Episode 265: Jihobbyist

0:01 Podcasting 2.0 for July 17th, 2026, episode 265, G-Hobbyist. We exist. Okay, so we took a couple weeks off. What can I tell you? We're human. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the official board meeting of Podcasting 2.0. This is where it all goes down. Everything is discussed, all cards on the table, and we are the only boardroom that doesn't blame China for election interference. I'm Adam Curry here in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and in Alabama, the man who wrote an online tool used by evil AI bots. Say hello to my friend on the other end, the one, the only, Mr. Dan. you Those pipes.

0:51 You have a lot of wind in those lungs. Yes. Thank God. An online tool. An online tool. If you wrote an online tool, baby. Yes. That was borderline insulting. Online tool. I think the person who wrote that is an online tool. You know, so I think I posted Gell-Man. amnesia amnesia for those who don't know whenever you read something in a publication that you know everything about and is absolutely incorrect, you cannot trust anything else from that publication or that actual article. And there was also no evidence they posted about it. They didn't post any scripts that had podcastindex.org in it, as far as I could tell. No. But they did link directly to the public assets download page, which I'm sure probably ripped out about five terabytes of bandwidth from us. People are like, oh, this is cool. Let's get this. No, it's all the bots. All the bots went and downloaded all that crap and didn't even know what to do with it.

1:59 Have you looked at it? Have you looked at the downloads? I have not. I need to. So the story here... was that a supposed hack... of Suno revealed that the AI music generator used Podcast Index, an online tool, to do its targeting. It identified 420,000 different podcasts that had had at least a five. at least five 30-minute episodes, and sought to download roughly one million hours of podcasts. Yeah, and of which they did what with. Yeah, exactly. What is the point? What are you going to do with that? What is Suno doing with podcasts? I thought they were just music. Yeah, it's baffling to me.

2:49 I mean, I found a couple of accounts in the... You know, in our user registration table that look like they might be related to those guys, but I mean, nothing. I don't know, nothing stood out really. I don't know what they did with it or how they got the data. I guess they didn't use the API. I guess they just used the download. Right, and then they had to walk the whole tree and look at every... No, I guess we have links in there. They could have looked at the... length tags, length. The size, file size, the bytes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hmm. Oh, well. Hey, so welcome back. It's good to be on the show again. Good to be here in the boardroom. Hello, boardroom.

3:34 Hey, boardroom. Hello, boardroom. That was an extended absence. Sorry about that. No, it's all right. It was good. You got to go visit family and stuff, and that's important. Yeah, still no baby. She should have been here by now. Oh, uh-oh. How many days overdue are we? Yeah, so I have an angry daughter, basically. Yeah, she's ready to get that thing going. Just getting angry. Just getting angry. Good question. What do these guys do with that? I guess you could whisper it all and get the transcripts and do something with that. Oh, yeah. Our bandwidth is up. I mean, we're still safely within limits, but it is way more than we normally have. So I bet automation just killed that page. 30% monthly usage. Usually at this point, halfway through the month, we're only at like 10%. There is something to be said for, I mean, I think transcripts are one of the most powerful things we've ever developed, and we didn't even realize how powerful it would be. moving forward. And I'll just give you a couple examples. Uh, So I have a transcript of 1,886 no agenda shows. I've got a transcript of several hundred Kareem the Keepers. I've got MoFax. I've got the board meeting. and um i just saw and it's just really interesting because i i just what do i hear oh that's me i'm sorry hold on a second

5:05 i hear something going There it is. Man, my ears are still with me. I heard some music playing. Okay. You're like a bat. I sleep hanging upside down. And so I fired up an agent. And I said, Agent. Agent. Hello, agent. I never give my agents names. Robot, agent, whatever. Robot is my favorite. Robot. I said, go write the story of my life. And I didn't look at it for four weeks. Based on podcast transcripts? Yes.

5:46 It is amazingly good. Is it depressing? No, it's really, really interesting. I mean, I'm an interesting guy. Now, I did give it a few parameters. I said, if you're going to write this. You said, make it sound good. No, no, no, not at all. I said. um i want i want this to be a memoir like um the kid stays in the picture from robert evans Have you ever heard that? No, I don't know what any of that is. Robert Evans, he was the producer of many movies, The Godfather. The Godfather series being the most famous. He was married to Ali McGraw for several years.

6:27 And he wound up doing an, before he died, he wound up doing an audio book version of it. And it's just riveting. And then later, Ken Burns turned it into a movie. With his voice, the audio book. But then with the typical Ken Burns photos, you know, the slow zoom out and all that stuff. And I just always love... Did they have a guy playing the banjo and talking like the Civil War? No, no, no. Man, I wonder if I can find an example of that. Let me see. second I'm sure I can Evans kid stays in the picture. Sometimes these entire movies are on YouTube, which is kind of interesting. Yeah, I've seen that too. Oh, in fact, this is a... Mind if I come in a minute? Wait, that's not it. That's definitely not it. Where's the Robert Evans? This is a trailer.

7:26 He has been both the toast of this town and he's been an outcast in Hollywood. He was in the golden era of the new Hollywood. And me, I was lucky to be part of it. My name is Robert Evans. No, this is trailer. The audio book is just really good. Anyway, so I told it that and I said, I want you to write this memoir. Looking back on my life from the vantage point of someone who's found Jesus and how I look back at what God did in my life. And it like wrote 12 chapters. How many words? 24,000. Holy cow. Yeah. Yeah. And because I've told all my stories. How many ways does it repeat itself, though? No, not at all. Have you read the whole thing? No, it came up like we were in Holland. We're in the car driving back from Christina's house. And I said, oh, no, I've got, I'm writing a book. And Tina says, what? I said, yeah, I've got a ghostwriter. What? You didn't tell me any of this. I said, no, I forgot about it because I just gave it to the agent. And I said, let me go get it. And so I start reading it in the car. And it even had, you know, her whole story in there because it just pulled stuff from Curry and the Keeper transcript. My point being that. There's so much power in the context of the written word.

8:46 There's a lot of issues around it, you know, because when I think I read at one point that I've been a can inspector for the government, you know, obviously that's Dvorak's story that it picked up, you know, so there's some contextual things missing. I would call that factual things. But, you know, so that's just one thing I was able to do with the transcript. And I think it was Spurlock who asked me when we had him on a couple of board meetings, meetings ago. He said, but are you doing anything with AI or with agents or LLMs on the client side? And my whole life has changed for podcasting, the way I produce my show.

9:28 It really has been life-changing. I've saved countless hours per week just by having the agent cut clips and put together rundowns and show notes and research. things, you know, it's like, hey, J.D. Vance was on Rogan. Go whisper the entire show and pull some good clips out of it. That's literally what I can do. um And I was thinking about it, you know, because we have all these app developers. And I have always been an app developer. advocate of doing something different. um And I've never really moved anybody. No one really ever moves anywhere. And so this came up on Pod News Weekly Review in the context of annotations. An annotation tag, I guess something that Apple is doing with, was it called timed links? Yeah, where they try to like... farm out or ferret out what the link, what a link to a thing you're talking about is, and then put a link to their own way to get that. Yeah. Which, you know, is.

10:38 Kind of interesting. I completely. see how that's pretty much chapters or what Daniel Lewis would call the super chapters. There's nothing really groundbreaking. And I think it's interesting that Apple did that. But that's a real example of Apple differentiating their podcast app by doing something different. Now, you can agree with it or not, but the conversation kind of went in the wrong direction. And that's what I want to tie into. This is a piece from Pod News Weekly Review because Lord knows this show is about reviewing their show. that. I also spoke last week to Ryan Williams at Car Curious about podcast annotations which I sort of likened to Apple's time blinks. We had some feedback again Nathan Gathright was saying that I love structured data as much as the next nerd. I wish this idea the best luck but I'm convinced that using LLM to derive data from transit will remain the purview of players not feeds. Weirdly Adam Curry also came in on the back of this. I haven't put the clip here James Ross, but he was also saying that he sees LLMs as well as being the way for on-device abstraction of data rather than tags. And I'm like, sorry, didn't you come up with the namespace? Okay. That's kind of apples and oranges. But that's the part that I really wanted to drill down on. Because the namespace is completely

12:10 separate from what I think Nathan was saying and what I'm saying. From an app developer standpoint, there's so many things you can do for an individual user. So from a publisher standpoint, yeah, I may want to link to something. And we've had that basic capability in chapters. There's nothing really new. But what can an app do for me? Why would I be drawn to a particular app? to me because it really has an understanding of what I like because it has all this context of things that I've been listening to, real context based upon transcripts.

12:52 Now, James, and this is really the reason why I brought it up because James gets all huffy about this stuff. I mean, he has such a hatred of AI. It's almost unhealthy. Well, I mean, look, I come at this on a very, I come at this basically saying, can we copy what Apple did with transcripts? They have LLMs that do all of the transcripts if you can't be bothered to do them yourself. But if you want to do them yourself, if you want to put additional data into your podcast feed, if you want to add all of this stuff, then please respect what the creator wants. And if the creator can't be bothered, then by all means fill it in with a fancy autocomplete system, which is all that an LLM is it's a fancy autocomplete system by all means fill it in with that that's fine but yeah but I would much rather that the creator is given the opportunity to do something good first so that's that's me basically yeah why are you so mad bro it's more than an autocomplete so I just I mean, full disclosure, I hate AI too. So I'm right there with him. And your hatred is not healthy either. It's not. It's... I... The hatred... comes from

14:25 It comes from a different, it comes from an interaction that. that the world. So if you do polling, This is... This is accurate. If you do polling, all the current polls. show that there's an intense dislike of AI. in the public, in just public sentiment. Like more so than historically, the latest numbers I heard was from maybe two or three weeks ago. The latest numbers I heard were that people dislike AI in surveys more than they disliked nuclear power after Three Mile Island. Sure. What I'm saying is the intensity of people who dislike... AI that much. It comes from... the way that it's being introduced and put in front of you on a daily basis.

15:31 I completely agree. The marketing has been either. This is a God and it will run everything in your life? to this is so dangerous we can't give it to you. So the marketing has been completely bullshit. Marketing, yes, but I'm saying something a little bit different. I'm saying something different than the marketing aspect. What I'm saying is... The... You? have seen You are in control of your... of your production process. You are the boss. And in that context... When you're able to explore and see the uses of a technology like this, What you see are the big wins. Oh, I see the losses too, brother.

16:30 No, no, no. I have hair-pulling moments. I'm not saying you don't. What I'm saying is the... You're in a sort of like a... You're a manager of one. Yes. And so in that context... the wins that you get. can be big and they outweigh. cause of the things like time savings and that kind of thing, they are monumental. What most people's interaction with in AI is in the context of a corporate job. And in the context of a corporate job on a day-to-day basis, you are inundated for – we have been inundated for months with AI, AI, AI. It's going to change your job. I understand. You've got to keep up. You're going to lose your job. I understand. The boss coming into your office and saying, hey, what have you done with AI? Have you used enough AI? Hey, I just heard about this AI tool. Can you do a demo on it? That's a direct result of the marketing and of the media.

17:39 people just talking BS about it. Everybody right now in the corporate world is to the point where they're like, if my boss comes in here and mentions the word AI one more time, I'm going to scream and run out the door because you're supposed to somehow just, quote, adopt AI. I understand. I understand. I completely understand. But see, that's where, because what happens is... But James doesn't have a boss coming in to him saying, you've got to use AI. Yeah, but the podcast industry has been pushing AI. on itself. For months and for years now.

18:26 He's literally been the one talking about it for years. Yeah, about how it's a mistake. Well, and I'm going to, okay, let me just segment out a few things. There's one particular piece that hurts me. And Bemrose just did it. Oh, a guy who can't code one line of Python without a trillion dollar brain. Yeah. And Paul does this to me too. When I say, hey, look what I created. And I'm not hiding. I'm not pretending I can code. I said, here's something I created. He's always very negative. I can feel it. It's like, I don't like this. This is not the way I would do it. This makes no sense. And I'm like, oh, well, tell me what would make sense and I'll see if I can fix it. People who have, in particular, developers who have coding skills built up over decades get very irked. And you even posted a meme about it.

19:21 Get very irked when someone who can't code their way out of a paper bag comes up with something that is functional, but is built with AI. And I understand that. Just don't kill me every single time. Now, to be clear, the meme was exactly what, the meme was the meme. The meme was making fun of how angry programmers get at people who... Yes, true. Yeah, true. True. um But my point is... If we can move all of that stuff aside and just see where can we get some real benefit from this, some real benefit. I truly believe. that what's coming with compacted, compressed models, hardware that runs it locally, that there are going to be experiences that can be built for listeners, for users of podcast apps that become very personal and I think people will pay for it. and that will almost lock them into that podcast app because they're so invested in... in teaching it what they like without having to really do too much work. And it can be all based off of contextual data, primarily transcripts. That's all that I'm saying. I'm not saying we shouldn't do tags and that creators... that podcasters

20:54 can't add stuff that they want to. Those are all good signals. But what is coming, I truly believe, is this, because that's what I'm seeing. I'm seeing the personalized nature of AI. Everything that's corporate, that is some service, it all sucks. I'm not interested. It doesn't work. It breaks. It's fake advertising. Nothing is right. But the ability to... tailor my world to what I need has been revolutionary. It doesn't come without pain and crying and like, oh, I just want to improve this 20% and it goes completely off the rails and I'm up until three in the morning trying to figure out what just happened.

21:36 but from an experiential... of a podcast app, I think that there will be a lot of opportunities for app developers to use the context, particularly of transcripts, and create experiences that will really lock your listeners into your app. That's what I'm saying. I'm not saying, you know, namespace is no good or we shouldn't have tags. I'm not saying any of that. That's my point. The difficulty of conversations like this is that I don't disagree. Like it.

22:20 The reality of all of this stuff is subtle. There's differences in context that make all the difference in the result. N. if I were to go back in time, if, if we, if we can't, if we started podcasting today and I don't think a transcript tag would ever even come up as an option. Like if, if, if. if the whole project, if the namespace started today, nobody would think of doing a transcript tag because LLMs and stuff would have already done it. Possibly. And we just wouldn't think about it. Yeah, possibly. We may entertain the idea briefly and then say, oh, well, that's a waste of time. Like, why would we make somebody go do, like, put a transcript tag in? So, like, I feel like... So in that sense... The transcript tag itself. is already sort of an anachronism. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's sort of a vestigial organ on the namespace. But the thing about it is... Vestigial organ. Hold on a second.

23:35 Show title. Let me just write that one down. Vestigial organ. A vestigial organ is sort of like an online tool, but you can't download anything from it. Um. But I mean, like, so, so like in general, I don't necessarily disagree with some of the, some of these things. And I also like I use. I use AI coding agents all the time. Every day, every single day, I'm using an LLM in some shape, form, or fashion. and But at the same, but that's. That's not the part that frustrates me. The usage of an agent is not – or LLMs in general is not what I hate.

24:26 What I hate is the... is the Um... is the entire atmosphere that's been built around it. Oh, understandable, of course. For instance, for instance. Um... You know, one of my long-running issues has been that... Uh... Twit did not put chapters into there. Podcasts for subscribers. Mm-hmm. And they recently started doing it, I guess, I think about a month ago, maybe six weeks ago. They started putting chapter markers into the episodes for their paying subscribers. It's great, except that they don't work. Because they don't work. They don't work because it's clearly an AI that's adding these chapters in some way. And the AI just gets the timing all wrong. You can go through and hit every chapter, and every chapter takes you to the wrong place.

25:32 Okay, so it's not that the chapters are contextually wrong, but they're technically wrong. The chapters correctly summarize a thing that will not be talked about for another 15 minutes in the show. That's a QC problem. Yeah, and that is the story of AI. The story of AI is in the current era. is We have to throw AI at everything as fast as possible, and we sure do hope it works. Or actually, we're not even that concerned if it does work, because if we throw AI at it, it just solves a problem. It's like I have a problem where I can't put chapters into my podcast.

26:20 AI. And you don't stop to even think, did it work? Did it actually do a good job? Right. Like what you can, what you're doing is you're creating a thing for, you're creating a workflow. process using these tools and it is really important to you that the outcome is correct yeah because that's your livelihood and you're you're banking its output you're banking your livelihood on its output being good And so if it's wrong, you notice immediately and you are constantly iterating to fix it. Yes. That is the way you properly interact with technology. What we're seeing in the broader atmosphere. Let me just pat myself on the back. Okay. I'm doing a good job. Good job. Little podcaster boy. Yeah. Yeah. Attaboy. But what we're seeing in the broader atmosphere. In the broader landscape of business, especially. Is people just say, oh, I'll just throw this in the chat GPT and it'll give me something.

27:19 Yeah. And I had a conversation this morning and I can, I wish I could even talk about it, but it is the exact same issue that people. Do not understand. They do not understand how fragile and hallucinatory these tools are. They just think... I can just, it's like it's a magic box and they can throw a thing in it and out comes the right answer. And it's wrong like 50% of the time, but it's so confident in its wrongness that you think it's right. And I go back to this is a hijack. The whole thing is a hijack of our brains. Because we, we, the human race has never encountered. has never encountered anything that can talk except another human. And when humans talk to each other, We We are. mostly internally consistent with our thought processes. And what I mean is like, when I, when, when I tell you a thought that I'm having, That thought is in, is, is. is internally consistent in itself. Because... because humans are language processing machines. It's wired

28:52 in. But what AI does, and you see this all the time, is it will contradict itself in the middle of a sentence that is also grammatically correct. So it will say things like... The dog ran as fast as it could across the street at a slow rate. Like, or something like that. And you're like, the grammar of the sentence is correct, but you're like, wait, what? You have to sit there and think about like, Hold on, hold on. We are not... Because we are only used to historically seeing that humans... are what the only things that can talk in language. Now there's a machine that can talk in language. But it doesn't know what it's saying. Right. It's just using the rules of grammar. Yeah, that's what I call the parlor trick. Yes, it's the parlor trick. Yeah. And so, like, this is the problem.

30:00 The problem is... People in the business world right now, people are throwing like 150 page contracts into a chat bot. No, I get it. And they're like, it said that this was the case. I know. And you just go with it. I know. And I understand that frustration. I really do. And I don't have to deal with work slop and all of that. It makes people lose their minds. Yes, I know. But what has happened, what I see, and also college kids have been told that you're going to be useless. Elon Musk says no one will work. All of this stuff, which I think is total crap. And it's doom trolling is what it is.

30:41 Yeah. But it's all comes from the basic marketing of these companies. And I just don't want people to be too afraid. I mean, so on no agenda in the morning. before the show starts, I play the end of show mixes. And the end of show mixes used to be people doing stuff in their home studio, multi-track, singing, doing takeoff songs. And they've, just like the Noah Jenna art, they've all gone away, they've all dried up. But slowly, people have emerged who are actually doing very interesting things. And they're paying more attention to the lyrics. I mean, even the fact that they'll take the newsletter and then turn that into a song, thing about it has become interesting. The voices have become better. You know, the technology's improved a little bit, but without a doubt, the minute I start those three songs and I play them, just like in the boardroom, people go, AI minus, minus, AI minus, minus, AI minus, minus. There's a hatred, a hatred. I see it. I recognize it. I hear it's AI. I got you. You know, but that hatred, I think, is holding people back from exploring the creator, ways it can be used. See, I think what we are describing, what this conversation is a perfect description. of the entire problem of the current landscape of AI. Because... the In order to... You have... You have people who are,

32:16 like you said, you have people who are getting doom trolled. and have negative reactions to it for that. You have people in a corporate world who are being AI slopped to death and they hate it. But then you also have people like yourself. who are having incredible success with it. And when you have incredible success with it. It makes you defensive. about negativity towards it. And then when you have nothing but negative experiences with it. it makes you defensive against the people who are having success. It's like it's got to be binary. It can only be one or the other, either AI good or AI bad. And that's not... That's not a healthy thing. No.

33:07 in general for any sort of like technology. I mean, in the end, 10 years from now, all this stuff is going to fade into just being part of the tools we use and it's going, and all the, all the stupid use cases for it that people try to cram into it are going to fade. And what's going to be left is going to be the verified. verifiable Use cases like coding, like creative works. where where these tools really do shine. But like attestation work? and knowledge work. Man, that is never going to be reliable. It's just not. Because knowledge work assumes knowledge, and there's not any. And so, like, the, the, I think, I think you are just basically, you are like in the wheelhouse.

34:05 of what these tools are built for, creativity and verifiable development work. You can code like crazy now. You can output tons of cool stuff. And you can have really reliable creative workflows. And I think those are the two like. Basically, those are the two pinnacles of this technology and where it really shines. Everything else downstream from that falls off so fast. And that's what most of society is left with because there's not – most of society is not in the creative – you know, the creative business, the creative side of things. And that's just. You know, like, it takes... You... I think that's why people have different experiences with AI at coding agents. I've had great experiences with them in general. And it's because... If you already know... how to talk, or excuse me, if you already know how things are structured, and you do too, even though you weren't a coder, you understand computers, you understand networks, you know how these things work. Generally speaking, you had enough knowledge to where this was a natural thing for you. And, but you, there's a lot of people out there who are non coders who try to vibe code and man, it's just a complete train wreck. They don't know what to do. I mean, like they, they're having, they're just, there is just complete garbage that comes out or it's something that looks good to them. And on the, in the underside of it's just

35:35 rot. So just bringing it back to podcasting, I completely believe there is a category of podcasts where a TTS voice is appropriate. um and i'm i'm quite confident that people will become very accustomed to it Now. I mean, I have many times I've hit a YouTube video. And there's a person talking. And it will only be after five minutes that I realize, oh, wait a minute. This is AI. And the reason why I notice it is because of the sentence structure and the writing. The writing is just so obvious. You know, let's dive in. You know, this isn't your daddy's Oldsmobile. You know, like that kind of stuff. Uh... But it's not like it's offensive.

36:31 And so I'm, you know. I think we're in a very big moment of exploration and creative. experimentation, and things will come out of this that will be completely LLM driven and will be accepted and will be used and enjoyed. And I'm not going to push back against it. As you know, I too find the talking robot to be a parlor trick, and it's because our brains are trained to think, oh, this person's talking to me, and I've seen movies and TV shows, and so I'm going to assume it's all right and real and there's a real person behind it, which is why I always call my agents robot, because I don't want to anthropomorphize it.

37:20 But I really believe we're going to get to a place where there will be text-to-speech podcasts that will be accepted, and people will enjoy them, and they will listen to them. There's not going to be a no-agenda show or a podcasting 2.0 where Adam and Dave are interacting as human beings. I don't think it'll ever get there, certainly not the LLM route. But other things, yeah, I think I can see that. against it. I mean, I sort of do. Why? Because... And it's okay. I'm not trying to convince you of anything. In fact, I find it more enjoyable that we disagree. It makes for a much better podcast. I think that the thing that made podcasting what it is. I don't think it was the technology. The RSS. Oh, of course not. RSS is not It could have been anything. The thing that makes Podcasting, so... drove it to the critical mass that it has become. was the humanity of it. was the fact that

38:51 anybody could do it. Right. And any person could just fire up a microphone and start talking. Yes, I completely agree. And when you hear that in your headphones. We know it's another, we hear the humanity on the other side. And when the, we can tell. And when you hear the humanity... on the other side, it makes you feel like you know that person, just like it did. When you were... you know, listening to a DJ on the radio and, you know, in 1987, and you just, you felt like you could just see them in the studio and you felt like they, that you knew, you just knew them. Well, I've always had that opinion, which is why I've never done video. I thought it was a huge mistake when radios, in fact, I think radio stations killed themselves by putting cameras in the studio. Look at me with my headphones on. Look at me. I'm pushing all the buttons. Look at me. Look at I'm so cool. Look at this. I thought that was a big mistake because you lost the theater of the mind.

40:00 And podcasting, I've enjoyed podcasting for interviews. I've enjoyed them for hearing the humanity of someone, of hearing different ideas and debates. I've done things like sound seeing tours, we used to call them, just walking around the street. So that is very much a theater of the mind. But it is also an information delivery system where people listen to podcasts instead of reading. Audiobooks the same conversation we had by the way with audiobooks the same conversation. Oh No, you can't have all you kids audiobooks is cheating. That's not real reading So podcasting is a lot of things. And it is also an information delivery system. And, you know, which is good and bad. I've always said to people, don't speed it up because you're going to become very frustrated with the human beings in your life around you because they're not talking fast enough. But people do that because they want more information, feed more into my head. But just as a, I listen to. Spurlock posted in an Atlantic article this morning. I read part of it. What was it about? I didn't get very far, but I started reading. Oh, it was about AGI and LLMs. It's never going to be the right way.

41:22 It's never going to work. And I was cleaning out the dishwasher, which is typically my podcast listening time. And I saw, oh, there's a 10-minute text-to-speech version of it in the player. And I hit the player. And I immediately could tell it was actually a bit. surprisingly, is something, some service called the News Voice Service or whatever. I'm like, wow, you guys really suck if anyone's paying for that because I got better TTS voices than this. But it gave me the information while I was cleaning out the dishwasher in 10 minutes and I was okay with it. And I had to sit down and say, why was I okay with it? Well, I just wanted to get the information. I wanted to multitask and it worked okay for me and I wasn't mad about it.

42:03 So, I'm just saying that... I want to force myself to be more open and podcasting is not just for humans. It's not just for this type of show. And it's certainly not just for advertising, which is pretty much all news about podcasting is only about how long is a play and value for value, streaming sats is dead and all these different things. The money is the least interesting part of it to me. Agree. I mean, it's the least interesting part to me as well. And... I mean, the... podcasting. If we're talking about podcasting as a whole, then... I think that podcast... I also have no problem just like using the screen reader thing built into Mobile Safari to just read the article. I have no problem with that because I know what I'm doing. I've taken the- I've made the choice to go into... A mode. where I have set the context for the experience I'm having. If podcasting in general, overall... comes dominated. Bye.

43:33 generated content. It is going to cheapen... and turn sentiment against podcasting negative on the whole. I completely disagree. Podcasting is not like one thing. I mean... There's no recommendation engine. You hear about a podcast from someone. This is what I've always said. You hear about a podcast from someone. Oh, okay, I'll go listen to that podcast. Now, if you're just toodling around and searching for stuff and you pop up against something, oh, it's an AI voice. You may like it or you may not like it. But it's not overshadowing anything. This is the part I disagree with. But this is the problem. But like, think about... What was that company? The big slop company that...

44:28 Inception Point AI. Inception Point. They were shooting shows to the top of the charts in Spotify's podcast app. And as people see things, they go into podcasts. They go into the podcast section on Spotify or whatever or Apple Podcasts. And these things are trending at the top of the list. And they hit it. And it's just like some half-assed slop. Okay, but right there. Already, I don't believe, and I've said this, I don't believe in charts for podcasting. I don't believe in awards for podcasting. It's dumb. But because you don't believe in it doesn't mean that it's not having an effect. And because most people's interaction with podcasts, is with something like Apple Podcasts. Oh, I completely disagree that that's how people find their podcasts.

45:14 I'm not saying that's how they find them. I'm saying that is their vision of what podcasting is. Right. Okay. But then that's why other podcast apps can do a better job. We're not beholden to Apple. This is the loop that I want us to get out of. You know, Apple's doing this, so we've got to do this. Who gives a shit? I don't care. I tell my listeners to use a modern podcast app. Turns out a lot of them have been drawn to Podverse and Podcast Guru. And they get a different experience. We're not slaves to Apple because they want to surface all of the Charlie Kirk murder mysteries that are all from Inception Point AI. That's not going to kill podcasting. That'll kill Apple podcasting. Okay, let me throw this at you. Jim Daly announced his retirement, right? From Focus on the Family. Huge podcast. Lots of downloads. They're a big player in the industry. They announced that they're starting a transition for the next person who's going to replace him. Mm-hmm. What if they decided to just do AI? Just do AI voices.

46:31 Well, what if they did? They would lose two-thirds of their listenership. Of course they would. And I'm saying, and that's my point. My point is that knowing that something is AI. that you're not expecting it to be or that you did not choose When AI is given to you rather than you setting it up and choosing it yourself. Okay, but this... You feel at its mercy rather than being in control of it. Okay, but that's... Then I would go look for a different podcast about... family issues and to to serve an existing audience with a different type of uh of voice that's just a dumb idea i mean that's that's the same as saying well what if i just replaced john and adam on no agenda with ai voice of course people would run away it's not going to be the same thing No, what I'm saying is... I think I want to say is subtly different. What I'm talking about is... that a show If you had an equivalent show of AI voices. and on one side, and a Jim Daley focus on the family, human show on the other side, the AI show would just never, it would just never. match up exactly it would never make it well exactly but that but that's not the that's not what i'm talking about of

48:02 course it'll never make it it doesn't mean that there's not place okay so i created a new service for for focus for focus live and it's three different voices they're ai uh there's a there's a format that i put in place for it and it's i don't have them saying hey i'm i'm bob uh bob thingamadig here's the news i just say Meow. Actually, as a joke, I say, here's the news at this hour, because I know that that's an urgency thing that news uses. And you've heard it. You've listened to it. You realize it's AI. Are you turned off by it? Do you go, oh, that's AI. I can't listen to this? No, because it's appropriate. No, but that was never my point. No, but it's appropriate for the format and for the information that's being delivered. It's not appropriate for a focus on the family with Jim Daly. It's just not appropriate. It's two different things. one over the other because one is human and one isn't. I'm not saying that either. You said something that I agree with. It's appropriate for the information as it's being delivered. And I'm saying that podcasting...

49:11 podcasting, just as a general idea. is not appropriate. 4. synthetic. machine generated content. That's what I'm saying. I'm just going to disagree. As an information delivery system, it can be highly appropriate. But you're making podcasting into something that it started out as when you had the Rock and Roll Geek Show and Don and Drew and the Daily Source Code and weird people talking about weird stuff and long soliloquies. Sure. And that won't go away, but it also won't get killed by a different type of show.

49:57 that delivers information. that may be completely appropriate to be computer generated. I just feel you. I want to be open to it. It's the same as I can listen to an audio book that's generated by an LLM. I can listen to it. It doesn't kill me that much. You know. It's just... I don't want to be against it just because it's there. Well... I see. You've had such success with it. And what I'm saying is... That success can just stand on its own. The success that you've had, which has been incredible. does not have to extend into the other uses of it. Like people can, just because you've had success in your workflow and in your product. Building.

50:57 with it doesn't mean that it also has to be okay. for content. to be generated by it in places where it's not appropriate. But what's appropriate? This is my entire point. What is appropriate is not up to me. No, it's completely subjective. And I'm saying that it's completely subjective, but I'm saying even when dealing with subjectiveness. There are... You can average the subjectiveness across a large body of people and come to some conclusions. And what I'm saying, like, yes, it is subjective. One person may not like this type of content. Another person might. But if you step back and look at things as a whole.

51:47 You'll see that there are patterns and there are things that generally most people are turned off by. And if... synthetic voices pretending to be real or synthetic voices talking about matters, and this is why I brought up Focus on the Family. I want, if I'm talking about... about. space. and ethics and family and politics. I want a human talking to me about this. I know you. I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying. I'm saying that I don't want to be in a place where I'm trying to stop something that may be unstoppable. Let's take faith specifically as an example. And I hate this example, but I cannot deny that it's happening. People are... pouring their hearts out into glue.com AI chatbots on church websites because they feel more comfortable talking to that than to their pastor. I think it's bad, and I think that... These people need to be exposed to humans. And I certainly don't think that a church should be promoting this. But that doesn't mean that it's not happening. And it doesn't mean that someone may not find benefit from it. I personally don't want it. I personally don't like it. But when we're making decisions and building, funny enough, AI models

53:20 and putting weights into them to remove all AI voices. I just want to question The validity and who gets to make decisions based upon that and for what reasons. because there can be very appropriate reasons. And even if it's 1% of people who want to hear 1% of synthetic voices for 1% of the type of content, I don't necessarily want to give them a no. That's... I understand where you're coming from. And we cannot ignore that the hatred you have to the work slop and corporate AI incessant, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, that that doesn't play into it. It absolutely does. It absolutely does. And we're like fighting the machine. Because we are.

54:19 We're kind of like, oh, we're fighting the machine. We're fighting this, and this is horrible. And, you know, I've listened to Inception Point AI shows. I'm like, meh, it's not for me. But that's more because the writing is just so crap. You know, the voice, it's not the voice that bothers me. It's that there's no humanity in the writing. And that's always the giveaway, and I don't see that LLMs will, ever really they just haven't proven it yet that they can get to a place where the writing is appropriate and it doesn't bug me me personally but the voice is the least is the least offensive thing If it's just about information I want to get. I'm not looking for a personality. I'm not looking for community. I'm just looking for some information about one particular thing, and this audio has it. boardroom. Is Gripen at us talking about AI? But I can tell you this. We're talking about podcasting. We're not talking about AI.

55:18 This is about the future of podcasting, literally what we're supposed to be doing. And you will not hear a discussion like this. Anywhere else that I'm aware of where people are. In in transparent disagreement about AI. It's usually, it's either AI is awesome and I love it and it's going to be the best thing ever or it's AI is the worst thing and it's going to kill everybody and destroy the world. You only get two sides. You won't hear disagreements. Exactly. You won't hear honest disagreements. Exactly. Let's talk about something else because I think we've...

56:01 We've done this. Can we talk about lightning for a second? Yes, absolutely. That's a good idea because I have some thoughts about that. Because voltage is... bailing out on individual. Yeah. Um... nodes and they're going enterprise only. I mean... We have to talk about this in a couple of ways. Our income... from lightning has dwindled down to very little. And we're not the only ones. Yeah, from Podcast Index. We went from about... $50 a week down to... seven If that. Let me actually go look. And there's a couple of reasons for that. The obvious one.

57:00 is the change in, uh, in protocols. The one that cannot be ignored is the price of Bitcoin. people tend to hang on to their sats if they've spent more than they're worth right now or if they're buying because they think it'll go up in value. I mean, that cannot be ignored. um but I think where you're going with this is that this centralizes lightning, which. you know, podcasting 2.0 and value for value, boosts and streaming payments. was always centralized. It was centralized from day one. And when we decentralize is when it fell apart. Uh, the...

57:47 The most current for last week. Our total income on the index was $11.56. Mm-hmm. So that's- We're up! We're trending. Hockey stick. Hockey stick. So the monthly income. to the podcast index node in... June See? you $559. Not from lightning. way. No. That's way too much. No way.

58:37 $50 maybe. Oh, that's from last year. We're down 10x. Okay, yeah, because based on the weekly... You're looking at what? 50 bucks? Yeah. For the month? Yeah, 50 bucks. So it's like 50 bucks for the month. Yeah, that monthly of last year was probably just single boost donors. But the weekly is, yeah, it's about 50 bucks a month. Yeah. Well, we're paying $240 a month for our lightning node at Voltage. Yes. That's not, that's not, we can't justify it. Is that on my credit card? I think I'm paying for that. You're paying, yes, yes, you're paying for that. 240 a month. Holy crap. That's a lot. We have to have a real discussion about whether we continue with this note or not because that's not sustainable. And we're about to have to upgrade the main podcast index database to the next higher size up. Wait, we... Well, let's look at the Genesis for a second.

59:52 I'm going to go back to the genesis of this, because I've been thinking about this a lot. the um The genesis of value for value streaming payments goes back to the genesis of Podcast Index. Podcastindex.org was created when Apple decided to de-platform, remove from its database several podcasts, particularly during COVID. And it's irrelevant who they were. It doesn't matter. Apple was making decisions, which we're doing now too in an interesting way. But Apple was making decisions. And I called you and said, hey, since when are these guys the boss of podcasting? Because everybody was talking to their database, for lack of a better word, for all of the independent apps. And they were kind of the on-ramp to podcasting. I said, well, why don't we just build an alternative and we'll run it value for value. i.e. people who want to use this, they'll either support it or they won't, and it lives or dies by the support. And we have, quite honestly, 70% of our survival rate is based on hosting companies who send us PayPal very graciously every single month. And the 30% is very important to me, is the sustaining people who send us $5 or $10 or $7.50. You know, that's how value for value works. As a part of that...

1:01:21 I suggested to you that we come, and I think, what was it? What was the name of the company? Cat something. What was it? The guy out in California. What was the initial nodes we were using when we were first testing it out? Sphinx. Cat. Sphinx. Cat. You were close. You were in the ballpark. That's how my brain works. Cat. Category error. Sphinx. Exactly. I said, look at this, because the idea was you're getting MP3 and bits and bytes in, and you're sending money out with this program. Well, money was very exciting, and it was partially, because PayPal was also, de-platforming people. I was like, what a great way to have independent value flow and have it automatic. And it caught some steam and we started to build on it. And then we had LNPAY, I think it was. Yes, LN Pay. LN Pay. And that centralized it, and everybody had something to work on.

1:02:26 And then, you know, what's the guy's name at LN Pay? Good guy. Charlie? Doug? Tim? Tim. Tim. Yeah, Tim said, hey, man, you know, and we wound up paying for his infrastructure every single month to keep it alive. And then he said, I really can't do this anymore. And then Albie came along, and so we went from centralized on Sphinx, centralized on on LMPay, centralized on Albi. Then Albi said, well, we can't do this anymore for legal reasons. And then we went, okay, we'll decentralize. And it became very complicated because people need nodes that are up all the time. And we all tried Uncle Jim nodes and all kinds of different things. And that didn't really work. And then we said, okay, well, maybe the way is to switch to this other protocol that is not KeySend. And we had a very clear split in the community, very clear. At this point, it became a philosophical Bitcoin versus value for value, what it was really about, and it became Bitcoiners who said, well, we don't want this, and we want this, and that's centralized. But the whole thing had always been centralized. And that, and it fell apart. Honestly, going back to the genesis of Value for Value, the new international lifestyle. That system still exists today. It may just not work for Lightning and

1:03:57 payments over Lightning because of the challenges. of wallets and connecting wallets and the challenges of people not wanting to have centralized systems and the challenges of people not understanding what Bitcoin is and not want to transfer money into a wallet. There's so many hurdles to this. I think there was another split that came along, which is when Noster was jumping in and like, hey, we should be doing podcasting and all this stuff. And then Fountain made decisions to, you know, add zaps. And so it became convoluted. And I personally think it's fallen apart. And I don't know if it can be resurrected. I don't know if it can either. I don't, I mean. I'm starting to see all of lightning as... as... failing to live up to its promise. I mean, Fountain is the best example of this. Look at the hoops that Oscar had to jump through to make that thing work. Yeah. I mean, with all the KYC and AML and Zebedee having to run, you know, all this, you know, KYC AML stuff and... I'm sure it's costing him a fortune. And technically is a challenge. Like, it is, that is not

1:05:29 the promise that Lightning said it was. Lightning said it was going to be... the decentralized. low or you know zero or low fee Bitcoin Mechanism Right. That anybody could risk self-sovereignty. Bull crap is what I'm saying because that is not the case. Bull crap. Bull crap. It is. We're like Tourette's on this show today. Bull crap. Bull crap. I mean abroad. A broad embrace of KeySend could have changed the course of all that. Maybe. KeySend. Well, we talked to the kid over there at Strike. What's his name? strike yeah the mall mallers yeah we talked to him early on this arrogant piece of crap He really is. Arrogant, arrogant mofo. Look at me sitting in my closet with no clothes in my closet. And we said, hey, man, you could really change the game if you supported KeySend. Well, he had no intention of doing that. He did not care. That was the moment I think when... You know, that would have, you know, because he's got, look, I use Strike. He's got momentum with that thing. And people are using it. and, you know,

1:07:00 it's the direct connection to the bank accounts and all that stuff. It's still centralized. It has nothing to do with Sovereign. But we also weren't necessarily... We didn't set out for, oh, it's got to be sovereign. That's when all the Bitcoin stuff, we were just like, we were looking at the functionality of it and religion came in. Well, so podcasting – and James says this all the time. Well, you can send bank-to-bank transfers in Australia with zero fee through an API. That's fine, but that's not the way podcasting works. Podcasting works across borders. And so anything that doesn't work, low fee or zero fee with instantaneous transfer, anything that doesn't work that way across international borders will not function properly for podcasting. Well, hold on.

1:07:43 And so that's what lightning was supposed to be. Yes, for streaming. payments. Absolutely true. For streaming payments, It doesn't work for boosts either because international payments are super expensive. What do you mean? What doesn't work for boosts? internet like uh you know, like go. Having something that's got a bunch of fees on it. Well, that's not true. You mean for streaming sites or for boosts? For boosts. No, that's not true. I mean, I live from PayPal and Stripe boosts, for lack of a better term. And people even send me money with the fees. All I know is I tried to send, uh... um Kyron, some money through PayPal. to an Australian bank and the fees were like 20%. Well, to an Australian bank, not to an Australian PayPal. Well, no, it was to his PayPal, but it was connected to his bank on the back end. Well, that doesn't sound right because I get PayPals from Australia, New Zealand, Japan. We get Stripe from Argentina, from France. We get payments from all over the world, and the fees are about 3%. So I don't know what happened there. Well, see, what my research turned up

1:09:17 one time was that like Australia, they use international transfer fees to fund. free internal transfers. They make it up on the other side. So they have really high, they have expensive international fees. But I mean, I think the offline, like... If Lightning had had Keith Send as a first-class citizen... enabled by default and some facility for offline payments and open invoices, it could have worked. It could have worked. It could have worked. But you're still dealing with a lot of the hurdles have become astronomical because you can't just have a Bitcoin wallet in every country.

1:10:00 anymore. You know, there's all kinds of hoops that you have to jump through. And if you send more than 8,000 sats, you know, the bank says, oh, what's this? Or even, even a strike in the UK has to block certain payments because you need a KYC for the person receiving it. So that that's, you know, unless we're living in a, in a Bitcoin standard world where everybody's paying each other with Bitcoin, it's, it's just going to be, I mean, I used to, I was, I would send my daughter, on-chain Bitcoin to her bit my money account whatever and she connected it to her bank and You know at a certain point they're like well you can't do that anymore You have to prove to my daughter you have to prove that this is your wallet And you can only send into our system from a wallet that you have proved proven is your wallet So I had to create a wallet for her And then she had to show a picture of her phone that she was alive. And then we had to sign the wallet. So then I send money from my Bitcoin wallet to her Bitcoin wallet. And then she sends that into my money wallet so she can put it into her bank account. It's become... What a joke. Now, it's still cheaper than international money transfer. But I would like to go back to the beginning of value for value. Because the streaming payments, it was a dream. It was a great dream. And I think you're right. got sold a bill of goods. It didn't really turn out that way with Lightning. It just didn't. Well, Lightning Labs from the very beginning basically told us to F off because we

1:11:34 got on their Lightning roundtable discussions and all these kinds of things and brought up the fact that small payments, just a few sats of streaming payments, that small payments were inefficient using bolt 11 and that we really need a cake key send to be a universal default. And their response was, you just need to send bigger payments. I remember that. I forgot about that. You got to send bigger payments. Okay. Well, I guess that means you don't care. We should have walked away then. Yeah, honestly, I mean, it's just... So what are you left with for international pay? Stablecoins? No, no, no, no. I mean, like every issuance of a stablecoin has a smart contract with it where they can take your money away? Well, okay. Let's forget stablecoin because stablecoin is a whole different thing. I don't think anyone sees exactly where that's going yet. It's not about the smart contract. It's about, you know, it's a representation of a backing of the stablecoin.

1:12:49 which will be US Treasuries in most cases. It's irrelevant. Because now you're back to the sovereignty. They can take your money away. Look, the government can go to your bank account right now and take your money away. You're not safe anywhere. So the only thing you have maybe is your Bitcoin keys and that's it. There's nothing else in the universe that the government can't touch. But let's just talk about podcasting. And I think that for me, I would rather see energy and focus put into the funding tag right now, which can be connected to Apple Pay and Google Pay. And we know that the Apple App Store now will not delete your app if you have a button on your app for a donation. We proved that through lawsuits, basically, with the gaming company. So.

1:13:46 that's a real possibility to implement to help people get value for value. But I just want to talk about value for value for a second. Because I have lived on this for almost, in October, 19 years. And it's, it. It has mainly been PayPal, but we later added Stripe for international payments, you know, so for credit cards. And it has worked incredibly well. incredibly well. And it continues to work from all over the world. The only problem we had, that's why we added Stripe, is because some people just couldn't use PayPal, notably from India. but some other countries as well. And so we added Stripe and they can, you know, there's a whole bunch of options that you can use Stripe for. And it works well. It really works. I would love for it to be easier. The same problem that we have with Lightning exists in that world where we have people sending a payment through PayPal. And then they have to, because PayPal is so lame. with the note that you can attach to it, which some people don't even see, it doesn't even surface sometimes, the field you can put a note in, then they're separately sending an email to noagendedonations.com, and then those have to be reconciled. It's a horrible, horrible system. So if we could put our energy. into connecting

1:15:18 those two, I call it the boost and the boost-o-gram through the funding tag, I think we would have something. Just forget the streaming payments. Streaming payments is just not going to work. It's over. I think you're right. I think it's done. And connecting those two. You know, something really interesting has happened in the past two years on No Agenda with Value for Value, which I want people who are chasing advertising dollars, I want you to think about this. So 60% of our income is people who send us under $50 per show or per month or whatever. Um, and you know, it's like. People set it and forget it and it's $3 or it's $5, 11, 11, 12, 12, 33, 33. You know, numerology has always been important. And then above the line, we have, you know, $200 or more and $300 or more. Those are kind of two levels that we have. And we give you like a associate executive producer credit, which is real.

1:16:21 You can go to IMDB, you'll see. And $300 or more. And what has happened over the past year and a half, and it really started with a lady named Linda Lou Patkin. Have you ever heard of her? I've heard you mention her. Yes. And Linda Lou Patkin. And these are all individual, small, small people. She has a service called Image Makers Inc. Image Makers Inc. with a K. And she started sending $200 every single show. So that's $1,600 a month. And it's always the same message. Your resume has about 10 seconds to make an impression and most don't. For a resume that gets results, go to ImageMakersInc.com. Linda helps professionals and executives position their experience so employers see their value. That's ImageMakersInc with a K.

1:17:07 And Linda Liu, Duchess of Jobs and writer of winning resumes. And it must be working for her, for her to spend $1,600 a month on a podcast. And then more people started doing this. And these are all small businesses. Gigawattcoffeeroasters.com, Eli the coffee guy. And then we have ManukaGold.com who have honey and they send $333.33. Something must be working for them. But what I find interesting... is that I don't have to have a meeting with them. I don't have to... approved ad copy. I can laugh at them, but I can say, oh, this is a great product, or I've never tried this. I don't trust it. Like the guy from... UnblockMeVPN.com? I have no, and if they don't like it, they don't have to support the show. They can go away. I don't care. But more and more have come in. And when you look at it, it starts to become really attractive in a way that... is not advertising. Because we also have people who say, hey, could you put a link to my GoFundMe? My wife needs a kidney. You know, that literally happened yesterday. That's a podcast ad right there. Literally happened.

1:18:27 Yes. Sir Dan the man. And, you know, and there's something about this model that is really attractive. And no one complains about it because we even have... cross-promotion. So Manuka Gold said... Keep fighting the good fight from Manuka Gold, and thank you for the nice feedback on Sunday. We just placed an order with gigawatt coffee roasters. I mean, there's like this whole thing going on. And what this comes down to for me with podcasting, for people who want to make a living in podcasting. The whole idea of grow your show, get more downloads. No. Build a community. Build a community and you will be supported forever. Yeah, I agree with that 100%. Build a community.

1:19:18 That is the trick. That is the absolute key to a successful podcast. No matter what you're doing, no matter what you want, build a community and you will have success in your venture. And you can pretty much determine that success for yourself. And all the big, even the big YouTubers and people like that, they have a community. They really do. Their problem is they're very vulnerable because they're on someone else's platform. Well, I think that's what True Fans is trying to do, is trying to build community. Yes. I mean, that's the whole point. And I would say. Why not focus on the funding tag?

1:20:00 and put a big donate button or give or whatever, or the funding tag actually has an option for you to put the words in there that you want. and have that surface in the app. And if we can tie together a message with a payment, and I have no idea how to do that, you know, but I know that you can have a button that fires up Apple Pay if you're on Apple or files up Google Pay. I know that exists. I was just... No, you're right, Eric. Platforms don't build communities, but content does. I mean, like, it's humans build communities. And that, just to close the loop... But platforms can facilitate it. They can help. Yes. Just to close the loop, there's where I'm in agreement with you. A robot with text-to-speech cannot build a community. I just don't know what... I'm just not sure what... Did you hear that? What was that? Was that a lightning? A thunder? Yes. That outside your house?

1:21:11 Wow. Yeah, wow. That must have been very close. Holy cow. That was kind of scary. I'm just not sure that there is a way forward. With lightning. No. I just need your response to Bemrose for a second. He says, build your community and occasionally jettison parts of it like no authority. Yeah, I don't like Jew haters, okay? I don't like memes about Jews with big noses and little tiny Jew hats and Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew. Yeah, I don't like that. I don't have to be a part of that. And I didn't jettison them. They left. I just... I just don't see a way forward. And especially like, so we, we had some, we had a, a supporter cancel, cancel a $200 a month PayPal recently.

1:22:02 And so. Essentially, I'm looking at, and there goes the node. I mean, like, I just don't, I don't, so if you do the math on that, I mean, that's... That's like... I mean, that's like. It's nearly three grand a year for a node. That we don't make that we that doesn't cover it doesn't even come close to covering its cost and I and I'm paying for it I didn't even realize it And so I'm just saying we have to figure out what to do. I don't see how do we keep it online. I don't see how it works. I don't see it either. And honestly, and this node is virtually unusable anyway. Yeah, you can't tie anything into it. It's so big, everything breaks and falls apart. It breaks constantly. Like, you can't even, it takes 10 hours just to reboot it. And this is another way in which this thing is... I just don't...

1:22:58 It just feels like a failure. Well, it is. And, you know, we, as a part of... noagendadonations.com we have two big qr codes send your money through lightning or through bitcoin And we get about one or two a month. Yeah. That's it. So it's as, as, as it's just not for podcasting. It just hasn't, it hasn't panned out and I don't mind shutting it down. I mean, it doesn't mean everybody has to follow suit. But it's not making business sense for us. No. It doesn't because if what – I've been seeing the numbers. in the back of my head. Like, as I've seen emails come through and all these kinds of things, but I've just sort of, like, been putting off and ignoring. it and thinking we'll have to deal with this someday. And I think that day came. That day is now. That day is now because. like It's no longer, this is not an issue where this is going to come back. No.

1:24:13 I mean, what we're seeing now, this is the reality of it. And this is not. Like... I think some... Albie's doing their thing. you know i i don't know what their market looks like i'm not sure what they do Fountain. is is an ecosystem that makes since and seems to be doing pretty well. But our dream of making lightning be sort of the currency of podcasting. No, I think that's failed. I agree. And for me, the writing was on the wall. with who was a little hit girl, Ashley. Ainsley. Ainsley. Mm-hmm. And her parents, they were so, they tried so hard to make it work.

1:25:13 They really, really tried so hard. And Julie and Ben. No, not you. No, no, no, no. They really tried so hard to do it. And I, and I was there with them. You know, I did the concert. Yes. Did, did what I could. But even there, the whole sovereign Bitcoin thing, this ripped everything apart. I'm not saying anyone was right or anyone was wrong, but it was too complicated. One of the funnest experiences of my... of my adult life was going to Nashville. And being a part of that Bitcoin conference concert where... you know, where me and Dovidas and Eric PP were like... try setting up NGINX reverse proxies to get Boostergram Ball to work at the last second. It was great. That was so much fun. It just sucks, man. Yeah. It just sucks.

1:26:22 And I see, and I see the. Some of this is sour grapes because I see that also the Bitcoin maxi world went all in with people like Jack Dorsey. Yeah. And they had some hero worship going on with Jack Dorsey and Jack Maulers. And these guys are phony. you I mean, Jack Dorsey fired half his company because AI or whatever. Yeah, right. Bull crap. Bull crap. I mean, this is the guy that you look up to? I mean, come on. I just think that, like, I think you're right. I think that the people, I think that lightning went through, it started off as a great idea and immediately got captured. Mm-hmm. Very quickly, yeah. By investment money and venture capital and these kinds of things, and they killed it. Yeah. I killed it. So. Can we focus our energy on the funding tag? I would love to. Me too. Me too. And I don't know how to shut our node down. I don't know what to do. I have no clue. I'll have to look into it. I have no clue. It seems like you've got to close channels and that'll be an interesting exercise.

1:27:45 Yeah, I mean, how many weeks is that going to take to close channels down? I don't know. I don't know. But no, I think funding tag is... You know, what a great experience in built-in support. Because what our dream was with Lightning was to make it where you could hit a button in the app and send money. Right away, yeah. right away. And Funding Tag can do that, just not streaming payments. And not sovereign. The perfect use case, to me, one of the most beautiful build-outs of this. is what Buzzsprout does. I don't know if you've used Buzzsprout's thing. So if you host on Buzzsprout, You get access to, I think it's like Buzzsprout payments.

1:28:38 I forgot what they call it. But they build a payment portal for you and they stick it in the funding tag. And so when you tap on the funding tag inside your podcast app that supports it, it opens up a web view sheet of their payment portal page. And you've got Apple Pay, credit card. You can just PayPal. All your stuff is right there and they can just send it to you and it goes. and it goes into your Buzzsprout account. Like it's, it's like a fully baked in payment portal with all these options right in the, and it shows up right in the app. It's a great experience. And if, if somebody, if other hosting companies would do that sort of thing, or if there was a third party, even something like pod page.

1:29:28 that would do that sort of thing. That would be a cool solution. Just give all the little payment buttons right there and people can just tap it and shoot you some money. Yeah. Speaking of that. We could use some. Yeah, for real. Do we have, I'm sure we have PayPal people to thank. We do. Lots of them, yeah. Because we have two weeks of them. Let me see if we got- I did hear a couple of Boostergrams come in while we were talking. Uh, 555 from Salty Crayon. He says, if y'all ever shut down the index node, can we get a heads up? Mutual close? We would never just yank it. We're not rug pullers. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. We don't even know how to do it. No. We have no idea. We've got 2222 from Salty Crayon. Welcome back. And EricPP2222. That's exactly what we got for this episode while we were live. Uh, we got a bunch of PayPal's.

1:30:32 We got three weeks of them. Jorge Hernandez, five, $5. Bear with me. It's going to be a long list. Uh, Michael Goggin, $5. Cone Glossbach. $5. Christopher Reamer, $10. Let's see. I need to scrunch this down a little bit. Hey, okay, I scrunched. You scrunched. Are you a folder or a scruncher? I'm a squeezer. you Randall Black. Five dollars. What I do is I put... keep the tube perfectly intact as it came out of the box but then you you put your you hold the very tip of the bottom of the tube and then you take your your other hand and run your fingers up the side of the tube bottom to top you kind of stroke up the side towards the towards the outlet okay okay you do that on the right side then you go back and you and you do that you cover up the left side and you you start at the bottom again and you stroke up the left side towards the out towards the outlet And then you keep, and then you work your way towards the middle. I don't even know what you're talking about at this point.

1:31:47 Because as the toothpaste gets low, you end up with some down at the bottom. This kind of in the little, you know, this trapped in the bottom where the tube has already been squeezed. So you have to... you have to kind of like work your way up from the bottom of the tube to the top in order to get the toothpaste to squirt out the top. Randall Black, $5. Yeah, thank you, Randall. Drebscott, $15. Chris Bernard at $5. Michael Kimmerer, $5.33. Nice. Charles Hicks, $5.00. Cameron Rose, $25.00. Thank you, Cameron. Appreciate that, Ralph Estep. uh 50 bucks. Wow. Thank you. Martin Lindeskoog. One dollar. Martin.

1:32:45 Brendan Mulligan. That's the pod page. $25. Thank you, Brendan. Uh... We could not process your recurring payment. I'll skip that one. Okay. Joseph Morocco, $5. Thank you, Joseph. And then we have the cancellation. Bronze. Let's see. Bronze Oxen Films LLC, $20. And I got a note on this one. Thank you for all you do. God bless, Sir Thinking Dad. Oh, thank you. Oh, yes, I got your note. And I will take care of that. Yes. Lauren Ball, $24.20. Mitchell Downey, that's Sir Mitch from Podverse, that's $50. Thank you. Christopher Harbaric, $10. Mitch on the personal side of things, $10. Thank you, Mitch. Damon Kassajak, $15.

1:33:43 Terry Keller, $5. Christopher Cowan, $5. Richard Turoksi, $10. This is so wonderful. I love this. This is value for value right here. This is beautiful. Yeah, it is. Paul Saltzman, $22. And... 22 cents. Derek J. Visker, the best name in podcasting, $21. Oh, who is this? No note. but it's a one-off $10 from Jesse Hunter. Thank you, Jesse. Appreciate you. Jeremy Gertz, five bucks. Now we're wrapping back around here. Gene Liverman, $5. Thank you, Gene. And Gene, thank you for running your uptime monitor. I appreciate that. Michael Hall, $5.50. Todd Cochran, rest in peace, $30.

1:34:28 Thank you, Todd. I love that he's boosting from the grave. Boosting from heaven. Timothy Voice, 10 bucks. And that's it. And we got a solitary singular. Comic strip blogger, 25,000 sats. Ooh, nice. He said he sent two, but I only found one. So... Send me the other one. I'm pretty sure he sent two. I think so. He sent two while we were gone. I thought he did too, but I could only pull one for some reason. Go send me the resend me the note from the other one and I'll read it next week. Uh... Howdy, Dave and Adam. Today, no promos. I just want to say thank you, Dave, for giving me interview about your AI tools over Zoom that I published as 56-minute long video. Yo, CSBPS, Adam, you're next. Adam, listen to Yoda.

1:35:24 There is no try. Just do it. This Bitcoin gram was $15.49 when sent. So back to community. I know that I've built a successful community when Comics for Blogger is a part of it. True. Every community needs a comic strip blogger. In fact, the comic strip blogger. If you don't have CSB in your community, it's not complete. And I have known him longer than. Two of my wives. put together. That's... That's interesting. I'm just saying. I'm just saying. That means a lot. It does. In a weird way, it does mean a lot. You need a guy like that. You need a guy like that in there. Let me throw something else out, though. I'm seeing some people in the boardroom saying, Um... Talking about... You know, like Cotton Gin said, RIP boosts. Think. I think there is a way. Let's try to express this. There are things that we have learned from this. from lightning.

1:36:59 It is not financially sustainable for the index. I mean, the numbers are what they are, and I can't make that stop. I can't make that change. Well, not to maintain the node. It doesn't mean that we don't have a node, that we won't receive it, but, you know. Sure, right, right. But keeping all the. The channel's open and everything. It's a heavy lift. Yeah, we'll still have the Albie hub thing. Here's what I think I've learned from Lightning. In general. And I don't think this means boosts are dead or lightning over podcasting is dead. I mean, that stuff isn't. That's not dead. There's plenty of podcasts that will still do it. All of Fountain still works on this technology. But... It's like you said, it's just our node that is unsustainable financially. But the thing that I'm. trying to You can pay us with the Albie Hub. That's who's Eric PP. We still got an address. All that works. so Yeah, no, nothing's being deprecated.

1:38:07 This is just, this is a one, the node, we cannot afford to run the node is the problem because there's not enough. stuff flowing through it because switching to bolt 11 killed it yeah that's just the honest truth yeah and so What I'm trying to say... is What I think I've learned from Lightning... over these years is that primarily Alex was right at the very beginning. It's not that I ever thought he was wrong. It's just that... He was more right than I think anybody realized.

1:38:48 that Separating the metadata from the payment is critical. Yeah. Because what's really needed is a way to send the metadata, the boost message, the sender, all those kinds of things in a verifiable way that is independently verifiable apart from whatever the payment process is. Because even with PayPal and things like that, you have a problem where you can't always fit the message. No, no. This is the biggest problem. This is the biggest problem. That's a problem that I would love to see solved. Yeah. It would be fantastic to solve that with really with any payment method. Because we have a part-time person working on consolidating that data every single show. Yeah, reconciling that is a huge deal. It's a nightmare. People use one email address for their PayPal, a different email address for their message.

1:39:52 It's a nightmare. And, you know, like, I don't think everything's going to break when... we end up having to take the node offline. I don't think that, I mean, if, if we take the lightning node offline and everything breaks, now that is, that tells you something right there. That's a condemnation of lightning. If there ever was one. Yeah, exactly. If it can't survive one node going offline, and then, I mean, Holy cow. So And if that's the case, you can't have, we're going to base all of our payment platform infrastructure, decentralized payment platform infrastructure on one person losing money every month. Yeah, that's not good. No. So I think. I think this is just going to, we're going to have to talk about this for a few weeks and just figure out how to do this and all that kind of stuff. But the meta, the metadata. part of it.

1:40:51 You know, that's... That's a thing. Let's pull it, Dave. Let's go. We got to end this show. We got to end this show. Boardroom, thank you very much. I mean, I feel bittersweet today about the board meeting, but we've had some real honest conversation. And no AI could ever do that. Amen. Amen. And we'll be back next week, I think. I'll be here. Dave, you'll be here. Join us for Podcasting 2.0. to podcasting 2.0 visit podcastindex.org for more information go podcasting all of that. Yes, 100%.