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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
$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.
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...
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.
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
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
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,
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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