Episode 234: Slopcasting

Episode Transcript

Podcasting 2.0 for September 12, 2025, episode 234, Stop Casting.

Hey, everybody.

Welcome.

Hey, hey, guys.

Welcome, everybody.

It's time for Podcasting 2.0.

We are, in fact, the boardroom, the board meeting of all things podcasting on a weekly basis.

It all happens here.

It all gets discussed here.

We are, unfortunately, the only boardroom that has an empty seat this week.

I'm Adam Curry, here in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and in Alabama, the man who is as alternative as his enclosures, saying hello to my friend on the other end, the one, the only Mr.

Dave Jones.

Yeah.

Yeah, we got things to figure out here.

Yeah, we do.

What are we doing?

There's a lot of balls in the air at the moment.

No, that's wrong.

That's not.

That's the wrong show.

Yes, we are.

OK, we probably should explain what we're doing here.

We are doing a live test of the lit tag in audio and in video.

So we have the live video URL information, schmick and lock and honey in the alternate enclosure of our lit tagged episode.

Is that did I say that right?

Yes.

OK, we have.

Yes.

HLS video currently streaming.

It's it's me.

It's just me in the podcast cave.

OK, I have I have it up.

But where do I find the where do I find the desktop?

I'm looking at true fans.

Yes.

OK, so if you're in true fans, this is not a good experience if I can't.

Oh, there it is live.

OK, so I hit live.

Right.

OK, so I hit live now.

OK, are you listening live?

Yes.

OK, now go down to the very bottom next to where like the volume control is.

Oh, yes.

Oh, there it is.

OK.

And what you need to choose.

This is now this is not what you need to choose.

It's not specified.

There you are.

OK, so why does it say not specified?

Is that because I didn't specify it in my in my in my feed?

It's probably got something to do with the way that the tag like we didn't put something in the tag that it wants.

So we need to figure out what what it wants and feed it properly.

Let's do while we're at it.

Let me just check because I OK, episodes, live episodes, alternate enclosure.

OK, Nathan says you're seeing not specified because true fans uses the title attribute to label the alternate enclosure.

So there's no title attribute in our alternate enclosure.

So we need to label that.

Well, I have here's here's the option.

Oh, content type.

No.

So I have this is from sovereign feeds.

I have under enclosure data.

I have application, which I have a type.

I have length.

I have bit rate.

I have height language rel for fifteen hundred Alex.

I have codex and default.

And then I have source you or I and content type.

And those are the default, the codec and the content type are all optional.

Let me go look at the spec.

So should I be real real?

Well, as well, I have alternate as per your instructions, your your strict specific instructions.

I, I probably I definitely gave you the wrong stuff.

Yay.

I gave you the right.

I gave you the right HLS URL.

Yes, but I did not.

I clearly did not give you the right of something else.

See.

Search documents.

Oh, we're going to use this.

I love these live life tests in closure.

The only thing we forgot to do is hook up our roadcasters together to make sure it was the maximum mess possible today.

I almost did that.

I got so close.

OK, no title is an attribute in the titles and attribute in the in the alternate enclosure.

Sovereign feeds sounds like it doesn't have it.

Oh, man.

No, that's no good.

Yeah, well, that's too bad.

OK, well, we can't do that.

Just well, unspecified, unspecified people use unspecified.

Yes, the rail provides a method of offering and are grouping together different.

No, it's very it's very possible, Eric, that sovereign feeds needs to be updated.

There's no doubt about that.

That's possible.

I mean, I've never used the alternate enclosure in sovereign feeds, and I'm amazed any of this stuff works at all, to be honest about it.

I have not looked at the old.

Oh, yeah.

Good one.

Hold on.

Hand hack.

Yes, manually edit feed.

Let's wait for that to happen.

OK, let's see.

Where do I do this now?

Please don't.

Come on, please.

What is wrong with you?

All right, go.

What is wrong with you?

Don't be don't be a wuss.

Hand hacker.

OK, well, the sovereign feeds has a capability to manually edit your feed so we can always restore it.

OK, and I'm looking here now.

OK, there's the pod roll.

There's OK, live September 12th.

Got it.

Custom value account.

Where's the where is the alternative enclosure?

OK, I'm at the alternative enclosure line.

What do I need to add here?

So I had to add title in the this is going to be so cool.

You need to add title in the alternate enclosure tag itself.

OK, where would you like me to add that?

Add it right after a length.

No, a bit rate added after bit rate.

OK, bit rate.

All right.

So just put video.

Video space.

OK.

All right.

Save.

And we're going to publish.

OK, and now we're going.

No, feed submitted successfully.

So something happened there.

OK, so does that did that pod ping it as well?

Yes, it podpings it because I want to see how what it looks like.

Baby, this is fantastic.

OK, OK, I'm going to I'm going to go and see you'll see pod or refreshing, refreshing true fans.

I'm going to pop in that watch.

OK, let me see.

I'm still getting not specified.

Sorry.

I knew that was going to happen.

Wow.

How exciting is this?

OK, here I see.

I see it just came.

I see the last just came through on podping.watch.

So let me go over.

To true fans, see me refresh true fans.

Delizio, Adam.

No, no, I'm here.

I'm listening.

There's so much going on on my computer right now.

I'm just like in in dimensions here.

I love it.

T-34.

OK, now let's see what do I have to play?

Yeah, I got to hit listen live.

Still says not specified.

OK, we'll we'll get we will get this.

We'll get this thing fixed.

Test successful.

Well, yeah, the video works for sure, which is I'm sure that true fans probably they've got to have some caching in place.

I mean, we can't can't totally blame them for this.

No, no, no, no, no.

I mean, they like but OK, so the ones that we of course, true fans was going to work.

I mean, that's that was I had total confidence in Sam.

The one the one that was the question mark was fountain because Oscar said that he he he came back.

He said, no, we don't support alternate enclosure video in the live stream and in the live item.

And then he came back a few minutes later and he's like, wait, maybe we do.

Well, hold on.

Let's try.

I don't know.

Podcasting 2.0.

Let's try it on the web version.

Oh, that's a good idea.

There's an idea.

OK, are you smoking?

No, I'm I'm eating trail mix.

I just wanted to say I can't hide anything I'm doing right now because I'm like I usually mute myself so nobody hears me.

So I don't see any live episode on the on the web version.

That's interesting.

Oscar, help.

Yeah, really, Oscar.

What's going on, man?

Hmm.

OK.

Oscar literally said, I guess we'll see what happens.

He's like, I don't know.

Well, that's the that's the only appropriate answer really is.

Yeah, we'll see what happens.

We'll see how it goes.

That's called running with scissors.

Yes.

So as your roadcaster hooked up, you want to do that while we're at it.

We just want to talk about some other stuff.

You start plugging stuff in.

Well, so let me let me see.

So the.

What I what I have going, what I have is.

Just to describe the setup, is I try I first tried to install pure tube and.

And I mean, it's fairly straightforward, but there's a couple of places in in pure tubes documentation where it is a little.

The commands that it says to run don't work.

Oh, that's always disappointing.

Yeah.

And so like it, you create a dedicated peer to the user.

Which is fine, but then it wants you to become that user to do some commands, but it doesn't.

Necessarily, but it doesn't really, but that doesn't work because.

When you add the user, there's no shell, so you can't really log in as that user anyway.

There's a little bit of an inconsistency, I would say, in the documentation.

It would have been I should have tried to do a docker thing or something and just make it easier, but I was trying to go this like, you know, manual install route.

Sure, but it messed up.

And then I got it in a state where I couldn't tell it Postgres, it wouldn't connect to the Postgres database, and I just really couldn't tell if it was something earlier on that I'd done that didn't work in the instructions.

So rather than try to like.

You know, beat my head against the wall, I booted Wednesday night and then just installed owncast.

What is what is what is owncast exactly?

Well, I mean, it's open source and it's it's just a personal HLS stream streamer.

Like that's all it.

I think that's all it does is just streams in HLS video stream.

And I don't know.

I mean, it has it doesn't seem to have any have any external dependencies.

Because I downloaded I downloaded the.

The script to install it.

And it was literally like you just run, you download it, unpack it, run this command and give it a port number.

And it just works.

I mean, it's like magic.

It's flat out works.

You and so you you.

You yeah, you download the owncast source and run the owncast command and say like port nine thousand.

And that's that that's your NGINX reverse proxy port.

And so that so that you can use NGINX to get all of your like TLS certificates and all that stuff.

And yeah, and then it just started working.

So it was it was streaming.

So I'm like, OK, well, that job is done.

And then the alternate enclosure, I just put one of those together and had you stick it in the feed.

And so now it's just it's just working.

And I was trying to say I'm logged into the admin console on owncast.

Is this a currently 19 viewers?

So that's pretty good.

Streaming to 19 people.

Let me see what the yeah, there's somebody watching in VLC.

And then it just gives you basically user agents.

The one thing I don't know.

Here is if anybody can I don't know on the stream side if you can hear both of us or not.

Or if you can.

Oh, that's a good question.

Well, somebody I presume somebody would have said something if that wasn't possible at this point.

Yeah, yeah.

Maybe some.

Yeah, I'm assuming because I've I think there was something one time before when I used to do this.

That's some.

OK, Nathan says that they can hear maybe I could I can't remember what the difference there was some sort of audio inconsistency.

Maybe they couldn't hear.

You.

Well, let me let me check it out, bro.

Let me let me check it out.

Where were we?

Because I remember Alex used to tell me that.

Well, that has to be different.

But that's that has to be on your end.

That's how you're you're routing the audio.

That's clearly not the podfather's mistake.

Oh, no.

How dare how dare me?

OK, let me let me check it out.

Where were we?

Oh, video showed up on true fans.

It worked.

Maybe they couldn't hear.

Oh, oh, oh.

Oh, it says video now.

Sure does.

Nice.

OK.

Well, let me let me check it out.

Yeah.

No, I can hear myself over there.

Oh, yeah.

Wow.

Go, Sammy.

OK, so we're nailed it, Sam.

Yeah.

Nice.

He's now our new validator.

He's honestly he's always been the validator.

This is I'm trying to see.

I'm trying to see what the top is on the oncast server.

See where we're each top is so pretty.

It's just beautiful.

It's just it's just a beautiful little thing.

Yeah, that's that is very cool.

Very cool that that works.

Nice.

OK, so we have 20.

Let me look at the.

OK, we have 15 viewers currently.

Now what you need is how can I stream my signal to you so you can hook it in?

Uh huh.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I mean, this is get super fancy now.

And so there's 15 viewers and then there's four.

We're using 426 megs of RAM.

And CPU on the server sitting right around 40 percent, that's not bad.

Pretty good.

That is not bad.

So this is a nano.

This is a five buck a month nano.

So can you.

Oh, that's very good.

Can you accept a video stream from me?

I don't know.

Can I?

I don't know.

Yes.

Have some sort of facility to like you can like pump your stuff over to me.

Yeah, of course it does.

Well, but I need to know where to pump it.

Baby, tell me where to tell me where you want me to pump it.

I want to pump it into my OBS.

I saw that, please.

Pump it into my OBS.

My goodness.

I mean, surely there's some way to do that.

There's got to be a way to do that.

Right.

I mean, there's got to be a way for me to like open up a port.

Yes, this gets better with with age, don't these jokes.

Ports are wide open.

Yeah, I don't know.

But I just don't know what.

Let me go look.

Let me go look in the OBS.

I have all kinds of things.

Settings, all settings.

Here's where here's where I'm going to accidentally show a password to somebody.

Oh, but I've got you know what I've got here, though, that I've resurrected from the grave.

What's that?

The stream deck.

Christmas present.

Yes.

And now I can just conveniently hide my desktop.

Yes.

Beautiful.

Appearance.

Surely there's a way I can send this.

Explore.

Explore all this.

Explore.

I want to explore.

I want to stream.

I'm pretty sure I can.

Yes.

Hello.

Hey, citizen.

Test worked.

I'm pretty sure I can.

Can I not stream direct?

This has got to be so boring for people who are just listening.

The boardroom loves it.

It's the boardroom.

Exactly.

The boardroom is listening to it.

Well, I know I can if I if you can take a stream yard, then I can send it from stream yard.

I think I still have one of those very expensive accounts.

Oh, you are.

Come on.

Someone in there knows how to do it.

Come on, guys.

Stop hosing around here.

Let's see.

You can have OBS accept a second stream by using the multiple RTMP outputs plug in for simultaneously streaming to multiple platforms, running two separate instances of OBS with different settings.

Do you have said plug in?

Oh, I'm probably not.

I don't I don't know about anything about OBS except.

Well, I do.

I'm actually I actually know a little bit now.

I'm not giving myself enough credit, but I see settings.

I don't see anything about plugins, so I'll figure it out.

Well, we will we will figure this out.

This this will now be a regular thing that I do.

And just you can just.

And it'll just be an ongoing test.

OK, until the world accepts alternate enclosures with video.

Well, I can always send it to a YouTube and people can do them side by side.

Yeah, double OBS.

I'm getting my popcorn.

Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.

I got I got home.

Uh, so everything was where I left the stream running last night.

Just so yes, I saw because I for a little while I just watch your your log tails go by.

It's it's so it's it's kind of a it's kind of peaceful.

You know, I I have it here to aquarium.

I love.

Yeah, I it's it's actually an aquarium.

Yes.

Like what is he tailing there?

Because you can't really see it in that.

So let's see.

But it's good.

It's very good.

But I left it running.

Yeah, I left it running last night and.

Then I got home when I got home for lunch today to do the show.

I went in and was going to click.

It was going to click around to connect to your clean feed and the mouse wouldn't move.

I was like, well, and this whole the whole my whole rig was frozen.

Oh, yeah.

Welcome to OBS.

Yeah, I'm like, well, this brings back memories.

So that's great.

Well, hopefully we do not crash.

I could say without a doubt.

Todd Cochran would have loved this episode.

He would he would have loved this experimentation.

He probably would have called everyone.

OK, we've got to set this up.

All of our podcast has got to be doing live video.

We've got to be able to stream it.

Let's get it.

Go.

We need a server when you go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go.

All hands bulletin.

Everybody has to listen to episode two for two.

Thirty four.

If you really want to know what's going on with this lit tag, you've got to listen to episode two, three, four of podcasting 2.0.

That will explain it all.

That's exactly what I would say.

No.

Well, you wrote a beautiful piece about him.

I thought that was really, really nice if people haven't seen it.

It was titled Leaving, I think.

On leaving.

Yeah.

Let me just put it in the show notes.

That was really beautiful, brother.

It's a real nice piece.

Well, the.

You know, the thing about.

I think I just echo your sentiment.

About Todd, which is.

I just always thought I just always expected him to just be there.

Exactly.

And then, you know, and then just one day he just wasn't there anymore.

And it was I think I just walked around in a fog for really a few days.

Yeah, I'm sure you did.

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, I texted you right away and said, man, this this one, this one hurts.

Because, yeah, I mean, there's been so many people who have passed away in the past 10 years that I know, but I knew as well as Todd.

But, you know, then you realize that even though we didn't really.

Talk to each other personally that often or.

See, just certainly didn't see each other very often.

He was always there.

It was all and he was Wednesday night, Rob and Todd in my ear, walking Phoebe in the dark here in Fredericksburg, yelling back at my phone, like, shut up about video.

You know, that was just it was a constant thing.

And then smiling when Todd would push back.

You know, that was it was.

And that, of course, is not the only thing that I remember Todd for.

But I mean, we did a nice new media show on Wednesday that Rob put together with Mike Dell and Rob Walsh.

And it was quite an honor to to be there for that episode.

That was nice.

Yeah, that was it was it was a good episode.

And you know, it was really nice to hear some of those older stories.

And because, you know, there's just there's some of that stuff.

There's some of that stuff I didn't know.

And there's some of this and some things you guys that have been around, you know, in the podcasting sort of boot up phase.

That you all just forget to tell because you were there and it's it's just part of your history.

And you don't you don't you don't remember to to tell it to other people as if it was history, you know, because you just kind of lived through it and it was a thing.

And so it's nice to hear some of those like when y'all are specific, y 'all were specifically like trying to think of old stories about the beginnings of of of booting up podcasting.

It was nice to see that, you know, and hear those things that sometimes I think y'all y'all just may miss just because, you know, y'all were there.

Totally.

Yeah.

It was not I mean, you know, Rob Walsh looks exactly like Peter Gabriel for some reason.

I don't understand.

Rob Walsh was but he was he was he was pretty.

I mean, you could tell he was feeling it.

Yeah.

He was feeling it.

And I had told myself it's like, you know, because every podcast I heard was, you know, and I'm like, man, when I go, please have somebody there who's having a good time with it and remembering all the fun times and bring the mood back up because that, you know, yeah, of course, there's a time to mourn.

Absolutely.

But at this point, we already knew for three days.

So I had been over and I talked to my pastor about this.

I said, man, this this really hit me, this one.

Yeah.

And I came home and talked to Melissa about it.

And it was really and I knew she was not going to understand because she does.

She's not really in that world anyway, but she but she had met Todd once before.

She so we were at.

We're at a podcast movement, Nashville.

I guess this was 2000.

I guess this is twenty twenty two.

Yeah, I think so.

That must have been that or twenty I think twenty three because I didn't go.

So it must have been twenty three.

Yeah.

OK, so we were there and some and Melissa had gone with me and.

She had been off doing her own thing in Nashville while I was at the conference, and then she came back to the hotel and.

Late, late after, you know, after being out, you know, kind of doing her own thing, and then we all ended up I think it was.

Yeah, he was me, Melissa and and Todd and Tom Rossi.

And I think Alvin Brooke was there.

It's just a bunch of people.

Ben and Alberto, I think we're also there all just sitting around a table in the sort of lobby lounge area or lobby area of the Opry Hotel.

And so Todd, Todd Cochran starts telling us about his Tinder dates and he starts flipping.

Oh, wait, was this the time that Melissa passed out?

Yeah, yeah.

So I do remember this.

So he's flip he's flipping through the he's flipping through Tinder dates and like in like showing us he's like, I'm going to meet this girl tonight and I'm going to meet and I got her size like lined up for the next day.

It was the funniest thing.

I forgot all about that.

I forgot.

Yeah.

And we're all just laughing at him and he didn't care.

He's like he did.

That's what I mean.

Like if even if you like, you know, even when you laughed at him, he just thought it was just as fun as that.

Exactly.

Now, that is Todd in a nutshell.

You could laugh at a person.

No, he never did.

He never did.

Yeah.

Anyway, I think it's a great idea.

They're going to try and keep the podcast awards going and have a Todd Cochran award, which, of course, we need to call the we need to call it the toddy just because he'd hate it.

The hot toddy, everybody.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

He would hate that so much.

Yeah.

Oh, man, we're going to I'm going to miss him, though.

Yeah, I'm going to miss him.

So a lot of talk about these Apple chapters.

And James, Detective Cridland has found that Apple is indeed slurping in the the Jason chapters file.

That's now I don't know about you, but I did not see that one coming.

In hindsight, it makes total sense because they've already they've already set the with transcripts, they set the mold.

And I like it, by the way, because they never want to disappoint their customers.

So I understand that if their customers are seeing transcripts on one podcast and not on another, they don't want their customers to say they probably don't want the customer support, honestly, like, hey, your chapters are broke, your transcripts are broken on this podcast.

So they created transcripts that are auto generated if you don't make them available.

I think actually you have to set it, if I'm not mistaken.

You have to go into Apple Connect and say explicitly take my chapters.

I'm not sure if that's still the case or take my transcript that I don't know if that's still that way.

And for chapters, I presume they're going to do something similar, which, by the way, kind of shows that they do have an AI strategy somewhere inside the company.

It's not necessarily super apparent on the phone, but doing generating chapters automatically for podcasts has been done for quite a while.

So I think that's a great way.

As long as they respect my own chapter file, I really feel I shouldn't have to go set it in Podcast Connect.

So that may not be the case.

I'm not sure.

Well, I mean, if from what from what James said, he's seeing he's seeing the chapter links get the chapter URLs get hit in his feed, you know, from from Apple's crawlers.

So, I mean, they're they're ingesting the document, you know, the chapter file that is specified in his XML.

And so, I mean, if they're pulling that in.

Perfect example.

I hope he's right.

And that what they're doing is pulling in a chapter's file, if you have it in generating sort of generating one, if you don't.

Because.

I mean, the perfect example of why that would be a good idea is that I there's two Twitch shows that I listen to every week.

I listen to them as part of my job.

And it's Security Now and Windows Weekly.

Just so I can keep track of those two.

Things and they're they're good sort of keeping you up to date on on news shows.

And even though I even though I'm a paid subscriber in the club thing, so I'm a paid member, so I get access to the advertising free episode.

Right.

They still don't have chapters.

And there's some things that I'm like, I'm I'm paying for I'm paying for the show.

To get like, you know, because I want to support.

I want to make sure this product doesn't go away.

I want to end in.

So I'm paying for the show and I still don't get chapters.

So it's not a matter of, you know, Leo always said he didn't put chapters in because he didn't want people skipping the ads.

But but there's no ads in it anyway.

And it would be an honest.

I love Steve Gibson to death.

But a lot of his show is just reading articles from bleep, right?

You actually want the the chapters for his show.

Yeah, I really need to just skip some stuff that's completely irrelevant to me sometimes.

And sometimes he's he's long winded and he can talk for 20 minutes.

And I just in trying to just like skip around, if they did, if Apple auto generated some chapters for those, that would be incredible.

Like I would I would use that immediately.

And if they do it in the same way they did transcripts where they're going to honor the chapters file, you specify or create them on the fly if you don't have any.

Man, that would be that would be amazing.

And if you if it's something you could do on device, then other apps could do it, too.

Oh, that's a good point.

You know, with their local models or whatever, I'm sure they're going to use AI for that, you know.

Oh, of course.

Of course.

By the way, I'm still waiting.

Somehow I got in the queue for the pod chapters.

Is it it's not I guess you would call it an app.

It's not an app app, but it's the pod chapters system from Daniel J.

Lewis.

And I was like, I wanted to use it for for my shows.

And I'm like, it says you're on the list.

I'm on the list.

You're on lots of lists.

I want to be at the top of the list.

I want to be in.

I want to be using it.

Ever since I heard that I see now that RSS dot com allows you to put your own your own URL in there.

I'm like, oh, this is great.

I can do it anyway.

Oh, wait.

So.

Hey, citizen, Dave, your OBS audio is four hundred and twenty milliseconds early.

Oh, versus me versus your mouth.

Oh, I'm not synced.

Welcome to video, my friend.

This is this is this is this is how this is how it starts.

This is what it is.

This is why one of the many, many reasons I do not want to deal with video, like why would I want to put myself through that?

Well, I don't know how to fix that.

So that'll have to go.

There's an offset.

I'll have to go in the bucket.

There's a setting for it to offset that.

And, you know, it's like, why would you even have to do it?

Shouldn't that just be something that the system automatically adjusts?

Yeah, yeah.

You would think so.

I don't know how to figure that out later.

But as soon as you open OBS settings, you're just like your eyes closed.

So what other tags could Apple implement in this manner?

What can let's let's take some let's start a pool.

What would the next the next tag be that they could do where they can satisfy all of their customers by generating it themselves?

Oh.

That's a good question.

I'm looking at the list right now.

Location.

No, they can't.

They can't possibly know location.

Because location tag can be where it's from, what it's about.

No, I don't think.

Well, but if they put it if it doesn't have a location tag, they could put in the the the non the the where it's now.

You're right.

Not because that's the source.

That's not too much hassle.

Give me give me the other ones.

What else do we have?

Let's run down the list.

Let's figure this out.

You know, they're going to do it.

You know, they're going to do something.

Person.

Person, person, that would be hard, very hard to do.

That would be very hard to do accurately.

Hmm.

Pod roll.

No, no.

Publisher.

No.

Maybe this is it, man.

We're done.

So finished soundbite.

That's I don't think they'd do that.

That just doesn't sound worth it.

Trailer.

Maybe.

Well, yeah, they could.

I mean, it would be it's a lot of work for them.

But it doesn't seem thought there was something that does trailers automatically, I could be wrong.

I bet there's lots of things that hit like headliner and those kind of things.

Hmm.

The the one the one that I think see, I was fully expecting their next big.

2.0 adoption to be live item.

Yeah, I did not see chapters coming.

I would love I would love for that to happen.

Oh, I think it's going to.

I just did not.

I didn't expect it to be chapters next.

That was a surprise.

Yeah.

But that just tells me that once they're finished with chapters, they'll be doing live now.

Yeah.

I hope so.

I think I mean, because they I mean.

Who doesn't want live in their podcast app?

Yeah.

Everybody does.

Right.

I think so.

I think it would start a revolution.

Which we've already started, to be quite honest.

You know, I just pulled it up in TrueFans again.

It makes me happy.

I'm so happy.

Did we figure out whether or not Fountain is working?

No, I can't find it.

I can't find a switch.

There's no toggle.

I'm pulling it up on mine.

Where's my Fountain at?

I just don't see if there's a difference between the iOS version and the Android.

That's your own Android.

Well, I'm on Android.

Yeah.

So maybe maybe the iOS is different.

I hate how TestFlight doesn't doesn't recognize that you're a premium subscriber in your apps that you're testing.

Man, I'm glad I don't have to deal with TestFlight.

Just give me that.

Give me the Play Store.

It's fine.

I don't see.

Oh, there it is.

OK.

That's 2.33.

That one ended.

Feed.

Podcasts.

Podcasting 2.0.

This is super exciting.

Not really.

No, it's actually terrible.

No, no, I guess.

But but you have to look when you're doing it, because that's the important part.

You know, well, this live item would be great for them to do next, that's for sure.

That would be fantastic.

Or alternate enclosure.

I mean, they could support the video alternate.

But that would that would make sense, too.

Yes.

And maybe it may go in that order because then they would do the alternate enclosure, then the live item so they could have the video as well.

And I believe in Ted.

What is Ted's actual title?

What does he actually do?

That's his title, Ted.

His title is Ted.

It's just that's just who he is.

It's just talk to Ted.

That's funny.

My fountain is just crashing out.

I can't.

Oh, really?

Somebody.

That's odd.

I know it is weird.

That's not usual.

No, certainly not.

Certainly not for them.

And we'll see where's my.

Yeah, I can't I can't I can't seem to pull this up.

Well, anyway, maybe somebody else can maybe somebody else can tell us that.

Did you see that the title music service is now doing their own sort of like donation?

Have you figured it out?

Because it's obviously it works with cash app because I know that is it a square?

Is that the square?

Is that Dorsey's thing square?

Yes.

Square.

I know they bought title for, I think, several hundred million dollars, which was weird when they did it.

Right.

Well, we always knew that.

And he even said at the time, Dorsey said, you know, oh, this is going to be you know, we're going to connect this to cash app and direct payments.

And the whole title thing by itself was kind of odd because they were focusing a lot on real high quality audio, which, as it turns out, nobody cares about.

OK, James, I hear you.

Yes.

Some people do care about it.

Yeah.

Him and Neil Young.

Well, Neil Young had a had a whole device and a whole system.

And and that went out of business because just there wasn't enough demand for it.

You had the thing that was like shaped like a prism or something.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

I have one somewhere still, but it didn't play like FLAC files or something.

Oh, I don't remember.

It was lossless.

The files were huge.

I remember it took a while for him to come down the pipe.

Yeah.

But I never understood that because I mean, that'd be like it was like PayPal buying Pandora or something is like, what?

What?

Why are you buying a music service?

Well, for this very reason, let me see, explain the way title will work with.

Cash app to pay artists directly, and I'm really curious how they do this, because this is all licensed music, which means you've got to split that money.

It's got to.

Got to under, you know, it's not like value for value music where whoever puts it up, you know, you you determine your splits.

I doubt that they have those splits.

OK, title music.

Oh, it's owned by block.

OK, that is block, not square.

OK, well, my my agent, my agent, AI is searching for an answer.

And what AI is this?

Oh, I use Grok pretty much for everything.

Oh, OK.

This got the agentic stuff in it.

I don't know if it's thinking it's browsing, whatever.

Yeah, sure.

20 bucks a month.

I mean, as far as long as it lasts, I'll take it.

But with my vibe coding, man, I tried Chad GPT again.

Oh, what a mistake.

Chad GPT.

Yeah.

It just takes you down the rabbit hole, man.

It's like, well, clearly this, you know, like, no, no, I'm not going to reinstall FFMPEG.

No, that's not my problem.

You took me down a hole, you know.

And and the one thing I will say that Grok does well is it it opens up code in a code block window in the browser, whereas Chad GPT just keeps it all in that one page.

And so at a certain point, you've got two gigs in this one tab and it just becomes unwieldy.

And you really I mean, you can do branch and it'll open up a new page, which will still be 800 megs.

And then you try to continue there.

I mean, you might as well just say describe what we did and I'll start a new conversation.

Which is what you have to do often with these things, because they have they don't they're not very good at remembering what they did at all, really.

Yeah, that's OK.

Titles, direct artist payout program since here comes finally.

Thank you.

Bad robot.

OK.

Up to 10 percent of their monthly fee is allocated directly to the most streamed artists of the month.

Oh, so Jay-Z and Beyonce get everything.

Yeah.

And Taylor Swift.

Oh, direct fan contributions.

Tipping.

Artists set up a contribution button on their title profile page.

Fans see this button and can send money with a click along with the viewing, along with viewing a custom message from the artist from the artist support.

OK, so they have basically a funding tag.

OK.

Yeah, that's the part that interested me.

Fans fans pay using their links payments.

OK, so doesn't tell me where it goes.

Hmm.

OK, so purely, purely proprietary.

Yeah, of course it is.

Yeah.

We expected that.

Well, you know, but I think, yeah, we expect.

Yeah, we expected it.

But I think a lot of people in the Bitcoin world.

Are seduced by the Jack.

You know, Jack of confusion, the Jack stuff.

Yeah.

I mean, they say that, oh, you know, Jack's going to be he's good.

He's good.

He's a good guy.

He's going to do everything right.

I mean, or whatever.

He's gonna do everything open source.

And it's just not the way this stuff works.

It really isn't.

He may be a fine person.

He may be fine, but he's but it's not good.

It's not like everything's going to be open source that that requires destitute people like us.

Exactly.

Destitute and desperate.

Exactly.

That's exactly what it is.

Yeah.

Billionaires usually do not give give away their software.

That's just not really in this.

It's not part of the program, typically.

Although, you know, he lost her.

He kind of gave away some Bitcoin to make that go.

Has that grown at all?

Is anyone is anyone doing anything with Nostra?

Is there any expansion?

I mean, I follow the the Damas guy.

Through the bridge.

Yeah, he seems to still be kicking.

So is Alex Gleason still doing stuff on the most or bridge?

I don't know.

It seems like it seems like the whole not it seems like Nostra talk has calmed down a lot.

It seems like it's just kind of gone, which I think is a background is a perfect time to rekindle using the Nostra relay that Oscar set up to send metadata to LNURL.

I mean, we're at that point where everybody's kind of throwing their hands up and like, well, this is dying.

Well, yeah, because we're still all on key send and the LNURL pay stuff works.

It works.

I get stuff in my strike wallet only from Fountain pretty much or podcast guru.

But if podcast guru, if you're using your strike wallet there, then it won't go to a regular key send.

So we have to kill off key send and we have to use the metadata proposal that is supported by the biggest player in the system, which is Fountain.

Yeah, but the problem, the protocol, the protocol for the meta, the structure for the metadata and the protocol for how to deliver it don't have to be the same thing.

No, I know, but everyone's looking for a way to do it.

Yeah, but that it can be done in multiple ways.

Like Fountain is publishing the metadata on to Nostra.

That metadata can be published somewhere else just as easily.

No, I understand, but everyone's like, well, we have no way to do this.

Like, yeah, we do.

We have an actual published way with a demo and, and how to do it.

And I think there's even code just do it already.

I mean, I know it's easy for me to say, because I know, I know what development is like a little bit, but it's not like we haven't already been through this loop and already came up with a solution.

Yeah.

Maybe not everybody agrees with it, but there's still all this Bitcoin bro VC money.

There's all this stuff lingering in the background, which kind of screwed it up in the first place.

Yeah.

Well, the, I don't know, here's, here's my take on stuff like this is I think if any people, people are going to lean in the direction that they feel.

Hold on, sir.

Spencer, there is no backward compatibility with something that has been deprecated that it just happens.

See, this is what I mean.

This is exactly the problem.

Drop keys in.

That's like, it's just not going to be there anymore.

I mean, you may not like it.

And I loved key send.

We developed the whole idea on key send, lest you forget who came up with it.

That was, that was the whole, that was the beauty of it.

Sending money in real time, no invoices, no permission.

Believe me, I, it's a shame.

We fought real hard.

I tried to even get what's the bit thing, the BitPay.

Bit, no, not BitPay, LNBits.

LNBits.

I really tried.

Like, look, you've got an implementation.

Just, you know, approve the pull request.

No, no one wants it.

So that's, it's not backwards compatibility.

It's dead, Jim.

Yeah.

I mean, lightning labs themselves have just killed it.

Yeah.

Because that's what, that's what Brian said this week that, that, that key send has been deprecated.

And it sucks, but that's it.

Just give up.

It's, you know, oh, it works good.

No, it doesn't.

Because you're in a very small circle.

And I don't even, what is going on with WaveLake?

Are they still around?

Are they still alive?

Have they, are they only doing zaps now?

I have no idea what happened to them.

I don't know.

I was wondering the same thing recently as well.

I haven't heard from, Michael was doing a couple of podcasts for a while and then those ended.

The mixtape.

Yeah.

Cause it's hard.

Surprise, surprise.

It's hard to do a podcast, to stick with it at least.

It's hard.

Absolutely.

And so I don't, yeah.

I've been wondering the same thing, but you know, I just, the people, when there's competing ways of doing, when there's competing sort of ideas about how the, about how to do something at that point, I think maybe people are just going to do, people are going to lean in the direction of the thing that they feel most comfortable with.

And Fountain feels most comfortable.

Oscar feels most comfortable in the Nostra world.

And then, you know, other people in the community don't.

And it's, and I think they can just both, I just think they can both work.

You know, if there's a, if there's a meta boost tag in the feed that go, that can be dropped in there and it says, it just, it just specifies, here's where to send the metadata.

Yeah.

Well, it can just go to whatever.

And then that end point, that receptacle can be Nostra or it can be something else.

I mean, it could, it could even just be an HTTP post request to some, to a backend service that accepts the metadata.

And the podcaster is saying, here's where you send it.

And that thing can go.

And then once, once this agnostic, you know, sort of receiver gets that thing, it could put it on the, it could put it anywhere, you know?

I mean, it could put it, it could put the metadata into on both Nostra and, and, you know, something else at the same time.

Well, let me just touch the third rail, because it's what I do.

The issue is that we got this very strong, the most excited people by value for value.

The people who were into it the most, unfortunately, were also completely into sovereignty and DMU.

And we can't have wallets that aren't completely independently sovereign running on your own node.

And that turned a lot of people off, people who are just, who just want to want it to work like on their strike wallet or something else.

That's all they wanted.

And there was a very, very strong push.

No, no, no, that's not, that's not doing it right.

And that's where we got stuck.

That's just the fact of it.

So, you know, everyone's like, well, how do I make it work on my node?

Well, it's not easy.

There's a lot of work to do it on your own node.

There really is.

Yeah.

You know, but there's...

The other part is that it was never having the, having the payment metadata in the, in the key send payload TLV was never, it was never the right way to do it to begin with.

True.

That was a hack.

Yeah, absolutely true.

That was a kludge and it just happened to work, but you never get, we've seen repeatedly demonstrations of people sending us boosts and just faking the amounts or faking the identities or all that kind of thing.

Sure, sure, sure.

You know, and that's, that's just, you know, that's, I guess that's a part of life, how it goes.

Oh, you okay?

What happened?

Yeah, I'm good.

Yeah.

Okay.

But you know, that's just part, I guess the other part of me wonders, do we even need source like identification and verify payment verification and this kind of thing?

I don't feel so.

And the, and what I'm, the way I look at it is I just want it to work.

And at the time when you and I concepted this, the reason why it worked is because lightning allowed programmable money and micro, micro, micro payments with very low fees.

That was the whole attraction of it.

And ever since whatever that stupid upgrade was to the lightning network, we will be able to send other types of tokens over the lightning network.

And I'm telling Taro, Taro, and I'm telling you, there are already 400 million people using stable coin wallets.

It's already 400 million around the world.

I don't understand because what, I mean, where do you even get stable coin?

Oh, you can buy.

How do I go get where?

Well, right now you get it on an exchange.

You can buy stable.

The stable coin has been used mainly as a digital intermediary.

When you're, you want to, for instance, you want to sell Bitcoin to then quickly turn around and turn it into a shit coin.

Instead of turning it into dollars, you turn it into a stable coin, USD or USDT or USDC.

And then it's just, it's a microsecond transaction.

It was really used for traders.

And, you know, this whole industry is built up around proving that they have the backing and that it's pegged to the dollar.

And I'm telling you that this is going to be the way they're going to take control away from the federal reserve.

I'm not going to say it's a great idea.

There's all kinds of downsides to it.

Yes, it can be, of course it can be interrupted, blocked, stopped, hijacked, censored, of course, of course.

But that's why I like the Lightning Network because you can always say, oh, okay, you block me, boom, I'm back to Bitcoin.

And I'll just continue on this way.

But the Lightning Network is perfect for it because most of the infrastructure is already in place.

And man, I'm telling you, this is the one problem everybody's had with this otherwise great idea.

Everyone loves the concept.

Oh, I'd love to pay some money on the fly.

Sure.

I'd love to send a boostergram, an attaboy, a tip, if you will.

And when everyone has gotten used to it in a couple years' time, when stablecoin dollars will just be the normal way you transact currency, because it's coming, okay, maybe five years.

But I think it'll be shorter than that.

We'll be well-prepared and people will love it.

And oh, you censor me?

Okay, I'm just going to switch to Bitcoin.

No problem.

Click.

I'm done.

Look, I'm still, the majority of my life, my income, my life is PayPal.

Do you know how precarious that feels?

Yeah, it's a nice edge.

Yeah.

I feel you.

Yeah.

I guess I just, I question, I'm starting to question the need for attribution.

Salty crayon, that's not true.

That's not true.

The fees on, there will be, I think there'll be no fees on stablecoin transactions.

This is part of the point.

It really is.

But do we need attribution though?

Because what we've been saying from the beginning is we need to say, this person said they paid this much.

Here's the idea we've been going under.

This person said that they've been, that they donated this much money and we need a way to verify that that was accurate.

But do we?

I guess that's the question because what we're talking about and the reason this is so complex to do it the right way is that we're talking about, and when I say right way, I mean like truly cross-platform, is that we're, I mean, we're, we're really beginning to develop, we're starting to take, we're starting to develop a payment system like in the true sense of the word and not just a way to donate money to podcasts.

And so if we're just, if, if the heart of what we're trying to do is donating money to podcasts, you get, you just get what you get.

And I'm, I'm okay with that because that's what we've always had.

We've always had, well, yeah, someone can spoof it or do something wrong or, you know, they send 10 million, they only had a thousand, it doesn't show up, but then the boost comes through as 10 million.

Okay.

That's happened maybe five times.

And you can still see that, that you, you can still see in the transaction that it wasn't 10 million, it was 5,000.

And you can verify it on the backend.

Like, oh, okay.

So, you know, the new helipad.

Right.

So I just, yeah, I'm starting to wonder if not, if none of it, if the payment proofs themselves don't matter because really what they are, what do you, as a podcaster, what do you want?

Money.

We want hookers and blow, hookers and blow, baby.

I want all my money in a brown paper bag.

I want 24 hour daily most service and chicks.

And those books that are hollow that you put on yourself and stick your cash in.

Yeah.

You're talking now.

What you want is you want the money and you want a note, some feedback.

Those are the two things you want.

And there's, so what Fountain did is they, they layered a social aspect onto this thing where they're, where they now, where they've, they've been able to turn it into comments and there there's, there's a, there's a social thing and true fans also is, is taking it as a social thing, but it, you know, but that's, that's just the direction they've gone with their product and that's fine.

But then you, as the podcaster, you, whether or not it becomes those payment proofs go out to Nostra or get published out activity pub on through true fan, no matter how that all works in the end, in the end, if you get paid, you just get paid and you get a note.

Yeah.

Whether it's in the memo field of the bolt 11 or whether it's in the TLV of a key sin, you still get the money and you get a note.

And that's really all that the podcaster cares about.

So I, I mean, I feel like one of the reasons this is so complicated is because these are now product decisions, not really payment delivery issues because the bolt, because bolt 11 works and you can stick a note in it.

I mean, I don't know.

I don't know what the note is.

The notes are not very long, but you can put one in there, you know, and by the way, Ben Rose, I'm not shitting on people who want sovereign money.

I hold Bitcoin.

I love sovereign money.

That's not, that's not the point.

It's like he can't, if, if you see the results, see the results of only wanting it to be sovereign, only wanting it to be self hosted, only wanting, only wanting the result is it dies.

That's just the fact of life.

And yeah, I just want it.

I just want to get money value for the podcast I'm doing.

That's all I'll turn it into Bitcoin later.

And if I get the platform and someone takes away my thousand sats or my thousand pennies or whatever it is, I'll move back to Bitcoin.

That's what I like about it.

I have a, I have a built-in backup and I'd love to be able to receive both.

Why couldn't, why can't I receive both?

Don't see any reason why that wouldn't work, but yeah, you're right.

We're making product decisions and I just wanted to make my voice heard because you and I came up with it.

It's a good idea.

It's a fun thing and it's slowly, slowly withering away, except within kind of the fountain ecosystem.

Yeah.

And we got, you know, we got one boost today.

Yeah.

And you know, yeah, it kind of, it's, it kind of stinks because it was, because it's really fun.

And well, I got a boost from Chad F that just came in 3,238 sats.

He says he's been working with Oscar on stuff and I can add wallets, new wallets, even send stuff to Nostra.

But if the feeds have keysend addresses, I can't do anything.

If we're doing this, we need to remove keysend addresses from the feeds.

This boostogram is going to keysend.

No, I understand.

Yes, we have to, we have to refactor and it sucks.

Totally.

That's the worst possible scenario for any product is like, I'm sorry, it's no longer compatible.

I'm still living with that with my Sonos system.

They literally bricked all the, all the, all of the, uh, the speakers and say, well, you got a new app and here's a legacy app.

Good luck with that.

Yeah, it's horrible.

People get fired over that stuff.

See the Sonos CEO.

Well, I mean, I just, I appreciate, I appreciate what Chad F is doing and Alex, you know, and, and, and, uh, Eric PP and, you know, I just, I'm, I'm just, I'm thankful that they're trying, that they're trying to get this stuff sort of kind of something, trying to get something working.

Um, and, uh, I don't know.

I just, I hope it works and I'm not sure.

I feel like, uh, and Oscar, I'm sorry.

I mean, Oscar too, cause Oscar wants this stuff to be open source too.

Cause his, his app and, and, and Sam, you know, cause they, they need this stuff to work cross platform because it helps them when everybody else can participate.

They don't want true fans is Sam and neither Sam or Oscar want a closed ecosystem where everybody must use their thing in order to be exactly because that's just not, it's not, it's not enough.

It won't work.

Um, on its, on its own.

It really, uh, and I'm thankful that those guys are actually working and trying to figure this stuff out.

Um, I feel guilty that I'm not, that I don't have, you should, you should feel guilty.

You shouldn't feel very guilty.

I don't have the mental bandwidth right now to honestly get in it.

You know what, if you were in there, it would be fixed.

And I'm just, I'm not saying that to make you feel bad or anything.

It's just the fact.

Oh, I don't think so.

Oh yeah.

I think this is a complicated problem.

I know.

I mean, I appreciate that thought, but that's not, I just, I think this is, I don't think that at all.

Um, and part of the reason I've stayed out of it is cause I don't, it feels like product decisions and I'm afraid I'm, you know, I feel like I'm going to, uh, I don't feel like I have anything to say on those things.

It, it's a comp, it's a comp, Eric is right.

It's just, it's complicated.

It's complicated.

I mean, you, you, I mean, Alex started writing an API to receive payments in, I mean, which was good.

You have to write a whole API.

That's not easy.

That's a big pride.

That's APIs.

What are you talking about?

I wrote a meta proxy API.

It's humming along.

Uh, yeah.

And that, that's when you're talking about risk, you know, receiving payment proofs in an API spec, that is a big lift.

Yes, I know.

You know, and the only, the reason this worked at the beginning was because key send was already functional and documented.

Yeah.

This next thing that we're doing, um, is not, and you can say, yeah, you know, I understand Nostra's there and there's already, there's already a spec for it, but that doesn't like, that doesn't change the fact that Nostra is just virtually unknown outside of a few people in the Bitcoin world.

I mean, if, if this is going to be anything and then who runs this and then who runs the Nostra relay that's going to be, what are we going to run a Nostra relay?

No, I mean, this was, this stuff works right now because it's running on fountains relay.

Right.

But the whole beauty of relays is anybody can set up a relay, which by the way, is the number one place censorship can take place.

You know, it's like all of that can happen.

I mean, they're talking censorship in Bitcoin core at this point.

There's all kinds of stuff going on.

That's the beauty of open source projects like this is what makes it exciting.

But that's what I'm saying is like, it fountain runs their own relay in order for this to be broader than found.

You have two choices.

If you're going to, if we're going to say, okay, Nostra is the way, is the way that we're going to do this.

And I'm seeing here again, I'm saying we, well, who is we?

I don't control people.

Everybody can do whatever they want.

Dave, you totally control me.

Whatever you want me to do, I will do.

You know, this is a truth.

Monkey.

Yes.

Yes, master.

And so if you go like, if, if we were to say, okay, let's, let's all try to do Nostra.

Who's going to run the, who's, what relay is this stuff going to go to?

Well, can't you have any relay you want?

Yeah, but, but you can't, yeah, but that's an idea.

I'm saying who's actually going to run it.

Okay.

I'll run one.

But because if you put this information on, if you put these payment proofs onto a dom, some just public relay, like domus or something, well now everybody can see it.

What if, what if podcaster doesn't want you to see it?

Right.

Well, that's another conversation that came up a long time ago with the booster grams.

And I think for me, we're past that.

In fact, part of the value for value system, which I've documented value for value.io or info, sorry.

I don't even know where it lives anymore.

Um, is that the entire motivating factor behind value for value support of podcasts is that it is open and transparent.

People actually like it.

It's just, you know, you go to give, send, go or go fund me.

And the first thing everybody does is looks at what money everyone else gave.

That's it's how the system works, right?

Oh.

And the transparency is good because people say, oh, I can sit there and count and see how exactly how much money you made.

And maybe that's a deciding factor for somebody.

I'm not against that.

Yeah.

I'm not against, I'm not against the idea, but I don't get to make those decisions for other people.

Yeah, but I do.

You see, you're the pod father.

I'm not the pod Sage.

I'm the pod kid.

But it's like the, the, that's what I'm saying.

I mean, I can't.

So that means, that means everybody's going to have to either post a fountains relay or somebody else is going to have to set one up.

That's like, quote unquote, dedicated to, you know, to whatever.

I mean, like, you know, Eric said, everybody can run their own relay.

Well, we've seen how that works with everybody running their own lightning node.

Right.

But don't these relays at a certain point, don't they all cross pollinate?

Am I misunderstanding how Nostra works?

Not that I'm not out of the box.

No, I think you have to add extra layers of stuff on top.

Extra bits.

You got to put extra, you got to put extra stuff on top.

Well, anyway, I'm open to testing.

So if anybody has any, anything they want me to test, I'm happy to do it.

I really am looking forward to it.

Now I can implement some stuff.

I'm a node runner.

Now, I know you didn't say everybody here, but I'm just, but the sentiment is that people can run their own.

And I'm just saying that that's a, we saw, we've seen how that collapses when everybody had to get off Albie and run their own node.

Well, yeah, it collapses.

It collapses the, the normies, if you will.

Of course they're all, they immediately, they they're gone.

That's why we don't get boosts anymore on the, on the show very much is that, you know, it takes nerds like CSB to send us a boost.

Did he?

Yeah, he always does.

He's the only guy that boosted us this week.

I don't know.

It's, it's a hard problem.

And well, I'm, I'm here to help.

I'm happy to help.

You know, I finally got Dvorak to accept lightning payments and all he does is scoff at me because he says, look, there's nothing coming in.

Told you so.

Yeah.

It's about five years too late, but well, there you go.

There you go.

This is a friend, maybe the first time that, that you're, you were late on something.

It's his fault.

It's totally his fault.

It's not my fault.

Oh man.

I don't know.

It's, I don't know.

I don't know what to think about it.

Honestly.

Well, yeah, we've got one thing we do have to have an uncomfortable discussion about.

Oh boy.

Is spam in the index?

Oh, this is, this is actually, uh, had it on my list.

So take it away.

Yeah, I did.

Um, there's spam in the index.

Who, who is they?

Um, well the, the spam, um, the one, the one I hit this morning, so there's, there's WordPress.

So here's, here's where this stuff is coming from, from best I know.

Um, WordPress blogs that are, um, using really simple syndicate or excuse me, uh, what's it called?

PowerPress?

No, it's the, it's the one from Castos.

Seriously simple.

Yeah, seriously simple.

And WordPress blogs, I've seen it coming from PowerPress as well.

WordPress blogs that spin up, install PowerPress and just start creating thousands of feeds of affiliate spam.

And so I cleared out about 2,500 of those this morning from the index.

Now that they, they create feeds with enclosures.

Yeah.

And it's just, it's just a lot of times they don't even play.

There's, it's just a link to a blank audio file.

Oh, okay.

Um, sometimes they do.

And it's just like completely unintelligible what the audio is supposed to be.

It's just completely, it's just junk and they're just trying to get indexed by something, maybe by LLMs or by search engines.

I don't know.

It's some SEO shotgun, shotgun approach, shotgun approach.

So I killed about 2,500 of these today.

I killed probably about 1,500 of them last week from a different blog.

Uh, then I saw this thing, uh, it was a bunch of audio books.

Probably pirated.

Pirated audio books.

Yes.

And some of these are coming from legit hosting companies and I'm going to reach out to them and let them know.

Oh, okay.

Cause they seem to still be active and it's probably people abusing their trial accounts.

Yeah.

Cause that's where all the shenanigans happen.

So I'm going to reach out and let them know.

But then there's also this, I found this other thing this morning.

It was a bunch of feeds going to easy hosting dot space, 274 of these feeds.

And these are audio, you know, full audio books come here to listen to free audio books, you know, and it's all in it's copyright.

You know, these are copyrighted things.

Easy hosting dot space.

And that just, if you go to easy hosting dot space, if you just type that address in, it redirects you to audio books .com.

And maybe I'm crazy, but a domain as expensive as audio books.com that probably is legit service, right?

Hmm.

I don't know.

Let me take a look.

That's interesting.

Easy hosting dot space.

And that just re redirects you to audio books.com.

And so, so do they redirect directly to an audio book?

No, it directs you to like a sign up free.

Okay.

Well that's not a podcast, right?

No, it's that's not, it's not a valid enclosure.

It doesn't open unless you call an HTML page, a valid enclosure.

No.

So the only there's.

That's probably 100% affiliate spam because if someone, you know, so they know where it came from, the refer link is the whatever that website was that you mentioned.

So that's just refer spam.

Okay.

So this, this easy, this easy hosting dot space is what they're just redirecting to audio books.com to get the affiliate spam.

That's what I would suspect.

Yes.

Yeah.

So this, this stuff is just rampant right now.

And so do you have ways to test before we add something and are they, are they pod pinging or are they just adding manually?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

I see.

Yeah.

I see what you mean, Daniel.

So yeah, no, they're coming from, so we, we ingest feeds a bunch of different ways, you know, from a lot of different sources.

And one of the ways we do it is through pod ping.

Uh, we also do it through missed search hits.

So if somebody searches for a feed URL and we don't have it, we then check it to see if it's a valid RSS feed.

And if it is, then we add it.

Got it.

So that's, and this is an RSS feed and it passes all the checks.

It's a valid feed.

Um, you know, with valid enclosures and all that kind of stuff, but it's just crap.

And, um, the only way I can think of to battle against this would be some sort of machine learning that would, that we would have to train to, to try to identify this stuff.

But, um, I don't know, man, it's just a big problem.

I mean, the, the main reason I brought it up was because, um, you know, I wanted to let hosting companies that have trial that allow trial accounts, uh, for a long, for a while, it was like Vietnamese poke online poker sites.

That was the big thing.

Now it's now it's audio books.

That's the latest thing.

Yeah.

I see the problem.

So everybody heads up, check your, you know, check your trial accounts, make sure you're not getting exploited.

Is it all, is it all legit trial accounts?

Uh, it seems that way.

Yeah.

It seems that way.

Just based on, I'm not, I'm not even going to mention which host it is.

Come on out him.

Come on, baby.

Let's do it.

Because it's, it's a, it's just abuse.

It's just flat out abuse.

You know, it's, it's abuse.

Well, then we have the, uh, the other issue, which is a slop casting.

Oh, that's, oh, that's horrible.

But I've actually had a conversation with Dvorak about it yesterday.

I mean, I really, yeah, I've listened to some of these, uh, slop casts, uh, AI generated, particularly from the, the former wondry lady who are doing 5,000 slop casts, uh, 3000 feeds or 3000 episodes a week.

I think it's, I think it's valid.

What do you mean valid?

What do you mean?

These are valid podcasts.

I have a, I'm at a dis you got me at a disadvantage cause I've not heard any of them.

So I can't, I don't know.

Wow.

Okay.

Um, hold on a second.

Do you have an example?

Yeah, of course.

Nigel Thistledown, Nigel Thistledown does the garden podcast.

Yeah.

That's just one example.

Now, of course, the way they make money is they generate these, uh, very cheap podcasts and they slap a whole bunch of inserted ads on it.

So let me fast forward.

Hold on.

Here we go.

Get in on the action.

This is an investment that carries risk.

Good evening, fellow garden adventurers and wildlife diplomats.

I'm your host Nigel Thistledown and I must once again remind you that I am an artificial intelligence, which proves rather advantageous for tonight's wild tale.

You see, while I may never experience the genuine terror of discovering a family of badgers has redesigned my entire abatious border overnight, I possess something rather extraordinary.

Comprehensive access to centuries of wildlife behavior studies, ecological resource that you get the idea.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So I'm like, we should let them in.

Sounds like a podcast.

Yeah.

I mean, why not?

Uh, are you against it?

I don't know what I, I guess I can't, I don't have a hot take.

I would have to think about it.

This, this is not, so there was an episode of America this week.

This has probably been about a month and a half ago, maybe a month ago.

And, um, they were discussing a AI and it was around the time.

I don't know if, if you saw a Jim Acosta interviewed.

Yeah, I was, I was very surprised.

Did he not know that he was interviewing an AI person?

No, he did.

He did.

It was all, it was all contrived.

It was all set up.

All right.

But he interviewed the, the, he interviewed the, the, an AI version of some kid that got killed in a school shooting.

Yes.

I don't remember who the kid was, but I, it was supposedly like an AI like version of this kid that they had been like trained on this kid's personality.

And so then Jim Acosta asked the kid a bunch of questions.

It was very creepy and weird.

And I honestly can't understand how that even got out of the idea room because it was so uncomfortable.

Look at me.

I'm so hip.

I'm doing AI interviews.

This is awesome.

I'm great.

I'm Jim Acosta.

And you know, there was the, the, what they were discussing was that this, the AI, like the AI versions of like that guy was, you're still firm.

We're still firmly in the uncanny Valley of, of this stuff where sometimes you, where sometimes it's just really obvious that this is not a real person, but, and, and that lends itself to people sort of rebelling against it and saying, you know, Oh, it'll never be.

Yeah.

Maybe it can do, maybe it can sound like a person, but it can never do so-and-so or it can never fill in the blank.

You know, it can never think like a real person or it can never, or it can never, you know, just fill in your blank of it can never, well, you know, the problem is, you know, it, it will eventually, it will so completely mimic a full person that it will get over the uncanny Valley hump.

And what this is now is not what we're living through now is training us to accept this stuff.

Yes.

Us being bombarded with it is training us to be desensitized to the feeling of the uncanny Valley so that we just accept it as normal.

And then it lower, it lowers our tolerance threshold down enough to where when AI does make another step, then we just forget it altogether.

And we just treat it as if it's fine.

Sir.

Ben Rose, sir.

Ben Rose had the right, the right statement to this in the boardroom.

He says, the reason to keep these shows in the index is so that the AI models ingest them and collapse faster.

That's fair.

I'm all for that.

I mean, I'm seeing it.

If you look at the no agenda, art generator, no agenda, art generator.com, where we have successfully driven away every single artist.

Oh, I'm talking over 15 years of people doing art.

It's all prompt jockeys.

And if you go look at it right now, no agenda, art generator.com, you'll see the model collapse in place because people are using the same models to create, you know, similar just images.

And somehow it's, it's definitely feeding back because things start to look orange.

It's all the same cartoonish type thing.

There's no luminance anymore.

There's no blacks, no real black.

It's just kind of washed out.

It's happening and I'm happy to contribute to it.

That's fair.

And, you know, well, if we're going to do it that way, we do not definitely don't need to label it as AI.

Oh, I don't think you label it.

Then they'll, then they won't ingest it.

Yeah.

But that would be a bad thing.

Exactly.

No, I I'm, I'm against labeling.

I don't think labeling is necessary, but yeah, this, this, but people are listening.

They are listening to these.

Yeah.

Because their, their tolerance threshold is beginning to lower.

That's going to happen whether we block them or not.

Right.

I, I'm, I'm, I'm yeah.

And I'm, I'm not against, I'm, I'm, I'm okay with it.

Have they actually even submitted?

I don't, have we even looked?

I don't know.

Where did you get that?

Where'd you get that from?

Apple.

Yeah.

What's the name of it?

The gardening process.

What was that guy's name again?

Nigel.

Nigel Thistledown.

Hold on.

Thistledown.

That sounds like a villain from Sherlock Holmes.

Oh, but they have, they have Instagram pages.

They got everything.

Let's see.

Nigel Thistledown.

Let's see if it's already been admitted into the index and nope, not there.

Guide to spring gardening with Nigel Thistledown.

It's in the index.

It's on Spotify.

This is in Spotify.

Guide to, let's see.

Oh, guide to spring garden.

Yeah, it is.

Guide to spring gardening.

Nigel Thistledown.

He's here.

Yeah.

Only one episode though.

One episode.

By QP daily.

What is QP daily?

Well, this is, this is a, uh, this is from Spreaker.

Well, they're on Spreaker.

They are.

I wonder, wonder he's on Spreaker or whatever.

This, this outfit that does it.

They're on Spreaker.

What's the name of that company?

It doesn't.

Um, why can I not find it now?

Podcast.

Oh, here we go.

This is in the Hollywood reporter and their name is Inception Point AI.

This was, this feed was added in May.

May.

Yeah.

Now that's, that must've just been an errant feed that flooped out somewhere.

And they're going through, they're, they're coming in through Spreaker.

Yeah.

I'm pretty sure they're doing Spreaker.

Um, it's their quiet please podcast network.

Huh?

Oh yeah.

QP.

So that's what that is.

QP.

Yeah.

It says QP daily is the, is the author on the feed.

I'm resetting it to see if there's more episodes.

We, we down, we, the, the API downranked it to negative one priority, which must've mean, which must mean that they didn't produce any episodes for a while.

They may have just published the feed and just not published any episodes for a period of time.

If they started in May and people are just now noticing it.

Here's a Ryan Reynolds, a QP podcast.

Is this spam?

Let's say day for free daily rewards and njarts.net.

The highlight will be an evening with Ryan Reynolds and friends.

Oh, this is spam.

There's so much crap.

There really is.

It's just so much garbage.

Yeah.

Oh, well the internet was nice.

What lasted my friend?

Yeah.

No, it's, it's just over.

It's all over.

Hey, let's thank some people.

Cause uh, you're, uh, you, you got a time limit coming up, my brother.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Um, okay.

Yeah.

Did you say we got one?

Uh, well I got a couple of live boosts here.

Chad F could you guys switch this show's feed over to Ellen address?

So only so we have something to build with app devs need a feed to build to.

And that's what this show has always been for.

Well, we have, I think three Ellen address, uh, splits in the feed already.

And I'm happy to sit here and look and let you know.

So if, if key send is just toast, I'm happy to switch it over.

And it doesn't matter.

I guess we just need to pull all those keys and addresses out, right?

Yeah.

If, if you want to test, I'm okay with that.

Uh, 22, 22 from sir.

TJ the raffle.

Hey, TJ row ducks.

I know things seem in limbo, but I'm still hanging in there with V for V music.

Thanks to what y'all started.

The main message is V for V in any way, shape, or form that works for the listener.

PayPal boosts, just sharing music, anything they can think of.

Talk about V for V Chad vibe coded a whole music player for us and door full verse.com.

That's nice.

Yeah.

I got to take a look at that.

Chat slinging, chanceling is some good.

He is man.

He's vibe coding up a storm.

Salty crayon three 33 ping pong.

This on is this thing on?

Yes.

It's on as Dreb Scott coming in from a cast thematic two, three, four, five nerd boost.

Gotcha.

See Brooklyn 5,000 sats.

Here's a boost.

Thank you.

Three 24 for a sats from Chad.

If that booster gram was pro removing key send, by the way, it needs to happen.

So Chad's all for it.

33 33 from Hey, citizen, deprecated boost coming in from pod verse.

Martin Linda's code.

Could you handle a round table discussion with different market players in a future episode?

I am in it for the long run.

I like how easy it is to top up the wallet on true fans.

Do you see the transactions in the back end?

Even if I see a network error message due to plenty of splits for your podcast lost in cyberspace or a safe ride with a starship?

What exactly is he asking here?

I don't know.

I mean, I see the booster gram come in and I just presume that that the sats came in.

I haven't really looked at it.

Um, let's see.

Dreb Scott, one, two, three, four, uh, pre boosting.

And there's, let's see, we got a hundred, a couple of hundreds here from Martin Linda's Coke, who just likes to send a lot of booster grams.

Upbeats three 33, take some true fan sats running with high def scissors.

And you sent that twice, actually, uh, triple seven from Sam go podcasting video label.

Now live.

It was in cash.

Yes, we saw that.

Oh, that's not yet low cash.

Another one, two, three, four from Dreb Scott running with scissors live on video.

And Mike Newman, triple seven pre-show boost Dreb Scott with 10,000 sats go podcasting.

He says from cast thematic.

Thank you very much.

And there's the delimiter.

We hit the delimiter on the delimiter.

We hit it.

I'm laughing at that at the picture of my truck that Dreb Scott.

It's funny.

Um, let's see.

Uh, we got some booster grams.

We got, uh, the, we, there was, let me see.

I'm sorting through all this.

Okay.

Yeah.

We got some PayPal.

These, these are not, there's no one-offs this week.

We just got some, uh, we got some monthlies.

Okay.

Uh, Lauren ball, $24 20 cents.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Appreciate it.

A podverse Mitch and Creon over there.

Mitch is just, I mean, he's just like locked in a room, creating next generation podverse.

I mean that I can't wait.

I can't wait.

I know I can't wait.

Basil Philip $25.

Thank you.

Basil.

Appreciate you always.

Uh, Mitch Downey, the aforementioned $10.

Christopher Harbaric $10.

Thank you.

Christopher Terry Keller.

Another long-term or five bucks.

Chris Cowan, another long-term or five bucks.

Silicone florist $10.

And we got one booster gram from CSB.

He's hanging in there.

He delimited himself.

He's the beginning and the end and the end, the alpha and the Omega.

Yeah.

See, uh, comic strip blogger, 13,035 stats through fountain.

He says, howdy, Dave and Adam.

Today, I'd like to recommend a podcast with ampersand in the name where actually he says ampersand in name podcasting Q and a by bus sprout quote on podcasting Q and a you'll hear the best tips and strategies to grow your podcast, whether it's getting more listeners, promoting your podcast on social media, or how to produce high quality episodes in your editing software.

Podcasting Q and a has everything you need.

End quote.

Thanks to Martin Lindeskog for finding it.

Yo CSB, the maker of www.trading.toys.

Yes.

Which is a fine website to go look at some, some graphs and charts up into the right to the moon.

It's a beautiful system.

That's it.

Well, that was a very short donation.

It was, well, I figured it was going to be short, but there you go.

Very short.

Uh, everything, uh, y'all send to us and booster grams or fiat fund coupons through PayPal, which you can find the bottom of the podcast index.org page, the big red donate button all go into the index fund and keep it running.

So, um, keep it running, please.

So Spencer asked about amp amp is amp is not, uh, is not a replacement for key sand amp is atomic multipath.

It is a way to split a large payment amongst different payment channels and have it be reassembled on the other end.

So if you had seven channels with a total aggregate of a million sats of liquidity, but each individual channel only could max out, you know, around, uh, 15, you know, 150 ,000, then you may have to split the payment to less, you know, if you're going to, if you're going to do like a 700,000 sat payment, you'd have to split it into smaller pieces.

The each would get routed through their respective channels that had enough liquidity and then it would get reassembled on the other end.

And amp was kind of, um, yeah, amp was sort of misunderstood as a, a key send alternative, but it's not really, no.

And a lot, and it's very unsupported.

Um, every, every node in the chain from along the route has to support amp and there's very, there's not very much support for it.

Bolt 12, bolt 12.

I'm telling you bolt 12.

All right.

Brother Dave, how's work going?

Is it okay?

Uh, over at the shop, everything hanging in.

Yeah, it's fine.

All good.

Everything at home.

Yep.

Otherwise I'll come in, you know, cook for you guys.

If you need anything, happy to do it.

Thanks.

Yeah.

Uh, yeah.

Scallops and potatoes.

Yeah.

No problem at all.

Hey, thank you very much boardroom for being here.

We love you.

We certainly do.

We'll see you next week right here on podcasting 2.0.

You have been listening to podcasting 2.0 visit podcast index.org for more information.

Clearly not the pod.

Father's mistake.

Episode 234: Slopcasting

Episode Transcript

Never lose your place, on any device