Episode 259: SlopJacked

00:00 Podcasting 2.0 for May 1st, 2026 Episode 259 Slopjacked! Hello everybody from a very blustery, blustery Texas It's cold it's rainy is this really Texas? Who cares it is time for Podcasting 2.0 This is the official board meeting of all things podcasting From now on until the future This is where it all happens. We are in fact the only boardroom that works on May Day! I'm Adam Curry here in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and, in Alabama The man who wants all your CSV base to belong to us Say hello to my friend on the other end Mr. Dave

00:44 I think you mean the dude in Alabama who owns chickens. I think that's what he means. You know, it was funny you said that! I was like hey, hey, hey... The dude in Alabama who owns... So we're talking about Pod News Weekly Review also known as P-P-Power with Sethi and the Criddler So I love my robot because i just tell my robot, ROBOT!

01:36 Go get me that clip from the pod news weekly review did it and it did and here It is I really like your show James, but we should stop talking about Adam Curry. I love my robot I Have not I have not touched editing software for three weeks Editing so what do you mean editing software? You know for making audio clips yeah I just don't even have to clean them up anymore. No, I just tell the robot go get here's what? I tell the robot Go listen to that three-hour congressional testimony Summarize it tell me what you think are some good good bits Find a story arc find the arcs within clips make the clips go Go and then it drops it into my obsidian folder neatly categorized

02:35 And, you know it's not always perfect. But in general it is pretty good! Yeah but what about the audio? Like the levels and stuff... Oh no it normalizes this is all FFmpeg Oh yeah, it normalizes everything. All the things you would normally do? Everything I would normally do and sometimes it has... You know to be like someone on a phone call or just some muffled audio and say hey robot clean that up! And then I do the transcription with whisper but I do one on together dot AI

03:12 So it uses the biggest, baddest mofo whisper model it has. Word for word JSON pops out so with frames all the way down to frame level so can cut exactly where you want it. It's awesome! It saving me hours of time. I can't... Yes Eric PP, I've been using that on no agenda for the past four weeks maybe three or four weeks I saw that Bloomberg article come out today, but the one the one that we were oh I have a subscription. Do you have the link? Yeah I got a subscription because The Oil Baron kept sending stuff to me like and can't read what he's sending me What does this subscribe today? What is this already subscribed man so your the reason that Bloomberg still exists

04:13 I'll be the first to admit that, you know... Yes. I actually pay for content. I'm a horrible man that way! Let me see... Now i can't remember what her name is Ashley Conrad? Ashley yeah let me see Is there search here somewhere would it be under AI maybe because Here it is The audio industry is grappling with the rise of Pod Slop Can you post the link? I can Subscriber? Oh, what is this subscriber... I am a subscriber. Not an- you're not enough of one! Oh yeah there's different levels of subscribers now You need to be more of a subscriber Let me see Even more Do you have the link? Do you have the link? Yeah but my signal is opening and it says loading messages from seven days ago Oh you can't just pop into the boardroom? There's a thought Just saying Come on man There it is thank you There it is Take a look

05:17 Welcome, it says undefined on the end but this has nothing to do with Nathan Gathright I promise. Let me see... Pod Sloppy. Bloomberg not a gaffer, not in Nathan's property The audio industry is grappling with the rise of pod slop Are you able to read it? Yeah I can! Welcome back to Soundbite This week we take a look at the wave of AI generated podcasts Podslop the song that's flooding the listening platforms Okay, let me see. I caught up her... that she's too- Oh! On his own podcast last week Dave Jones Da da da da Dave Jones Podsage who operates the Podcast Index Operates it Marvel- No mention of you Marveled at the scale Absurd he said

06:11 Welcome to the modern era of podcasting, which thousands of new shows are released into the world every day with a sizable portion likely being AI generated. That's true by the way Yes So I got to... okay Shoot me a copy of that A copy of this? Yeah, yeah. Just that order because I'd like to read it and I would like to read it without paying $11.99 a month. I figure I'm entitled since I was quoted right? Quoted! Yeah, I thought you were gonna do this on background. Eric PeePee said the chicken guy? He's the chicken guy. The chicken guy... Well let's just start with that for second because there were some uh..I thought the interview with Alberto from RSS.com

06:57 on Power was pretty good. Yeah, me too. Alberto's just top... I mean he's great He is a top-notch dude He does not give a bad interview and he is just genuinely good person He also like, I'm a scientist! Yeah, I would love to see him with the coat The big long coat So there were three clips that I pulled because So, you know, RSS.com started with the opt-in AI tag so you can say it's – and I have a use of RSS.com for couple different things – so you can say it's fully AI generated uses some AI elements or we can just not do anything which as he rightly says is also a signal.

07:44 And I realized that I'd been thinking about this tag incorrectly because, you know if you're doing AI and don't want anyone to know it then you aren't going to fill out the stupid tag. So this clip kind of set me straight. But there's no policing from Apple? Should it be less a voluntary disclosure and more mandatory disclosure? Well, that's the point. The disclosure is voluntary in the sense that you have an element when you are uploading on episode where you can specify whether the podcast contains elements of AI will get there later. You need some guidelines there because elements could be anything but

08:26 The voluntary disclosures paired to internal policies at Apple, for example in the platforms or even institutions can become mandatory because if you are in breach with Apple terms of service because you didn't disclose then they can act. So the nuance of non-disclosing, once there is a disclosure and you are required to do that even if it's voluntary. If you don't do that then you are in breach so there could be an action taken. That's where I think the detail is very important. An episode which is generated by AI should be disclosed. AI voice, AI script no curation. It's in English or Spanish and you get English prompts from an LLM.

09:11 That is made by AI. If you don't disclose, someone removes the episode and I think they have their right to do so depending on the platform service in terms and condition. So now I understood it's okay that makes sense to me like if someone says hey this is a piece of slop and they go to rss.com and say, this is slop and they go on look and it wasn't disclosed then you violated their terms they can kick you off so from the hosting company's perspective great idea that made sense I never really thought of it that way like who cares if your going to signal it to me as slop or not? Or AI generated So that... And yes Alberto has a PhD in artificial intelligence

09:58 or he has a PhD in something that includes artificial intelligence. So, he really wants to make this work so I thought that was good then he said something which Of course I knew he was talking about me. People are barking in this period, you know? They're just saying that's a problem we have to solve it. It's about money and advertisement but really if we disclose We follow regulations and we together as an industry go towards the same direction This is a problem that can be solved really Yes That would be me barking And the reason why i'm barking about that Is because

10:36 It's a scam and I just want to explain the scam, and I'm sure everyone realizes it because there are two sides to the scam. One side is you just have a large language model of bot create podcasts create episodes The scam is that you have advertisements to typically pre-roll The scam is on the listening side go look at the numbers at Livewire The amount of browser traffic has increased. There's so much scammy stuff going on with downloads that this is where, and it's no as JCD would say no sweat off my balls but it is going to affect advertising

11:19 So it may be a little win in the short term and the platforms do make some money off of that. And you know, it could be hundreds thousands of dollars a month I don't think its huge yet It could be bigger But advertisers are eventually going to say wait a minute You have these things automatically created and then on the other side you have these things that are automatically listening That's stealing money! so yeah...I'll bark about that a little bit I mean the advertise, the digital advertising business is has proved completely inept over 25 years now at combating all of the things that we know that are going on. That are scams like click fraud is just as prevalent today as it was 25 years ago and so and there's never been a comprehensive

12:16 You know, like a battle against that. It's just part of it is because Google owns 90% of the digital advertising market so it's sort of obfuscated but digital advertising fraud You know, that's like one of the The scan and it doesn't even have it doesn't have to be I think back to Spotify a few years ago. There was these stories about streamers and this was actual organized fraud where there were people running like

13:03 banks of cell phones like 200 cell phones streaming all day long with different Spotify, you know different Spotify songs in order to boost streaming downloads so that they could boost You know, you can buy essentially by these fake streams and now that's just flat-out absolutely fraudulent but the So they were there were people who had music on Spotify, who were buying those streams, increased my stream services and defrauding Spotify and therefore the music companies. This is a little different because the way... Streams are in the music world are all first party. There's no

13:59 There's no way you can listen to a stream of music and not be logged into something with an account. And so all the data, the advertising, all that stuff is in line in a first party context. Podcasting is different Podcasting is completely unregulated and open in that way. So, you can... anybody can come along and download a episode of your podcast And you have to sort of figure out after the fact what that thing was Where did it actually come from? Was it a real person maybe? What was the device like? You don't- you really don't know This is true

14:49 But I think that it's solvable. It's not actually an AI problem, all that... This has been going on since advertising started in podcasting fake downloads and there are lots of filters and heuristics and ways that people can figure it out Can they figure it all out? No absolutely not! I'd say home-based routers are probably the number one place where this is taking place And people don't even know it You know, there's entire bot networks that take over home routers to do stuff like this. The solvability is in how we as a group of crazy people decide to

15:30 Hand over first party data, which is you know it's possible. So it's not something we're gonna solve I'm just saying once again the metric that is used for podcast advertising Is poor its poor and we could do better But will anybody? I don't know so It's it's just the it I guess what I'm trying to say though is that I'm going to put scam in quotes because scam implies that somebody's doing something illegal and, and um...I think this is all squishy. And so that's not what i'm saying but the sort of download part of if you want to boost your downloads of your podcast artificially and honestly I oughta do this one time out to do this someday

16:20 maybe soon, we should go do one of these download boosting things and just see what happens. Because we're on OP3, we could see it. We could see the effect of it. In fact I am going to do this so in the next few episodes when I'm going to sign up for one of these download boosting services like Mopod or one of these and you'll get your... You know? You get a bump in your downloads Isn't this magic? That's magic, right?! Isn't this magic! Because... So there are ways to boost your download numbers in podcasting

17:08 that do not involve botnets of router armies, like doing fake downloads. Of course I agree with what you're saying But it's still... It's not fake downloads but its still there is this gray area in the middle where its its not fraud but it's not real people interested in your podcast Its a squishy middle where you're getting downloads in ways that are just like... People not listening. Right, very temporary. But the thing that we used to have you had at least create a podcast now you can create 300 podcasts today That's our yeah, but that's the fraud part so it's just look again doesn't matter to me but advertisers at certain point will say

18:06 You know, this podcasting stuff it's just too squishy. It's no sweat off my balls! So... Yeah that. Yeah so I'm just saying we're talking around the problem Well but see so... Bark! Clos on Linux said he boosted Bark for me. 3996 that, thank you. All over the place transform your smile with Tucson dentist Yeah, and you get that thing right into Apple podcasts. Yeah now you're now you have SEO from an apple.com domain Mm-hmm which you've won the digital well, you know Olympics mmm So yeah this is this is in there's there's they're on every host They're spread out like if somebody is doing this yeah

19:12 Yeah, I don't know who it is. But somebody is doing this and there's a difference between let me see if I can find Let's do show-and-tell. All right show until everybody dental Oh here we go top dental crown Tucson for perfect smiles Okay, so there's a difference between this paste podcast index ID seven seven four seven zero zero eight It is protect and preserve your damaged or weakened teeth with a custom crafted dental crown by author GKY74. And then something like Phoenix, let me see if I can put my hands on it. Yeah here this is podcast index ID 5876525 Oh I may have to listen to it now Is there actual audio? Let's see Uh...I'm sure there is yeah

18:06 You know, this podcasting stuff it's just too squishy. It's no sweat off my balls! So... Yeah that. Yeah so I'm just saying we're talking around the problem Well but see so... Bark! Clos on Linux said he boosted Bark for me. 3996 that, thank you. All over the place transform your smile with Tucson dentist Yeah, and you get that thing right into Apple podcasts. Yeah now you're now you have SEO from an apple.com domain Mm-hmm which you've won the digital well, you know Olympics mmm So yeah this is this is in there's there's they're on every host They're spread out like if somebody is doing this yeah

19:12 Yeah, I don't know who it is. But somebody is doing this and there's a difference between let me see if I can find Let's do show-and-tell. All right show until everybody dental Oh here we go top dental crown Tucson for perfect smiles Okay, so there's a difference between this paste podcast index ID seven seven four seven zero zero eight It is protect and preserve your damaged or weakened teeth with a custom crafted dental crown by author GKY74. And then something like Phoenix, let me see if I can put my hands on it. Yeah here this is podcast index ID 5876525 Oh I may have to listen to it now Is there actual audio? Let's see Uh...I'm sure there is yeah

20:28 Ooh, ominous. Which one is this? This is drop top beer. Hello everybody! Welcome back to another episode of Podcast Call. No that sounds like a real podcast Dave Yeah so I'm saying... So here's the difference The title of this podcast and the title field of the XML is Phoenix. Oh, I see it! Phoenix Auto Detailing LLC Well... Is that a problem? It's not a problem and that's my point One of them is for as a dentist in Tucson The other one is an auto detailer in Phoenix

21:05 But the two, so both are local business advertising essentially. But one of them is just purely a placeholder for SEO and nothing else. The other one is an actual podcast. Yes it's a branded podcast for a local business but that's fine. Nothing wrong with that no! Nothing wrong with it they're actually doing a show. Yeah The other thing is just using the podcasting ecosystem platforms as a way to get backlinks into search engine ranking. I consider one of these completely legitimate and one of them abuse, one is platform abuse On the dentistry... So i just want to warn that we don't go down a certain path because this also came up in power If you are an independent content producer You are being swamped by these slopcasts

22:00 and by people that frankly don't care about you, they don't care about the audience. They don't care about anything other than can we make another £2.20 by fooling people that this is a real human being or even worse by calling someone a doctor – a spam voice but calling them a doctor and giving medical advice which may or may not have even been checked by a human being Terrifying, absolutely terrifying. Don't go down that path because now you're talking about something different and there's a lot of doctors who will kill you with their advice who are human beings so don't go down that path I think that's the wrong way to look at it. I agree with this maybe with a little bit of a different twist

22:50 I see what, and know what you're saying. You're saying that's the truth... Don't trust Fauci is what i'm saying! Yeah that's the censorship, now your being in your editorializing. Yes But.. The.... I want to make a different point about which is I think... I understand why he's saying that and it is It's a legitimate concern because you really are calling your AI Host a doctor is that's kind of over-the-top. I mean, that's crazy But the I think I would be careful about using that too much as our example Yes Because it gets the eye off Sort of the big sort of the bigger issue yes um I don't want to get too focused on things like that because it's The bit the bigger problem I think is what he said at the beginning which is

23:52 The slop is overwhelming the system and the system this it what I say what I call, you know We've always said there is no podcast industry and I still believe that What the podcast quote-unquote podcast industry? Is is just a sort of a meta narrative on top of just a bunch of hosting providers in XML and things like that. We create this idea of there being an industry over the top of just a bunch of stuff, so I still agree with that but there is a distribution system that is in place that's like Apple Podcasts, like Podcast Index, like Pocket Casts

24:55 Everybody who has a directory created their directory, listen notes. Created the directory with a certain idea in mind that there was a thing that was called podcasting and we could sort of inventory that thing and display it back to the world through podcast apps as a way to find the content that people are looking for. And I've tried I've tried to shift, this is difficult and i'm still not successful at it but I've tried to mentally shift from the standpoint of we're going to find every single podcast meaning every XML with an enclosure in it. To something slightly different which is We want to have a copy of every podcast that somebody would ever look for

25:59 If somebody wants to find it, they should be able to find it on the podcast index. That doesn't mean that we're only going to have that but to me that's what I'm trying to shift mentally into as my baseline because if nobody ever wants a thing then it might as well not even exist It's sort of like the tree falling in the woods, does anybody hear? It is sort of an irrelevant question about whether you have it if nobody ever wants it. And I think we're going to have to, in order to accomplish that goal, We always have and we always will have to Have way more content in the index than anybody would ever want The question is how do you get it when someone wants it? How do you surface what they want? That's part of what... You know, we already have a facility in place for that

27:01 When somebody searches for something on the podcast index hourly, we go back and we look for things people searched for that were missed. So if somebody searched for something a feed URL or an iTunes ID or something like that, and it didn't show up, we didn't have it, We will go get it So we sort of backfill behind people searching for things and those searches not showing up any results. And how does that process work, the back fill? Well if it's a feed URL and we don't have it... We go find it. It just gets added. Yeah, If its in iTunes ID it gets resolved and will add it What I would like to do is go even further. I can't find a real sane way to do yet but I would love

27:56 and try to figure out if something looks like an exact title, and then go really do searching across various repositories and try to find that thing. But we backfill a lot! We...we do that a lot I think the point is what even is the point of us? Now you're talking why am I even here On my Friday afternoon, I had many other things that could do. Yeah! Are we an API for app developers? Are we a research tool or are we a utility for the hosting companies? Or are we a shim for tags, spam filter and XML catalog of audio?

28:49 Are we a message bus? Well, right now we're all of that. Yes and but the genesis of it is that the genesis of this project was called A Project is that every single independent developer was looking at the Apple database and that was the source of truth because there's just too much out there to store it all in your app Apple decided to take things out that they didn't like. That's the genesis of the project and then part two of the project was, well since we're here anyway why don't we extend RSS and build a namespace which according Rob Greenlee is fringe and no one cares. Rob Greenlee is off the chain!

29:44 Okay, even whatever even the Cridler defended us on that one. That was appreciated Yeah, that was appreciated Just because they were not doing video fringe okay anybody checked Rob's medication So I like what we've become I like that where this universal resource that is a I think also universally appreciated and used by many different constituencies for many different things. But the ability to become a better discovery slash search slash recommendation engine would be something incredible. Yeah, yeah, like...I feel definitely that we're gonna have to

30:50 weather the current storm to a degree. According to Bloomberg, you're the guy so... The chicken guy. The chicken guy! Some dude in Alabama with chickens runs that thing man Just saying. We're all going to have to wait, and it's not just us you could see this coming a mile away It's not... You could see this coming at the end of last year is not just us as GitHub Yes I mean GitHub is getting what the latest numbers? I saw This week was that get GitHub has had a 14x increase in commits Oh wow oh man

31:37 How does anybody absorb that much traffic? That's a great question. Really, it's... we're at a moment in time where this stuff is not prepared for the slop apocalypse. Nobody was. It's not just podcasting nobody was prepared for this and I listened to a good interview last night with the guy that created the Pi AI coding agent. Don't know if you're familiar with this? No, I'm not

32:25 So it's what OpenClaw is based on. Okay My understanding is that OpenClaw just took Py and forked it, and it became OpenClaw Oh really? Yeah Interesting So Py is like open code but less opinionated And highly customizable I really want to try it It sounds like a cool thing But the creator of Py was saying They had a real in-depth discussion about just what has been happening with all of this. And he said that he immediately closes all pull requests that come from an AI agent, just immediately. He doesn't even look at them it's just auto... he just auto closes it and he has basically an allow list

33:23 in a file in his repository and it's like if unless your GitHub name is on his list, you can't open a pull request without being auto closed. And so he uses this as sort of filter and like if you contact him in out-of-band way and he knows who you are, you get on the list and now you can do pull requests It's just this, that's the creator of one of these tools. I mean even the creator of one of these prominent tools is having put a white list in place in order to keep this stuff to be manageable and here's the issue there's gonna have to be some grace given because

34:23 We are humans trying to deal with an automated onslaught of content and we are going to get some of it wrong. And that's what he was saying, He was like look there is probably some pull requests that gets sent to the Pi repo that are actually really good and they would fix real problems and we should merge it but I can't do it because I do not have time to review 300 pull requests a week. I can't do it, and so all the good stuff is also going to get thrown out. The baby's gonna get thrown out with the bath water in some circumstances." You know what? I think...I can't remember who this was but heard somebody a long time ago say if you put on white gloves and go work out in the garden

35:22 the garden doesn't get more glovey. No, you're going to get dirty and that's what is going to happen. And I think that is the point James was trying to make when he said real podcasters are getting overwhelmed with a wave of slop because this is going to dirt us all up as this process unfolds and so The Grace is gonna have to be Let's not start calling and telling each other that, let's not start complaining that we're doing censorship and all this kind of thing. We're trying the best we can to deal with this And there is going to be mistakes as we go through this process There is going to be a mess but this truly is a new thing That we've never seen before So it's gonna take time To figure out how to deal with it properly You know what I also think? I think this may be temporal

36:22 This this right now. We're in this mode of look at all the stuff I can do what shall I do? Oh, I'll do this know what I mean It's like people haven't quite used their imagination Like okay So I have this capability whether it's open claw or you or pie Or maybe it's just Claude code or open code. I can do all this stuff with my computer I can tell my computer to do stuff This is this is the dream I've been watching this since i was five years old. Computer, do this! Computer tell me about this! Computer write me a word document! All these things and where the energy will flow eventually...

37:10 I mean, I don't know if it's that lucrative to be doing this podcast round robin. I think it's cool You know, I can see where people look at all these podcasts are created It's amazing But that will wear off and the money will taper off For a whole bunch of different reasons the industry will kind of start to figure this out. We'll work through that but but what's happening is something Think much bigger and I'm trying to I've already made that leap, you know. I'm using this now for my production in ways I never imagined possible My computer is actually working for me doing things I used to do by hand And when people start to figure that out? I think we'll have a shift That may be so dramatic That your phone might not even have as many apps

38:02 Your phone will just do things you tell it to do. It'll have input with voice and output with text, voice and video You may not be...you know copy paste? That's for pussies! We're never gonna do that again Ever! Send this just send this to Dave Get the get the texts of this Bloomberg article send it today I think that creativity hasn't quite sparked yet, but it's going to happen. And so this... and by the same token people will want to say just find me a podcast that has this and my phone or whatever will come back and say well here are some options Well tell me what is in them Okay well this sounds like an automated voice I discard that Yeah this sounds like a doctor but you know I cross reference he is kind of sketchy So maybe maybe not

38:54 You know, I think that's where it's going to go. That's the beauty of what what's being built here particularly with LLMs that do coding and we have enough for the chat bots and all that fine you know but your computer actually doing something for you instead of this clunky graphical user interface with a mouse You know, Dvorak will be vindicated. Yes, barbaric mouse! It'll be something completely different and we just haven't... Now that everybody has these tools the few who are super creative just haven't broken through yet but I think they will and that's what you're looking at because you are super creative and you're going to find out

39:43 The path to this and it's probably not Desperately trying to fight the slop that's gonna taper now. There's hope So for instance the pie guy like I can easily see writing a bot that says okay go through these 300 pull requests And make an estimation Find the ten that you think are worthwhile and show those to me That's gonna, I think that will fix itself. I'm seeing it already! Can i just give an example? Yeah sure So for yesterdays NOAA agenda I had 29 bins with clips in my obsidian daily folder which all had 2 to 4 clip each in them so there is a lot of clips

40:32 And, you know so that... I had Iran UAE. Iran Trump's what he is saying. Gay General Patton Scott Besson all these different things then I have under computing like Sam Altman OpenAI fighting with Elon to Anthropic Pricing all these different things and this is now on Claude 4.7 I said make meta categories of this You know, so put all the Iran stuff under Iran. Just make meta-categories... It comes back with a markdown document that not only did it have meta categories it suggested which clips to drop which clips to use which ones to switch around I was blown away! This thing just saved me two hours on a prep day That's the kind of stuff that we're gonna start getting if we focus on it

41:27 And all the slop stuff, yeah temporal. I really think it's temporal and of course hope so for you So what I guess what i'm saying is can we let's just say the slop is unsloppable to a certain degree But can we... What you just said it? What people really want Is they want to find what they're looking for And if anyone is uniquely positioned to build that, it's the podcast index. Because only we have some dude in Alabama with chickens. Let me show you what we're not going to get rid of while we're doing Show & Tell. Podcast Index ID 7829041

42:18 Link in the link in the boardroom looking at yeah, it's loading Shakespearean tragedy yes okay with Matilda now before you hit play Okay before you hit for I hit play don't even look at what host its own. Don't do it. I'm not looking at anything I'm looking at one picture. I'm looking at the picture tell me what you think this is well? I'm looking at the picture and I think In no universe is there a chick that looks like this reading Shakespeare That's my first inclination Okay. And can I read or am i am i allowed to read the descriptions? Yes, yes absolutely you just can't listen to the audio yet okay first episode I see Shakespearean tragedy with Matilda Ridgway in this conversation we dive into the depths AI language

43:06 We're diving into anything that's already a flag for me. Look at the top level description under the... in the main... Oh, yes! A deep dive into the world of Matilda Ridgeway who plays Lady Macbeth in her tour with The Belle Shakespeare Production. So this may be written by AI but she maybe an actual cute actress so I'm curious. I am pod-curious at this point. Let it rip Welcome back to BC News Radio. My name is Pooja Smith, today we're diving into the dark patriarchal world of medieval Scotland

43:52 Okay, all righty then. Not what you were expecting was it? No not at all but it's okay I'm not hurt because I can just mark this as not what I wanted Right so this is a example of something we absolutely will never... We're not gonna get rid of the sanity index The thing is even if I spend a few minutes Looking at this, this week trying to figure out what the point was. It caught me off guard because I'm like you looked at it and I was like yeah that's AI and I went on like I'll just double check and hit the play. And I was like whoa whoa well this is like a 13 year old Indian girl what?

44:35 What, or Pakistani or something? I don't know. I'm like what who is this? So this to me seems- But this is great though! This you nobody will ever want to listen to this podcast except her. Nobody. Well but I think this to me sounds out...this looks like a typical open claw gone rogue create a podcast grab some audio from somewhere and publish it worked that's what this feels like to me Maybe yeah, maybe I mean it feels there we see tons of this on like anchor and Spreaker of You know some teenager. That's just having fun Yeah, yeah But but they but the description is throws you off. I mean if you're if you're having fun Why would you do that Matilda Ridgeway? Is a real person now she has a full-on She has a full-on

45:27 a fake interview with herself playing both characters. It's great! I listened to the whole thing! I listened to like the whole episode. Well now there you go, so this is valid! It's completely valid! I was oddly fascinated and couldn't turn it off. Alright Dave we need to get you a different hobby. Okay... No I am gonna make a plea here though Can I make a plea? Yeah, make a plea! Okay my plea is somebody please

46:05 And I'm not very comfortable asking for stuff like this, but somebody please either donate enough money to us about $3500. Enough money so where we can buy a hardcore machine like a DGX Spark so I can train this model or send us like 64 gigabyte Mac Mini or something. Oh, it's a donation drive here we go I'm good at these! I can do donation drives all we really need is a $3500 machine and we will solve the problems of the world yeah because my 16 gig Mac

46:54 Mac mini M4, it cannot handle what I'm trying to do. It's like it is crying for help. So I think in order because all that I'm doing all this at home because we can't afford to pay some kind of AI API cost filter all this stuff out. So I'm literally just running a lot, running all of this and training this model locally so my plea for help is somebody send us a big ass Mac mini with a bunch of RAM or like about three grand 3500 bucks to get a DGX park or something where we can have a local machine capable

47:35 of keeping up with what we're trying to do, because it actually is... So we can't- We can't do this with a rented GPU? Have you looked at those? Not the model training part. I think that's going to be and that's gonna take a long time but okay so my plea is over but like cost wise going forward though I think this makes financial sense for us to just own it outright Okay But Going But on that note though. I did finish the API Yes, yes be upload very excited about this Give us your data The follow counts API for CSV uploads Very excited about this and so i'm gonna i'm gonna publish the spec for the endpoint and how it works but here's the idea the

48:44 This is for the intended audience for this, is podcast apps. So if you're not a podcast app... Then you can stop the podcast! Stop listening! Forget about it. We would want people like Podverse, Overcast, Pocket Cast, Castamatic I don't know if Franco even has this data True fans, you know obviously just everybody. If you're a podcast app we would like YouTube periodically if you can or if you're willing upload your follower count data to us through this endpoint and so it's a post request with a multi-part upload format

49:50 and it's just a CSV file. And again, I'll post the details of this. What I'm going to do is go back and do a proper like open API implement spec so that I can get all that cleaned up So I'll post the details on how to do this shortly and you will upload the CSV and the CSV just has two columns. I am trying to make this effortless for people because I don't want anybody have to jump through a ton of hoops It's feed URL and follower count. Well, the good news is Sam Sethi already had this built three months ago before you even asked for it so it's coming from true fans first. He just been getting a 404 on that API real quick every day. I got you covered Sam. Coming in clutch. So

50:50 Then you, so you'll just if you can just periodically upload this and it's a list of all the feed URLs in your system. And how many of your users slash listeners follow or subscribe to that feed? And and so that will be used for ranking in returning search results I presume Yes, that's going to be used for so many things. We're going to... This would be so helpful for us. Describing how? So we don't have access to first party data and don't want it but we do want to have some way of knowing

51:39 what is actually popular and being actively listened to and followed in the world. And that will help us to... The immediate way that it helps is going to be with training the model Because you can't, it's always way easier to find the bad feeds than it is to find the good ones. Find the good ones yeah like this one that you just posted which is your new favorite I know you're subscribed to that girl Oh yeah, it'll never have another episode but I'm refreshing every day So we need in order for the training data to make sense and like we said last week developing your training data is going to be the hardest part

52:27 because we need it to be comprehensive and we need it to be balanced. We're going to need about, I'm aiming for about 25,000 feeds of each type And I'm not worried about the slop feeds. I'm not worried about the spam feeds, those...I can get those in a day. It'll be so easy to get 25,000 of those." The good feeds? Finding 25,000 feeds of all different flavors and varieties that people actually follow and listen to you. Oh man! This will be so good. So good to have this. Critical. Critical. Yeah.

53:08 And then we can not only use it to train the model, but then we can also use this for accurate ranking. of being cross app because each app has its own flavor. The number of people who follow a certain podcast on Fountain is going to be completely different than the number who follow it on TrueFans at all. Now, will you have that ranking? Will you take that into account so if... Let me see what if I can explain that So if someone's on Fountain and they're searching for a Bitcoin podcast They may actually want something different than someone on

53:53 The podcast guru who was looking for a Bitcoin podcast does that make sense? Yeah, for sure. Oh yeah I know what you're saying mm-hmm because you may have to Both people may be interested in Bitcoin but different kind of different reasons. Yeah, yeah for sure You may have one person who listens you know to Peter McCormick and another one who listens to a bunch of Wavelake Yeah So you're... yeah, and this should normalize that across the whole thing. That way you don't end up biased real heavily towards... because imagine if only Overcast sent their data to us? Well I'm saying... Lord help me! No. You'd end up with a whole bunch of shows that are Mac specific. Do you see what I am saying? It would be skewed. My question or what I'm saying is

54:48 Will there be a way for a podcast app who has a user who is looking for something? So, Overcast great example. So that user will probably want something different than the fountain users so does it behoove us to normalize it or does it behoove us to say well if you're this app you might want these results I think we could do it in both ways. You know, because that'll be the cool part is that we could say Do you want a normalized ranking of... Because right now in the database We have a column called popularity

55:33 And everybody wonders what that is. It's just whatever some dude in Alabama with chickens really likes Yeah, exactly it's the backcountry redneck scoring system You know you break out the 22 shoot a few bottles and figure out what comes next I don't know what that column necessarily means either and i'm the one who wrote it But...I mean I know how I am deriving it which I don't really like to discuss publicly because i don't want it to be like you know gamed out or anything but, It's just been sort of trial and error over the years based on API traffic. And it's just not good enough. So we can replace that with real data. I love it! When I saw that on the index on the social I'm like oh man this is so cool...so cool

56:32 Yeah, I think it's gonna work really well. So there are a few unknowns here. Obviously i don't know how many people will participate... I really hope its alot. Because this is purely anonymized data. There's no listening or information anywhere in it. Well we're the right guys to do it! We're not going to try and make money off of your users data True yeah So if that's true, Apple can't do this because Apple will somehow make money off of your data. Everyone knows that when I was talking to Ashley Carmen on the phone she's like so y'all you partner with hosting companies and but I was like no we don't really partner with them I mean we just uh i think maybe she didn't really believe me that

57:27 She was finding it hard to believe that there was no financial incentive in what we're doing. Hence the dude in Alabama with chickens, he's just some weirdo redneck! Does he live in a trailer? Does he live...in a double wide? Now its making sense to me Yeah, you're either lying or you really are a kook. Why would you do that? I'm from Bloomberg! What's wrong with you?! So like yeah...I think you're right it is the right place to do it and if we can make this work man that would be boots on the ground real numbers And it would be the tide that lifts the boats

58:17 Everyone who uses the index can say, we help you find what you really want. And we can push that date...the popularity column that is in the downloadable weekly database We'll just update that with this normalized info or whatever we want to do it. Yeah, and man it makes that download so valuable Yes Immediately everybody can update their recommendation engines with real data including advertisers true think about that And I look and also think will probably be we are probably hope to be very surprised by

58:58 What we actually find out. Yeah, that Noah Jender show man everyone's listening to that. Oh by the way when I was working through this I've been doing like almost nothing but this stupid model training for so long now and as I was going through something else trying to figure out how some data set format stuff And at one point in the conversation that I was going back and forth with, it wasn't Claude. It was Quinn 3.6, the 35B model. I'm going back and forth and just trying to format some data. And it will...and I was like okay referenced a quote good podcast. And it was like well you know your dataset needs to be...it needs to include

59:56 a big cross-section and it was giving examples of all the different sort of categories of podcasts that would be good to have in the data set as on the good side of things. And one of them was No Agenda. Yeah, baby! You're in the model but you're like in its core knowledge base or whatever I was like, wait a second. What? It must be off something's wrong. Yeah this is completely... It has to be dire of the CEO otherwise it's not right that's the only one that matters diary of a CEO! I bet we're gonna find that there are some very listened-to podcasts that never get any mention in the media Oh yeah for sure Well that's great Dave I'm very excited about that I think that's awesome and I love that you're doing that

1:00:46 The upload limit right now, I don't even know what to put it at. Well you have 50 megabytes was what you... Right? I got 15 megabytes Yeah, I just picked up 15 megabyte, I picked it out of my butt and no idea if that's right. I dunno. I dunno but we'll find out when somebody tries to upload one and they get a error So can I just share something with you? Yes sure! So uh..I told my robot Robot Prepare the OPML for podcasting 2.0 for today. And at the top, the robot puts Dave ships first party data at the app level

1:01:31 New Podcast Index API endpoint shipped April 30th. Apps with Publisher API keys can now post follow count CSV uploads back to podcast index format, feed underscore URL comma follow underscore count max 50 megabyte upload Dave colon First party data at the app level is something we've never had so we've been handicapped This will be a critical step to getting the training data set for the new model training as well Why it matters colon Up until now, podcasts indexed inferred subscriber counts from indirect signals. Apps directly know who subscribed but had no way to share that back without privacy concerns. CSV of totals threads the needle." This is my robot! No, not threaded the needle... This is my robot! Nothing but net! It's like I used to have producers. I remember what it was like. It's coming back to me now The only thing this thing doesn't do is make me coffee

1:02:29 I think that the excitement about this stuff that I hear from you, I also hear it in other people of our Age bracket like Gen Xers. Thank you, thank you for not putting me with the boomers thank you Oh no your fully, your gen x yeah I'm boomer adjacent though its close, it's a close call Yeah you barely, yeah by the skin of your teeth Kind of I think that people of our age bracket are more excited about this stuff than other people because it reminds us of the feelings we had when we were young, when we were getting to build stuff. Blink tags! Yeah, back when we were staring at Commodore 64s trying to get them do stuff on the screen

1:03:30 And in every new thing that you were able to do was exciting. It was exciting. Yeah, peek and poke! I heard Leo on Windows Weekly the other day say he was like, Happy that I get to talk about something other than the new phone. Yeah Yes, I understand that he was stuck in that loop for over a decade We all have been we've all been yep you're right all been stuck in this stupid loop Nobody cares about that crap anymore yes And I think there's the excitement comes from just being able to actually build a computer as project yeah and That's what you know moving to Omarchi was the best thing I ever did

1:04:14 Holy crap, I'm coming behind you. I mean I was windows because of the driver situation with with Roadcaster for once and I prayed to thank that guy who wrote those Those pipewire scripts if we had his name right now But once I had that, it's like oh okay now can just have Linux and then i forgot. I'd forgotten how much fun it is to have the computer customized exactly the way you want it. I wanted to do this and now I have this robot and I say make my computer like this Okay Ah yes! It's fun without the coding skills. I had lunch with John Spurlock and his wife Oh Was he in town?

1:05:04 He was, yeah. So his wife is a medical researcher. Doesn't she work at Princeton? Rutgers. Rutgers okay Yeah and so she was in town at UAB for a conference for a medical conference and he was like hey I'm gonna be in town you want to have some lunch with us? Awesome! So yes I took him out to lunch We sat for a couple hours, had good conversation. It was so much fun to get to see John again hadn't seen him in awhile. Yeah since Dallas I think right? Mm-hmm yeah and his wife is just the sweetheart and... I hear she's a supermodel! So she evidently does research into

1:05:56 like metabolism and stuff. And so I was just- Yeah, you're all in on that. No, I was like, I know this is going to be weird. I'm gonna try not to be a fanboy of you but I want to ask you all kinds of questions. I need to know! Help me. Should I be eating beef milkshakes? This is the number one question. What is your opinion on beef milkshake and lemon yogurt at the same time? Can we get it? Yes How is your gut health? So we were talking and he was like, he was just saying how kind of demoralizing a lot of this AI slop is. And I agreed with him like you know it some days you just say you look at it all and it just kinda makes me wanna

1:06:47 throw your hands up and go do something else. Because he was saying, well you know what got me into... He was saying what got him into podcasting in the beginning was just the human connection of it all. Yeah and I think um I really hope that you're right about this being a temporary situation because I think that if we don't-I think the AI stuff Really matters. It's really it matters a lot and it's really helpful in a lot of ways in our life But what's happened is we've overshot and it's it's forcing its way into Areas that it has no business in yeah, I think that is actually doing harm And I don't hope I hope that

1:07:45 that this is a temporary thing that recedes, because if it's not I think its damaging long term. You know, it kind of reminds me of the Script Kitties era. Do you remember that? Yeah We had some pretty easy... It was probably PHP but Perl and just Script Kitties They would just write stuff to write stuff And they could just do it and there was a reaction There was a response But it was always kinda destructive But that, I think that passed. And some of them grew up to be super excellent hackers and they're all rich on Bitcoin but in general...I think that's this kind of phase. So I really hope- I'm with you, I hope so. I think we also have a- This is gonna be a little bit of an out there type of statement but I think we also have a problem

1:08:43 that may be coming at us with just knowing all the answers to things. And I'm putting answers in quotes, and I don't mean that they're actually true. I just mean there...I think a little bit of mystery in our life is important. Yeah? You know we have a problem, there's this long-standing sort of you know there are many fundamental problems in the philosophy of religion One of them is the problem of evil, but another one is the hiddenness of God. So this problem you could say well if God exists why's he hidden from us in so many ways? And it's rightly defined as a

1:09:41 Quote problem the problem of the hiddenness of God, but but then there's this paradox and humans are nothing if they're not paradoxical But you know we were bothered by the hiddenness of God. But we also despise a person who gives us all the answers hmm You know a friend of ours who? Was married to this Presbyterian minister for many years She describes this moment And they're divorced, you know. They got a divorce and she describes this moment that she had in the car where one of her kids from the backseat asked a question about God and the...and her husband gave this long technical answer about, you know, answering this question. And she said at that moment she knew she couldn't be married to this guy anymore. Wow!

1:10:43 Because she had heard this so many times and what she really just wanted him to say was, you know I don't know. Yeah Which would have been the right answer? Yeah, she wanted him to say I don't know son It's it's a mystery And we want We want to know the answers and we want to see these things clearly But mystery is also I think a critical component component of to the human experience. We need it and so if we can, if we try to construct a world where AI or whatever these things are these...these..where technology gives us the answers to all of our questions I don't think it's gonna be a world we want to live in. No, I don't think that'll happen right? I'm already seeing Gen Alpha change, Gen Zed, the zetters

1:11:41 Yeah, the young people younger than me. They a lot of them are highly AI skeptical. Yep know that it's not even interested yeah they don't care Not at all Before we before we Dance on out of here I did want to mention that Daniel J Lewis has proposed a new namespace tag GitHub 770 it's in the show notes for today show This is the contact I think it's called contact. In fact, you said quote makes a ton of sense structured way to expose podcast contact info host email social handles business contact currently scattered across iTunes tagged email slash owner fields with no standardization and i think it's solid he did this in consultation with Alex Sanfilippo

1:12:34 Who would call me about it and I said, hey man this sounds like a tag so i want to make sure that people know about this. Let's bang it around and let's get this thing working because you know I did the town hall... Did we talk about that? Yeah you did yeah So I did the town hall Everyone sounded on board with it. So, you know the of course the the industry is the industry the podcast Booking industry is waiting for this and as usual It'll take some fringe group nobody cares about to make it happen a fringe group that nobody cares about Yeah, right riding the fringe yes So let's go take a look at that please people so I think that tag

1:13:20 My understanding, and tell me if this is yours as well. My understanding is that Alex Sanfilippo proposed a specific podcast colon booking tag. And then Daniel pivoted and said why don't we make this a little bit broader? And have like contact tag of which booking is one of the- Which I think it's a great idea. I think its better. It is better but he already shows the different examples of how could work in different different scenarios. So I think that is good, I think that's a broader way of looking at it and...I mean I just think we just need a booking tag, that's easy but this as a contact is broader more usable and even has some examples like sponsor pitch guest invite interview feedback which is interesting And that's really what contact is But you can specify

1:14:18 You know, if you want to... If it's just feedback. This is the email address. If it's sponsor related here's the number you call. If it's a pitch here's the booking system we use etc., etc.. I think that's great! I think he did a good job on that When I first saw Daniel say hey why don't we do this other way? I was like oh my god here comes some JSON file and then It ended up not being the case. He wrote a very good proposal. Now we have a quicker way to know who to call on our segment of where we call scammers. Yes, hello!

1:15:03 I'm Sam looking for my boyfriend. We need another one of those segments, Dave. Get me one of those numbers for next show. I'll bring you a fresh one next week. All right. Thanks to people in our Value For Value project is what podcastindex.org is. You can go take a look at it. You've already heard what it is where it started six years ago Why we're doing it, why we do it... well we didn't explain why we do it for no money other than its somehow our job and so were doing it. Because were nuts! Cause where nuts you know some dude in Alabama with some chickens, some dude in Texas with some guns, with some guns, with some guns

1:15:41 And you can support us through Value for Value, your time, your talent or your treasure. We love the Fiat Fund coupons You can do that by going to podcastindex.org down at the bottom there's a big red donate button and you can send it to our PayPal which accepts a whole bunch of different payment methods Or through The Boosts! The Booster Grants with modern podcasting 2.0 apps and we say thank you for 100 sats from Lyceum That's Martin Lindes Coke Oh wait he is actually talking back-and-forth with Sam They're doing a co-listening. Yeah, co-listening. Okay let me see if I can go back...

1:16:19 So 1776, I'm going back in time a little bit. It is Labor Day in Europe on Mayday celebrate spring! Indie podcasters unite here's a Liberty Boost with 1776 Satoshis co-listening and chatting with Sam Sessi Sethy on TrueFans.fm Go podcasting this month that will celebrate 20 years of podcasting I will wear my Podcasting 2.0 certified t-shirt on my birthday may 25 all the best from Martin And so then he has a note to Sam. Sam said, with 1892 sats... We'll also talk about their new music hosting platform and support for premium RSS. Plus, James and I will be reviewing all the new video pricing announcements from Buzzsprout, Captivate, Flightcast, Libsyn etc. Already actioned your request for follow counts told you! Coming next week plus the contact slash booking tag whoo! Sending you a Liverpool FC Super Comet 18... Oh, Liverpool Football Club was founded in 1892 ooh very nice oh that's a good book so what we need now Eric PP

1:17:27 is when we have this co-listening that Sam is doing with Martin, we need threaded Boostergrams on the helipad. I'm just saying it needs to be threaded now! And so Martin replies, Sam Cool Beans did you listen to Fountain's live show? I tried to find it here on True Fans but i listened to it for a bit on fountain.fm I am a synth pop guy So hip-hop rap is not my cup of tea lol The venue in London is the classical building right Okay they're just talking to each other and im reading it I don't know what Im doing It's like co parenting Between the two of them they birthed a boost

1:18:06 2997 from Silas on Linux. As long as you don't have a whitelist for proposals, can IAI generate new tag proposals in the loop every second? Good luck! Please do. 1701 from Martin again. Dave have you read the book Generation 64 how the Commodore 64 inspired a generation of Swedish gamers Ooh, I have not read that. That sounds like something I will be reading there. Sounds pretty generic yes. 3333 from Hey Citizen just returning value on a completely unrelated note. I hope you remember that i have over 1 billion subscribers and should appear at the top of most searches on the index. Getcha covered!

1:18:46 $29.97 from C Brooklyn, thank you very much! $55.55 from SaltyCrayon and he says he's sending some V4V for the chicken guy There is $39.96 from Sealoss on Linux Bark for me did that and I hit the delimiter so it's over to you Dave I got some PayPals we got 533 from Michael Kimmerer Thank You Michael Dreb Scott 15 bucks hey Dreb Thank You Dreb Dreb what is your weight now? We need to wait. He used to keep me updated I don't know if he's how he's doing on that no, you just vibe code like a scale thing that'll shoot an email automatically Yes Chris Bernardik five bucks Thank You Chris we got a new monthly subscriber $10 a month from Who is this from Mark van Patten?

1:19:42 Says MVP go podcast. Yes, MVP is maker of many fine AI slop end-of-show mixes on the no agenda show No really man Pat that sounds Dutch yes I think he is Charles Hicks five bucks Thank You Charles appreciate that and we got Cameron Rose $25 thank you Cameron Ralph Esteb $50. Whoa, I'm gonna hit a baller. Thank you Ralph appreciate that and that's all the PayPal's and then we've got only show one booster gram

1:20:23 Yeah. And that's from Comma Strip Blogger. Okay? It's really not a delimiter if it's just the one comma in the file, right? No, it says hard stop! Hard stop yeah 20 000 sass from Comma Strip Blogger through Fountain he says Howdy Dave and Adam please tell your audience to subscribe to a podcast by Daniel J Lewis and his son www.nontopical.com Oh. A father and son walk and talk about everything, and nothing at all." They have some fun topics. Give it a listen! Yo! CSB AI Arch Wizard still stonewalled by Adam. This was $15.43 when sent. I'm sorry CSB it's just been crazy man It's been crazy That's gonna be the subtitle of CSVs autobiography Stonewalled By Adam? Adam never got on my podcast

1:21:19 I didn't know you were doing it. You're kids talking, huh? I woke up one day and his kid's talking during a podcast Daniel said that's not him Oh, it's an AI forgery. Ah there you go slop! Slopcast! He got slopjacked. Slopjacked? Yeah he... Somebody slopjacked his voice. Slopjacked thank you show title I needed that at the last minute At the last minute any other anything else or is that all it and that's it I guess that's it. Yeah, I mean...I've got 10 pages of stuff here but why read it now when I've been collecting for a year and half? So thats nontopical dot com Daniel J. www.nontopical.com What is this? We discussed true ultimate power

1:22:22 What is... what? Man. Is this a slobcast? CSB, have you been drinking brother? Because I'm not sure I understand in any way what this is Noah Jenna Millennial says, do not Google slop jacking. Okay that's a good point. Urban dictionary avoid it please! Alright brother Dave thank you so much for all you're doing. You are a hero amongst men. Boardroom thank y'all for being here and of course we will actually I think I'll be in Europe next Friday where we let you know if we have a board meeting or not. Until then have a great weekend! Adios!

1:23:04 You have been listening to podcasting 2.0 visit podcast index org for more information Alabama with chickens