Episode 265: Jihobbyist

00:00 Podcasting 2.0 for July 17th, 2026 Episode 265 G Hobbyist Oh yeah! We exist Okay so we took a couple weeks off What can I tell you? We're human Hello everybody Welcome to the official board meeting of Podcasting 2.0 This is where it all goes down Everything is discussed All cards on the table And we are the only board room that doesn't blame China For election interference I'm Adam Curry here in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and in Alabama, the man who wrote an online tool used by evil AI bots. Say hello to my friend on the other end! The one, the only Mr. James... James Jones!

00:47 Oh those pipes. You have a lot of wind in those lungs. Yes, thank God an online tool and online if you wrote an online tool baby yes that was borderline insulting online tool I think the person who wrote that is an online tool. You know, so I think I posted gel man amnesia. Amnesia? For those of you who don't know whenever you read something in a publication that you know everything about and it's absolutely incorrect... ...you cannot trust anything else from that publication or that actual article

01:31 And there was also no evidence they posted about it. They didn't post any scripts that had podcastindex.org in it, as far as I could tell No. So... But they did link directly to the download, to the public assets download page which I'm sure probably ripped out about five terabytes of bandwidth from us by automated bots. People are like, oh this is cool let's get this! It was all the bots. All the bot went and downloaded anything all that crap didn't even know what to do with it Have you looked at it? Have you looked at the downloads? I have not. Need too. So the story here

02:07 was that a supposed hack of Suno revealed that the AI music generator used podcast index, an online tool to do its targeting. It identified 420 thousand different podcasts that had at least 5 30-minute episodes and sought to download roughly 1 million hours of podcasts Yeah, and of which they did what with yeah exactly. What is the point? What are you gonna do? What is Suno doing with podcasts that I thought they were just music yeah It's baffling to me back. I mean I found a couple of accounts in the

02:53 you know, in our user registration table that look like they might be related to those guys. But I mean nothing... I don't know nothing stood out really. I don't-I don't know what they did with or how they got the data? Well, I guess they didn't use API. I guess they just used a download. Right and then they had to walk the whole tree and look at every... Now I guess we have lengths in there. They could have looked at the length tags length No. The size? File size, the bytes? Yeah yeah yeah. Oh well... Hey, so welcome back. It's good to be on the show again. Good to be here in the boardroom. Hey, Border. Hello, Borders. That was an extended absence. Sorry about that. No, it was good you got you got to visit family and stuff And that's important. Yeah still no baby she should have been here by now Oh, well, no grandbabies. So many days overdue are we? Yeah, I have a angry daughter basically yeah she is ready to get this thing going just getting

03:56 Just getting angry. But that is a good question, you know? What do these guys do with that? I guess you could whisper it all and get the transcripts and do something with that... Oh yeah our bandwidth is up. We're still within safely within limits but it's way more than we normally have so I bet automation just killed that page 30% monthly usage usually at this point halfway through the month were only like 10%. There is something to be said for I mean, I think transcripts are one of the most powerful things We've ever developed and we didn't even realize how powerful it would be moving forward and I'll just give you a couple examples so I have a transcript of 1886 no agenda shows. I've got a transcript of several hundred Korean the keepers have got mo facts. I've got the board meeting

04:57 And I just saw, and it's really interesting because... What do we hear? Oh that's me. Hold on a second. I hear something going. Man my ears are still with me. I heard some music playing there. Okay you're like a bat! I sleep hanging upside down. So I fired up an agent and I said Agent. Hello, agent! I never give my agents names... Robot, Agent whatever. Robot is my favorite. Robot. They said go write the story of my life and i didn't look at it for four weeks Based on podcast transcripts? Yes It is amazingly good

05:49 Is it depressing? No, it's really really interesting. I mean...I'm an interesting guy! Now, I did give it a few parameters. I said if you're gonna write this- You said make it sound good? No no not at all. I said um I want this to be a memoir like The Kid Stays in the Picture from Robert Evans Have you ever seen that? No, I don't know what any of that is. Robert Evans was a producer... he was the producer of many movies The Godfather being.. The Godfathers series being the most famous He was married to Ali McGraw for several years and ummm.... Before he died he wound up doing an audiobook version of it And its just riveting! And then later Ken Burns turned into a movie with his voice in the audio book

06:42 But then with the typical Ken Burns photos, you know the slow zoom out and all that stuff. And I just always love... Do they have a guy playing the banjo and talking like Civil War? No no no! Man, I wonder if i can find an example of that let me see uh hold on second I'm sure I can Robert Evans' Kid Stays in the Picture. Sometimes these entire movies are on YouTube, which is kind of interesting Yeah I've seen that too Oh! In fact... This is a... Mind if I come in a minute? Wait that's not it That's definitely not it Where's the Robert Evans...? This was a trailer

07:26 He has been both the toast of this town and he's been an outcast in Hollywood. I was lucky to be part of it my name is Robert Evans. Now, this is trailer The audiobook is just really good anyway So I told her that and I said I want you to write this memoir looking back on my life From the vantage point of someone who's found Jesus And how I look back at what God did in my life and it ended like wrote 12 chapters How many words? 24,000. Holy cow! Yeah yeah and because I've told all my stories but anyway how many ways does it repeat itself though like no not at all

08:11 Have you read the whole thing? No, it came up like we were in Holland. We're in the car driving back from Christina's house and I said oh no I've got...I'm writing a book and Tina says what?! See yeah I've got a ghostwriter! What!? You didn't tell me any of this! And she said no I forgot about it because they just gave her to the agent And I said, let me go get it. And so I start reading in the car and it even had her whole story in there because it just pulled stuff from Curry and the Keeper transcript my point being that There's so much power in the context of the written word. There's a lot of issues around it You know because when I think I read at one point that I've been a can inspector for the government, you know Obviously that's that's Dvorak story that it picked up, you know So this is contextual things missing I would call that factual thing But yeah, so that's just one thing I was able to do with the transcript and I think it was Spurlock

09:10 who asked me when we had him on a couple of board meetings ago. He said, but are you doing anything with AI or with agents or LLMs on the client side? And my whole life has changed for podcasting the way I produce my show it really has been life changing. I've saved countless hours per week just by having the agent cut clips and put together rundowns, show notes and research things. It's like hey JD Vance was on Rogan go whisper the entire show and pull some good clip out of it that is literally what I can do And I was thinking about it because we have all these app developers and I've always been an advocate doing something different

10:04 And I've never really moved anybody. No one really ever moves anywhere, and so this came up on Pod News Weekly Review in the context of annotations, annotation tag, and I guess something that Apple is doing with... was it called timed links? Yeah where they try to like Farm out or ferret out what the link what a link to a thing you're talking about is and then put a link to their own Way to get that. Yeah, which you know is kind of interesting I completely See how that's pretty much no chapters or would Daniel Daniel Lewis would call the super chapters

10:49 You know, there's nothing really groundbreaking and I think it's interesting that Apple did that. But that's a real example of Apple differentiating their podcast app by doing something different. Now you can agree with it or not but the conversation kind of went in the wrong direction And that's what I want to tie into. This is a piece from Pod News Weekly Review because Lord knows this show is about reviewing their show, so let's do that. We also spoke last week to Ryan Williams at Card Curious about podcast annotations which are sort of likened to Apple's Time Blinks We've had some feedback again. Nathan Gathright was saying that I lost structured data as much as the next nerd, and wished this idea the best of luck but am convinced that using LLMs to derive data from transcripts will remain in the purview of players not feeds. Weirdly Adam Curry also came in on the back of this. I haven't put the clip in here James for us but he was also saying that he sees LLM's as well has been a way for on-device

11:51 abstraction of data rather than tags and I'm like, sorry didn't you come up with the namespace? Okay. That's kind of apples and oranges but that's the part that I really wanted to drill down on Because the namespace is completely separate from what I think Nathan was saying and what i'm saying. Is that, from an app developer standpoint there's so many things you can do for an individual user not... So from a publisher standpoint yeah you know I may want to link to something And we've had that basic capability in chapters There's nothing really new But what can an app do for me? Why would I be drawn to a particular app because

12:37 It feels much more personal to me because it really has an understanding of what I like, because it has all this context of things that I've been listening to. Real context based upon transcripts. Now James and this is really the reason why brought up because James gets all huffy about this stuff. He has such a hatred of AI. It's almost unhealthy attitude. Look, I come at this basically saying please can we copy what Apple did with transcripts. They have LLMs that do all of the transcripts if you can't be bothered to do them yourself but if you want to put additional data

13:22 into your podcast feed. If you want to add all of this stuff, then please respect what the creator wants and if the creator can't be bothered then by all means fill it in with a fancy autocomplete system which is all that an LLM is. It's a fancy autocomplete system. By all means fill it in with that! That's fine But, yeah. I would much rather that the creator is given the opportunity to do something good first so that's me basically. Why are you so mad bro? It's more than an auto-complete! So i just want... I mean full disclosure I hate AI too and your hatred is not healthy either it's not

14:14 The hatred comes from an interaction that the world... So if you do polling, this is accurate. If you do polling all the current polls show that there's an intense dislike of AI in just public sentiment

14:50 like more so than historically, the latest numbers I heard was from maybe two or three weeks ago. The latest numbers I heard were that people dislike AI in surveys more than they disliked nuclear power after Three Mile Island. Sure And what i'm saying is the intensity of people who dislike AI that much comes from the way that it's being introduced and put in front of you on a daily basis. I completely agree, the marketing has been either this is a god and it will run everything in your life to this is so dangerous we can't give it to you So the marketing has been completely bullshit Now I agree, marketing yes but I'm saying something a little bit different I'm saying something different than the marketing aspect What I am saying is

15:55 You are in control of your production process. You are the boss, and in that context when you're able to explore and see the uses of a technology like this what you see are the big wins. Oh, I see the losses too brother. No no no... I have hair pulling moments okay? I'm not saying you don't what i'm saying is that you're in a sort of like a manager of one yes so that in that context the wins that you get can be big and they outweigh

16:54 Because of the things like time savings and that kind of thing, they are monumental. What most people's interaction with an AI is in the context of a corporate job And in the context of a corporate job on a day-to-day basis, you are inundated for—we have been inundated for months with AI. AI. AI is going to change your job. It's going to do it. You gotta keep up or your gonna lose your job. The boss coming into your office and saying Hey, what have you done with AI? Have you used enough AI?" But that's it. Hey I just heard about this AI tool can we do a demo on it? That's the direct result of the marketing and of the media and people just talking BS about it

17:42 Everybody right now in the corporate world is to the point where they're like, if my boss comes in here and mentions the word AI one more time I'm going to scream and run out the door. Because you're supposed to somehow just quote adopt AI. But you can't! I understand, but you can't! I completely understand But see, that's where... because what happens is- James doesn't have a boss coming in to him saying you've got to use AI? Yeah but the podcast industry has been pushing AI on itself for months and for years now. He's literally been the one talking about it for years! Yeah about how it's a mistake Well and I'm gonna... so okay let me just segment out a few things

18:36 There's one particular piece that hurts me, and Bemrose just did it. Oh! A guy who can't code one line of Python without a trillion dollar brain. Yeah And Paul does this to me too when I say hey look what I created and I'm not hiding it. I'm not pretending I can code but here is something I created he's always very negative I can feel it. It's like, uh...I don't like this This is not the way i would do it This makes no sense And they're all like oh well tell me what would make sense and ill see if i can fix it Now people who have, in particular developers who have coding skills built up over decades get very irked and you even posted a meme about it. Get very irked when someone who can't code their way out of a paper bag comes up with something that is functional but is built with AI and I understand that just don't kill me every single time now to be clear the meme was exactly what...the meme was the meme

19:39 The meme was making fun of how angry programmers get at people who are doing it. But my point is, if we can move all of that stuff aside and just see where can we get some real benefit from this? Some real benefit I truly believe that what's coming with compacted, compressed models hardware that runs it locally. That there are going to be experiences that can be built for listeners for users of podcast apps that become very personal and will... And I think people will pay for it

20:23 and that will almost lock them into that podcast app because they're so invested in teaching it what they like without having to really do too much work. And it can be all based off of contextual data, primarily transcripts. That's all that I'm saying. I'm not saying we shouldn't do tags and the creators that podcasters can't, you know add stuff that they want to. That's all those are all good signals but what is coming I truly believe is this because that's what I'm seeing the personalized nature of AI everything that's corporate that has some service it all sucks I'm not interested in doesn't work it breaks its fake advertising nothing is right and but the ability

21:19 tailor my world to what I need has been revolutionary. It doesn't come without pain and crying, and like oh i just want to improve this 20% and it goes completely off the rails and up until three in the morning trying to figure out what just happened but from a from an experiential aspect of a podcast app, I think that there will be a lot of opportunities for app developers to use the context particularly of transcripts and create experiences that will really lock your listeners into your app. That's what i'm saying. I'm not saying you know namespace is no good or we shouldn't have tags...I'm not saying any of that! That's my point

22:10 The the difficulty of conversations like this is that I don't it is that I don't disagree but like The reality of all of this stuff. This is subtle there's different there's differences in context that make all they make all the difference in the result and If I were to go back in time if we can't if we started podcasting 2.0 today and I don't think a transcript tag would ever even come up as an option. Like if the whole project, if the namespace started today nobody would think of doing a transcript tag because LLMs and stuff would have already done it. Possibly. And we just wouldn't think about... Yeah possibly We may entertain the idea briefly and then say oh well that's a waste of time like why would we make somebody go do like put a transcript tag in? So yeah

23:13 So in that sense, the transcript tag itself is already sort of an anachronism. Yeah you're absolutely right yeah. It's a it's a sort of vestigial organ on the namespace but The thing about it is vestigial organ hold on a second show title. Let me just write that one down This digital organ is sort of like an online tool, but you can't download anything from it But I mean like so so Like in general, I don't necessarily disagree with some of the some of these things and

23:55 And I also, like...I use AI coding agents all the time. Every day! Every single day i'm using some an LLM in some shape form or fashion and but at the same- But that's not the part that frustrates me The usage of an agent is not, or LLMs in general Is not what I hate What I hate is the entire atmosphere that's been built around it. Oh, understandable of course For instance... You know one of my long-running issues has been that Twit did not put chapters into their podcast for subscribers

24:58 And they recently started doing it, I guess about a month ago. Maybe six weeks ago they started putting chapter markers into the episodes for their paying subscribers and it's great except that they don't work. They don't work? They don't work because clearly an AI has been adding these chapters in some way And the AI just gets the timing all wrong. You can go through and hit every chapter, and every chapter takes you to the wrong place. Okay so it's not that the chapters are contextually wrong but they're technically wrong? The chapters correctly summarize a thing that will not be talked about for another 15 minutes in show. Yeah well that's a QC problem

25:51 Yeah, and that is the story of AI. The story of AI in the current era is we have to throw AI at everything as fast as possible and we sure do hope it works or actually we're not even that concerned if it does work because if we throw AI added it just solves a problem It's like I have a problem where I can't put chapters into my podcast...AI And you don't stop to even think, did it work? Did it actually do a good job. Like what you're doing is you're creating a thing for... You're creating a workflow process using these tools and it is really important to you that the outcome is correct because that's your livelihood and your banking its output on its output being good

26:50 And so if it's wrong, you notice immediately and you are constantly iterating to fix it. Yes that is the way you properly interact with technology what we're seeing in the broader atmosphere myself on the back okay I'm doing a good job good job little podcaster boy yeah yeah attaboy uh but what we're seeing in the broader atmosphere In the broader landscape of business, especially. People just say oh I'll just throw this in the chat GPT and it will give me something Yeah And I had a conversation this morning these and I can I wish I could even talk about it But it is the exact same issue that people do not understand They do not understand how fragile and hallucinatory these tools are they? Just think

27:41 I can just, it's like it's a magic box and they can throw a thing in it and out comes the right answer. And it's wrong like 50% of the time but it's so confident in its wrongness that you think is right! And I go back to this as... This is a hijack The whole thing is a hijack of our brains because we... We... The human race has never encountered has never encountered anything that can talk except another human. And when humans talk to each other, we are mostly internally consistent with our thought processes and what I mean is like when I tell you a thought that I'm having that thought is internally consistent in itself

28:44 because humans are language processing machines, it's wired in. But what AI does and you see this all the time is it will contradict itself in the middle of a sentence that is also grammatically correct so it will say things like you know, the dog ran as fast as it could across the street at a slow rate. Or something like that and your like... The grammar of this sentence is correct but your like wait what? You have to sit there and think about it hold on we are not because we are only used to historically seeing that humans

29:39 are what the only things that can talk in language. Now there's a machine that can talk in language, but it doesn't know what its saying. Right well thats using the rules of grammar and pre- yeah thats what I call the parlor trick Yes, you're it's the parlor trick. Yeah and so like this is and this is the problem is People in the business world right now people are throwing like 150 page contracts into a chat bot No I get there like yes It said that this was the case I know just go with I know I understand that frustration I really do And I don't have to deal with work slop and all of that

30:18 It makes people lose their minds. Yes, I know but what has happened what I see and also you know college kids have been told that you're gonna be useless Elon Musk says no one will work You know all of this stuff which i think is total crap and it's doom trolling is what it is yeah But it all comes from the basic marketing of these companies and I just don't want people to be too afraid. So on no agenda in the morning, Before the show starts, I play the end of show mixes. And the end-of-show mixes used to be people doing stuff in their home studio, multi track singing, doing takeoff songs and they've just like the no agenda art they've all gone away, they've all dried up but slowly people have emerged who are actually doing very interesting things and they're paying more attention to the lyrics even the fact that they'll take the newsletter

31:19 and then turn that into a song. Something about it has become interesting, the voices have become better you know the technology's improved a little bit but without a doubt the minute I start those three songs and I play them just like in the boardroom people go AI minus minus! AI minus minus! AI minus minus! There is hatred...a hatred! I see it, I recognize it as I hear its AI I gotcha That hatred, I think is holding people back from exploring the creative ways it can be used. See, I think what we are described... This conversation is a perfect description of the entire problem of the current landscape of AI because in order to like you have people who are like you said, you have people who are getting doom-trolled

32:19 and have negative reactions to it for that. You have people in a corporate world who are being AI slopped to death, and they hate it but then you also have people like yourself who are having incredible success with it. And when you have incredible success with it, it makes you defensive about negativity towards it And then when you have nothing but negative experiences with it, it makes you defensive against the people who are having success. It's like it has got to be binary. It can only be one or the other either AI good or AI bad and that is not a healthy thing in general for any sort of

33:09 like technology. I mean, in the end 10 years from now all this stuff is going to fade into just being part of the tools we use and it's going... And all the stupid use cases for it that people try to cram into are gonna fade and what's gonna be left is gonna be verified verifiable use cases like coding, like creative works where these tools really do shine But like attestation work and knowledge work, man that is never going to be reliable. It's just not because there's no- Because knowledge work assumes knowledge and there's not any. And so like I think you are just basically in the wheelhouse

34:05 of what these tools are built for. Creativity and verifiable development work, you can code like crazy now you can output tons of cool stuff and you can have really reliable creative workflows Basically, those are the two pinnacles of this technology and where it really shines. Everything else downstream from that falls off so fast and that's what most of society is left with because there's not... Most of society is not in the creative business, the creative side of things. And I think that's why people have different experiences with AI coding agents. I've had great experiences with them in general

34:54 And it's because if you already know how to talk, or excuse me. If you already know how things are structured and you do too even though you weren't a coder, you understand computers, you understand networks, you know how these things work. Generally speaking, you had enough knowledge to where this was a natural thing for you And, but you there's a lot of people out there who are non coders who try to vibe code and man is just a complete train wreck. They don't know what to do. I mean like they're having there just it's just complete garbage that comes out Or is something that looks good to them and on the end the underside of its just rot So just bringing it back to podcasting, I completely believe There is a category of podcasts where a TTS voice is appropriate

35:49 And I'm quite confident that people will become very accustomed to it. Now, many times I've hit a YouTube video and there's a person talking... And it will only be after five minutes that I realize oh wait a minute this is AI And the reason why I notice it is because of the sentence structure and the writing. The writing is just so obvious, you know? Let's dive in! You know this isn't your daddy's old mobile... like that kind of stuff But it's not like it's offensive and So um, you know, I think we're into a very big moment of exploration and creative experimentation

36:42 And things will come out of this that will be completely LLM driven and will be accepted, and will be used and enjoyed. I'm not going to push back against it." As you know, I too find the talking robot to be a parlor trick and it's because our brains are trained to think oh this person is talking to me. And I've seen movies and TV shows so I'm going to assume it's all right and real and there's a real person behind it which is why always call my agents robot cause I don't want to anthropomorphize

37:19 But I really believe we're going to get to a place where there will be text-to-speech podcasts that will be accepted and people will enjoy them, and they will listen to them. There's not gonna be a No Agenda show or a Podcasting 2.0 where Adam and Dave are interacting as human beings. I don't think it'll ever get there certainly not the LLM route But other things, yeah. I think i can see that and... And I don't want to be a jihadist against it. Yeah, I mean I sort of do. Why? Because- And it's okay! Again, I'm not trying to convince you of anything in fact I find it more enjoyable that we disagree It makes for much better podcast

38:17 I think that the thing that made podcasting what it is, I don't think it was the technology. The RSS... Oh of course not! RSS is not... It could have been anything but the thing that makes podcasting so... drove it to the critical mass that has become was the humanity of it. Was the fact that anybody could do it Right?

38:55 And any person could just fire up a microphone and start talking. Yes, I completely agree! And when you hear that in your headphones we know it's another... We hear the humanity on the other side and when they hear- we can tell. When you hear the humanity on the other side it makes you feel like you know that person just like it did You know, listening to a DJ on the radio in 1987 and you just felt like you could see them in the studio. And it felt like they... that you knew- you just knew them

39:39 Well, I've always had that opinion which is why i've never done video. I thought it was a huge mistake when radios in fact I think radio stations killed themselves by putting cameras in the studio look at me with my headphones on Look at me and pushing all the buttons look at me looking up so cool. Look at this I thought that was a big mistake because you lost the theater of the mind as And podcasting, I've enjoyed podcasting for interviews. I've enjoyed them for hearing the humanity of someone, of hearing different ideas and debates. I've done things like sound seeing tours we used to call them just walking around the street so that is very much a theater of the mind but it's also an information delivery system

40:24 where people listen to podcasts instead of reading. I'm not against audiobooks, the same conversation we had by the way with audio books the same conversations oh no you can't have audio because audio books is cheating that's not real reading So, podcasting is a lot of things. And it is also an information delivery system and you know which is good and bad I've always said to people don't speed it up because you're going to become very frustrated with the human beings in your life around you because they're not talking fast enough but people do that cause they want more information feed more into my head But just as a joke...I listened to Spurlock posted an Atlantic article this morning

41:10 Which was... A report of it, yeah. What was it about? I didn't get very far but uh started reading It was about AGI and LLMs. It would never-it's never going to be the right way. It's never gonna work And I was cleaning out the dishwasher which is typically my podcast listening time and I saw oh this there's a 10 minute text-to-speech version of it in the player and I hit the player and I immediately could tell it was actually surprisingly is something some service called the news voice service or whatever like wow you guys really suck if anyone's paying for that because I got better TTS voices than this but it gave me the information while i was cleaning out the dishwasher in 10 minutes and i was okay with it and i had to sit down say why was they okay with it well i just want to get the information i wanted to multitask and it worked okay for me and i wasn't mad about it um so yeah i'm just saying that

42:06 I want to force myself to be more open and podcasting is not just for humans. It's not, you know, just for this type of show and it's certainly not just for advertising which is what the pretty much all news about podcasting is only about how long is a play? And value-for-value streaming sats are dead! All these different things like the money is at least interesting part of it to me I agree. It's the least interesting part to me as well, and... The podcasting if we're talking about podcasting as a whole then I think that podcasts- I also have no problem just using the screen reader thing built into mobile Safari to just read our article. No there you go! Yeah exactly. I have no problem with that because because i know what I'm doing. Mmhmm. I've made the choice to go into

43:13 a mode where I have set the context for the experience i'm having. If podcasting in general overall becomes dominated by AI generated content, it is going to cheapen and turn sentiment against podcasting negative on the whole. Yeah see, I completely disagree Podcasting is not like one thing. I mean, there's no recommendation engine you know? You hear about a podcast from some... This is what I've always said! You hear about a podcast from someone, okay I'll go listen to that podcast now if you're just toodling around and searching for stuff when you pop up against something oh it's an AI voice she may like it or you may not like it but it's not overshadowing anything

44:14 This is the part I disagree with. But this is the problem, but like think about what was that company? The big slop company that... Inception Point AI. Inception Point. They were shooting shows to the top of the charts in Spotify's podcasts app And as people see things, they go into podcasts. They go into the podcast section on Spotify or whatever or Apple Podcasts and these things are trending at the top of the list and they hit it and it's just like some half-ass slop. Okay but right there already I don't believe...and I've said this..I don't believe in charts for podcasting. I don't believe in awards for podcasting It's dumb

45:02 Because you don't believe in it doesn't mean that it's not having an effect and because most people's interaction with podcast is with something like Apple by oh I completely disagree that. That's how people find their podcasts. And I'm not saying this how they find them, I'm saying that as their that is their vision of what podcasting right? Okay but then that's why other podcast apps can do a better job we're not beholden to apple This is the loop that I want us to get out of. Apple's doing this, so we've got to do this." Who gives a shit? I don't care! I tell my listeners to use modern podcast app turns out a lot have been drawn to Podverse and Podcast Guru and they get a different experience

45:49 You know, we're not slaves to Apple because they want to surface all of the Charlie Kirk murder mysteries that are all from Inception Point AI. That's not going to kill podcasting. That'll kill Apple podcasting. OK let me throw this at you. Jim Daley announced his retirement right from Focus on the Family. Huge podcasts lots of downloads but they're a big player in industry They announced that they're starting a transition for the next person who's gonna replace him. Mm-hmm What if they decided to just do AI? Just do AI voices well, what if they did um, they would lose yeah Well of course thirds of their listenership Of course they would and I'm saying and that's my that's my point My point is that then knowing this something is AI That you're not expecting it to be or that you did not choose

46:53 when AI is given to you rather than you setting it up and choosing it yourself. You feel at its mercy rather than being in control of it. Okay, but that's... then I would go look for a different podcast about family issues and serve an existing audience with a different type voice that's just a dumb idea. I mean, that's the same as saying well what if i just replaced John and Adam on no agenda with AI voice? Of course people would run away it's not going to be the same thing. No what I'm saying is...I think I want to say something subtly different when I'm talking about is that a show if you had an equivalent show of AI voices

47:45 and on one side, and a Jim Daley focus on the family human show. On the other side... The AI show would just never- it would be- It would just never match up. It would never make it. Exactly, but that's not what I'm talking about of course it'll never make it. It doesn't mean that there's no place... Okay so I created a new service for Focus Live and its three different voices their AI there's a format that I put in place for it and I don't have them saying, hey, I'm Bob Thingamadig. Here's the news." Actually as a joke, I say here is the news at this hour because that's an urgency thing that news uses and you've heard it, you've listened to it, you realize its AI? Are you turned off by it? Do you go oh! It's AI, I can't listen to this?!

48:40 No, but that was never my point. But it's appropriate for the format and for the information being delivered It is not appropriate for a focus on the family with Jim Daly. It just not appropriate two different things doesn't mean that we should shun one over the other because one is human and one isn't What I'm not saying that either. You said something that I agree with, it's appropriate for the information as its being delivered and I'm saying that podcasting just as a general idea is not appropriate for synthetic machine generated content That's what I am saying. I'm just going to disagree As an information delivery system It can be highly appropriate

49:33 But you're making podcasting into something that it started out as when you had the Rock and Roll Geek Show, and Don & Drew, and The Daily Source Code. And weird people talking about weird stuff... ...and long soliloquies. Sure! That won't go away but it also won't get killed by a different type of show that delivers information that may be completely appropriate to be computer generated. I just feel like, I want to be open to it and i'm not... It's the same as, I can listen to an audio book that is generated by a LLM, I can listen to it doesn't kill me that much you know? I don't want to be against it just because its there Well

50:29 you've had such success with it. And what I'm saying is that success can just stand on its own, the success that you've had which has been incredible does not have to extend into the other uses of it like people can... Just because you've had success in your workflow and then in your product building with it doesn't mean that it also has to be okay for content to be generated by it in places where it's not appropriate. But what's appropriate? This is my entire point, what is appropriate is not up to me! No, its completely subjective and I'm saying that but... It's completely subjective but I'm saying even when dealing with subjectiveness there are

51:29 you can average the subjectiveness across a large body of people and come to some conclusions. And what I'm saying, like yes it is subjective one person may not like this type of content another person might but if you step back and look at things as a whole You'll see that there are patterns and there are things that generally most people are turned off by Synthetic voices pretending to be real or synthetic voices talking about matters, and this is why I brought up focus on the family. If i'm talking about faith and ethics and family in politics

52:17 I want a human talking to me about these things. I know you, I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying. I'm saying that I don't want to be in a place where i'm trying to stop something that may be unstoppable let's take faith specifically as an example and I hate this example but yeah I cannot deny that it's happening people are pouring their hearts out into glue.com AI chat bots on church websites because they feel more comfortable talking to that than to their pastor I think it's bad and i think that these people need to be exposed to humans and, uh...and I certainly don't think that a church should be promoting this but that doesn't mean that is not happening

53:05 And it doesn't mean that someone may not find benefit from it. I personally don't want, and I personally don't like it but when we're making decisions and building funny enough AI models and putting weights into them to remove all AI voices... ...I just want a question the validity and who gets to make decisions based upon that? And for what reasons? because there can be very appropriate reasons and even if it's 1% of people who want to hear one percent of synthetic voices for one percent of the type of content, I don't necessarily want to give them a no.

53:53 I don't know. That's... I understand where you're coming from, and we cannot ignore that the hatred you have to the work slop and corporate AI incessant AIAIAI that doesn't play into it It absolutely does. And we're like fighting the machine, because we are! We're kind of like oh we're fighting the machine and this is horrible. I've listened to Inception Point AI shows and it's not for me

54:29 But that's more because the writing is just so crap. You know, it's not the voice that bothers me... It's that there has been no humanity in the writing and that's always a giveaway and I don't see that LLMs will ever really... They just haven't proven it yet that they can get to a place where the writing is appropriate And it doesn't bug me personally but the voice is the least offensive thing If it's just about information I want to get. And i'm not looking for a personality, I'm not looking for community and looking for you know...I'm just looking for some information about one particular thing and this audio has it The boardroom is griping at us talking about AI but I can tell you this When we're talking about podcasting We're not talking about AI This is about the future of podcasting literally what were supposed to be doing! You will not hear a discussion like this

55:29 anywhere else that I'm aware of where people are in transparent disagreement about AI. It's usually it's either, AI is awesome and I love it and it's going to be the best thing ever or its AI as the worst thing and it's gonna kill everybody and destroy the world. You only get two sides you won't hear disagreements. Exactly. And on...you won't hear honest disagreements. Exactly Let's talk about something else, because I think we've done this. Can we talk about lightning for a second? Yes! Absolutely that is good idea because I have some thoughts on that. Because voltage is bailing out on individual nodes and they're going enterprise only... We have to talk about this in couple of ways

56:32 Our income from Lightning has dwindled down to very little. And we're not the only ones Yeah, from podcast index We went from about $50 a week down to seven If that I can look Let me actually go look and there's a couple of reasons for that The obvious one is the change in in protocols. The one that cannot be ignored is the price of Bitcoin people tend to hang on to their sats if they've spent more than they're worth right now or if they're buying because they think it'll go up in value I mean, that cannot be ignored but I think where you're going with this is that this centralizes lightning which podcasting 2.0 and Value for Value boosts and streaming payments

57:34 was always centralized. It was centralized from day one, and when we decentralize is when it fell apart. The most current for last week our total income on the index was $11.56. We're up! We're trending! Hockey stick! So the monthly income to the podcast index node

58:12 June, let's see was $559. Not from lightning? No way that can't be right now it's way too much no way $50 maybe huh oh that's from lab sorry that's from last year yeah well where is the we're down there 10x we're down 10x but okay yeah cuz because based on the weekly

58:52 You're looking at what, 50 bucks? Yeah. For the month. Yeah, 50 bucks yeah. So it's like 50 bucks for the month. That monthly of last year was probably just single boost donors but the weekly is about $50 a month. Well we're paying $240 a month for our lightning node at Voltage Yes. That's not just that, that's not I think we can't justify it Is that on my credit card? I think i'm paying for that You're pay yes you're paying for that 240 a month holy crap! That's a lot Okay well We have to have a real discussion about whether we continue with this note or not because that's not sustainable No And were about to upgrade the main podcast index database to the next higher size up and

59:44 I mean, that's like we... Well let's look at the Genesis for a second. Gonna go back to the Genesis of this and then because i've been thinking about this a lot The genesis of value for value streaming payments goes back to the genesis of Podcast Index. Podcastindex.org was created when Apple decided to de-platform, remove from its database several podcasts particularly during COVID and irrelevant who they were. Doesn't matter, that was Apple was making decisions which we're doing now too in an interesting way but Apple is making decisions and I called you and said hey since when are these guys the boss of podcasting because everybody was talking to their database for lack of a better word for all of the independent apps? And they were kind of on ramp to podcasting so why don't just build an alternative

1:00:45 and we'll run it value for value, i.e., people who want to use this they'll either support or they won't and it lives or dies by the support then we have quite honestly 70% of our survival rate is based on hosting companies who send us PayPal very graciously every single month And the 30%, which is very important to me is the sustaining people who send us $5 or 10 dollars or 750, you know. That's how value for value works as a part of that I suggested to you that we come and I think what was it? What was the name of the company cat something? Was it

1:01:30 the guy out in California, what was it? What was the initial nodes we were using when we first testing it out? Sphinx. Kat! Sphinx. Kat you're close, you're in the ballpark. Yeah that's how my brain works. Kat category error. Sphinx exactly and said look at this because you know the idea was You're getting MP3 and bits and bytes in, and you're sending money out with this program. Well money was very exciting! And it was partially because PayPal is also de-platforming people... I thought what a great way to have independent value flow and have it automatic. It caught some steam and we started to build on it. Then we had Ellen Pay, I think it was?

1:02:18 Yes, LNPay. So then that centralized it and everybody had something to work on and then you know what's the guys name at LNPay? Good guy Charlie Tim Tim Tim said hey man, you know and we wound up paying for his infrastructure every single month to keep it alive And then he said I really can't do this anymore. And then Albie came along and so we went from centralized on sphinx centralized on LN pay Centralized on alby then albee said well We can't do this anymore for legal reasons and then we went okay will decentralize and

1:02:57 And it became very complicated because people need nodes that are up all the time. And we all tried Uncle Jim nodes and all kinds of different things, and that didn't really work. Then we said okay well maybe the way is to switch to this other protocol that is not Keysend. We had a very clear split in the community, very clear at this point It became a philosophical Bitcoin versus value for value, what it was really about and became Bitcoiners. We said well we don't want this and we want this and that's centralized but the whole thing had always been centralized And it fell apart Honestly going back to the genesis of Value For Value The new international lifestyle That system still exists today

1:03:53 It may just not work for lightning and payments over lightning because of the challenges of wallets, connecting wallets and the challenges of people not wanting to have centralized systems. And the challenges of people not understanding what Bitcoin is and not want to transfer money into a wallet There's so many hurdles to this I think there was another split that came along, which is when Nostra was jumping in and like hey we should be doing podcasting and all this stuff. And then Fountain made decisions to add zaps and so it became convoluted. And I personally think it's fallen apart and I don't know if it can be resurrected. I don't know if you can either. Like...I'm starting to see all of Lightning as

1:04:54 as failing to live up to his promise. I mean, Fountain is the best example of this. Look at the hoops that Oscar had to jump through to make that thing work. Yeah. With all the KYC and AML and Zebedee having to run all this KYC-AML stuff... And like, I'm sure it's costing him a fortune And technically as a challenge, like it is that is not the promise that lightning said. It was lightening said it was going to be the decentralized low or zero or low fee Bitcoin mechanism right? That anybody could risk self sovereignty bull crap is what I'm saying because that is not that is not the case

1:05:55 Bullcrap! Bullcrap. We're like Tourette's on this show today. Bullcrap, bullshit bullcrap! Like I mean a broad embrace of key sin could have changed the course of all that maybe. Key sinned... Well we talked to the kid over there at strike what's his name? Strike. Yeah, the Maulers. We talked to him early on this arrogant piece of crap He really is arrogant arrogant mofo. Oh look at me sitting in my closet with no clothes in my closet And yeah and we said hey man you could really change the game if you supported a key send Well he had no intention of doing that. He did not care That was the moment I think when

1:06:51 You know, that would have... because he's got... look I use Strike. He's got momentum with that thing and people are using it and you know as the direct connection to the bank accounts and all that stuff It still centralizes nothing do with sovereign but we also weren't necessarily We didn't set out for oh it's gotta be sovereign That's when all the Bitcoin stuff which is like we were looking at the functionality of it and religion came in Well, so podcasting and James says this all the time. Well you can send bank to bank transfers in Australia with zero fee through an API that's fine but that's not the way podcasting works. Podcasting works across borders

1:07:31 And so anything that doesn't work, low fee or zero fee with instantaneous transfer. Anything that doesn't work that way across international borders is will not function properly for podcasting? Well hold on and so that's what lightning was supposed to be yes for streaming payments absolutely true for streaming payments and it doesn't work for boosts either because international payments are super expensive What do you mean? What doesn't work for boosts The internet, like having something that's got a bunch of fees on it. Well that's not true. You mean for streaming sites or for boosts? For boosts! No, that's not true I live from PayPal and Stripe Boosts for lack of a better term And people even send me money with the fees All i know is I tried to send

1:08:30 Kyren some money through PayPal to an Australian bank and the fees were like 20%. Well, to an Australian bank not not to a an Australian PayPal. Well, no it was to his PayPal but it was connected to his bank on the back end Well, that doesn't sound right. Because I get PayPals from Australia and New Zealand Japan we get Stripe from Argentina from France We get payments from all over the world And the fees are about 3% So i don't know what happened there What my research turned up one time was that like Australia

1:09:19 They use international transfer fees to fund free internal transfers. They make it up on the other side, so they have really high – they have expensive international fees. But I mean, the offline like if Lightning had had Keith Send as a first-class citizen enabled by default and some facility for offline payments, and open invoices. It could have worked where it could have worked. It could've worked but you're still dealing with a lot of the hurdles that become astronomical because you can't just have a Bitcoin wallet in every country anymore

1:10:01 you know, there's all kinds of hoops that you have to jump through. And if you send more than 8000 sats, the bank says oh what's this? Or even Strike in the UK has to block certain payments because you need a KYC for the person receiving it so unless we're living in a Bitcoin standard world where everybody is paying each other with Bitcoin I would send my daughter on-chain Bitcoin to her bit my money account or whatever and she connected it to our bank. And you know at a certain point they're like well, you can't do that anymore You have to prove to my daughter! You have to prove that this is your wallet and you can only send into our system from a wallet that you have proven is your wallet so I had to create a wallet for her

1:10:53 and then she had to show a picture of her phone that she was alive, and then we had to sign the wallet. So then I send money from my Bitcoin wallet to her Bitcoin wallet, and then she sends that into my money wallet so she can put it into her bank account." It's become... What a joke! Now it's still cheaper than international money transfer but I would like to go back beginning of value for value because the streaming payments, it was a dream. It was a great dream and I think you're right we got sold the bill of goods it didn't really turn out that way with lightning they just didn't well lightening labs from the very beginning told basically told us to F off

1:11:33 Because we got on their lightning roundtable discussions and all these kinds of things, and brought up the fact that small payments just a few sets of streaming payments. That small payments were inefficient using Bolt 11. And that we really need a key send to be a universal default And their response was, you just need to send bigger payments. I remember that. I forgot about that. You got to say no. Okay? Well, I guess that means you don't care we should have walked away then Yeah honestly it's just

1:12:18 We, we. So what are you left with for international pay? Stablecoins? No no no no no. Smart I mean like every issuance of a stablecoin has a smart contract with it where they can take your money away Well okay let's forget stablecoin because stablecoin is a whole different thing i don't think anyone sees exactly where that's going yet It's not about the smart contract. It's about, you know... it's a representation of backing of the stablecoin which will be US treasuries in most cases. It is irrelevant Because now you're back to the sovereignty, they can take your money away. Look... The government can go to your bank account right now and take your money away You know? You're not safe anywhere So the only thing you have maybe is your Bitcoin keys and that's it There's nothing else in the universe that the government can't touch But let's just talk about podcasting

1:13:16 And I think that for me, I would rather see energy and focus put into the funding tag right now. Me too! Which can be connected to Apple Pay and Google Pay... ...and we know that the Apple App Store now will not delete your app if you have a button on your app for a donation We proved that through lawsuits basically with The Gaming Company So that's a real possibility to implement, to help people get value for value. But I just want talk about value for value for a second because I have lived on this in October 19 years and it has mainly been PayPal but we later added Stripe for international payments so for credit cards and it has worked incredibly well, incredibly well

1:14:14 And it continues to work from all over the world. And the only problem we had, that's why we added Stripe is because some people just couldn't use PayPal notably from India but some other countries as well. And so we added Stripe and they can, there's a whole bunch of options that you can use Stripe for and it works well. It really works! I would love for it to be easier now after we always have the same problem that we have with Lightning exists in that world where we have people sending a payment through PayPal because PayPal is so lame

1:14:55 with the note that you can attach to it, which some people don't even see. It doesn't even surface sometimes... The field you can put a note in then they're separately sending an email to knowagendadonations.com and then those have to be reconciled. It's horrible system so if we could put our energy into connecting those two, the I call it the boost and the booster gram through the funding tag. I think we would have something just forget the streaming payments. Streaming payments is not going to work is over. And I think you're right. I think it's done and and connecting those two. You know something really interesting has happened in the past two years on no agenda with value for value which I want people who are chasing advertising dollars or wanting to think about this

1:15:46 So, 60% of our income is people who send us under $50 per show or per month. It's like people set it and forget it and its three dollars or five dollars 11-11 12-12 33-33 numerology has always been important And then above the line, we have $200 or more and $300 or more. Those are kind of two levels that we have when we give you like a associate executive producer credit which is real. You can go to IMDB and you'll see. And $300 or more. What has happened over the past year-and-a-half... It really started with a lady named Linda Lou Patkin Have you ever heard of her? I've heard you mention her Yes. And Linda Lou Patkin

1:16:36 She's and these are all individual small people. She has a service called Image Makers Inc, Image Makers Inc with the K. And she started sending $200 every single show so that's $1600 a month And it's always the same message. Your resume is about 10 seconds to make an impression and most don't for a resume that gets results go to imagemakersinc.com Linda helps professionals and executives position their experience so employers see their value That's Image Makers Inc with a K, I'm Linda Lou Duchess of Jobs and writer of winning resumes And it must be working for her, for her to spend $1600 a month on the podcast. Then more people started doing this and these are all small businesses gigawattcoffeeroasters.com EliTheCoffeeGuy and then we have manukagold.com who have honey and they send $333.33 something must be working for them but what I find interesting

1:17:35 is that I don't have to have a meeting with them. I don't have to get approved ad copy, I can laugh at them but i can say oh this is a great product or I've never tried this I do not trust it like the guy from unblockmevpn.com and if they don't like it they don't have to support the show They can go away! I don't care But more and more have come in And when you look at it, it starts to become really attractive in a way that is not advertising. Because we also have people who say hey could you put a link to my GoFundMe? My wife needs a kidney. That literally happened yesterday. That's a podcast ad right there. Literally happened yes Sir Dan the man and there's something about this model that is really attractive

1:18:37 And no one complains about it because we even have cross-promotion. So Manuka Gold said, keep fighting the good fight for Manuka Gold and thank you for the nice feedback on Sunday. We just placed an order with gigawatt coffee roasters! I mean there's like this whole thing going on and what this comes down to for me with podcasting... For people who want to make a living in podcasting The whole idea of grow your show, get more downloads. No! Build a community. Build the community and you will be supported forever

1:19:14 Yeah, I agree with that 100%. Build a community. That is the trick! That is the absolute key to a successful podcast no matter what you're doing no matter what you want build a community and You will have success in your venture and you can pretty much determine that success for yourself And all the big, even the big YouTubers and people like that they have a community. They really do their problem is they're very vulnerable because they're on someone else's platform YouTube can... Well I think that what True Fans is trying to do is trying to build community Yes That's the whole point and I would say

1:19:56 Why not focus on the funding tag and put a big donate button or give or whatever? Or the funding tag actually has an option for you to put the words in there that you want. And have that surface in the app, if we can tie together a message with a payment... I have no idea how to do that but I know that you can have a button that fires up Apple Pay If your on Apple or files of Google pay. I know that exists I was just... No, you're right Eric. Platforms don't build communities but content does. It's humans that build communities. And that, just to close the loop- But platforms can facilitate it they can help. Yes Just to close the loop there is where i'm in agreement with you a robot with text to speech cannot build a community. I just do not know what

1:20:58 I'm just not sure what... Whoa, did you hear that? What was that? Was that a lightning or thunder? Yes. That outside your house? Wow! Yeah wow! That must have been very close Holy cow that was kind of scary um i just i'm just not sure that there is a way forward with lightning. No, I just need a response to Bemro's for a second he says build your community and occasionally jettison parts of it like no authority yeah i don't like jew haters okay? I don't like memes about Jews with big noses and little tiny Jew hats and Jew Jew Jew Jew Yeah! I don't like that I don't have to be a part of that And I didn't jettison them they left

1:21:51 I just don't see a way forward and especially like, so we had some... We had a supporter cancel $200 a month PayPal recently. And so essentially there I'm looking at and there goes the node. Yeah right? So if you do the math on that, I mean that's nearly three grand a year for a node That we don't make, that doesn't cover it. It doesn't even come close to covering its cost and I'm paying for it! I didn't even realize it. And so I mean...I'm just saying we have to figure out what to do. Where? How do we keep it online? I don't see how it works

1:22:35 I don't see it either. And honestly, and this node is virtually unusable anyway Yeah you can't tie anything into it It's so big everything breaks and falls apart It breaks constantly like You can't even...it takes 10 hours just to reboot it And this another way in which This thing is..I just don't... It just feels like a failure Well it is! We as part of noagendadonations.com we have two big QR codes send your money through lightning or through Bitcoin and we get about one or two a month yeah that's it so as it's just not for podcasting, it just hasn't panned out I don't mind shutting it down doesn't mean everybody has to follow suit but its not making business sense for us No

1:23:36 No, it doesn't because if what I've been seeing the numbers in the back of my head like as I've seen emails come through and all these kinds of things but i've just sort of like been putting off and ignoring It. And thinking we'll have to deal with this someday. That day came that day is now because It's no longer, this is not an issue where this is going to come back. No I mean what we're seeing now this is the reality of it and this is not like... I think some Albi's doing their thing you know? I don't know what their market looks like. I'm not sure what they do Fountain is an ecosystem that makes sense and seems to be doing pretty well

1:24:46 But our dream of making lightning be sort of the currency of podcasting? No. I think that's failed. I agree and for me, the writing was on the wall with a little hit girl Ashley Ainsley And her parents, they were so... They tried so hard to make it work. They really really tried so hard and... Yeah Julie and Ben? No not you, Ben. No no no. They really tried so hard to do it. I was there with them! You know, I did the concerts. Games Yes Did what I could but even there The whole sovereign Bitcoin thing just ripped everything apart

1:25:37 I'm not saying anyone was right or anyone's wrong, but it was too complicated. One of the funnest experiences of my adult life... ...was going to Nashville and being a part of that Bitcoin conference concert where me and Dobidoss and Eric PP were like Setting up NGINX reverse proxies to get Boostergram Ball to work at the last second. It was great! That was so much fun and it just sucks, man. Yeah. Well... It just sucks and I see some of this is sour grapes because I see that also the Bitcoin Maxi world

1:26:31 went all in with people like Jack Dorsey. And they had some hero worship going on with Jack Dorsey and Jack Mahlers, and these guys are phony! I mean, Jack Dorsey fired half his company because AI or whatever. Yeah right bull crap. Bull crap! This is the guy that you think that you look up to? Come on...I just think that like a- I think you're right. I think that lightning went through it started off as a great idea and immediately got captured. Very quickly yeah

1:27:13 by investment money, and venture capital and these kinds of things. And they killed it. They killed it. So can we focus our energy on the funding tag? I would love to. Me too! Me too. And I don't know how to shut our node down, I don't know what to do... I have no clue! I'll have to look into it. It seems like you gotta close channels and that's an interesting exercise Yeah but how many weeks is that gonna take? I dunno. At the rate of... But no, I think funding tag is

1:27:53 is, you know what a great experience in built-in support. Because what our dream was with Lightning was to make it where you could hit a button in the app and send money right away. And funding tag can do that, just not streaming payments and not sovereign. The perfect use case to me one of the most beautiful build outs of this is what Buzzsprout does I don't know if you've used buzz sprouts things so if you host on Buzzsprout you get access to I think it's like Buzzsprout Payments or I forgot what they call it

1:28:40 But they build a payment portal for you and they stick it in the funding tag. And so when you tap on the funding tag inside your podcast app that supports it, it opens up a web view sheet of their payment portal page and you've got Apple pay credit card. You can just PayPal all your stuff is right there and they can just send it to you and it goes into your bus route account Like, it's like a fully baked in payment portal with all these options right in the... and shows up right in the app. It's a great experience and if somebody- If other hosting companies would do that sort of thing or if there was a third party even something like Podpage that would do that sort of thing That would be a cool solution

1:29:34 Just give all the little payment buttons right there and people can just tap it and shoot you some money. Speaking of that, we could use some. Yeah for real. I'm sure we have PayPal people to thank? We do lots of them yeah. Because we have two weeks left. Let me see if...I did hear a couple of boostograms come in while we were talking Uh, 555 from salty crayon. He says if y'all ever shut down the index node can we get a heads up mutual close? We would never just yank it when not rug pullers Oh yeah for sure Yeah that's yeah rove ducks how to do is no idea got 2222 from salty crayon welcome back and Eric PP 2222 That was that's exactly what we got for this episode while we were alive

1:30:29 Uh, we got a bunch of PayPal's. We got three weeks of them where hey Hernandez five $5 bear with me it's going to be along list Michael Goggin $5 cone gloss bought $5 Christopher Reamer $10 see me I need this crunch this down a little bit. Hey OK I scrunched you scrunched folder or scruncher? I'm a squeeze her Randall Black, $5. What I do is put

1:31:07 I keep the tube perfectly intact as it came out of the box. But then you put your, you hold the very tip at the bottom of the tube and then you take your other hand and run your fingers up the side of the tube like from bottom to top kind of stroke up the side towards the outlet. Okay? You do that on the right side, then you go back in and you cover up the left side You start at the bottom again and you stroke up the left side towards the outlet. And then, you work your way towards the middle. I don't even know what you're talking about at this point! Because as the toothpaste gets low... ...you end up with some down at the bottom

1:31:53 This kind of in the little, you know this trapped in the bottom where the tube has already been squeezed. So you have to work your way up from the bottom of the tube to the top...in order to get the toothpaste squirt out the top. Randall Black $5. Yeah yeah thank you Randall. Dreb Scott $15 Chris Bernardik, $5. Michael Kimmerer, $5 and 33 cents. Nice Charles Hicks five bucks Cameron Rose twenty-five dollars Thank You Cameron appreciate that Ralph Estep 50 bucks Wow thank you Martin Lindeskog one dollar Thank You Martin Brendan Mulligan that's a pod page 25 dollars Thank You Brent

1:32:49 Uh, we could not process your recurring payment. I'll skip that one. Okay? Joseph Morocco $5. Thank you, Joe's then we have the cancellation to bronze. See Bronze Oxen Films LLC, $20. And I got a note on this one thank you for all you do God bless sir thinking dad oh Thank You Did it did it? Oh yes, I got your note and I will take care of that yes

1:33:26 Lauren Ball, $24.20 Mitchell Downey that's Sir Mitch from Podverse that's 50 bucks Thank you Christopher Harabaric ten dollars Mitch on the personal side of things ten dollars Thank you Mitch Damon Kasejak 15 bucks Terry Keller five bucks Christopher Cowan five bucks Richard Turoxie 10 dollars This is so wonderful I love this this is value for value right here it's beautiful Yeah it is Paul Saltzman 22 dollars and 22 cents. Derek J Visker, the best name in podcasting $21. Oh who is this? No note but it's a one-off ten dollars from Jesse Hunter thank you Jesse appreciate you

1:34:10 Jeremy Gerdt, five bucks. Now we're wrapping back around here. Gene Liverman $5 thank you Gene and Jane Jean thank you for running your uptime monitor I appreciate that Michael Hall five dollars and fifty cents Todd Cochran rest in peace thirty dollars Thank You Todd I love that he's boosting from the grave Timothy Voice, 10 bucks. And that's it and we got a solitary singular comic strip blogger 25000 sats. Ooh nice! He said he sent two but I only found one so send me the other one... Pretty sure he sent two i think so he sent to while you were gone. I thought he did too but I could only pull one for some reason go send me the uh resend me the note from the other one and

1:35:06 Howdy, Dave and Adam. Today no promos I just want to say thank you Dave for giving me interview about your AI tools over Zoom that are published as 56 minute long video Yo CSB PS Adam you're next Adam listen to Yoda there is no try just do it this Bitcoin gram was $15 and 49 cents when sent so back to community I know that i've built a successful community when comics for blogger is a part of it. Every community needs a comic strip blogger in fact the comic strip blogger if you don't have csb in your community, it's not complete and I have known him longer than two of my wives put together

1:36:00 That's interesting. I'm just saying, that means a lot does in a weird way it does mean a lot you need a guy like that you need to go like that in there let me throw something else out though because I'm seeing some people in the boardroom saying talking about you know like cotton gin said RIP boosts I think there is a way

1:36:43 Let's try to express this. There are things that we have learned from all of this, and from lightning it is not financially sustainable for the index. Right I mean the numbers are what they are and i can't make that stop. Well not to maintain the node doesn't mean that we don't have a node that we won't receive it but you know sure right keeping all the channels open and everything. It's a heavy lift. Yeah, we still have the Albi hub thing but here is what I think I've learned from lightning in general and I don't think this means boosts are dead or lightning over podcasting is dead that stuff isn't... That's not dead there are plenty of podcasts that will still do it all of Fountain still works on this technology

1:37:45 It's like you said, it's just our node that is unsustainable financially. But the thing that I'm trying to... You can pay us with the Albi Hub. That's who's Eric PP we still got an address and all that works so yeah no nothings being deprecated this is just a one- The node We cannot afford to run the node because there not enough stuff flowing through it because switching to Bolt 11 killed it. That's just the honest truth and so what I'm trying to say is, what i think I've learned from Lightning over these years is that primarily Alex was right at the very beginning- It's not that ever thought he was wrong, its just that he was more right than anybody realized

1:38:50 Separating the metadata from the payment is critical. Because you can, what's really needed is a way to send the metadata, the boost message, the sender all those kinds of things in a verifiable way that is independently verifiable apart from whatever the payment process is Yeah. Because you even with PayPal and things like that, you have a problem where... You can't always fit the message No no this is the biggest problem This is the biggest problem That's a problem that I would love to see solved Yeah It would be fantastic to solve that With whatever... Really with any payment method because we have like a part-time person working on consolidating that data every single show

1:39:42 Yeah, and it's reconciling that as we do. It's a nightmare. People use one email address for their PayPal or different email address for their message...it's a nightmare! And, you know... Like I don't think everything's gonna break when we end up having to take the node offline. I don't think that. If we take the Lightning node offline and everything breaks now that is a condemnation of lightning if there ever was one! Yeah exactly. If it can't survive one node going offline then holy cow so

1:40:21 And you can't, and if that's the case you can have we're going to base all of our payment platform infrastructure decentralized payment platform infrastructure on one person losing money every month. Yeah that's not good. No so I think this is just gonna... We're gonna have to talk about this for a few weeks and just figure out how to do this and all that kind of stuff but the metadata part of it is you know that's a thing Let's pull it Dave, let's go. We gotta end this show. Boardroom thank you very much I feel bittersweet today about the board meeting but we've had some real honest conversation and no AI could ever do that Amen And we'll be back next week...I think! I'll be here, Dave will be here Join us for Podcasting 2.0

1:41:24 I agree with all of that. Yes, 100%.