Episode 262: Podcleanse

00:00 Podcasting 2.0 for June 5th, 2026 episode 262 pod cleanse Hello everybody! Have you been wondering what's going on with podcasting? Well, you came to the right place. This is Podcasting 2.0 It's where we do the board meeting every single week In fact, we are the only board room that never meets in secret I'm Adam Curry here in the heart of Texas Hill Country and Alabama The man who holds all the power of Greystoke Say hello to my friend on the other end The one, the only Mr Dave

00:38 Jones The Meeting in secret is way too much trouble. It's cool man Cool, no it's cool you you gotta have Chatham house rules we have Chatham house rules everybody I don't even know what that means Oh chat of what is Chatham house rule? Well you know what Chatham houses No. Chatham House is basically the UK version of the Council on Foreign Relations Of course it's British. Yeah, and so the Chatham House you know that's where they the liberal world order is decides their rules there so Chatham house international rules based orders oh yeah that's yeah that's where that all takes place and then they give the Council on Foreign Relations their marching orders in some way the Bilderberg group comes in at the Trilateral Commission but ultimately Chatham House

01:32 Anything discussed at Chatham House may not be discussed outside of Chatham House. It's a bit like Fight Club, only with nerds! and old rich people. Very old, rich people and weenies yes exactly It starts at Chatham House goes to the Council of Foreign Relations then to Bilderberg eventually it winds its way all the way down to the Amp Accords. The Amp? Yes! And you know this is how things work in the kingdom man so I have my robot

02:10 My robot is... Don't say that. I do, no, I love my- Just find a different way to express it Well it's a robot! It means just the robot. It's not like uh..I didn't say I loved my AI or my chatbot. I said I loved my robot because my robot But when you say I loved my robot it just makes me think of like the movie Her or something Oh no, oh no, don't do it So but my robot is very highly tuned for the boardroom And, you know it's built all kinds of stringers and agents. And it goes out and so brings stuff in that is important It whispers the entire power podcast Brings me back stuff I need to listen to Tells me the topics You know So I can like hang out with my wife while the robot doing their work Today was filled with all kinds of little bits and bobs from you and Spurlock Oh this is interesting

03:08 And so I've been thinking a lot since our last board meeting. Hello, Boardroom by the way good to see you all and then like 15 minutes ago you say oh yeah by the way Spurlock on the show today which i had missed that email because you always copy me on the invite that's our system consists of Dave invites somebody and sends out an invite a calendar invite and if I catch it then you know oh yeah that's right because so I had Does that qualify as meeting in secret? I don't think it does. It's not really, no. Okay, no. And he is like the perfect guy to round out the trio on the show today... ...as we chair the board meeting because I'm just full of ideas man! I got so many good ideas and I am so excited to share them with you

04:03 I mean, I've got...I'm bringing stuff to the table but if you know what I don't want to throw cold water on your excitement here so feel free. Well, I have a rundown why don't we bring this Spurlock in because he's the kind of guy that has nothing to promote and is rich independently rich Yes, he has a farm or something. I don't know what he's doing. He's got livestock and Yeah, yeah Brussels sprouts Ladies and gentlemen please welcome to the boardroom The man behind op3 dot dev and livewire dot io from the great state of New Jersey John Spurlock

04:48 Hey guys good to be here always always fun and ready to talk about WWDC next week. Yeah, yeah Okay wrong Maybe you can go on with those overcast guys talk about that their liquid glass sucks so bad there you go There's your whole podcast Everybody hates liquid glass. Do you hate liquid glass? I've actually been out of podcasting for a while, we went on like a week-long trip and you know how it is it's a great time to kind of like declare podcast bankruptcy and live a real life. But then you come back, and then a lot of stuff has happened. And so I've been catching up in very interesting times, very interesting times we're living in but... That's called a pod fast by the way? Pod cleanse! I recommend it though. It is nice everyone. The danger though there's a lot of danger in pod fasting because

05:46 Sometimes you find that your life is so much better that you don't resume. You don't want to go back! Yeah, well really do you feel that way Dave? Do you feel if you stop listening then and you get back into it and you'd feel that your life was better without them The total hours of podcasts I consume if you charted it on a monthly basis for the last five years has steadily declined. Yes, it has been on a downward trajectory not precipitous but very steady downward decline. Like once every five or six weeks I drive to Austin honestly to get my hair cut and

06:29 It's only because I'm loyal to the girl who has been cutting my hair for 16 years. But man, I love... Because I don't drive much. I drive to HEB like 10 minutes or 8 minutes So I have an hour and a half each way And I just listen to this and listen to that Then I am really into it I'm listening to way more audio books than podcasts because honestly it's news that i just can't tolerate anymore. So what you're saying is you don't listen to No Agenda anymore? You just skip it, you're done with it

07:05 I stopped listening to No Agenda like two years ago. No, thank you! Because for this reason... I feel so special! For the reason that... The reason I stopped listening was that... Okay this may be an interesting story. So the reason I stopped listening was because I didn't want to hear the things you said on no agenda so they would then affect My the discussion here valid point. I was all I would always avoid So what would happen is? I would always avoid the Thursday show of no agenda No, because I was afraid you'd say something did yeah, I wanted it to be fresh when I heard it on Friday

07:51 So then that led to, well you sometimes you would say something on Sunday that would bleed through and give me ideas and stuff like I can't do this. So I stopped listening altogether. And I was like, I just want to be fresh in whatever Adam's thinking process is. Okay? Well that's good. That I understand. I mean, I was just telling pastor Jimmy this morning it's like, I love doing podcasting 2.0 because It's really, I mean yeah board meeting podcasting blah blah blah. Really it's just an opportunity for me to catch up with Dave. Yeah that is really what it is like I just want to catch up with Dave see what's going on because we used to talk more you know like on the phone and stuff like that and then now this is sort of the time I get to talk to you all three. And it would be like okay you hang up first no you hang up first

08:41 I love you, sweetheart. Bye! Okay hang up now. I'm really gonna hang up. Yes here i go But then the funny thing that happened though was that after I stopped listening to No Agenda for that other reason I now find any sort of podcast that has news in it intolerable. It's totally intolerable, everything is like... It's hard for me to even listen to This Week In Bitcoin the only reason that I listened to is because I just support Chris and yeah everything he does That still my guaranteed every week go-to listen but I don't think I'd ever miss an episode

09:28 There's just something about it that I just like it. He's using a lot of robots too now for his clips, I need to coordinate with him because... Y'all should use economies of scale So John what your go-to podcast man? What do you never miss? You know I was just thinking Pods of America? I'm into this is because I listen to Hunter Iser Goal Hanger Hundreds, hundreds. I have so many podcasts that I have subscribed in my...

10:04 little app that I have here. Oh, you're just helping the podcast industrial complex with your auto download? Yeah! That's not doing anything... Well actually so i'm still using an app that I did a while ago to learn SwiftUI back in the day and it doesn't auto-download anything so when it comes in I do an initial swipe You know most I swipe away Nope Not even So they're actually getting from me whether or not I actually intend to listen And once I download I pretty much DO eventually listen too Very few auto downloads from me, but I actually get this question all the time because you say you work in podcasting. And the first question is something like... Is that what you, is that your pickup line? Hey baby. I work in podcasting. Yeah hey hey, I'm big on podcasting. If they say what are your top three podcasts and I have no, you know, you can't answer something like that. People ask me all the time and another one is What's your favorite song of all time? What's your favorite music video? Abba? You should have something ready for that. Abba? Dancing Queen come on man

11:06 I heard I finally saw a good trick the other day. There's a karaoke thing going on and someone picked tequila The whole time you're just sitting there watching this person dance and then they say one word so it's perfect So I need an equivalent of that for podcasts like what's my favorite podcasting 2.0 clearly? Did you get any on you Dave? That's why we were at the Black Label Society concert. He was like, You know what my favorite city is? Nashville! Of course! What city are we in tonight?! At the risk of turning this into This Week In AI I am interested have you done anything Adam on the client side of things do you have your robot go out and

11:56 sift through your podcast and say like, hey just give me the sort of important bits on the listening side because I could see that being useful once you start trusting it. What i did is...and I have other things to talk about but I will tell you this there's this site called bingit.io which redirects to noagenda.clipgenie.com And Dean, who set that up. He has all the episodes, all the transcripts, all the clips, all the show notes and he's run some AI stuff robot over it and it's a search engine so if you go in there, you search for something then it'll say okay here is the relevant NOAA agenda

12:42 episodes and you can listen to, you can listen because we publish all the clips so he has the clips. You can click on the articles but you can also just in the transcript click on it and then you hear that part of that show which is fun because some of it is like really bad quality It's 15 years old So I hooked that into The Robot Here's a five-hour Senate confirmation hearing Go and find clips in this, and measure it against the corpus of everything we've done for the past 18 years. So it'll go back and it will find things that we said previously so gets kind of an idea of the attitude that we had about it And then more or less it knows what I want from a clip out of it. And then make a series of 3 to 5 clips

13:36 I mean, not bad. No that's still on the production side but anything on the like personal listening side where it's like there's too many podcasts? I need help! Anything like that? No... I think an app would probably be the best helper there. Exactly what i said is PodNews Weekly Review. Yeah. I don't always have time to listen to it just because of my schedule when it comes out and then stuff from doing Friday morning so um The workflow Find out what's going on, find out what pieces correspond to what I already want to talk about or what Dave and Spurlock and whatever is going on on podcastindex.social And then it'll highlight those for me Then I go into the podcast app and hit those chapters So it's kind of doing a couple things for me That is indeed on the client side

14:25 Yeah, I've actually been really surprised with how often I use transcripts. And I use them primarily through Apple Podcasts so like yesterday I was listening to the Catching Up on the Amp stuff. Yes, and I have to say like they did put out two fairly informative episodes on what their what they're doing so although their site wasn't great. They didn't talk about it. They have a podcast? Yeah they have they have two podcasts i subscribe to it oh and they did lay it out rather well but who is Oxford Road? This is Oxford road's thing right Well, I've had a lot of thoughts about this and i'm glad that you took us right there into the AMP thing. So the way I understand it... Let's just skip the definition of a podcast for a second and I will come back to that so in essence they have come up with new measurement guidelines And the measurement guidelines are

15:25 Pretty simple. I mean, in fact, I feel that they really made a huge mistake by saying okay, play is 30 seconds of content played audio or video once per user per session Then the number of unique users who had a podcast play. I'm not quite sure what that means, should have been unique... Anyway it seems like something wrong with that sentence An ad impression A commercial begins playing for the user These are very specific words And ad audience The number of users exposed to an ad impression Which sounds like a guy in a dark alley opening up his coat Like hey look at this! Look at this ad Are you impressed? I was exposed

16:07 And I was just thinking about this. Let's just talk about that first, because both you and Dave were going back and forth on the Mastodon. What are your initial thoughts about these measurements? Again, I try to look past the marketing side which is clearly a marketing site for the Proctor Road. And if you listen to their podcast, the 12 people that they have on on the group are folks that work with Oxford Road, right? And they are ad buyers and networks. And I think there's a guy from Libsyn on there as well. They had their own summit and they picked 12 people to be part of this secret group. I have no clue why they decided to really go gung-ho on the secret route. Multiple times you're like oh we've been doing this in secret! I don't know if they think that's a good thing or bad thing but... I think it's Chatham House vibe. It makes it more

17:02 exclusive or I don't know. No, no, no! I think it means that we didn't... believe me i know how Chatham House people think and these to me are Chatham House people they're thinking you know we did this we really got together and um you know and we were underground and we didn't have any outside influences and so this was the best way to do it so we didn't have anyone pushing or pulling at us which reminds me of the movie by Danny Kaye A song is born? I gotta look that up. And it's a bunch of professors and they go down in secret for years to write the definitive encyclopedia of music

17:46 And as they're ready to publish, they come out and they're here we are. We're ready to go public with our encyclopedia and jazz happened. And they completely missed that. And they're like what is going on? What happened in music? It's a great movie! So I think that was well intended more as...we were serious you know we put our time into it That's what i think that is. It too was a bit of marketing But I don't think it's nefarious per se. And there are three of the members that aren't comfortable with being listed even so that goes to the, you know we have to be sensitive as far as a lot of the decision makers aren't in that group So if a company is signing up to some of these proposals they may not even be able to make the decision within the company itself Yeah but i honestly just want to look at it and I think I tried to say this yesterday and the group

18:40 just look at it from what they have proposed. And I've, I'm really allergic to all these... Especially as it happens with software now. Not proposed, they ratified must just be clear. They have with no dissenting votes yet but the stuff they've produced right? Like what is actually there today and there's not a lot and they say as much and personally I'm really sick and tired of software companies pre-announcing things right so I will try not to pre announce things right and say it's coming in three months! No if you haven't you know, there's so much stuff out there. Let's limit the news to like actual news." But I mean the definitions that they've laid out...I think it's useful as a starting point for discussion. Ultimately what they want is that players would somehow feel that theirs—and this is why I went back into the transcript. I wanted to know their exact language because they used a great word I couldn't remember but they want to hasten the demand

19:34 for this idea, right? So they want to get it out in the world and sort of make it more apparent that this is a problem for some people. This is a problem for people that are in the advertising business and podcasting when they comparatively can be using podcasting as a channel in relation other channels. Right. So there's certain things that podcasting can give you. And then there's some metrics that it can't. And so they're hitting these problems I fully agree there's probably people that have these problems and it's just more of a way for them to get it out um and into the world and make sure that other people know about it so in that, in that respect I don't have a huge problem with it. I do think it's going to be hard like uh do they have Apple on board with this? Do they have YouTube ultimately that they want Apple YouTube and Spotify to agree to these numbers or these metrics and I'm not sure

20:24 Why they would do that because or why they would do that Oh man, that's because that is what always happens in podcasting when Dave and I started this August of 2020 Apple's not never gonna do it. Never gonna do it though if you don't get them on board, It's not gonna happen. We've been hearing that for 10 years...10 years and now we are 16 years into the apple If the apple doesn't do it and won't happen is not important blady blady blah And what you see is Apple now does stuff kind of without even asking anybody, you know. Oh okay well we'll do HLS video blah blah blah... So it's still just as pathetic as it always was and on the secret WhatsApp group are you in that John? The WhatsApp group I am yes! I think I know the one your talking about Secret by the way, the hilarious part is there's a secret Whatsapp group complaining about the secret AMP group

21:22 And in the group it's like, you know their solution is to yammer about it. Oh we need to invite more people into the group! And I love this. I hope they never kick me out, I love this group because i am a whatsapp user because of friends in Europe and it's on mute so just go in and look at every couple times today to see what is going on and its like ok we need to get so-and-so in yeah we got so-and-so in well how come they didn't do that? I guess this group isn't Chatham House Rules, then. It's totally Chatham House Rules! In fact listen to this...I think this is from Cridlin explaining the rules We don't quote from this group even me

22:10 And Apple has threatened to pull my arms and legs off for something I've written on here in the past, so there are eyes here. So if there's also spies in the group... Oh that's great! That was great! Look, I will Don't, please nobody has ever asked me to be a part of any of these groups. I've never gotten an invite to them Do not ever ask me because the answer is no! I hate this crap Completely allergic To all secret groups do not even bother it's a... Nothing gets me more irritated than a buncha secret

22:56 groups making a bunch of decisions that has zero visibility. Well, they make no decision. And you're just presenting it to the world as if it's somehow legitimate. If I cannot follow your... If I cannot follow the trail of logic that shows how you came to a decision your decision is completely worthless to me! It is a very guilty pleasure of mine I'm sure it's fun to watch. Because, because... I've never been invited to these groups this is the first one i was actually invited too there may have been a slack group at some point that Todd Cochran rip! That Todd Cochran invited me too but you know I lost slack along time ago and don't know what's going on But WhatsApp is something I am still into now. To me this is like

23:50 I want to compare this to the secret group, to the topic being discussed of HTTP signing which we'll talk about later. In public in the GitHub discussions and you can see everybody's point of view and everyone is arguing for their side, everyone presenting their arguments. It is a completely transparent above board Open participation discussion. Yeah, I can't handle those. If the goal of the AMP folks was to... And again it's hard as a tech person to not hear AMP and then hear Google's uh... I don't know Dave if you remember AMPs sort of content? Oh! I spent a lot of time making support for AMP back in The Freedom Controller and on different websites and then Google rug pulled it

24:49 No, it's not a thing. But if the goal was to get everyone talking about it I think they've succeeded right? Everyone knows who Oxford Road is now everyone knows their definitions and honestly I think that's a good starting point like if the apps are all trying to not coordinate... They're competing but if they all want to choose a common definition at least now they have something to work with And if people have a problem with it, you know, I'm sure they'll hear about it. So I don't have a huge problem with it. It's once they come out with actual technology and actual sort of ramifications or changes that need to happen to the ecosystem...I don't honestly see that happening.

25:30 Hey, we're getting client stats now from Apple and from Spotify and from YouTube. And they're completely different and we'd like them to be similar. That's it." Okay thank you! Now I need to tell you what i've been thinking about Because man, I went down a long memory road of how all things came to be. And the first thing that I want everyone in the boardroom to understand is that we have incredible... We are meek! You know how the meek will inherit the earth? That's not weak. We're meek in the way that we have power that we kind of keep under the hood.

26:10 You got a V8, you got huge blower that is... you don't see but then when you step on that thing it just... This is what this group is and I will remind everybody. that when we were told Apple will never do this, Apple will never do that. What happened? Apple did transcripts. Chapters became a thing the funding tag person tag location tag I know we're on the fringe but still We have incredible power just by doing what we do and not writing blogs about it

26:45 and announcing stuff, and meeting in secret. This is the most non-secretive group we've ever had And we don't give ourselves credit for it Now I just need to preface this by saying that I have been in the advertising business for a long time I've been out of it for a long time but I've been at radio television web podcasting I built a company, took it public way too early didn't get rich off of it did okay We had $450 million in revenue. I build big websites for Reebok, Budweiser, Continental Airlines, Tampons...Tampax actually! The website you'll visit more than once a month

27:28 I did all of these things. I've been on the buy side, I've been on the sell side at MTV. I brought Budweiser onto the channel which make no mistake was spring break was not because we thought it would be cool to do spring break No Budweiser! We said Budweiser everyone's drinking beer there will make sure it's Budweiser put big bottles on the stage and you'll bring that stupid dog will do the bud light thing with Spuds McKenzie...I've done all of that What we, what I'm going to propose here will piss everybody off except for the advertisers. And will actually have a huge benefit for podcasters. I am loosely calling it PCDC The Podcast Data Collective

28:14 It's a secret? It is not a secret. And the reason why it happened... Collective, we're collective. What is Podcasting 2.0? It's a bunch of misfits. We do bands every week Someone shows up with a banjo, we got guy playing spoons, a washboard. We've got five drummers blowing on the jugs... We've got 18 bass players and one guy shredding you know this like we're very weird group but Statistically, the relevance of the podcast app developers and this is a crazy situation in all media. It has always been the radio station, the TV station, the website

28:59 who get the advertising. They get a piece of the advertising and whether they share that with content producers or not is irrelevant, it's always gone through the transmission stations Now in podcasting that turned out a little bit differently The hosting companies who by the way are the ones actually making money Who do not support directly any podcast apps The podcast apps, it's very much like Dave and Adam. We've been doing this for six years haven't put a penny in my pocket love doing it love doing it for podcasting feel that it's important as the contribution to the world and we get enough value for value in so we can keep it going I don't think there are many app developers keeping Marco aside who are really living off of any of this stuff

29:49 So, there's a discrepancy and a break in the system. And where last week I said you need to cut us in on the advertising revenue have changed my thinking. Statistically the independent app ecosystem and John you'll have to jump in is probably about...I think we can claim eight to ten percent of overall listening apps. Is that a fair number? Yeah, that's a good ballpark. So I'm just going to keep it at 10 to keep it simple when you have a ten percent number in advertising Statistically that is more than enough To make very informed decisions about your advertising money if the data collective if we Collectively just like we did with transcripts Just like we did with chapters If we all start supporting

30:44 an aggregation of follows, plays per episode and completion rate by time. And we publish those per podcast I mean initially maybe a top 10 or whatever it is but we make these numbers available so anybody can any advertiser can go to podcastindex.org and i'm saying it should be us because i pretty sure people trust us The app developers, I know they trust Dave. They can trust me as far as they can throw me probably but my track record shows that I haven't screwed anybody in business

31:20 If we publish these, these would be real numbers. So you can actually see who if you look at a podcast and go well how about this episode? Well here's how many people listened to it by pressing play Here is the percentage of people who made it all the way through or listen to where your ad placement was Or whatever reason there could be many reasons to want to know how long somebody listened. If we publish that initially, publish it and make that available, we will become the de facto We will become the source of truth. Matthew 5, 6 came up for me today. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled I believe in this! I believe that if we publish these numbers from the independent apps at 10% of the ecosystem that a certain point we collectively can monetize that data not by selling ads

32:19 But we, the first customers probably should be the hosting companies. Okay hosting company you want to give real stats from 10% of the entire ecosystem which you can extrapolate to 100%, to your customers here you go. Data brokers do you want to sell this to the advertisers? To the buying companies whatever now you got to pay for that and And then we divide that as a collective amongst ourselves, prorated perhaps. I haven't even thought about that but just the opportunity to stick up a big middle finger to all of these secret groups and podcast industry and oh and IAB and all this nonsense that we've known for so long let's be able to give podcasters at least an actual number

33:10 of what is really happening with their podcast. We will be hated for this because it's going to ruin a lot of people's days when they find out that the numbers aren't what they've been telling the advertisers for 20 years But over time, it will make the industry honest. It will have real metrics so everybody can participate We have a checks and balances with op3.dev with Livewire because obviously so many plays how many downloads I mean we have everything we need to provide the real numbers for podcasters

33:49 Not advertisers, not networks. Podcasters who then can decide what they want to do with their show have real... and they should pay for it too by the way because this is coming from us It's time to get paid and time to deliver something of real value which I believe we can do as a collective My first take is that data is valuable and I'm all for getting that data out there. That would be great, uh...I think- I think that handles the half of what the AMP group was talking about and that is like plays how long you know how many people and how many you know how long they got in the episodes

34:35 I don't think that handles the exposure aspect of things. And that's the... Why not? Was this ad particularly listened to? Why not? But that could be, well because they do dynamic ads right and unless this would you know not everyone gets the same ad So just because in aggregate you have the histogram of how many things were played, if the same ad isn't in each episode it doesn't... I'm with you. But that's not a huge deal! Even plays—I'm with you on that—that would be such an eye-opening thing to lots of people. Let me tell where this came from. With Godcaster and by the way I think we should be the first app to join The Collective. With Godcaster

35:17 stats for our stations and for our ministry partners, this is what you call a customer in Christian business partner. We've had play share engagement etc recently we started doing stats from our app with that what does that program called Apollo base? What is it called Dave? App to Base. And the stuff that we get out of is fascinating and the path that people take, and anybody can put this into their app. Now we're starting to do you know just to see how long people are actually listening so the date I totally agree with you there's some

36:05 with dynamically inserted ads, which by the way is remnant crap inventory anyway. But okay maybe we can actually get those out of the business by creating something that's very valuable you know even now you can track in-host reads how many people actually listen to it We have so much power with just 10% of the listening apps out there. That's the point I'm trying to drive home. Yeah, absolutely. Would you be willing to prepay apps to do it? The pool will be very small, I would assume, to start out. Would you be willing to kind of seed that with... Because apps are going to need a little bit of incentive to do this and what they're sitting on is actually very valuable so the question would be

36:51 Before we start to see the pennies coming in, it would be nice to have some dollars there and some significant dollars right away to do the first list. The way I envision this is we first have to prove that we have the data and that the data is valuable. And it's a rug pull, basically. The rug pull is just like we're publishing all kinds of other stats here's some real top 10 lists here are some real data Maybe something you can query per pot, anything just to prime the pump and show the advertisers or anybody who's interested in this data. There are so many different reasons people want to know about this type of information I think we need to prime the pump and then we pull the rug and say okay now you have to pay for it

37:50 I want to share with everybody because if someone's going to front the money, then that person is going to be the guy who controls everything and runs all of the money. And I don't really want to be that guy." I would prefer that if we can get enough people interested with a couple API endpoints, you know. But there's...I'm not sure exactly how to do it technically. For example, why would PocketCast do this? They would be a good first target for this. I don't think Arvokast would be a good first target for this and between those two that's a huge chunk of that 10%. Yeah but i'm not looking at it that way That's not how we started with PodFriend

38:30 You know, then we went to Podverse. It took those guys a long time I'm not going to start with them. I love the idea of providing a good example so you know instead of a secret room what if we get together and figure out a way to represent this? So that people can look at it... People like to copy right? People like to copy something that's working. So yeah i'd love the idea of a few intrepid apps putting this out there and then showing We could even use start with our definitions, right? Start with the AMP definitions and then seeing what's possible. And then it gets the ball rolling a bit. In fact at this point if we can do this we can actually give you the definition of a podcast and the definition of a podcast becomes syndicated delivery of media files with precise consumption data for all stakeholders

39:27 Now that's a podcast. That's aiming high! But why not? Again, we were told for over a decade we couldn't do anything nothing would work you know can't change anything it's not true its bullcrap when we really started to do it and then we just did it by doing it you know by writing code and by publishing information people followed and then it's true. You need the apps to get it, some have some sort of incentive to do it but the apps have this information and if they do it then you basically have what you need. It just there is really... If you look at as a system they really don't have the incentive right now to do it So you got to sell everyone one by one

40:11 That's the way this always works. It has always been that way. It has always been about money, that is what I have tried to explain in the past it is not enough to write a standard or decode something you have to convince people to use it and that requires forming relationships talking to people in the open actually one thing it requires that is impossible to short circuit is to take a or impossible to take a shortcut too, is time. It takes it takes time to prove to people that you're serious and they are also not going anywhere like just staying power has an effect on other people that they become comfortable that you are not just somebody who's gonna pop up

40:59 have a proposal and disappear. And the value is in the data, that once we have the data and we have enough of it then we just say okay now you can buy this data from us! Then we all get a piece of that money and if we feel like it's not enough will say okay we need to raise the price I'm sorry we're not getting enough out of this. The customers are obvious hosting companies right off the bat. And they can take their aggregated hosting company data, their download data compare it to our play data and they can sell that to the ad. We don't want to be in the ad business we want to be in the data business which is what were in all we do is data about podcasts about metadata about where stuff lives where its at now we have this wonderful opportunity

41:50 that everybody has this. And I'm just asking for a few things, a few basics and we could always build it from there but... It sounds like you're describing what is what it sounds like you're describing? I want to make sure that I'm clear Is sort of a co-op Collective yes the coop yep okay where all the apps, the listening apps combine, you know and open source platforms. We all get together and essentially aggregate our data. We aggregate our data in a way that fits what groups like this AMP

42:35 We're giving them more. This 30 seconds of play is bullshit! Oh, I agree. It's baloney but we give them actual real stats that really tell the true story and then as a way the listening apps themselves get to share in the revenue of selling this data back to people who want it There's only I think that's a fantastic idea but the only thing that I think throws a wrench into the whole thing is The fact that people don't really want real data. Well, no see they want No, no People let's define people as I said advertisers they don't know to know this stuff isn't working. No, no

43:32 Advertisers really want to know. Ad networks don't want to know people selling ads Don't want to new want to know and who are the advertise but who are the advertisers though? See that's the thing is the advertisers are not the company writ large as a blog. I'm going back to my experience, advertisers want the right information what they always say in advertising is half of my money is working and just don't know which half. Advertisers...the companies! The actual mainly fast-moving consumer goods companies package good companies they want to know

44:17 If it's working and what they will find out is wow we've been overspending a lot. We will be hated which is kind of position I like, yes! I said that we will be hated by a lot of people but it will be the truth It will be the truth. So buying this from so the people buying this from The Collective the buying this data from the collective would be the advertiser directly, not the agency. No! That's why you have to make it public for a while You have to show that you have the truth and this is the proof That's why the index is a great place to do this because what are they going to do? Sue us? Who cares The advertisers will eventually say hey these guys say the numbers are this

45:05 And you're saying it's this. We would prefer to buy based on this and you know what might actually happen? The CPMs might actually go up Because there will be less inventory with more people fighting for it. That's interesting, yeah that's... I didn't think about it in those terms And this is the problem This is why these groups in secret are like well you know we have to have these metrics but man we can't let everybody really know that it's all bogus so lets make a play 30 seconds That's why they do that. Exactly, and that's why seeing the discussion in the open instead of in secret is super important because if you saw the discussion as it was playing out you would realize that what the thinking was we can't actually see real playthroughs exactly have to limit it to 30 seconds so that we can actually register something yes set up this

46:01 This person started the podcast, started listening to the podcast figured out there was 12 ads in a pre-roll and just stopped. And this is why I'm so happy that John is on this show because he has done the work out of the goodness of his heart and got some value for value help but he's really doing it because...I don't know It's cold on the farm And op3.dev is a fantastic, fantastic resource because now we have even more data to say well here's what we're seeing in the listening apps are 10% it's just 10%, actually on noagenda it's a bigger percentage because I've promoted them It's 10% versus what we're seeing on downloads so now you can... Now you advertiser can start and talk to your agency

45:05 And you're saying it's this. We would prefer to buy based on this and you know what might actually happen? The CPMs might actually go up Because there will be less inventory with more people fighting for it. That's interesting, yeah that's... I didn't think about it in those terms And this is the problem This is why these groups in secret are like well you know we have to have these metrics but man we can't let everybody really know that it's all bogus so lets make a play 30 seconds That's why they do that. Exactly, and that's why seeing the discussion in the open instead of in secret is super important because if you saw the discussion as it was playing out you would realize that what the thinking was we can't actually see real playthroughs exactly have to limit it to 30 seconds so that we can actually register something yes set up this

46:01 This person started the podcast, started listening to the podcast figured out there was 12 ads in a pre-roll and just stopped. And this is why I'm so happy that John is on this show because he has done the work out of the goodness of his heart and got some value for value help but he's really doing it because...I don't know It's cold on the farm And op3.dev is a fantastic, fantastic resource because now we have even more data to say well here's what we're seeing in the listening apps are 10% it's just 10%, actually on noagenda it's a bigger percentage because I've promoted them It's 10% versus what we're seeing on downloads so now you can... Now you advertiser can start and talk to your agency

46:53 You know, Dan Granger may have to downsize his office. I don't know but we're gonna get we're gonna get to the truth and it will be the most truthful honest delivery system All media because all measurement of all media is a lie. It's just the lie everybody agreed on But when we get down to this real truth, and it's it's the true data What was the promise of the Internet when everyone saw? Well you know these number don't go up The way we told people they would so these came up with stuff and we agreed on it We formed associations And we say yeah This is how you do it now that we can show people the truth and that

47:35 That will define what a podcast is. It's a big idea I got my mic I Really like the idea of comparing to legacy RSS downloads by the way, this is how they refer to downloads as legacies Legacy that's why I'm going to refer to them for now but it's you're always gonna need them because Like you said Adam It's useful to compare that to the actual listens, right? Because then everyone can start doing the math themselves. Yes. And like you said they are looking for again taking them at at face value. They're looking for accuracy, right? This is why DraftKings and BetterHelp are on the team. Yes! Exactly. They want to know if I put a dollar in what am i getting for that and I don't see that as necessarily dangerous or corrosive sort of incentive there. Not for Draftings

48:29 And if we're able to give them a better answer than other mediums, and I do agree Adam that that data is there. In fact it's already being collected Yeah It's just not being sent or centralized or in a central clearinghouse at the moment That could be really valuable Apple will never give it to us Spotify will never give it to us YouTube will never give it to us but we don't really need it That's the beauty we have the 10% you got 10%. I can extrapolate. Thank you, I can do math. I got a spreadsheet I know kind of what it is now it gets super interesting down the road And maybe some apps will follow Apple's cue and say well We have like fountain we have this type of person using our listening app and we feel that they are very valuable as

49:19 And there's something we want to do with the data that we have independently. But that only happens once everyone has seen the aggregate and understands, wow wait a minute this is the real stuff but that data after I'm saying it up front rug pull We're going to show this data. The first ever announced rug pull. We are pre-announcing the rug pull! We're gonna give it to you for free for X amount of time And then we're going to say, OK. Now you like it? Do you like it little girl do you like the lollipop now and now we're gonna take it away from you. Now you're gonna pay for it because app developers need to get paid podcast index needs to get paid John Spurlock's OP3 dot dev needs to get paid an I want to see Daniel J Lewis get paid. Everybody We have so many people in our ecosystem with so much power and we did we've been so successful on the fringe

50:13 with chapters and transcripts, etc. that now it's time! And this was the big revelation I've just been bouncing around all week trying to figure out where does it break? The only way it breaks is if we don't do it But if we do it, and the technical implementation is what will make it Dave. You know whether it's an I don't know maybe you hit an end point when someone hits play maybe upload a CSV file? I don't know what the answers are but follow numbers playing numbers and duration of listening those are the three big ones at an episode level We will have created

50:50 A true medium called podcasting, audio or video or PDFs for all I care. It doesn't matter but we will be able to drive the industry instead of a bunch of people sitting inside secret locations or in offices or in trade associations that's not what podcasting has ever been It's never been that way. Sam Sethi has already done it before we've ended this episode, so any spec that we develop is going to be applied to everyone else. Yeah So like... That is probably the difficult part that is gonna require a lot of input from everybody in the community Is how you do this Here's always the difficult part

51:40 making something like this not burdensome on the app itself because that's a lot of data and a lot of traffic. Well we've been watching it in real time with what Paul has been doing yeah is like I know that people, I know that these apps will be willing to share because they already have. I just simply have started asking people if Hey, can you give me the follower counts for all the podcasts in your database? I just want the feed URLs and how many people follow that. And Mitch gave it to me and Sam and all these like... People are just like yeah sure here we go right i know they're willing to share but in order to have it be like an actual pipeline

52:26 Or a workflow that doesn't put a lot on them. That's why the pod sage is here, you're going to go back and think about it, camping and you know like I got an idea now! Yes of course this is why your the pod sage And by the way I am so grateful for hosting companies who have supported podcast index I don't want to sound like hey thanks for supporting us now we are gonna charge you but we are You know? I suggest a two-stage rug pull. First, don't rug pull then rug pull. You do what Nathan says you say free during beta and then you rug pull that but the second rug pull is one time payment lifetime subscription then a year later you say oh yeah we didn't mean that you have to pay every month so I just want to do all of things

53:24 All the dark patterns people do to everybody else, we should do all that. But yeah data surcharge. Yeah data surcharge fee yes a bandwidth fee. Dave you probably don't remember podcast events? Do you it was a proposal I put together a long time ago. I remember that. I was about to mention it earlier on when we were talking It was actually pretty much meant to kind of address this exact problem and say how did we do it but But that was more in a decentralized way. That was assuming that apps would be sharing it for the benefit of podcasters, not the benefit of advertising and apps. So there's nothing that would prevent you all from sending that to a centralized let's call it a clearinghouse sort of endpoint, not every single podcast host. So that could be something that could be off-the-shelf

54:13 pretty much used to do this. My big allergic reaction, I think to this is that it's this whole centralization aspect and that kind of goes to the signing as well it's like as soon as we start really sort of integrating existing apps and hosts I tend to see that as a bad thing in general. And this would be a massive, like out-amping amp like we're all working together. It's a super amp! Giga amp... My first thought on how to do this and hot takes are usually terrible but my first thought on how to do this was simply it to make it decentralized Okay well let me just say

55:00 Let me lay it out this way. Centralization is okay as long as it comes after the fact, and what I mean by that is like Think about Podping. Podping is decentralized, but you have websites like tiles.podping.org that then re-centralize the data back into a feed or stream or some sort of product and all it... And I mean this is essentially what podcasting does. Podcasting is decentralized but then you have these listening apps that are they aggregate the decentralized data back into a single point of contact

55:39 So that is fine. And the first thing that popped into my head on how to do that was, why not broadcast it over PodPing? We define a standard of how the stats are to be laid out. Let's just for the sake of discussion let's say that it was something as simple as just a flat comma delimited CSV file. Okay, I'm not proposing that I'm just saying let's do it let's just keep that in your head as some as the format we might we could work with As long as we specify the columns and the exact data that them way is supposed to be laid out The apps themselves Could produce a file that fits that spec

56:29 And then they could just simply pod ping out from time to time once an hour, once a day. Who knows? They could pod ping out a URL where that data is publicly downloadable. Here's the only problem I have with that But then everybody would just grab it and we couldn't charge for it Exactly This so I'm going against everything that I've ever stood for really in podcasting However, I'm doing it to advance podcasting. And what do I mean by that? Oh, I love when I do that. Why should have said why here's why yes please question yourself there's already a huge amount of trust in podcast index as entire businesses that depend on podcasts index being around several apps could not live without it so there's a trust and I think we've earned that trust and and we deserve that trust

57:28 everything around us, all the things we complain about involve money. Now I'm not interested in advertising. I am interested in not just helping the apps that have been Frankly struggling for years or decades just to kind of keep the new version going update with the app store etc. Now I need a server but also to have the ecosystem grow with more apps Because, hey I can actually participate in the data collective and alright i'm a small app so maybe I get five dollars a month or five dollars a week or whatever it is. But now there's your incentive

58:16 There has to be an incentive and it has to be financial. And we will outstrip the demand, outstrip the... Look at Apple is already 30% of my listeners use Apple that's a lot less than it was now The other 30 percent is probably Spotify but I have 7% Podverse I've got 3 or 4 % Fountain You know, so this is an ecosystem that will grow but we're not getting into the ad business. Lots of people want to know how their podcast is doing just how's my podcast doing? We got this many downloads what does that mean well now the hosting company can say for you know they charge 20 bucks or maybe they have to pay 50 cents or 25 cents a user into The Collective This is exactly what's going on! This is exactly whats happening with your podcasts

59:14 You see, it starts to benefit everybody. Why the sigh? Because... It's not the tech of this that makes me nervous. It's the administrative overhead of having to like accept money and then make payouts to people and all kinds stuff like that. But we have- We don't have any intern house. No but wait! That's why we have the rug pull timeline We have plenty of time. First, we're not there yet! The first thing we have to do is prove that we have the data and that data is valuable. That comes from publishing that data continuously

1:00:01 it being a thing, people going to look at it. Podcasters saying well here's what I'm seeing here is what I've got once we have that we may decide at the end of the road we're gonna do something else! We all want a chocolate bar...I don't care but we have to show The so-called industry that we as a collective, we have the true data and you're full of shit. And this is the real stuff. So stop meeting in secret! This is what podcasting is and a podcast IS a syndicated I had that line written down. Syndicated delivery of media files with precise consumption data for all stakeholders, everything else is not a podcast because here's your proof these are podcasts can be video can be HLS video can be downloads i don't care what it is

1:00:53 Is there going to be a rug pull countdown timer on the website? Yes, definitely. On Times Square! Like the debt clock... yes. On the Flatiron building okay yeah If we do that if we do part A Part B will come naturally and so I'm not worried about that part at all And once we're all, once we've all figured it out and there may be five other ideas of what to do with this data but at least it'll be this group. My, my... Oh that's not a fear. Because we're all gonna get stomped out and rubbed out by the heel of the podcast industrial complex over time if we don't do something like this. My expectation

1:01:47 If this is truly successful and this data is published for all to see, and the extrapolations are made my expectation is that people would immediately see how much the advertising narrative is built on just complete fabrication. Absolutely! And the numbers will expose that very clearly I disagree with that only because they're seeing this today, Dave. So like the stats you get from Apple are incredibly detailed and the stuff...I don't know if you've seen a bumper dashboard and that sort of thing? There's companies that will scrape

1:02:33 for a particular show that go out to Apple, they'll go out to Spotify, they'll go out to YouTube and they will present it all. So they're actually seeing this today, bad news or whatever you want to call it and there's... This is basically Mr Meister's job as the kind of educate people as to this. So I don't think it would be much of a shock and, again, I think they would love this information. They would love more of it and we could be good at... This is a big idea but I think it could serve as an example. And just like with the namespace, the shape of the data I think is probably the number one thing. What are we capturing? What do you think is valuable? And what is valuable not only

1:03:17 the apps, but it's really like what is valuable to the stakeholders? I think a lot of this would be to talk to folks in the game right in the advertising game and say like would this be useful if we did this. And that's part of the open discussion I think that you have to talk about We need Dan Granger on this show, which I'm sure he'll come on Dave. But to finally be able to define what a podcast is... we just added a little bit to it But we define it, not these other guys. Personally I think the podcast definition is a little overreach. I don't think you have to send stuff to PodcastIndex.org to be called a podcast. I'm not saying that!

1:04:04 I think holding up podcasting as a great way, podcasting the term being known as a great way to get accurate stats on how things are just like kind of digital is. I think that would be great and it's sort of like it's turning the weakness that a lot of folks see in podcasting right now which is the coordination and chaos into advantage. It kinda flips the narrative Here's the great thing John...it's not exclusive to us If someone comes along and they have a better way of doing stuff with that data, then all the apps can send that data to them. Yeah totally! And Apple could just look at what they do... They pay attention to all this stuff they just don't contribute and if they see hey this is working you know who knows? They might participate as well or participate in something similar and that's why the shape of the data is probably the most important thing

1:04:59 So it's not exclusive to us, but I think it would move pod. I'm passionate about podcasting and if and I'm passionate about being on RSS but I specifically say in my definition syndicated delivery so it could be something else. I hope it never is but it could be and it doesn't have to be as aggregating it. Um, I'd like it to be but doesn't have to be If we do a better job. I mean, it's still completely like Podcast Index itself We have to go to the GitHub, go build your own. Go ahead and I think everything is open source at this point. Go build your own. I was in there just today looking at Dave's code Yeah, go ahead, go build your own podcast index And some people don't want to do that But i think it It is The perfect time

1:05:46 When I see these types of groups and they got the advertiser in there, yeah. And DraftKings and BetterHelp... They spend a lot of money so they want to know what they're spending their money on that's why they are in there So if we say hey here is the real numbers I think will be loved by advertisers but also loved by speaking bureaus people who just want exposure for their book or whatever it is And then if you want, hey break it down by app. Hey turns out I've got a huge following on Podverse Let me go talk to Mitch over there and what can i do Mitch? Can we do some business here We started out with podcasting...I happen to have been there When it was this..hey man its all open,we all love each other and we got fucked! I'm sorry that just slipped out.We really did Everybody made money around us

1:06:44 And I was gonna come in here and be optimistic. I think podcasting is like rocking it right now We have a video solution that works great everything still in the open this is amazing Podcast technology is rockin because there's people they care yeah, no I'm super positive. Um in fact. I am amped oh, I'm amped up Because this is an opportunity that I see this like, wow. This is once in a lifetime We've proven that we can do stuff we've proven we can move mountains. We can change the big boys by just doing it So why don't we do it? That's my pitch

1:07:24 I'm gonna clap. From Spurlock, I take that as a huge compliment! Very big idea, love big ideas. Thank you. Is there enough energy to even talk about HTTP signing requests anymore? I'm exhausted... PCDC? We got to work on the name though. Well, yeah... That's a small thing Yeah I didn't have time for acronyms I just like... Podcast Plus! Podcast Data Collective Plus plus no it was going to be two pluses So yeah i'm kind of wiped out too but if you want to talk about anything else I'm good I basically just spewed my- blew my wad that I've been holding up for an entire week

1:08:13 I literally have no energy for HTTP signing discussion at this point. It's a bad idea, let's not do it! That clearly seems to be the sentiment. I was actually interested to see that Mr. Overcast sort of not only made one like very long contribution, but two. And this is not something that normally happens though I think we might have hit a nerve there. What contributions? Just to the discussion yeah To the open discussion Well i mean so I guess I'll throw in my thought See where do I start it? Here's my concern let me just try

1:09:07 throw dirt on my idea. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is only HTTP signing it's topic shit they just be... I think that the issue arose from a very- I know how it arose because I talked to Tom about it The desire for better identification for download agents had its origin in HLS video because abuse of HLS video at those data sizes is extremely expensive. And so let me... Now does Buzzsprout have any HLS video out there at the moment? Yeah, they do. They support it. Not in feed though. Well I don't know. They're supporting Apple spec but

1:10:09 But they are definitely serving HLS video. Right, but it's not in Featured. I think the... No you're right it is getting abused because people are scraping the HLS stream out of the podcast.apple.com website and even only using the private API for distribution, it's already getting abused. And that's the concern." And so here let me just lay out my what seems like a devil's advocate argument at this point because what I want to do is not care about HTTP signing. I don't want to have...

1:10:50 That's not the thing I want to be, like the hill I want to die on. Well he titled it well! It's more client identification right? Like do we want to add stronger client identification to podcasting? Right but... But I see their concerns and I think they are identifying a problem that is going to become a big problem in HTTP signing May not be what everybody wants to do and that's fine. I'm completely fine with whatever the group decides That's why we discuss things in the open but video downloads are large expensive things and it's just different than audio like the people Abuse, I agree it's important for that very reason by the way

1:11:47 And I want to talk about this only as it involves HLS video. But, like...I don't think anybody has ever proposed that audio be part of this traditional MP3 downloaded audio podcast. So if we're talking about only HLS video then I don't see there having to be any sort of secret meeting or like Zoom call in order to get your data trusted. To me, what this is is if you send a request for HLS media to our CDN we would require you to sign the request and then at some point in the future we determine that you are an abusive bot

1:12:37 we will stop respecting your requests. But it would not be blocked and then you have to contact us to get access, it would be everyone immediately has access by default It would default open and then it would only close access when there was an abuse that happened To me thats how I understood his proposal That seemed reasonable to me. Tell me how that's not reasonable So I thought actually, I thought you're gonna have Tom on the show. I thought that would've been great But um...I think it is reasonable and in fact it would make my life a lot easier as well Uh..I spend probably way more time than I should spend every day battling the same sort of thing with OP3 Now I don't block requests

1:13:37 But I do make sure that requests that say they're from Overcast, but then are hammering the site a thousand times. Like I have to exclude those right? And it's always a new sort of challenge every day out there. There's new bots, there's new things pretending to be other things because the user agent in HTTP is not should never have been and is not a good reliable signal of who's calling right in HTTP. In HTTP you do that with authorization header You don't do that with user-agent header But the question comes in, like do we want to introduce...should we filter podcast media now? So not that we're not talking about client stats but the media that has always been open in podcast feeds. Do we now want to

1:14:21 add an additional layer of who's, who are we going to send this media versus what are they doing? And I think Buzzsprout does this today and all these other companies. What they do today is they look at requests coming in right and they make their application level firewalls more complex over time. And to me, there's no real... It is for audio today because it's actually similar to video. In fact the way HLS works, HLS is not one massive file right? It's like six different encodings but six second chunks so with HLS it's actually far easier to filter on the server side and detect abuse quicker

1:15:05 I actually happen to, I've been working with some folks and if I'm actually work on an OP3 integration with HLS you can see a lot more but some of the patterns are still exactly the same right? There are a lot of auto downloads especially in audio right so those look like someone's just ripping through the video. So you can't really trap those um and then the videos that are kind of live our human scale right so you can see six seconds chunks requested about every six seconds. Those are easy, it's really we're talking about subset of a subset of requests that give me all the variants right over and over and over and you know how long it takes to rack up a appreciable bandwidth bill off of several six second chunks? It's a long time so I mean it's more of an abstraction breakage. I don't think we should be in the business of filtering like if

1:16:00 Like if a podcast is putting data out to the media, out to the world. To me I don't think we should be discriminating based on the caller and yes that even includes bots because one man's bot is another man's app right so let's say someone uses Claude to create their own podcast app right who knows what they're going to use as a user agent who knows what they're gonna have as a back end it's really not something I think that would be good to go down in general and In the short term, it would help particularly on the server aspect of things. The PSP is mainly made up of hosting companies and this is why I would love Marco to participate in that a little bit more. They'd love to have him but that would create some balance in the force but no one's really speaking for the app side of things and innovation side on the client aspect of things. It's dangerous just sort

1:16:55 view every media fetch, yes including video as something that can only happen between known entities. And let's be clear like this would be used to filter requests right? Rather than slow them down or whether to block them and I do have a bit of information for my position like looking at all the podcasts that are you know released in the world or whatever There is a list of podcast companies that block more than others and try to do this more aggressively than others. Buzzsprout is at the top of that list, so they block more aggressively than any other company. So when I saw that Tom was involved with this, I wasn't necessarily that surprised.

1:17:42 would be Red Circle. And then there's a huge drop-off, like basically no one blocks media requests and to me that's a good thing I don't know if you saw part of Marco's comment was he... Basically Marco gets blamed when things get blocked right? Of course! So Buzzsprout is never blocked This is an app problem right? And to me I think we should basically do as much work as possible to make app lives easier because that's where really the current problem that we have in podcasting is Having to do more work, having to do more work for John. Having them do more work for Tom is a price I think we need to pay in smart kind of server filtering instead of adding more integration between who's calling and the media itself. What do you mean by smart? That's my basic argument. What do you mean by smart server filtering?

1:18:31 So every company now, when requests come in they get the logs. Old school is you look at the logs after the fact and then everyday they go in and tweak either by IP or user agent and IP so this used to be a very slow process And now basically think of it as this process speeding up so that it can almost happen during the day right? They see something happening right now they can quickly turn that one off or slow it down If it were me, I would kind of like slow these requests down. Right? Because that's one thing to sort of make sure that this is so if someone sits there and hits download on a movie and it takes an appreciable amount of time to download that's fine for human but that would really squash any sort of dumb transcription bot that just kinda doing things over and over. Also, transcription bots are not gonna read movies but

1:19:25 I think you're saying tar pitting, you're saying tar pitting instead of blocking. I wouldn't even if targeting means slow down yeah i wouldn't necessarily serve weird videos for abuse. I would actually just slow it down so that human scale in the worst right? If we do determine that this looks like something that's abusive and yes honestly I know that that's difficult but maybe we could come up with common server libraries or even third-party services You know, something like an HLS shield right where if you don't want to do this work yourself. You can just put something in front of it and that will do the work for you so are saying that good again? No sorry go ahead I talked about all right So are you saying that

1:20:07 Are you saying that you advocate for a hosting company to never block any media download for any reason? I think yes. I think that is something that podcasting has been for 20 years and i think thats the dark road to go down, we should block requests that we don't, we should be innovating in how to serve media as much as possible to everyone. I don't think unless it's obviously an abuse and that can be detected by use not by caller um i think we should try as hard as we can to serve uh serve media without discrimination yes but it's not about but it's not again i will make another disclaimer because people tend to forget things

1:20:52 I'm giving my best attempt to argue for this with everything I've got just so that we can have the best debate possible about whether or not to even spend our time on something like this. But it's not about effort, to me it's about cost. If somebody, and I can tell you that this has happened. If somebody's bot goes wild and downloads terabytes of data... I don't see how we can say that a hosting company should just sit back

1:21:45 And just accept that and just pay that bill when it's clearly not a person who is one like what the hosting company, the sort of the contract. The hosting companies have with the podcasting ecosystem is they're going to serve their customer, the creator And by doing so, they also facilitate the media delivery from the creator to the listener. When it's clear that the listener is no longer part of this transaction... then there's no more contractual obligation there to the hosting company. And I think that this has a problem for decentralization also, because take a hosting company like Pinecast it's a decent sized hosting company independent Matt Basta is an independent hosting company he seems to do pretty well He's got...I don't know how many podcasts he delivers at this point but it's I don't know if a few thousand at least

1:22:50 And at the scale of HLS abuse that I've heard of so far, I don't think that Pinecast could even do HLS unless they did it in blocking. There's a lot of fear coming into this It takes a very long time to download terabytes and terabytes of HLS segments. It's happening, John. I can give you the people to talk to it is happening. Yeah but i just think that it can be detected and should be detected. You can download um terabytes of audio in the same way what does

1:23:30 what does Pinecast do? Or even a better argument is, what does someone like James Cridland do?" So he hosts his own show. Let's say he wanted to start doing HLS. He probably is not going to go and have a dynamic HLS filter on his side so that's probably... But the question is can this abuse be combated without making the media effectively private. And that's, I would hope with it we sort of exhaust we use all of our kind of innovation that we have in the group to kind of look at that specifically you know take Flycast right so fly cast is a great new company and this is the awesome thing about podcasting right some they just came out of nowhere and all of a sudden they're the producer basically the highest quality HLS videos out there in open podcasting today right? So they publish more variants

1:24:23 higher quality variants in more podcast episodes using alternate enclosure than any of the existing providers. And they are somehow able to do this." So I think it's, you know... Obviously, I'm just one person and it's just my opinion but I think this should be something that hosting companies are compared against each other with right? Like how open can we make our media because ultimately it's going to come down to the apps. You know someone is gonna say, in this app because it's on this host, and then we get to this matrix of app server. But why would that happen? That is what I'm saying but why would that happen? See like you were... What you're describing is a closed ecosystem and that's not what this proposal is. This proposal is not for closing the ecosystem. This proposal is for adding a verification metric where if somebody spoofs your user agent

1:25:18 The CDN can tell that that's not you and they can block the correct Entity that is abusing and not you like what Marco was describing with overcast Was middlemen that sit in between and say it's something like ad blockers and or or lousy redirects. Or VPN's a lot is filtered out. Yes, but none of that applies to HTTP signing requests None of those things are factors there and what you're saying to me already though is that

1:25:57 Buzzsprout is already blocking and Red Circle. They're already blocking abusive traffic, but that does not show up in normal client app download. We're not seeing rampant failures of downloads for major podcast listening apps from Buzzsprout and Red Circle. So they're doing this blocking intelligently already, even with the limited metric... Even with the limited ability to do identification that they already have This would allow them to do it even more intelligently And again only for HLS video which Overcast does not support video anyway so this would not even be part of the equation for that app

1:26:45 I'm sure he'd like to, right? And if there are videos in the feed that you would definitely take a look at that. I don't think we should use Overcast necessarily as I mean, even though he was very kind of like adamant on this point. We should basically do this for him necessarily but i think it's sort of a dangerous to me... if you view the abstraction line where all the apps are on top of the line and all the hosting companies are below the line, it's sort of this new kind of the hand sneaking over back and forth and saying like, okay so we know this. And again Tom's a great guy like Buzzsprout is amazing company that's why it sort of... honestly that's why I chose to add to that particular thread whereas you know i don't necessarily love getting into all the github threads but I think it's important because it is a narrowly good idea for certain

1:27:38 players in the space, right? Where it's not necessarily good long-term. What if Spotify said tomorrow we're coming out with something called verified apps where if you want to fetch audio from Megaphone or Anchor We're going to have you, we're going to do a signed cryptographic thing and then you can register with us. You know? We're not going to block you based off of it." But that's not the p- That was never the proposal! There was never registration involved there was never any sort of coordination It was purely sign it And it's like basically this is, uh, this request came from someone that owns this domain name. Basically it was what the public key does or this public key which is more signal right? So I totally see and again, I can argue the other side as good as Tom It would help OP3 because I could say hey these are verified Apple downloads and these are non-verified Apple downloads Again in the fictional world where Apple would do this

1:28:41 It doesn't that well actually that's probably important if I'm someone that's doing This abuse. Do you think it was intentional the HLS abuse that you're talking about Dave or was it unintentional? um, I think that it is most my just Of course like a bug there's no way to prove any of this Yeah But I think most of the abuse just from what I see on the index side, most of the abuse comes from carelessness. Right. Mainly stuff on VibeCoding. And they're going to continue to use browser user agents right?

1:29:21 Oh, time out. Is it dinner time? I am just alerting the pod sage that we are at 203 and 129 on the counter so it's up to you. I'm happy to sit here... It is my fault! I shouldn't have gotten into this conversation because this is actually a very long conversation. I think it goes to like what podcasting almost is and if media should be always public versus not for video and audio but So that's my fault No, it's no one's fault Dave has a job he has to get back too I think the issue- What do you think, Adam? You invented podcasting. Oh, what someone asked me my opinion! What?! Should the media that it's always been readily available should the media be free for any caller regardless if they're faking their user agent or not But that's not a fair characterization. I do not care

1:30:16 if this proposal goes forward or if it dies today. I really ultimately do not care because the community gets to have its way, that's the way this thing works but I do deeply care about whether or not it is fairly characterized so that we're all agreeing that were arguing for the same thing And it's not, and the way you described it is not accurate. But there is no closing of the ecosystem. What you're seeing and describing is a potential blocking of valid traffic in the future. And that's not a technical thing. That is a behavioral thing that may or may not happen

1:31:09 I am sure it may or may not happen. I'm just curious what his thoughts are on it My thoughts are, I would like personally... obviously I feel that from the beginning It's just been open and free access and do whatever I know that video is an expensive data hog And people need to pay for it And that includes bot stuff. However, I would personally appreciate being able to identify as something valid and tell a company that has blocked something from me this is valid and this is why now if they decide to block me Okay There's nothing I can do about it But they're probably gonna block me anyway because they don't know who I am and I've had this very issue with stuff I've been doing for Godcaster

1:32:02 And it would be if there's a technical way to identify and say, hey I'm signing this request and this is me. And here's what i'm doing...and for them to say okay why are you? Why is it so much or whatever that may alert me to something. That would totally something that I could mess up and I have I think it would benefit. So to have, but by the same token you know it's like The problem is I use Linode instances, they're blocked by everybody. Yeah yeah and but you know i need to use a linode instance because I can't just have everything running on my systems at home so that's why I'd like to be able to sign it and say this is me and here's what I'm doing and here's why and if there's something you're seeing that is out of... we're all pretty well where think we're all good people in general certainly that system level

1:32:58 Someone says hey, man. You're like you're downloading 50 copies of this file every minute Oh crap Thank you. You know I Don't see why someone would block me just because you know I'm doing something different But if there's an abuse say it's easy way to See that who that is and how to get in touch with me does that make sense? I can see how So I just know the way I behave with API because like you, John. I'm fighting bot traffic on a daily basis and what I see often is I'll see traffic that becomes abusive

1:33:39 Suddenly there's just some new user agent that pops up out of nowhere and just starts hammering everything we have. Have you seen the ones that actually apologize in the user agent? They're like, if this is causing you trouble underscore I'm sorry. No! There must be some code that does this because I see a bunch of these every day And so... The only way I know how to handle that traffic is is to rate limit it by hand and start giving them a 429 because I don't know who this thing is. It'll be some vague user agent coming from, you know an Asian CDN. I have no idea what this is. It could just be a mistake in their code or they didn't read the terms of service or who knows? And so all I know how to do is get their attention, I have to 429 them

1:34:36 and get them, and that will get their attention because suddenly their thing fails. And then they... Most of the time I never hear another peep from it. It just... The traffic disappears in the name. Well because they changed their user. Yeah well no but I never see the same behavior again. It just goes away but occasionally I'll 429 somebody and i'll get an email say hey I can't access the index anymore and I will go out work with him and tell them what they were doing, and they're like oh we didn't know there was a mistake. This very thing happened with the podcast app

1:35:15 that was backfilling transcripts. And I was like, no you can't scrape every episode in the end, you can't scrape 150 million episodes. Just please... I will give you a better way let's work together because it's going to degrade the platform for everybody else who also needs it and so like So what I see with something like signing is the ability for somebody like a bus sprout or red circle or somebody like that

1:35:53 to identify, to go ahead and say okay look this is Overcast. This is his public key. This is Podverse's public key. This is Fountain's public key I know these guys and if they have a spike in downloads I can go ahead and whitelist them ahead of time so that they never get blocked And so that they, I can if I see in a something that looks like a really strange change in traffic patterns. Instead of blocking them, I can reach out to them and say hey here's something that is going on just like I had to do with Fountain and Oscar ended up

1:36:37 identifying a problem where they were getting bot abused on their end and that abuse was flowing through to the podcast index API. And Oscar was very thankful that I gave him that information so he could fix the problem on his end. We've identified a lot of things like in Apple podcasts, there have been bugs in the past and those show up immediately in all these systems. Yeah yeah yeah... And then um..and that's why I wonder if the HLS thing is also a bug? In um Overcast, they continue to have a redownloading bug. So you'll see a lot of the overcast share go up sort of artificially in the last few months and then people are starting to realize this so that's a case where like you wouldn't want to block Overcast ever really but it's a good way to say like oh we think its Overcast and whether its signed or not I mean... You can tell an Overcast user agent right? And yeah I don't think signing is necessarily required to do this Just so you know John

1:37:33 My robot went to go get the Pod News Weekly Review, and as all robots do they just decide to do it differently today. And it said oh I got blocked but the overcast user agent worked literally came out of cloud code And I think actually James does a very good job. He's a bit grumpy on this week's episode, but he does a lot of traveling. Like I think he does a very good job of laying out why this is important and really it's more about stronger client identification right? That's really what this is. It's like who is calling who's fetching the media in this case because that's I think the strongest argument and I do agree that

1:38:15 the semantics of whether it's using signing that looks like Mastodon or something else. And there is a lot of prior art here because websites are being sort of pulled excessively by bots and there's a similarity there. So I don't know that a new solution isn't necessarily even needed here, we might just want to piggyback on one of those whether or not...I think it's more of a- i'm sort of not looking at it from the technical side, I'm looking at is this a good idea? And so everyone just needs to be hey is this a good idea not only for all the hosting companies which it would be a good idea for But also the apps and also the services that can't speak for themselves because they're not listening to the podcast. They lose. Yeah, well I know that one of a very valuable website to me um that i used it was an enthusiast website for 70s model Ford trucks

1:39:11 incredible resource that had every technical diagram and detail and owners manuals, forums. It's basically just been completely knocked offline by AI scrapers. It finally just bit the dust this week it has been limping along but it gets hammered all the time because they are getting constantly crawled and ingested and they don't have the technical expertise to be able to deal with that And so I know that this new era we're in with a, because I see the same thing that you did, that Adam does. I see Claude Code when I use it sometimes, I see it just morphing its user agent to impersonate other stuff until finally something works and so like...I guess I've made the best argument I can for it

1:40:01 And I don't think it'll go any further than it already has. I think this is a complete wash and it's just going to die on the vine, but at least we had the discussion and we can actually make a decision. It may become something in the future that we hold into the side and say... At some point in the future if the ecosystem becomes so threatened by malicious traffic or impersonated traffic that we do have to blow the dust off this thing and actually do something. And I go back to the apps, we don't often hear from the larger apps right there really would be impacted by this and if you make it useful for them to do and they see the value in it then I think that's something that we can now say OK both sides agree on this makes a lot of sense

1:40:51 Yeah, and I think you're right about that. And that's why it was...I was very sensitive to making sure that we were actually talking about the real thing and not just talking about fears of things because if we're just talking about being scared about something this sounds like it might be a problem, I don't think that actually communicates the real benefit of the thing You know, I just want everybody to be actually talking about the reality and not the fear. I really need to stop this... Not because of... I had a rebutt to that but i'll stop Go! No please rebutt me Well I think a lot is based on fear now right? Like I think um

1:41:40 We haven't seen a lot of visual sub use yet. And a lot of it is, I've... Me as a hosting company right? I have a model that is great right? I have a margin that makes me very good living and I can afford multiple people alright and like we figured this formula out. I pay this much for bandwidth and charge my customers this. Video throws a wrench into that right? The question is, even before it happens—even before a lot of people had their implementations—I've heard a lot of people saying, oh we can't. It's very interesting what will other people do? What could we afford to do and that sort of thing. I think there are companies that don't filter today. In fact no one really does

1:42:28 And I just think we should be in the position of always saying, like let's get this out there as open as possible and not... wait to see what happens. Wait to see actual abuse coming in from crawlers. I doubt there are crawlers that even parse HLS right? There's very few and whether they know how to go to the podcast feed, go to the alternate enclosure and then download something that would even be noticeable which again we're talking about the video segments I'm not sure that's the case, right? And let's get the data we have out in the open and know what we're tackling instead of kind of a fear of something that yes videos are a lot larger but lets take a look at what is actually happening before we start to make any decisions. Again it goes to fear. Yeah i think thats very fair. I am afraid Dave will be late for his day job. Oh sorry Dave! I am very feared of this

1:43:21 Okay, now I think that's a good way to end it John and maybe the best way to move forward if somebody If if the hosting companies really think this is something valuable Is for them to put out some data some numbers that Detail the abuse so that we can all sort of appreciate the scale and then make appropriate decisions Yeah, I think I think that's a good way to end it. Yep Okay, do we have time to thank some people Dave? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Absolutely What is this is a free Friday for you? Yeah, I don't have to go back to the oh Okay if I'd known that it would let you yammer on for another 15 minutes about all this stuff That's not that's good. I needed wait. I think everything that needed to be said was said

1:44:09 Do you feel that way, John? I'm like Dave was saying. Yeah what's cool is that this is being done in the open! I would invite everyone to go to the GitHub thread and take a look. Excuse me it's Chatham House Rules You can't talk about this after the podcast is over Well that's something...I actually don't know maybe I'm too cynical but those threads one of the audiences I feel like now every time I put something into the Github thread The audience is current and future Claude's right It's like I want to make sure This is on the record, right? This argument is out there. Not for necessarily people that are reading it now but like hey at the time some people were thinking about this and then that gets ingested as part of the summary I can confirm The robot definitely can read GitHub and make decisions I can confirm that because its just updated mine so there we go And if you take a look at the app You'll see the feedback from the hosting side Is a lot different than the feedback from the app side No kidding! And I think that means something

1:45:05 We want to thank Salty Crayon for his row of ducks. 2222, he says howdy Dave and Adam I was considering stopping altogether until all the positive and optimistic tech info was brought to this meeting by Adam in regards to the index in the future of P2.0 This gave me a recharge thanks Dave and Adam well you're welcome happy to hear that 1111 from Martin Lindeskog he says today This is coming in from true fans. I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member. Groucho Marx, yes indeed! 1776 from Martin Lidde Kogue. I'm happy to join Adam's Accord today. I asked the guy on LinkedIn if he knew about podcasting initiative... What is the podcasting initiative? He worked for Klang AI. I will test out the transcript service for forthcoming podcasts about the Orisund region. That's the greater Copenhagen region we'll talk both in Danish and Swedish okay

1:46:00 And he sends a 1701. He's funding the show today, testing testing go podcasting Starship Boostergram of 1701 Let's see, we got 3330 from NAMillennial from Fountain. Thank you for the podcast index API Claude complimented its design I'm sure it's great hashtag by coding Mike Newman 17776 boosting from the Bitcoin Valley stay frosty my friends and with that I hit the delimiter I've got a boostergram that i missed from Martin Lindeskog last week. Did I miss it too? I think so because he sent it to me in email, he said Dave yes this is 92 52 Satoshis He said uh Dave yes had a ball with Mike Newman co-listening and chatting maybe I should drink some moonshine or whiskey next time yeah It turns out that a kinesiologist in Gothenburg

1:47:01 is also a whiskey collector. Maybe I will get him starting, uh, starting a podcast on whisky with the twist going back to Mike. I'm happy to be on the leaderboard for the Mike Newman show. I've listened to Oh, this he said, I've listened to the podcast for three hours 37 minutes and paid 92 52 Satoshi's cheers. Okay. So I think that was some streams. Yeah. Streaming streaming sets money. Yeah. Um, Got some more, let's see. We got some PayPals. We got Mark Van Patten. MVP! Thank you, MVP. He is at the end of show mixes for no agenda. He said I listened to the Adam Accord segment with a stupid smirk on my face. Not because it was stupid but because you guys were just nailing it V4V baby. Yeah yeah. Let's see we've got Cameron Rose 25 bucks thank You Cameron. Ralph Estep

1:47:57 $50. Thank you, Ralph. Appreciate you Martin Lindescoe there's one buck from Martin Brendan Mulligan and pod page 25 bucks. Thank You Brendan Joseph Morocco five dollars Oh look it's Oscar Mary two hundred dollars Thank you thank you I think that is yes that's it for the PayPal's And we do have some booster, we did have one booster ground. One! In addition to what you read. Yeah? Uh-huh. And that's CSB 25000 sats. Nice. Through Fountain he says

1:48:38 Howdy, Dave and Adam. Today I'd like to recommend a podcast called No Agenda where Adam Curry is chatting with half Polish half Czech guy called Dvorak. Dvorak's mom literally had a Polish passport so he could get a Polish passport too if only he wanted 25% ancestry is enough He has 50%. Fun fact many years ago Dvorak gave me an interview for my now discontinued podcast But you two are stonewalling me. Shame on you! Yo, CSBA Arch Wizard! Stonewalling? Yes... I gotta do that. I gotta do that! I got to-I gotta do it. Um.. I'm just trying to clear the decks Wow what a board meeting i'm wiped

1:49:22 Yeah, it was wild in here. There's no AC! Do you guys do this every week? No AC? This is crazy. Well my studio is AC supplied but quiet the way it should be. Hey John thank you so much for being here today man we really appreciate it and thank you for what you do with op3.dev and just all the contributions It's really appreciated And I hope we can keep The Data Collective moving forward Yeah, I like the idea. You need a fancy marketing site where the background moves around as you move the mouse cursor around just like the other course. Did you notice that? No! We're not going to do any of that but we're just gonna get it going one way or another but ultimately these things are up to Dave

1:50:06 No pressure. I think it's a very, very interesting idea and I like the idea of building it and getting it out there and that will attract sort of like hey this is really interesting at least as an example that other people can take a look at so I really liked the idea. I wouldn't mind if you built it That'd be fine for me too. No, I'm serious! It doesn't have to all be Dave... that was just my initial thought. Like oh it makes sense here we are as i said this comes down to trust a lot of these apps would fall apart if we didn't exist so yeah

1:50:43 Yeah, let's keep thinking about it. It's a very interesting idea all right Dave my brother Thank you so much man as always good to catch up with you yeah Good to catch up with you've had two great ideas into we into weeks in a row You know yeah? I know what it is testosterone testosterone Hey boardroom thank you for being here We'll be back Friday with more of your podcasting 2.0 You have been listening to Podcasting 2.0 Visit podcastindex.org for more information Go podcasting! We, as a collective we have the true data and you're full of shit