled and we're ready to talk about what is going on with podcasting, podcastindex.org, and all the things we're talking about on podcastindex.social. We are, in fact, the only board meeting that doesn't care about the midterm elections. I'm Adam Curry here in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and in Alabama. The man who went to war with the feed aggregators before breakfast and posted a decadence. database graph as a riddle. Say hello to my friend on the other end, the one, the only, the pod sage himself, Mr.

0:43 Dave Jones! Man. Man. I tell you. Tell me something, Dave. Tell me something, Dave. If I can not die here. No, no, please. I can only handle one friend dying a year. I'll wait until it's three months. New rule, new rule, new rule. I got a few months to do it. Yesterday was nutty. Yeah, you don't say. There was a lot of me staring at the screen and typing things yesterday. Well, the first thing that happened is I'm like, hey, man. My podcast is no longer showing up in search. No, wait. It was Wednesday is the first thing that happened. I'm like, I hate doing this to you because I go into the dashboard and I try everything. I'm like... And I'm like, scan for we get to do this. Like, okay, let me hit the pod ping again. No, it's not happening. And then at a certain point, you know, after like an hour, I'm like, I got to tell Dave because it's probably not just me. I was like, Dave, it's not updating.

1:50 And then while you were working on that, someone sent me an email and said, hey, you know, no agenda doesn't show up at the top of the search, which you would expect. And then it wasn't showing up at all in the search for a while there. All these adjacent shows were showing up. I'm like, okay, well, oh, man, I hate to do this to Dave, but there it is. What went wrong, my friend? What was happening? Where do you want to start? I mean... What do you want to know first? I'm dying to know why no agenda dropped out of the top in search, and then I'd love to know what happened with the aggregator. I mean, there's nothing but pain is what I love hearing about, so bring it on. Yes. So the search is easy. We'll do that one first. Of course, when you told when when you sent me that email saying that no agenda was not showing up in search anymore.

2:45 Internally, my first thought was, well, it's not it's nothing I did. Curry probably screwed it up again. Yeah. Oh, this is clearly somebody else's problem. But. But that's not what comes out of your mouth because you learn over time that every time you think that, it ends up being your problem. Right. So I'm like, well… What's the what's the most likely explanation for this? And clearly it's the podcast identity layer schema change thing that I've been doing for the last three weeks. That has to be part of it. It had to be. Yeah. And the first thing I did was I checked no agenda. Can I ask you a question? Can I ask you a question? Yep. My thinking was this has to be something with a feed consolidation or merge or something you were doing. But I stopped myself from saying, could it be or it might be related to this as a developer troubleshooting these things. Are you happy that I didn't do that or would you have preferred me to do that?

3:57 It would not have been it would not have made any difference because I well, I say for most people. Most of the time when you get reports like that as a developer, you sort of mentally chop that off the end anyway. It's like it may be dot, dot, dot, and you're not even reading. You're already on a different browser tab. I figured. All right, good. But when you say stuff, though, I tend to – Read through it and consider it because – Oh, I get through the gate. All right. The gate. I'm load-bearing. That's why. I'm load-bearing. Yeah. You're the load-bearing gate of the index.

4:39 But you know how this stuff works on the back end so well that you're probably in the ballpark. Right. And that's so I pull up no agenda, which is podcast ID forty one five oh four. I pull that up in the index dashboard. And the first thing I see is our new little badge here that says podcast forty one five oh four currently serves feed five nine two six oh six four. Oh. And so... And it also gives another little piece of text that says, not 41504, so this row is an abandoned or superseded feed.

5:21 Oh, no. You've been superseded. So this was the first clue of, yeah, well, this is obviously related because – So podcast ID 41504 used to serve, used to be used to be identical to literally identical to feed 41504. But now that the 41504 has moved up in the conceptual hierarchy to a podcast. Yeah. And the feed that is serving can be any feed. Now it's not pointing to 41504 anymore. It's now pointing to feed 5926064, which and the reason is because of what I texted you trying to get clarity was that. Feed.nashownotes.com slash RSS XML is the feed we have in the index. Right. But it's actually being served from feeds.noagendaassets.com slash noagenda.xml. Yes. So there legitimately is two feeds of the same thing, and it picked – The later one, because this seems to be the more widely distributed one, and it's what's in Apple's directory. Got it. So it's in our attempt to try to stay consistent with Apple as much as possible.

6:47 When they have a feed and we have a feed, excuse me, when they have a podcast and we have that podcast. Because we act as a fallback, we try to just stay with what they have unless what they have is absurd. So that that means that the search, the search still works on feeds. Not podcasts because I had not gotten to that point yet. So basically it was just – it was seeing 41.504 as a dead feed. So it was not surfacing in the search. So I just had to hastily – Finish that work that I'd already designed and get the Sphinx search indexer SQL remade to respect podcast identity table and it fixed it.

7:43 So, I mean, that was a fairly straightforward issue. I sort of knew that. quickly what was going on. What determines the order of search ranking? Well, I don't know. Because we don't have first-party data or we have very little of it, Uh... We get a couple. Just whoever your friend is, basically. Pretty much Sam and Mitch. That's pretty much it. They're our only friends. But other than that, we have very little first-party data. So we have to just do what we always do. Heuristics based on API traffic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's a, you know, it's just a number that gets cooked up through what we think is going on. But it could be completely wrong, but it's it generally tends to get it mostly right. Yeah. It does. I mean, it's decent. Although Podcasting 2.0 has also been dropping down the charts, I noticed. Hold on. So if I go to – I like going to pod.link. Okay. So podcasting 2.0. And it's an Apple podcast. It's number two with number one being podcasting explained 2.0 the podcast. Okay. And on podcast index.

9:11 We are not in there. We are like, I think we're like 10 down or something like that. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Now we're not in the top 10. I'm seeing it on my dashboard search. Well, I'm just doing, so in Podlink, I couldn't even link to it. pod.link because at least not in maybe nathan bandus oh that would make nothing but sense yes because we called him because we called him undefined guy for so long he was like screw these guys yeah that's interesting i don't know why that happens when i saw podcasts index.org. Let me see. Podcasting 2.0.

9:57 Well, shouldn't we be at the top? Oh, man. We're like 11 down. Yeah. That's what? 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Yeah, we're number 11. We're number 11. It goes to 11. That's why we're not showing up in pod.link because they only go to 10. We are below – in our own search rankings, we are below – Gay Talk 2.0. Yes. And Esto... Alpha Male 2.0. Esto es Podcast 2.0. The Rural Church Podcast 2.0. And the Daddy Mines Podcast. Daddy Mines. But yeah, I was just looking at Daddy Mines. Gay Talk 2.0. Let's see what happens. And Earthlings 2.0 Podcast. Let's see what happens if someone goes there. What if it's... It's just a gay version of you and me talking to each other. You smell that? What? Smells like gray sweatpants and bearded daddies. Yeah, baby. That's a podcast right there. Sweatpants and gray bearded daddies. Show title.

11:02 There we go. Sweatpants. Smells like daddy talk. Yeah. Yeah, so that was the easy one to figure out. Search ranking is always a constant weird thing. I demand you put us at the top. I'm sorry. I demand you cheat. Put us at the top. Come on, man. Come on. The aggregator issue of why your podcast wasn't getting picked up by Podping, that was a complete rabbit hole. That was where the fight was happening. Yeah, talk to me. So… When I got in there to look and see why we get to do this was not being told. It looked like it. I look in the database.

11:53 There's one hundred and thirty five thousand backlog. Of shows. Whoops. And they're all in this. They're all in the seven thousand. Excuse me. The seven million ID range. I'm like, oh, ag seven again. Ag seven. That bastard. It's this thing. It's. Gives me like aggregator anxiety like it is always every time there's an aggregator problem. It's always seven. I don't know why, but... So I get in, and of course it's crashing. So it's been crashing for who knows how long. I don't know, maybe a day, 24 hours at least. Weeks and weeks. No, no, no.

12:36 Luckily not weeks. The oldest one non-polled I think was from the 21st. It was like 24 hours or right around the right time. And I'm like, okay, what am I doing? I've always – again, I've given up on index coding by hand. I'm now just full agent guy when it comes to the podcast index. Heck yeah. I'm so deep into this thing now. Mr. Agent Guy. Yes. So – I'm like, all right, here we go. I'm just going to start throwing the coding agent at it. And first thing that pops up is – because I knew what the problem was. It was running out of – it was overflowing – Node.js was overflowing the heap, and so it was just hitting a feed file. Loading the feed file into the parser was just overflowing the amount of memory that was given. And it crashed it.

13:37 But I'm like, I've put – I know I've put in a 35 meg limit. I know that. And so I go start going through, well, syntax problem or just a logic problem in there. It just wasn't hitting. It was not picking up the limit. So I'm like, okay, this is an easy fix. The coding agent can do this. So it goes, it refactors a couple of lines of code, 35 limit kicks in, back in business. But then, so I'm like, okay, this thing parsed now. Well, when it gets to, these run in detached screen sessions. Mm-hmm. So I get in the screen session. And I'm looking at it. I'm watching it. I'm watching it roll.

14:19 And, yeah, Eric, we are going to move to that, but just so many other things that I haven't got there yet. But the – so I'm watching it roll, and then – I see it when it goes to do its next cycle. It just hangs for life. Five minutes. Then I see it blow through and start doing aggregation again. And then it goes to its next cycle. Hang. For like five minutes. I'm like, okay, what is going to start looking at the other aggregators? They're all doing the same thing. So there's all the, there's this like anywhere from three, To eight minute hang that's happening at the beginning of each feed polling. This is hang time in this case is not good. This no is the opposite of what you want. Right. And. So I'm like, okay, well, here we go. Coding agent. What's happening here? Is that literally the prompt you gave it? No, I was a little more eloquent than that. So then it's a it's it starts looking at the code and it says, well, here's your problem. You are... You're trying to use a SQL query. to pull feeds to poll, but some of the columns you're using are not indexed.

15:51 I can't be right. I mean, I'm I've been doing this a long time. I know how to properly construct an indexed SQL statement, or at least I thought I did. And but here's the issue. Sometimes SQL can get. At a certain size, a SQL statement becomes almost incomprehensible. You really need – An agent. At least a syntax parser to help you make your way through this. And I don't typically do that. I'm typically writing these things just – text by hand. And I don't like it's almost like a regex. But, you know, you need something to visually like give you colors and stuff because this stuff can just get away from you. If you have like a. Yeah. Your colors is good. Yeah. If you have like a 40 or 50 line long SQL statement with multiple subselects, this kind of thing, it really gets difficult to understand what's happening. And so what. here's to make it concise or try to The way that each aggregator pulls in the feeds that it's going to scan is, is there's nine aggregators, zero through eight. And each

17:24 one of them takes a slice of the index. But that's not the only criteria that it needs. It also bases it on priority. So there's a priority number each feed gets. and update frequency. So there's multiple criteria. And the way I have that set up is, first of all, each aggregator looks for its own slice of the index. So aggregator zero gets podcast IDs one through a million. Aggregator one gets one million and one through two million and so on. Each one starts with. give me all the feeds where dead equals zero. and the ID is within my slice range, And it's pull now flag is set to something greater than zero. So that means I'm supposed to pull it. I'm supposed to pull this feed. But then there's a second set of criteria, and those are all indexed columns. Then there's a second set of columns that are also all indexed. And so, for instance, on aggregator zero, it's saying, I want that. Or so either that criteria or if nothing is in that criteria set, I want to I want to also scan.

18:51 for feeds where the update frequency is nine. And the priority is greater than negative one, which means like don't ever scan. Negative one is don't ever scan. And the pull now is greater than negative one. is is equal to zero so what i'm trying to say there is i'm trying to say this aggregator needs to always look at at flagged for for pulling feeds within this slice. And also another set of work. And so and what I'm trying to do there is maximize all the aggregators so that even if there's nothing to pull at any given time or if the number of feeds in their slice is very small, They still get a bunch of extra feeds that also need work to do. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a value for value project. I hope you're listening very closely and understand what work goes into this. Please consider supporting the index podcast index dot org down at the bottom of red donate button. This is a lot of work that's going on here. And we need to keep it running. Back to you, Dave. Thanks, Jim.

20:00 Um, um, So, All of the columns in all of that, they're all indexed. The thing that I did not... Think of the thing that I missed is that ordering those results, you want to give some of those a priority because what if you come back with, let's say, what if you come back with 1,100 results, but your aggregator is limited to 250 feeds? You want to have some sort of priority in there where you say, OK, I got back a bunch of these, but these are the ones I want to do first. And the order by is the pull now column because that can be great. It can be zero means don't pull this feed currently. Everything gets a one by default, but if I want to jump something to the top of the stack and make sure it gets pulled right this second, I set it to two. So that's what I did with we get to do this. I set it to two.

21:07 Well, when you were pod pinging it, it was setting it back to one. So that's why we kept like, that's why I told you not to pod ping it. I didn't. I didn't. No, no, no. But you did the first time. I saw in the second time. I'm sorry. Yeah. That's fine, but then there's another order buy, which is last check. And that's an ascending column that's just a Unix timestamp. So that's saying if if the pull now is is two, I want those first and everything else. I want to check it in the oldest, oldest to newest. So if we haven't checked it in a long time, well, that last check column. Did not have an index. Okay. Yeah, because the last check had been like two hours before I started publishing. And so in my mind as I was writing, I remember as I'm writing this sequel, in my mind I'm thinking, okay, by the time we get to the order by… We've already we're already down to our limited set. So we're just doing an ordering. We're not doing this is not a criteria for this for the select body itself. Well, that's not accurate because MySQL's plan engine where it determines how to execute the plan does not always do what you think it's going to do. And if you're ordering by a multi... congruent set of criteria It expects that

22:45 thing to be indexed or else it's going to order it before the limit check and not after. So it was basically doing a lack of it. It was yeah, it was pulling all every time any aggregator pulled its slice, it was pulling all. All 8 million feeds and then grabbing the 100 off the top is what it was doing. Oh, wow. And that was the hang time, the 8 million ingest. Yeah, and it was hammering the database all day long. Okay, so is that the change that – was that the graph that you showed? That was the change that you made? Yes, and it went from – on the metrics, it cut database server load by 65%. Wow. Just by refactoring. I thought my Linode alerts were low today. I'm like, I don't have as many. You weren't getting Mindy alerts? No, I didn't. I got no Mindys. I got Mindy. Who names a server Mindy? I can tell you why it's named that, because originally we had two database servers, and one's name was Mork, and the other one was Mindy. But we killed Mork because it was too expensive. Mork was from Ork.

23:59 Get rid of him. Yes. Yeah, Mindy is all that was left. Yeah. So there was two solutions to this problem. One is we… The last check is critical. So in order – we need an index on that column, so I had to do an alter on the table to add the index. Well, then in trying to do the alter on that table, it would not get a lock. So when you alter a table that's the size of the – that's got 8 million rows in it. It needs to sort of find a place to jump in, so to speak. Yeah. Because it's going to have to do a temporary table lock. And then it can do the online alteration. It doesn't have to stop the database. But then at the end of the process, it'll have to do another brief table lock. Well, if it can't ever get that very first table lock because there's something else going on, it'll just keep rejecting it. And I fought that for, gosh, an hour and a half and finally figured out. It was the Sphinx person server.

25:06 That thing had been running a constant hit on the database for like 12 hours. So I had to kill that thing, refactor that thing's sequel to go in batches. Before I could finally come back and do the alter to add the index, Then after that happened, that only took like 10 minutes. Then after that, go in and refactor the sequel to because that sequel was still going to be slow when the when the limits drop below 100 because it's still going to fall back to a big scan. So then we refactored that out from being like select where and or to being a union, which is basically two separate selects. Then do a join and take like a Venn diagram of of the contents that you're pulling out of the middle. So you both of those things run at full speed. So. Like basically the aggregators are pulling out the database at like 300 milliseconds now. They're like blazing fast. And so they got like a million times faster and dropped the load on the database by like over half. Wow. Well, that's a big win. Congratulations. That's a big one. Yeah, I mean, the end result is fantastic. It was just – but, I mean, there was more. I just – I kept going because I'm like, okay, well, we're in here. We might as well just keep going down the rabbit hole and

26:39 ended up spending more time on the aggregators. Staggering their start times. So now none of them launch their polling at the same minute mark. So they randomize across the minute. There were some feeds that were stuck in limbo that were just getting – reprocessed over and over and over because there was a couple of, um, There's a couple of HTTP status codes I was not handling. And so they were just they had been getting pulled like once every 10 minutes for, I don't know, years. We're just hammering those things. And there's a couple of. Stop the hammering. Yeah. Yes. Somebody the the A.I. agent literally told me it was like. It said something like, this is how you get banned. I was like, well, sorry, man. I mean, like, geez, come give me a break.

27:44 So and then we were keeping an extra copy of every feed and memory even after the XML parsing was done in order to potentially flag it later. So we. It refactors some of that. It's just a bunch of, you know, a bunch. Oh, and it found, it did find another bug with one of the. It being the robot. The agent, yeah. Yeah. Another runaway API query. Yeah. that was a result of this recent refactor. So that was a bug it created, so it had to fix it. So anyway, it's probably... It was an all-day adventure, let's say that. Well... It's highly appreciated, brother. The stuff you do. The stuff you do. Let's bring in our guest. Let's bring in our guest because he's been waiting very patiently. And if we let him wait too long, he'll be drunk because he likes to drink wine around this time. Because our guest today is coming in from Marlowe. He is the CEO of True Fans, co-host of Pod News Weekly Review. And as of last weekend, a sexagenarian who would like it noted that growing old is mandatory, but growing up is optional. Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Sam Sethi. Ah, good evening, gentlemen. Good evening.

29:06 Can I just point out all I understood from what Dave said was nanu nanu. It meant nothing to me. I have no idea what you said, but it sounds amazing, Dave. Thank you. Well. If amazing means fixing problems that you yourself created, I agree with you. It was amazing. I got to ask you one before we talk about podcast stuff, though. Your wine business, are you seeing an increase? Because I have a friend here in town. who also is a wine importer, and he said the amount of non-alcoholic wine is way up. Yeah, it is.

29:47 Are you seeing that? Yeah, more people are going for lighter wines or non-alcoholic wines. It's a shame. This is a travesty. This will not stand. It's the young, not the old. It's actually demographically young. But I mean, how do you even make non-alcoholic wine? Do you, I mean. It's called Ribena, I think. He said they, he said they like centrifuge it or something. It's just, it's not, I mean, there's trends like orange wine now as well. It's like, it's just becoming silly. i mean with with the warming that we've had this summer a lot of the european wines it's just grape juice yeah but they've they've actually ripened too quickly so the problem is you're now getting white wines are great but red wines uh it's not good for it so it's not going to be a good summer for wine anyway we we digress So it's juice boxes, basically. Juice boxes. Juice boxes and shoko love. What more could you ask for? It's a beautiful thing. So Sam did what everybody should do. He sent us an email and said, Hey, man, I want to be on the show. And that's how you do it. And because you got stuff to talk about, because if there's any... For any member of the podcasting 2.0 band of misfits, it has got to be true fans that is literally implement. I mean, they run out of tags. It's like we don't have another thing to put in there. Could you please make another tag? We need something else. We need more tags.

31:20 We reached the end of the namespace. We need more. I literally sent an email to Mo saying feature complete. there's nothing left that's where you need to start making bugs so that you can fix them so you can have something to do now we've got enough of those still so you now what I always appreciate about Sam is he will update the the podcast index.social with the latest things that he's working on. Although it always kind of sucks the way it shows up because it comes in reverse order. You know, I have to go, oh, let me go find out, you know, okay. And I have to go and go to your click on it to get the first one and they go down the list. But, man, you've you've done a lot of new things, particularly on the value for value side with new payment stuff. Where do you want to start? I think one thing I'd love to start because it's related to Godcaster is publisher feeds versus network feeds, if you don't mind. Yeah. So Oscar came up with the idea of publisher feeds and that was about two, three years ago.

32:27 It's been ratified as a standardised tag within the podcast namespace. Brilliant. Brilliant. No one's implemented it and I don't know how to get other hosts to do it. But what is a publisher feed? It's fundamentally podcasts from one single producer that you aggregate. So it's a great form of discovery. I land on... Smart list as an example and then we say the publisher is wondering you click on the one tree link and boom You get all the other podcasts from wondering you go. Oh my god, okay I didn't know about this this isn't okay become a fan become a fan Click on the playlist and run it as a whole playlist. So that was really cool, but no one's doing it so We then had this issue that a lot of independent podcasters were saying, well, that's great for the big boys, but I want to form a wine podcast society. And I want to be able to start with my own podcast, but I want to invite people. I don't know, five or six other little podcasters. And we want to aggregate all of our listen times and our plays and then go back to the advertiser or sponsors and say, look, instead of having 100 plays on one podcast and 10 plays on another, we've got a thousand plays as a network. Can we now get sponsorship or can we now get sponsorships?

33:45 some advertising or whatever it may be, right? And so the difference between a publisher and a network feed is a publisher is a single publisher with multiple podcasts within it that you can use for discovery and a network is you are not the publisher of any of those. You aggregate and invite people to join you But the analytics in your dashboard shows you all of the aggregated totals so that you can then act like a big player and take it to somebody else for monetization. This is a very good explanation. And as it relates to Godcaster, I would say that because we have an integration network. partnership with RSS.com, and we're seeing a definite uptick of stations who are creating podcasts, you know, like – uh their own station podcast but they may have one from a local pastor or something from the city council you know some other ones and this would be a great place to integrate that i'm the funny thing is sam is that people they really don't seem to care that much about stats it's so crazy i i the for the um uh For the linkage side, you know, this podcast belongs to this network, that kind of stuff they understand. Our customers, they're not, I mean, they don't have ads or sponsorships, most of them, I would say.

35:13 But in general, it seems just like the hosting companies, this is something they need to jump on board with, and we should probably start asking them to do that, because I presume True Fans Hosting does this. Yes, we do already. Of course. Why am I even presuming? And it's like, yeah, I mean, I put a link in the email I sent you, but the idea… is that we copied the publisher feed format in the structure. So in the RSS feed for the podcasts we host, we also put podcast colon network, and then that links to a file which lists all of the podcasts within that network. So we copied the same structure, and I'm going to put it up on the GitHub page, So that hopefully, you know, everyone can review it and then maybe we can get that approved as well. But the idea is that within the RSS feed, we now have pod roles. We now have publisher feeds. We now have network feeds. We have merch feeds. So we're trying to aggregate information. Lots and lots of things. I call it a super feed, but that's just our internal name for it.

36:19 The thing you're – it sounds like you're describing – is less of a network and almost like a collective or a co-op. Correct. Yeah. And that was something that your hosting customers asked for? Yeah. So a lot of them were saying, look, I keep going and asking somebody to sponsor my podcast or I ask somebody to put DAI type advertising into it. and they go how many plays have you got how many listeners have you got what how many fans and the number is always small and so in the long tail it's really hard for those people to go and find people to you know pay them so if you can then say well my podcast is about wine and i've got 20 other wine podcasts and collectively we can then act as one So the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, then it works. And we also, in the analytics, drill down. So in terms of the money splits, it's easy to work out which one's got 10% of the plays, which one's got 5%, etc. And so you can split the monies back very easily as the admin of that network. Okay. What I thought was most interesting, and you've been working on this for a long time and I've been hearing you talk about it. By the way, two weeks of no pod news weekly review is tough, I have to say. We're doing it tomorrow morning. I can tell you why we had. So James was in New York for one week and then... We recorded two hours on Thursday as we normally do. And unfortunately, James sounded

37:50 like he was in a water tunnel. Oh, no. What happened? What happened? There is a super secret new recording tool from our friends at Buzzsprout. And you decided to use the super secret new recording tool? Well, we've done it once before, but actually James says it was somewhere between the Rodecaster's SD card failing and obviously what was being tested. I hate it when that happens. I mean... That's the beauty of streaming live is there's always some crazy guy out there who's recording it. I've had that happen many times. Like, holy crap, everything failed. And I got a copy here for you. Don't worry about it. Yeah. It'll be out on Sunday. Oh, okay, good. So you're talking about it more. You're posting about it more.

38:38 The idea of hosting no longer just being podcast hosting, but more like a creator portal. Yeah. Now, look, you've talked about this in the past. You've called it the Rachel Maddow problem. Well, Rachel Maddow is a problem, but yes. Okay. Continue. I think what I'm seeing is that podcasters doing audio is great. And I still insist that a podcast can only be a podcast if it has an RSS feed. Otherwise, it's not a podcast. Now, because the alternative enclosure, that can be video as well. It doesn't have to be just audio. but it has to have an RSS feed. Anyway, that's just me. But what we've seen is that people have started to want to aggregate all of their content that's been disparately spread across the web. So in the past, you might have had a WordPress site, and then you might have had a sticky meal site or a Wix site. And all your contents everywhere, your merch, your blogs, Now what we're seeing, not just with Truefans, I think, you know, Substack, Supercast, Memberful, Supercast, all of these sites are now becoming creator portals. And I think that is the arrow of direction I hope and see that creators will go down. So what would that include? For us, That's so audio, video, a blog, live events, ticketing, merch, network or publisher feeds. And all of that gets aggregated

40:11 into one RSS feed as well from Truefans. So when we publish to the podcast index, you get that full RSS feed. Of course... Any app can then read it, but most apps won't read half of the RSS reader. And I think you've also talked about adding newsletter functionality. Yeah. Yeah, so we've just built our own newsletter. So we're just going to push one out very quickly. And then, yes, that's the last bit we want to add for creators so you can have an own newsletter. your own email list and then send that out to people who have subscribed to your newsletter that's that's gotta be a hard thing to get into yes i mean like with all email is so restricted and broken broken broken broken we use send grid um you know is it good is it bad we'll find out um i think You know, we're coming from a very hard place. I mean, you've got Substack whose core was the newsletter, you know, and they're now building audio, video, live premium content.

41:13 They're building all of this stuff around it. And, you know, So we're coming the other way. We're coming from an audio first and then trying to build these other features onto it. I will say one thing that I tell people over and over again, particularly with value for value. So if you're supported by listeners, the newsletter is essential and people have no idea how essential it is. So to be able to send out an email the day before you have an episode come the day, the day before and the timing also matters. And that's, you know, that's a testing issue. And what I've what we've been doing for 19 years. is hey we've got a show tomorrow here's a funny picture remember you have to support us donate here's what's come on up on the show and remember you have to support us donate and uh here's another fun picture remember you have to support us donate and it is typically responsible for i'd say close to 40 of donations come in after the newsletter goes out Because it functions as just a reminder? Yeah.

42:22 Is that what you see? That's what it is. We're all attention deficient, so we need things that land just in time. So we get to do this. We've been using Substack. Now, unfortunately, Substack won't just let you... keep your own RSS feed and import it. If anyone's listening at Substack, you're idiots. Because that would be like PodPage. That would just be perfect if you allowed for that. But no, we have to use our feed and all this stuff. But what they have built in is they have... the financial model built in. So with one click, you're paying, which is great. On the other hand, it's not great because they're always popping up little things like, hey, you should spend money on this, which I hate.

43:10 You know, it's like, no, no, it's value for value. Don't put the free option at the bottom. Let people know. You know, so there's some problems with that. But that integration, if I was starting from scratch and I didn't, for whatever reason, I would trust them as a host, which I just, I'm not seeing that right now. I want features. I want 2.0 features. They don't offer that. I can see why people go with that. So I think that integration and once you sub stack has has mass adoption with people who've already put their their payment details in. So the value part is like one click, boom, done. Okay, you're good to go. That's the amazing part. And look, they're building on a really strong core function, which is the newsletter and the blog. So it's – you know, Substack is being – it's being inshittified. I mean, you can just see – It is.

44:02 It is a bit, yeah. It's gotten demonstrably worse over time. More stay on our platform, please don't leave. It just – It's a worse experience in every way. The app is horrible. It is. It's so bad. It's not as bad as Medium. You've got articles, notes, comments, posts. I don't know what's what anymore. It's too much. Well, the CTO has just left... and also to join OpenAI. Really? From the factory to the fire. Nice. Well, to start a creator network on OpenAI. I mean, that's what his announcement was. Yeah, so... And, you know, they added a podcast button and stroke tab on Substack because people couldn't find podcasts. Right. But you go try and look for that and find that tab. I still can't find it. So I think the UI is really a mess right now. It is. And it makes me – it brings up the – Something that me and Adam talked about last week, which is just everybody's trying to do everything now. It's not like you have hosting companies. Well, I think it started with things like Riverside and Descript putting in hosting. And now it's spreading to where, well, everybody feels like they have to do everything because everybody else is doing everything. And so now you're going to – everybody is going to have to – I think

45:33 there's this pressure going on for all platforms to give you every possible thing to do. Well, I talk about – Sorry, thank you. No, no. I was just going to finish up by saying true fans, at least you understand podcasting. Like Substack, I mean, they may understand it a little bit, but they started out as a completely – it's a bolt. Just like Spotify started out with music and they bolted on podcasts later, I feel like the podcast first world – It makes more sense to bolt on other podcast features to start out as a podcast hosting company and then release like a like a recording tool or something like Buzzsprout instead of starting out as a. You know, it's like a meeting tool like Zoom and then adding podcasting onto the side of it.

46:20 I have to say I just because Sam said it challenge accepted. I went to the I got the Substack app. I hit podcast and it shows a whole bunch of podcasts. And this is the interesting thing. So I put in we get to do this. And it shows it as the top hit in the podcast search. Then I tap and it shows that. Now, these episodes are just articles. I have no player embedded or anything, just purely a link to our own player. I think we link to the bridge page. Godcaster player. I tap on it. It pops up a page. It still has the click here for this episode, but it has a listen button. And I hit the listen button and boom, a player opens and it's playing our podcast. I don't know.

47:09 So they recognize it somehow. And they I give them no feed. I give them nothing. Somehow they recognize it. That's that's rather outstanding. I have to say. Huh. So are you saying that you don't have a presence on Substack? No, we do. Somehow they have your content. No, we we our newsletter is on Substack. And. We post, so we'll create a new article when the episode comes out, which is basically show notes, and we post a link. But I didn't put the listen button on there. They did that. So they're smarter than I thought, actually. So they're not pulling your feed, is what you're saying? No, they're not. As far as I know, they're not.

47:50 So it sounds like they're almost re- Building you another feed on their side and in effect. Because you have a play button next to all of your episodes, but it's only in their silo. Yeah, but if I say – if I'm looking for other episodes and it doesn't – I don't understand it. This is the problem. This is the problem is it's confusing. It is confusing. And you're the one who's – It's your account. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's better than what I thought, but it's also much worse than I thought. Oh, well. I was just going to say, Deb, I think what we're seeing is a change from what I call horizontal to a vertical world. So horizontal was Buzzsprout was the host and then Overcast was the app or Pocketcast was the app. And then you've got WordPress for your blog and you've got something else. And I think we're now spinning that to a vertical where... Everyone does hosting through and you know Fountain and ourselves became hosts not because we wanted to I spoke to Oscar about this. He didn't particularly want to, but we were frustrated. asking all the existing hosts, add video, add this. Why is that feature not there?

49:06 Who's got a pod role? Why don't you do this tag or that tag? And it was like, okay, well, if you're not going to do it, guys, we're just going to come and go, we'll do the hosting part. And the cost of hosting is minuscule. you know the the cost per gigabyte is literally 0.001 it is not expensive anymore so you know in the technology escalator it's now the bottom of the escalator in terms of feature and function and you're now seeing all the hosts are having to up their game to differentiate and Yeah. So we just went through the whole video upgrade. Everybody pretty much did that. Do you see a huge uptake as was expected? No. Yeah, I didn't think so. No, pretty much. That's as expected. I think it's good that we've done it. I think leaving the video to YouTube and Spotify was stupid. Um, I'm glad that we've all upped our game and done it. Will we see a massive uptake? I don't think so, but, you know, at least we've ticked that box.

50:08 I mean, you know, Amazon this week have added the alternative enclosure. They've added video in the alternative enclosure, which is really well done. So congratulations to them. But Apple... So as a host, I'm still having to use the proprietary APIs from Apple, Spotify and YouTube to send video. It's not, you know, they don't support the alternative enclosure. They don't support in the primary enclosure HLS. So we've still got a long way to go in order to get the adoption of video properly in those clients. So is TrueFans hosting? Are y'all publishing in the alternate enclosure? Yes. Yeah. So we, before any of the Apple API stuff came out, we had made the decision to upload MP3 and MP4 and convert to HLS. So we did that. Why did we do that? it goes back to the other big issue that's going around what is a play how long should a play be and how can you get first party data and we were like okay we can't beg borrow or steal apple will not give it to us spotify or youtube and you look at bumper you know they have to ask their clients to give them a login and then they act and then they aggregate in some dashboard but it's micro data just for their clients now we worked out and i'm gonna you know i told you in the email i'm now gonna reveal how we're doing it because i think everyone should be doing it because we've got to break the monopoly of these three big players so There is something

51:39 that we did, we converted all of the content, MP3 and MP4 into HLS, and then we use this HTTP 206 partial content. What that does is it actually asks for a range request. So we're streaming content down to the client. and the range request is being pushed. At the point when the person stops requesting content, i.e. they stop playing, we know exactly that A, they've played it, and B, how long they've played it, and then we can put that in our metrics, and that's how we do it. So we can do that across all apps, and it works really well. Mm-hmm. So the issue that leaves, though, is the thing that we're facing right now.

52:26 I've gotten two questions in the last couple of weeks of people texting me and saying, hey, is this y'all? And – They gave us a screenshot of they gave me a screenshot of a user agent claiming to be podcast index. And it is not us. And that's the and I this we know this is I mean, obviously, this has been happening forever. But it seems like this is now a huge problem. User agent faking is now just the norm. You have no idea whether or not Apple Podcasts or Overcast or Podverse or Truefans, you'd have no idea if that's legitimately who they are. But you cannot tell anymore. No, and so my learning curve has been vertical since we became a host. So the first thing was, okay, how do we do this? How do we get our own CDN? How do we make the optimisation? So great learning. then we did the hls learning and then everyone jumped on the hls bandwagon brilliant and so that's the next thing and then we started to get all the streaming data coming back and it was like hours and hours of stuff and we were seeing bots all over the place and so we built a wath which is a firewall uh and we basically allowed the individual creators then see all the bots we worked with john spurlock's oporg list to begin with and so

53:59 we could see the the ones that had truly said they were a user agent and they were bots and then as a creator you can then turn them on or off so the reason why we gave the option was because some people said no i want to be indexed by open ai no i want to be indexed by these bots and other people like well that's costing me money no turn it off so we gave that option but now we're getting uh unknown um data in terms of streaming it's quite a large percentage and We don't know how to fix it right now. Seems like it was 60% or something when I saw that graph you posted. Yeah, it's really high. And I think the answer is Apple. And so if these bots are apps, forget web for a minute. If these bots are apps and that bot that James highlighted is. which was removing the ads and providing some skipping capability. That's up in the app store. But the first version was spoofing itself as overcast. Now it's worked out that he can turn off that and he doesn't have to even give a user agent. Apple banks 30% from that app because it's a paid app. Apple could enforce every app to have a user agent before it is allowed into the app store. And that would fix it because then it would be a whitelist that we as hosts could then point ourselves to, oh, that's what it is. Okay, that would fix it, but Apple's never going to do this. I

55:32 don't know if they're interested. So you're saying that this particular app is now claiming to be something like a web browser? Yeah, it can claim to be safari. It knows now that if it claims or reports itself, it will be blocked. So now it says, well, I'm going to illegally claim to be something else. And no one's policing me. So happy days. You know, that is interesting because that could be I'd seen I'd seen James mention that or heard him mentioned it. And I wasn't really following what he was saying, but now that you lay it out like that, I think I understand because if there was a user agent enforcement mechanism on apps, that really would make a big difference. That would help. Yeah, it definitely would help. And it's not like it's completely out of line with the other enforcement. I mean… Apple and Google enforce lots of things on app developers, and we know this because they – sometimes app developers have to email us and say, hey, I submitted my app for app review, and they say that I'm not allowed – they won't approve it unless I get written approval from Podcast Index that I can use your API. So they already enforce lots of different requirements like that. That is something that Apple and Google – I don't know that I agree with you, Sam, though, but I think that sounds like something they absolutely would do. I don't see how it hurts them at all. Well, how do we get them to do that? You know, we have

57:02 friends in both camps, but nobody seems to want to... Nope. Hello? Sorry about that. I'm sorry about that. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I was on the phone with Apple. Okay? I felt my brain turned inside out for a second. I'm sorry. I was on the phone with Apple. Yes. I don't know how you – that's the question of how do you get giant mega – Mega national corporations do anything. We can hear you coming back, Adam. You still hear me? Yeah, I'm hearing it. You're bleeding through, brother. I'm bleeping through. I'm sorry. All right. Thank you. I'll stop now. How do you get these humongous corporations to do anything? That is an unknown thing. Well, I think if you talk about it more and talk about it as a pain point, I mean, this week was crazy in podcast movement, you know. Tom Webster stood up on stage and said, you know, Netflix is basically one of the top three podcast platform apps. I'm like, where's that come from? Then Rob Walsh said, yeah, but Netflix has one in 67,000 podcasts, you know, so yours isn't going to be part of it. and then apple has a play that is zero you know literally one second um youtube has a play that is a hover um The amp record totally tried to get something to be 30 seconds. That lasted about 30 seconds. Yeah. That

58:38 died as predicted. We knew that would die. Yeah. So nothing is, you know, so we've got this going off in the background about what is a play, what's the analytics. And then we've got user agents. There's a lot in the air right now I think that we have to fix and not quite sure how we go about it. Well, I think from experience, we all know that you that you can't fix stupid things at once. Well, there's that too. You can't you can't fix 10 things at once. You got to you got to like make make your list and hit the biggest ones. To me, the list of things that have to be fixed always come down into two camps. It's like, is it realistic this will ever be fixed? Well, okay, once you get through that filter, which one is the most likely to be fixed? Not which one is the thing that hurts the most, but which one is the – Which which issue that you're trying to solve is most likely to receive a favorable ear from the people from from this other group? And if you can if you hit that one. And then the next most likely, instead of trying to solve your hardest problem first or your worst problem first, if you solve the one that you're most likely to find agreement on first, then over time you build a consensus or a base in order to start working.

1:00:00 next hardest thing. And I mean, I think at least Spotify has shown zero interest in playing in the open podcast world at all. They just seem to not care. Apple, on the other hand, I think Apple Podcasts, that team over there, I think they would love nothing more. than to see App Store review enforce user agents to make these other podcast apps identify themselves. If they do it, everybody will do it. So that would be great. Yeah, I think the biggest problem is it's mini-thiefdoms inside of Apple. So the podcast team won't have App Store...

1:00:40 input i mean you look at apple it it's got siloed all over it right so the the app music the app audio books the app for podcasting all separate look at amazon exactly the same audible is different to amazon music is different to wandry is different to art 19. um this is corporate um, fiefdoms being exposed at the front end, whereas Spotify is an aggregated app. At least it appears to the consumer as one out with audio books, podcasts, and music. Well, we had, we had this solution kind of bubbling for a little bit, which is the idea of registering your, um, your ID, your, what's the word I'm looking for? Your, user agent? Yeah.

1:01:29 Are you talking about the HTTP signing? Oh, whatever it is. I mean, yeah, HTTP signing. I think that's what it was. In general, look, Google forced HTTPS on us for everything. Yes. So why don't we get them to enforce this for everything? This would actually, it doesn't matter too much to me, but it does matter to people who are paying for bandwidth, although we just heard I should start a CDN because it's pennies. It's fractions of pennies now, so that's a new business I'm working on. But at the same time, it is costing people money, and it would be nice if we had the ability to say, no, not you, you know. But yeah, no, not you or only you or whatever it is. And that should go for browsers, too. Well, I don't really know about – I don't want to go back down the signing argument. You already tried that. Yeah, and we do it. We do it. That's how you can tell if it's us. If you want to know if it's the podcast index aggregator – We sign our request with a public key. You can verify that it is us.

1:02:39 So we do – we put our money where our mouth is. We're walking the walk. And I don't want to like re-litigate that whole thing. Oh, my God. You're buzzing like crazy. I know. Well, not anymore. Move the chocolate. I swallowed my chocolate. But – Like I don't want to relitigate that whole thing, but at the same time, this – I think what we're seeing is an escalation in – The issue of apps being impersonated – it's an impersonation and escalation. That's what we're seeing. And like – so if you're an app – like I know that there's – you know, Spurlock and Mark and all these. I know that they have – There are legitimate reasons not to want to do this, but at the same time, if you see millions of requests claiming that they're you but they're not, that's also – you have to admit that's a problem. Because what if they're being abusive and it's not your app doing it? Yeah.

1:03:40 Well, the biggest problem is if you keep spoofing that you're overcast and suddenly people block overcast. Yes. And the legitimate overcast thing gets blocked. Then, you know, Marco's going to be very upset. And I would be too if it was true fans getting blocked. So... Before we get to that problem, let's try and fix it because we know that's the problem that will bite us in the future. And I think that was the biggest misunderstanding of that whole argument is that it was looked at from the standpoint of if you have signing, then you can get blocked. But the whole point of it was to not get blocked. That was the whole point of it was if you sign your stuff, we'll know how we'll know you're that you are who you are and we'll know not to block you. And so, like, I think the incentive to. The incentive to not block a legitimate app is stronger than the incentive to block a legitimate app. So at what point would a hosting company or provider... Want to block legitimate download traffic from a real app? I can't think of one. So Tom Rossi at the PSP has proposed this. I think it's on the GitHub as well. The only other negative I heard was the podcast apps that are serverless wouldn't be able to participate. Now, I don't understand that enough. But that's one

1:05:13 of the arguments. Say that again. Say that again. So the apps that are serverless would not be able to participate in a signing because they don't have a back end to sign against. I understand the argument, but I think that's easy to work around with like an escrow. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I don't think that's a problem at all. I mean, I would – the podcast, I would be totally willing to host an escrow on behalf of serverless apps. I mean, like, completely open. We could – it's – it costs us nothing. Why don't we just – how about this? Let's just do it. Let's just build it. Build an escrow for all apps, for all I care. And just make it a thing. And then maybe someone will pick it up and say, oh, look what these guys are doing. And that's good. I mean, that's how things usually work in this world. You build it. You push it. It's like any other type of content. Oh, here's a new tag. Oh, here's a key to sign with. Oh, I kind of like that.

1:06:11 We can get a nonce or some sort of key signing material, give it to an app developer. They can sign it with their key, put their public key in our escrow, and then we have verified that they are who they say they are, and then we'll basically co-sign. I'm fine with that. You know we'll join you. You know that. As always. We've got nothing else to do. We've been waiting for you. You already finished the internet. We got to the end. We're like, now what? How's business doing in general, Sam? Pretty good. Daily signups of users about five, 600 people. Wow. Yeah, and hosts about 20 to 30 a day minimum. With some days we spike at 50. So it's good. It's good. It's going well. We... I mean, I'm going to reveal something that you might not be aware of. So Mo, my developer who is stuck in Afghanistan. Afghanistan. Yes, I know. He was in Iran. He got out just before the Internet was turned off. He was in Afghanistan living in his uncle's. a farmyard just outside a car, but how that guy delivers anything to me, I have no idea. Sam, one day you're going to have to tell the story of how you know this guy. I mean, like, it sounds like he's always in the deepest, darkest. I'm thinking

1:07:43 since he's from Afghanistan, it was probably Sam's old import-export business. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no. No, I won't tell you who, but I was at a podcast movement three years ago and they wanted to invest into true fans and we shook hands, quarter of a million. And then I got a phone call at eight o'clock the next morning because I'd spoken and said, oh, Mo's in Iran. You know, that's where my CTO is. And he went, I do work with the government. We can't do this. And that was it. It was just removed. I've never revealed this. I'm quite happy to do it on this show. Yes. We've raised two million out of 10 million valuation. That's what we did. We did that back at the beginning. Congratulations. No, not excellent because while Mo is in Afghanistan, they won't give me the money. It's stuck in a bank account. So he's currently at an airport. All two million? All. Nothing will be. So he's currently at an airport on his way to Dubai. We have to now send a photo next week with a geolocated photo. Can't be AI. It's like, no. Proof is out. Of him standing in front of the Dubai airport, right? Something, anything. It's KYD, know your developer. You've got to do a whole – wait a minute, wait a minute. Hold on. Stop for a second. Right. So this is 2 million pounds sterling, I'm presuming. Yes. Yep. And from what I understand, you did this under an interesting

1:09:13 – UK specific financing law for small business. EIS, yeah. Yeah, so you got a bunch of... High net worth. Yes, that's the term I'm looking for. High net worth who actually get a tax benefit for making this investment. Their tax benefit probably doesn't count until they make the actual investment, but I'm trying to make the connection to why this is being held because, Is it being held by them? Yes. The lead investors basically through due diligence. I'm not going to lie because it'll come out in discovery anyway. So when you tell them where he is, they go, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, that's too dangerous. We won't do it. But if you can get him out and put him somewhere else where we think it's a safe country, we'll We'll release the money. And we're like, okay, come on.

1:10:02 So we've been trying and trying. Oh, man. Hey, but listen, if you need help, I do have contacts in that area. Right. I do. I do. Okay. Certainly getting people out of a country. If he doesn't mind the military, C-130 military transport. I don't care how you get him out. It's not very comfortable, but we probably can bust them out, man, if he has some kind of paperwork. My wife will agree with you because our savings are dropping like a rocket right now with me funding. Yeah, I hear you. Yeah, it'll be lovely if we can because it's so, it's awful. I can see the money because I've got access to the account. It's sitting there, but I can't access it. Because if I do, then obviously the investors will come at me. I mean, the EIS is a great scheme in the UK. It stands for Enterprise Investment Scheme. And what it means is if you've got a tax bill, let's say a hundred thousand pound tax bill, you can put that money legitimately into a certified startup. Yeah, that's great. And then as long as that startup survives three years, you get 75% of that back as, you know, relief. Tax relief. Yeah.

1:11:14 And if I fail, they get 75%. And if I make a killing, then it's capital gains free. So they don't pay tax on the upside. I love how the British I love how the British call. They just straight up call this a scheme. It took me a while to figure that one out. Yeah. You have the BBC licensing scheme as well. Everything's a scheme over there. Schemers. I'm telling you, the British schemers at least is honest. Yeah. Well, Sam, send me a note later. I'm happy to see if I can. can put you in touch with somebody who can help him. As long as he has some kind of paperwork, everything's possible. He literally got his passport about a week ago. Don't ask. Well, I don't ask. And he got a visa as well. Again, I don't ask. A visa for Dubai or for the U.S.? Yeah, Dubai. Well, this guy is critical to the podcasting 2.0 ecosystem. We need to help. We got to stick him in a hubcap and spin him out of there. Hold on to that wheel, mate. You're going out.

1:12:20 Things are going to get a little dicey. Wow. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that, but we'll see what we can do for you, man. We'll definitely see what we can do for you. Well, I just find it amazing when I go to Mo every day, because we talk every day, and I go, "Hey, we've got this crazy idea for this feature or function, whatever." And he goes, "Yeah, leave it with me." And a day or two later, it's done. And I go, "How are you doing this?" the the you know i moan about my broadband connection in the uk and he's probably got you know one hand pointed out the window with an air to try and get some internet access, you know. Yeah, and this is pre, and he was doing this pre-AI. I mean, he was coding features in 24 hours way before AI even existed. Exactly. Yeah. Now, thanks to Claude, we...

1:13:04 We are rebuilding all of TrueFans at the moment. Oh, really? Oh, okay. That's interesting. I have found that, I don't know if you're in the same boat, but when you build things very fast, you have a lot to go back and clean up after the fact. Oh, yeah. I mean, refactoring is essential. But one of the... By hook by crook, we got lucky. We didn't plan it. We built it as a PWA to begin with because we didn't have the iOS and Android native skills. So we said, right, we'll build it as a PWA. And then we put the wrapper around it and submitted it to the app stores and they approved it. What's really interesting is we don't then have to put for every new feature we push to the PWA. Yeah, you just push it to the PWA. Yeah, we don't have to get approval every time we have a new feature, which is why we've been able to accelerate so fast with all the things we do. But are you going to go fully native eventually? Exactly. now with now we're feature complete or at least i think we're feature complete well just stand by new new tags coming up but yeah i mean that's what we're doing right now because we can't get are you Yeah, exactly. Android Auto and CarPlay.

1:14:18 Exactly. Now, are you considering putting everything in there, like with the kitchen sink, with the newsletter capability, basically creating a sub stack? It's going to be a pure native, yeah. We have so many micro issues that our user experience. experiences that you know limit us so good example when it goes to the iphone screen when you're playing a podcast yeah don't lock it button doesn't yeah the play button doesn't yeah you have to open it in order to play right it just doesn't work you don't have to tell us we've been we've been through this pain many many times And so I just bit the bullet and said to Mo, look, forget it. Let's just stop building new stuff. Let's get to a point where we're happy. And then let's just build a native and then submit them. So that's what we're doing. Yeah. And then you get to get on the bandwagon of waiting two weeks for approval. Yeah. Yeah. But that's just the way life is. I mean, it's just the way it is. You can't change that. You've got to play that game. Yeah, and I mean, Paul, because one thing Paul's doing right now with Godcaster is having to re-architect the whole thing for Android. What started it was Android Automotive.

1:15:27 Mm-hmm. You know, which is the new version that's replacing Android Auto. And evidently, it's a completely different animal. And so that just really got none of the existing stuff framework that he was using would work. So he had to just refactor the whole app from scratch. And like that's going to be the new. But you're going to have to because Google. is way more aggressive at deprecating stuff than Apple is. Oh, we lost access to the Google store recently because we wanted it. Again, the UK is weird. We've got these codes that determine what your company is, right? So they're called SIC codes, S-I-C. It's a scheme. Yeah. Yes. And Audio UK has now got the UK government to agree on two new denominations. One is podcast producer and one is podcast sort of app.

1:16:21 That's not the exact ones, but that's roughly what it is. There's two codes. And so we wanted to be listed as a podcast app. I don't know what the benefit or downside would be, but I wanted to do it. So we took the opportunity to take Trufans FM Limited as our company name from what it was before, which was Trufans Technologies. Anyway, because we've just changed the limited company name, Google just took us out of the app store. Oh, no. So we had to reapply. Apple, no change. Didn't care. Don't worry. They'll screw you with something else. They always do. That sounds like the American NAICS stuff. It's like a company... like industry code. Yes, exactly. Designate, yeah. I think that, isn't that, doesn't that all come down to like insurance or something? I'm not sure what the value of it is, but it was one of those, it came out, Audio UK had done the work. I thought, oh, let me try and do that for my own company then. you know, trying to eat the latest, greatest thing. And then, of course, I screwed myself over, but hey. So how do you remedy that? What do you do? We create a new account on Google in the Google Play Store. We resubmit and then we put it in. Start over from zero. Yeah, exactly. Wow. Well, this is depressing, Sam. Tell me something.

1:17:43 No, it's not. Got to ramp up that wine business, man. Podcasting is a bust. No, I think what I'm seeing is – Premium content is now becoming much more prevalent. I think people are beginning to accept painful quality content. Stripe, I don't know if you saw, I posted yesterday, they've got pay by bank, which I think is really interesting. We've just enabled it. Again, I think there's stuff happening. We still haven't got that micropayment, you know, the way that we all want it to be. I think there's still hope there. I'm not sure how yet.

1:18:29 And look, I think, you know, we are moving the needle forward. You know, HLS is there now. We have got audio, video. We are seeing the alternative enclosure used. If you look at all the tags... and the lag between thought and implementation is about three years but it's all happening So I'm really positive. Okay. I'm glad you are. If we can avoid – I guess the thing I'm mostly concerned about is just avoiding an economic crash at this point. I feel like the AI bubble is so close to popping. Well, it's only 3.8% of GDP.

1:19:12 3.8% does a lot. I had some clips I was going to play today before we knew you were going to be on, Sam. And, like, I mean, I'm pretty concerned about that. And I think that's one of the reasons why Bitcoin is going up is – Not because of money printing, but because of – like what I was hearing was that the AI debt markets have grown so large that they're now competing with treasury auctions. That's right. That is insane. That cannot be a good thing. And you're talking about they're competing with treasury markets, and they're already at like 10% on a note. Really? Oh.

1:20:00 This is not going to end well. This is the beginning of a... Because when you're... When you see that, that means the only way that the treasury market survives is by increasing to match those interest rates. You've got to increase interest rates, yeah. Yeah, you've got to increase the yield. Well, then we have Buffalo Besant. His idea is to get everybody to use our debt as a stable coin, which I think is a good gambit. I really do. I still think it's a good gambit. Yeah, and what I'm saying is Get Mo out of there as soon as possible. Get your money. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, put that stuff in cash and hold on. We're going to have to do an extract. You know how the CIA extractions work, Sam? It's like Mo has to go into a field and he has like this big rubber band. And the plane comes down with the hook. The hook. I'm not kidding you. Yeah, the hook. And it – and it whisks them off into the air behind the plane and then they reel them in slowly. So don't drop your laptop. Yeah. Exactly. He needs a backpack.

1:20:58 That's got all the code on it. No, don't do that, please. Get him a backpack. Hey, Sam, we appreciate so much what you do, man. We joke around. We have fun. But you've been leading so much in all of the 2.0 development. And we really want you to succeed. So whatever we can do. Thank you. Obviously, we want to help. you can hang around if you want I'm just going to thank a few people because I did hear some some boosts coming I'll hang in there hang in there very good I have to tell you my family by the way is not allowed between 6.30 and 8 o'clock to talk to me on a Friday night I understand we've had arguments it's like my wife's booked theater tickets I'm not going Oh no, the dinner, oh no. I don't go anywhere. It's like, nope. at least you went to your own birthday party in the back garden well that's a Saturday no it had to be a Saturday okay okay let me see this is so we are value for value everything you support this podcast with doesn't go to us it goes straight into the account for podcastindex.org and obviously there's a lot going on a lot of machines. Mindy needs to be fed, so please, you know, support us. Podcastindex.org at the bottom there is a big red donate button. You can support us with PayPal. We also got some boosts coming in.

1:22:18 Actually, we got a lightning invoice payment. I'm not quite sure where that came from. 100 sats just came in. So I don't know who it's from, but it says, good show today. I see it, yeah. Martin Lindeskirk, 1701. There it is. He says... And he comes in for true fans, as he always does. Fascinating conversation in cyberspace. Adam, Dave, Sam, go podcasting. More power to Moe, CTO, KYD. Fascinating. And he also sent another 1111 with a cheers to Sam's Wine Business. Indeed. Dreb Scott, 1234, coming in from Castomatic. I'm here. I'm here. Stuck in our on-prem data center tracking down fiber or SFP issue for some new servers. Yikes. Yeah. And I hit the delimiter.

1:23:04 So, Dave, you are up with your spiffy news. new poll? Oh, Randall Black, $5. These are PayPal, so we got $5 from him. We got John Hind, $12.79. I think John had an... He had a message. Why did it not come through? It was Eric PP who sent the lightning invoice from Boost Me Bitch. So, okay. Thank you, Eric PP. Oh, thank you. Man, I cannot find his note. I'll have to find it after the fact. James Sullivan, $10. Thank you. Thank you, James. Cohen Glotzbach, $5. Christopher Reamer, $10. Uh, Jorge Hernandez, $5. Michael Goggin, $5. And the boys and girls at Buzzsprout, $1,000. Yo!

1:23:49 Shot collar, 20-inch blades on the Impala. They are a great bunch of guys. They support a lot in podcasting. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. Let's see. I think I got John's note here. Yeah, you. Oh, yeah. He says you accompany me while whilst marshalling the park run on Saturday mornings, nine o'clock UK time. Yes, I don't know what the park run is, but it's a run in the park morning. Yeah, it's a run in the park. Let's see, Dreb Scott, 716 sets. He says, bat signal received. Sorry for all the truck talk last week. I was successful in getting the alternator replaced last Friday. Very good. Anonymous 578. We got a few anonymous of various amounts. 920, 189. Quite a few of those. We got a fountain user. Another anonymous. 6691. Thank you user 9401. Blah blah blah. Uh... Let's see, read BTC at Fountain1176. As building a community around a podcast is the best way to add value for everyone. Noster as an identity and messaging layer is a perfect fit for podcast communities. Find your community at onlyboosts.social. I get boost whenever there's a boost nearby. Yeah. Only Boosts. This sounds like an OnlyFans competition. OnlyBoost.social. Interesting. I have to

1:25:20 tell you, most people in my village think I run OnlyFans. Oh, you run everything else. Why would you not? There's that guy. He's loaded. He runs OnlyFans. That guy. Yeah. As you cruise by in the Ferrari. He's like, what does he – what does Sam even do? Does anybody know? Love down Babylon at Fountain. One, two, three, four. Is there something self-hostable as a value split destination in my podcast feed that could automatically split again to multiple wallets? Like a wallet switch where a band subsplits what others split to them but for a changing list of charities. Thanks. I think that's a combination of BoostMeBitch.com and the TARD box. That's the thing. That is a sentence that I never expected to hear in my life.

1:26:11 It is a combination of Boost Me Bitch and Tart Box. You know, Chad F., he's vibe coding a lot of cool stuff, but the commercial value of his stuff – You know, the marketing is a little askew. I think it's hilarious. I love it. But I can just see, you know, hey, Pastor Jimmy, I just want everyone to go to boostmebitch.com. That's not going to work. That's going to be a bit of an issue. We need some different marketing there, Chad F. That's where you say boost me, buddy. Boost me, buddy. Boost me, buddy. Yeah. uh anonymous fountain user 2007 sats thank you anonymous user uh we got comic strip blogger 10 000 sats there he is and uh yes 10 000 i thought it was oh that's interesting your numbers must be off because i i see that's the part that went to us right but the total number is 18. Mm-hmm. We got 10, though, to the podcast index. Right, but don't you want to give them the – Well, I don't see it. It's not in my export. Okay, all right. You tell me what the – what is the total? 18,000 zats. Okay, we get, okay, 18,000 sets through Comicster Blogger.

1:27:23 And I say this because otherwise you know that he'll never give up on us. I gave you 18. By the way, what I really loved this past week and a half, Comicster, something was up with Comicster Blogger, and he posted something. And it was beautiful to see our community say, hey, man, are you okay? Is everything? I texted him. I said, you know, everything okay? He's like, no. Like, well, let me know what I can do to help. But I just love seeing everybody who – everyone's had an issue with comics or blogger at some point. But it was really nice to see. Everyone's like, hey, bro, you okay? What's going on? That was just beautiful to see. And comics or blogger, if there's anything we can do, let us know. Howdy, Damon, Adam. Today, I recommend not a podcast, but YouTube channel. YouTube.com slash at puppet, E-D-G-A-R. Puppet Edgar. Puppet Edgar. So, Puppet Edgar, who is a blue puppet akin to Triumph Insult Comic Dog, but is operated by no agenda fan. Yo, CSB, still stonewalled by Adam Curry. This gram was $15.10 when sent. I wonder if it's my stonewalling that is making him feel so down. I hope not. You're going to have to solve this problem. Yeah. It's now firmly in your camp. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to solve this. I've got to solve this. My life is a mess. It's all right. Yep. Yeah. Okay. Was that it? That's it.

1:28:56 That's it. That's it. There's nothing else. There's nothing. It's the end of the road. We've reached the end. Sam, is there anything else we can do for you? Can we help besides the things we already discussed? Anything else you want to close out with? No, no. I mean, look, you know, it's cool. I think... We've, what, what, is it five years, six years now we've been on this journey? Yeah, six. Yeah, I mean, you know, and we are moving the needle forward now. It's cool. I love it. That's why. The needle just does not, it just does not move very fast. It's a needle. No, but if you look back. Over the time, it's really funny, the arrow of time moves forward slowly, but when you look back, it's moved really quickly. You know... You see things, you go, "Wow, we came up with that crazy idea," or let's say Ukraine came up with a crazy idea, and it's implemented, and then suddenly it's adopted by the big players and suddenly it's everywhere. Transcripts, chapters, person tag. It's great. And I think the thing that's often missed is that it is The board meeting that keeps it all together. You know, every open source project should be doing some kind of podcast, some kind of board meeting. The idea of doing it live with a boardroom and people chiming in and we have fun. You know, we're goofing off this. You know, no one's a no one's the police officer of anything. Yeah. It is such a beautiful example of what podcasting can do. And Tina asked me the other day, she says, so why do you do this podcasting 2.0

1:30:28 podcast? So, well, one – Otherwise, I'd never catch up with Dave. I just want to talk to my buddy Dave. I'd be lonely on a Friday night as well. Yeah, we don't want Sam to be lonely. We want a commentary blogger to have something to do. But it's also, it's in our DNA. It's in our DNA. It's in our DNA. It's who we are. It's a part of who we are. And I just love that this community has grown and that people continue to contribute. And it's a beautiful thing. It's a very beautiful thing. Sam, thank you so much, brother. Dave, thank you. Everybody have a great weekend. And we will return next Friday for another Board Beating of Podcasting 2.0. I hope you will join us. Somebody bring the donuts. We'll see you then.

1:31:11 We'll see you then. Thank you. Thank you. You have been listening to Podcasting 2.0. Visit podcastindex.org for more information. Go podcasting! It's an impersonation and escalation.