Podcasting 2.0 for October 17th, 2025, episode 238, Podherpies.

Oh, hello, everybody.

Welcome once again to the official board meeting of Podcasting 2.0.

This is where we discuss everything going on in podcasting, and there's always a lot happening.

What's up?

What's down?

What's right?

What's left?

It's all right here.

We are, in fact, the only boardroom that will never stream on Netflix.

I'm Adam Curry here in the heart of Texas Hill Country and in Alabama, the man who will refactor the stats query for you at the drop of a hat.

Say hello to my friend on the other end, the one, the only, Mr.

Dave Jones.

And Barry comes cruising in the door right as we...

Yeah, yeah, let me see.

Did you make it in, Barry?

Yeah, I guess.

What happened?

Where'd you go?

Yeah, did your internet just drop out all of a sudden?

No, no, I was saving the show, exporting the show on the Roadcaster 2, and then the Roadcaster just bricked.

It just gave up.

I almost mentioned this.

Okay, so like when you told him to export that, I was like, well, you need to have the card.

That might not be a great idea.

You need to have...

Do you have the MD card, the mini card?

Really?

Yeah.

I never use the storage settings anymore because I've...

Two times in the past, when I've tried to export my saved setting, one time it bricked a Roadcaster Duo.

Like literally it never functioned again.

Wow.

You know, and the other time it like corrupted it so bad that I had to like do a factory reset.

Well, the trick is, to the Roadcaster, is just don't update.

And once it's working, just keep it that way.

Although I did get on the beta, and that has been very precarious.

Ooh, how'd you do that?

Oh, it's the funniest thing.

It's almost like what Paul did with tap on the pie icon seven times.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Did you accidentally discover this?

No, no, no.

Someone was telling...

This is way back.

When they first released this, their whole mix minus, it was completely wrong.

Actually, they had an update, which just everything was wrong about it.

There was no processing.

And then I know within like six or seven hours, they released a beta fix for it and that worked.

Because I was literally routing wires from outputs to inputs on the back of this thing, just to get it to function properly.

Oh, like one of those big Moog synthesizers.

Yes, exactly.

You mean the way we used to do it before we had roadcasters?

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

With patch cables, the whole deal.

The wall of ports.

Yeah, I still have so much gear here.

I've got compressor limiters.

I've got Warsanis processing units, all 19-inch rack stuff.

It's amazing.

And Tina has not purged you?

No, because I have one closet.

It's known as the closet.

Oh, you've been sequestered.

Yes, and it's in the studio.

So the studio is my domain.

She comes in, gives disapproving looks, and then leaves.

And then she came in the other day, OK, I'm getting shelves put up here so you can move this crap up there, and then you need to purge.

I'm like, OK.

You're like, nope.

Yeah.

Well, so we blew the surprise guest.

I was going to keep him on mute and announce him properly.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome into the boardroom.

The owner, CEO, founder, technical support of Podhome .fm and his brand new app.

Say hello to Barry Luybrechts.

I got the pronunciation right, didn't I?

Yeah, that seldom happens yet, but obviously.

Yes, or in Holland they say Barry Luybrechts.

Yeah, that's better.

But I would just call him Barry.

Hey, buddy.

How you doing, buddy?

Buddy, buddy.

Yeah, well, yeah.

Is Dutch a hard R or is it a soft R language?

Hard.

Yeah, rolling hard, Barry, Barry, Barry.

The reason I wanted you back in the boardroom, Barry, is because you released the Podhome app.

And so it's a celebration and rare that people make a new app.

And so it's like.

I know why.

Yeah, this is perfect.

This is perfect because you get to explain your pain and tell the whole world how writing an RSS feed podcast app is way harder than you think it's supposed to be.

Yeah, it sucks.

It does.

It does, yeah.

Well, you know.

Yeah, all the easy stuff is hard and all the hard stuff is even harder.

Yes.

What did you find the hardest thing?

Now, you're hooking into the podcast index, or are you parsing feeds yourself to tell us?

Tell me about the architecture.

What's in your DNA?

Well, it's kind of a combination.

So when you discover and search for a podcast, I combine Apple Podcasts with a podcast API.

And a little bit.

I forgive you.

Yeah, I don't.

This is ludicrous.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Yes, thank you for your forgiveness.

Well, that's the kind of guys we are.

The thing is, I want to offer an experience where you can find everything.

So if it's not on the podcast index, which sometimes does happen, it might be in Apple.

And if that doesn't happen, it might still be in my own index if somebody else added it, for instance, manually or something.

So it's a combination of those things.

Are you by any chance syncing up and getting stuff back into our index if you find it somewhere else?

I mean, you're not doing that?

No, I'm not doing that automatically.

No, because I think you guys have quite enough shows in there and I don't want to, you know, put more crap in there if people just put crap in it, because that happens.

I'm interested in what would show up.

I mean, stuff is something that's not junk.

But what would show up in Apple, but not in the index?

Like brand new stuff, maybe?

Yeah, maybe brand new stuff, stuff like that.

Is it a lot?

Is it a lot?

Because you also sync it with it, right?

No, we don't sync directly with them, but we get their sloppy seconds from all over the internet.

There's like about five different routes that things come into it.

We eventually end up with it.

It usually takes, you know, if somebody just puts something in the Apple directory, it may take a few days to like worm its way.

Don't most of the podcast guides, you know, podcasting 101s, don't they at this point all have us listed as you should probably add your feed to the podcast index?

Yeah, I think we do.

Yeah.

So most of it is obviously in the podcast index.

Stuff that's not in my app is stuff that's, for instance, exclusively on Spotify.

Because obviously, you know, I cannot get to there, but that's totally fine.

How much of that is there?

Who still does that?

Oh, a lot of people.

Companies, for instance, like local companies that make their own little podcasts and they just put it on there and on YouTube maybe, and that's it.

Oh, but it's not like- Right, but it's not like it's exclusive to Spotify.

They've just only put it on Spotify.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, okay.

These are known as dummies.

Yeah.

Yeah, dark times.

We live in dark times.

Very dark times.

I'm telling you, that's no good.

But they still have a feed though, right?

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

But the most difficult thing is obviously, you know, dealing with feeds because feeds are just, you know, some companies, some hosting companies, their feeds just are so random.

Sometimes they miss a title or a description or- No, no, say it's not- No, we've never noticed any of that.

Say it's not so.

Spam, you know, you see so much spam in Podping as well.

It's just crazy.

You know, the overwhelming amount of spam that is in Podping is these currently are these stupid audio book referral kind of things.

God, they're every- I reached out to Ted over at Apple to let them know that there's, you know, that there's stuff like that in their index and they're looking into it.

But I mean, like it's everywhere.

It's like, I mean, it's like herpes.

It's all over the place.

And I don't- It just reeks of some kind of like one actor who's just found a niche and is just wearing it out.

Now, how are they accessing the Podping?

Don't you have to have some kind of key or some permission?

Oh, PowerPress.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, it's a WordPress site.

Well, I say PowerPress, but it's either PowerPress or Seriously Simple, the Castos version.

Okay, so what's happening is they're just doing WordPress blogs everywhere and they just say, oh, what's this?

I'll install this.

It'll be on podcast too.

And then, but then they don't even know that Podping exists, I'm sure.

They don't even know how it works.

It's just going out right now.

Okay.

Yeah, it's just- It's just- Because I've blocked- I mean, I've actually blocked it at the CloudFlare level at Podping.cloud because it got to be so bad.

And, you know, like I've actually started blocking their IP address.

So should we call this Podherpes?

Yeah, exactly.

Maybe a show title.

I'm just tracking it just in case.

It's okay, Barry.

So yeah, yeah.

So you get a lot from Apple, you get it from our API, and then you are- Podping as well, of course.

Of course.

From Podping.

Tell everyone about your pod because you have Podping integrated into the app, which is pretty cool.

Yeah, so the app has some, let's call it discovery features where you get to see random episodes.

So that's one thing where you can just swipe through random episodes like on social media.

But also there's this thing, and I've called it, I just need to look it up, episode pulse.

And when you go there, you just see something that looks like Podping.tiles.

Right, yeah.

You see all these things just pop in, pop around.

And this is all on my own infrastructure.

I listen to Podping.

I have a little .NET client with it because all this stuff is written in C sharp .NET.

That's also on GitHub, by the way.

Open source thing, which just listens to Podping.

I made several iterations on it to make it more resilient because it's pretty difficult text to do right.

And then whenever a bunch of Podpings come in or whenever a Podping comes in, that could contain, I don't know, maybe five feeds that are updated, perhaps.

And then I check all those feeds to see if something is actually updated.

And if it didn't update already, like in the last...

Oh, you're doing some error, some checksum error checking there.

Filtering, yeah, some filtering.

That's good.

And that's why you just see, you know, if you go to that episode pulse thing in the Podhome app, you just see the one thing, right?

So you see one update from this show, one update from this show, where in Podpings .tiles...

Oh yeah, it's nonstop.

This one again, again, again.

Yeah, yeah.

But also Podpings for this show is updated.

Like, I don't know, we updated the show description or something about the show, but there's not actually a new item in it.

So I do check that if there is actually a new item in it.

Now, does your app also do video?

No, it does not do video.

Audio only.

Very nice.

Yeah.

Okay, so that's a deliberate thing.

You don't have video on your roadmap at all?

No, it's not on the roadmap at all.

So it's audio only and it's also podcasts only.

So it's not, you can do music, but it doesn't have music specific features like where you can save music or where it says tracks instead of episodes.

Interesting, because Podhome.fm is home to hosting of music and I believe audio books and I think video too.

Don't you do video as well?

No, we don't do video.

But yeah, all sorts of mediums, indeed like audio, we have a bunch of people that host our audio there.

A couple of audio books as well.

But I think, well, and everybody can choose this for themselves, but I chose to make this app focused on just audio podcast listening.

That's it.

I think there's also, there's a place for other stuff as well, like maybe a podcast music app, for instance, a podcast video app, a podcast audible app, that would be cool, like for audio books.

It's dedicated to that thing.

Are you thinking?

An everything app.

Is that something you're thinking of?

Doing separate apps for separate medium types?

Yeah, I think music is a very good one because there's lots of stuff out there.

Like audio books would also be cool, but I don't think there's a lot of them out there yet.

So that would be quite empty.

Audio books?

I mean, there's quite a few.

All of the, what is it?

What's the name of the, what's the big one?

Gutenberg Press.

LibriVox.

Oh, LibriVox.

LibriVox.

And then there, yeah.

And they all have feeds.

And I think if I'm not mistaken, they all are tagged with the audio book medium.

LibriVox.

Let me double check because we communicated with the developers over there.

And at the beginning, they didn't really understand much about, you know, who we were, what we're doing.

But then later came back and then added some.

Yeah, yeah.

They're, I think they are tagged here.

They declare the namespace.

Nice.

Cool.

Pretty much everybody declares the namespace these days.

I don't think they know why.

Oh, everyone has this.

Okay, I'll put that.

Oh, they're using alternate enclosure.

Oh, sweet.

What is it?

What are they using that for?

Oh, for different bandwidths.

Okay.

Nice.

So they're using alternate enclosure for different bandwidths.

I don't see them declaring the medium though.

I mean, I'll write down, I'll send them a message, let them know to do that.

But you should be able to find, there's LibriVox.

And then there's one other big one on there.

There's quite a bit, man.

Okay.

Well, then maybe that's an option.

Because that would be very cool.

Like, you know, an open version of Audible.

Right.

I'm glad that you've done audio only because I came across something earlier this week that really made me very positive about the audio podcast format and medium.

And it was actually, it was from my dealer, from my info dealer, Spurlock, who always has the most thoughtful things he posts.

Although some of the podcasts he listens to, I listen to, I fall asleep to this.

I can't listen to this.

Yeah, he likes boring stuff.

Very boring.

He should do an app, the boring podcast app.

And it was called Everything is Television.

It was a sub stack.

And who is this written by?

This is written by Derek Thompson.

And the most interesting part is about a Federal Trade Commission meta filed in a legal brief on August 6th.

And this is because there's a lot of, a lot of stuff, a lot of legislation, age gating, all kinds of stuff is always in the works.

And there's going to be specific things for social networks.

And in this case, it was about them being a social media monopoly.

And meta filed, and I don't get the exact wordage.

They said, you cannot classify us, you cannot possibly classify us as a social media monopoly.

And here's why.

Quote, today, only a fraction of time spent on meta services, 7% on Instagram, 17 % on Facebook, involves consuming content from online friends, end quote.

A majority of time spent on both apps is watching videos, increasingly short form videos that are unconnected, i.e.

not from a friend or a followed account, and recommended by AI -powered algorithms, meta developed as a direct competitive response to TikTok's rise, which stalled meta's growth.

When I heard that, I'm like, okay, we've just become an entire nation, world, online connected world of blithering morons who are doom scrolling short videos all day long.

7% of Instagram people use Instagram to like follow and connect, only 17, Facebook, that was the, how are my kids doing?

You know, I'm checking up on my classmates.

Whose birthday is it today?

That's what it was initially used for.

And now everybody, and Xs, of course, I don't have to even look at anything for them to know what they're doing, because you play one video, the minute it's over, goes to the next one, goes to the next one.

Everything's video on X, yeah.

And that's the point.

So Derek Thompson writes, social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo and video.

And finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state in which TikTok and meta are trying to become the same thing.

A screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we do not know.

Social media has turned into television.

And here's the beautiful part.

Then he quotes amusing ourselves to death.

Neil Postman, don't know if you've ever read that book.

Oh yeah.

Everybody should read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Here's what he wrote.

Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, and for sensibility.

Now, of course, when he wrote this, there was no TikTok, et cetera.

Television speaks to us in a particular dialect.

When everything turns into television, every form of communication starts to adopt television's values, immediacy, emotion, spectacle, and brevity.

So now in the glow of a local news program or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol.

When everything is urgent, nothing is truly important.

Politics becomes theater, science becomes storytelling, news becomes performance, and the result, a society that forgets how to think in paragraphs and learns instead to think in scenes.

And when I read this, I got so happy because audio podcast is truly a medium that you can just zone out to while you're walking, driving, walking the dog, doing the dishes, no distractions, because you should just have it in your earbuds.

And I think we are entering an age where, okay, it may only be 7% or 10% of people, but at least we'll be the ones that aren't stupid.

That book, Amusing Ourselves of Death, written in 1985.

Yes.

That's how prescient and predictive that book was.

Yeah, I think he did an update.

Yeah, it's like in the early 2000s.

Yeah, he did an update to it.

So I really got happy about that.

I'm like, yes.

And all this noise about, oh, video, video.

No, no.

The only thing I see from video podcast is that people chop it up and take clips and then people watch a minute of a podcast with some point that someone's making and they never actually watch the entire podcast.

That's what it's become.

Yeah, and audio podcast is completely different use case.

There's nothing to do with that.

So you listen to it whilst you're doing something else.

You're not actually watching a screen.

It takes up all your concentration, all your attention.

It's very different.

And that's one of the reasons why we declared video as a separate medium in the medium tag.

And I know it caused a lot of confusion and a lot of like, this doesn't make any sense.

Why not just have it as the alternate enclosure?

And you can do that.

And that's a fine use case for alternate enclosure is to be able to switch back and forth between video and audio.

That's fine.

But the original thinking about declaring video as a separate medium was that video is a different experience.

It's the difference between watching a video podcast and listening to an audio podcast is just as stark as the difference between listening to an audio book and a podcast.

That or an audio book and music.

They engage you in a completely different set of, you know, levels than that does.

And so like it's meant to be, it's sort of like the chat, you know, the chat room is the same way, like chat rooms.

You know, we sit here and talk, the board, like if you're engaging with a video, you're completely, almost robbed of agency.

Oh, wait, listen to this.

Let me just interject a little data point for you, Dave.

All right.

So this article goes on to say that watching videos, so if people are watching Netflix, specifically Netflix, they're doing other stuff.

They're scrolling, they're doom scrolling on TikTok.

So the attention is really nowhere.

In fact, several screenwriters who work for Netflix told him, this author, that a common note from company executives is to have this character announce what they're doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.

So literally lines like, we spent a day together, Lohan tells her lover James in Irish Wish.

I admit it was a beautiful day, filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn't give you the right to question my life choices.

Tomorrow, I'm marrying Paul Kennedy.

It's almost like the captions for the hearing impaired and where it says, where it says creepy music playing in brackets.

Exactly.

So it's much worse than that.

And I really, truly believe, I mean, reading is difficult for a lot of people that just don't have that.

Like my daughter, she's 35.

She's an avid reader.

And I think she's kind of elder millennial.

She just got in on the cusp, but a younger generation just in general doesn't read that much.

So audio books are great.

But the attention span, when you're listening to a podcast, you just, if you do it properly, in which in my mind is earbuds in, that's it.

One X.

Yeah, one X.

Oh yeah, well, that's a whole different conversation.

Doing it at two X will kill you, but okay, do whatever you want.

And all your friends.

And first it'll rob you of your social life.

Then you'll be anxious and annoyed at your family members because they can't hurry up and just get the words out that they need to say fast enough.

And then you wind up with your kids hating you and you're divorced.

Okay.

Then, and you're doom scrolling TikTok all day.

It's beautiful.

Have you seen this experience where people like in your family or something like that, they'll, it's the exact same thing, what you said, they'll be watching Netflix or some streaming video.

And then there's, and then they're scrolling Instagram.

Yeah.

And they're doing the, they're doing it exactly what the way you described.

And then at some point they just go, and just like toss the phone down on the, on the couch.

Yeah.

It's like they had a bad trip.

It's like they hit overload.

Yes.

They just crossed a threshold and they can't, can't, can't handle anymore.

They can't handle it.

And they just have to like throw the phone down and then they'll, then they'll engage with the video.

It's, it's like the brain just got short circuited.

Well, it has to, at a certain point, you, you just can't handle anymore.

It's too much.

It's a dopamine problem.

It's, it's a constant dopamine hits.

Dopamine and cortisol and all kinds of different brain chemicals.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Maybe that's what happens.

Maybe you become, maybe, maybe the dopamine becomes so saturated in the, you know, in the neuron that you're just, that you're just like, okay, now it's just flat lines.

And you're like, and you just can't stand anymore.

And you just have to like truly just go to sleep.

And remember, and remember when we started podcasting, there really wasn't, I mean, yeah, YouTube was there and it was a lot of cat videos.

It kind of, you know, it still had a long way to go before, before it really caught on and they, and they got their recommendations and all that stuff.

Right.

But people would listen on buses, on the bike, you know, everywhere they could, they'd just be listening to podcasts.

And so I feel that a part of this incredible push towards video podcasting is mis, misdirected and misguided.

Because I still believe that, and I think the numbers show that 70% of people who quote unquote, watch a podcast are just listening to it.

And they may even be scrolling something else at the same time for all I know.

Yeah.

And from the hosting side, most of my customers are not interested in hosting video as well because it's a completely different skillset to make an actual video.

Yeah.

It's very difficult.

And you, and you speak from, you speak from intimate knowledge because you make videos all the time, training videos.

I mean, you know, you know how difficult it is to edit all that stuff and get it right.

Yeah.

And to keep it engaging.

So like every three seconds or something, something else needs to happen on the screen that is actually an attention grabber.

Otherwise people, you know, they doze off.

Yeah.

Do you still do the .NET training videos?

Sometimes, like the last videos I did was in March this year or something about enterprise architecture.

But sometimes I do, yeah.

And also there I get to see the, the, the engagement, like when users drop off of the videos and like the last, I don't know, five, six years, people have completely lost their attention spans.

So an hour video, and I try to keep it short.

So there are people out there that make seven hour masterclasses on TypeScript or something.

No.

So if I make an hour video or something, I bet like 60% of the people cannot complete a full thing.

And it's not because it's boring because I do a pretty good job.

At least I think, but it's just attention span.

It used to be much higher.

So you're not, that was your main source of income now.

So are you completely dependent upon Podhome and that's your main source of income?

Is that your main gig now?

Do you have other things happening?

No, it's still, I still get what you call it, royalties from the courses that are out there.

Nice.

So those things are royalty based, which is good.

That, you know, keeps me off the street.

It's probably the best kind of royalties in all media.

I mean, you don't get song royalties anymore.

There's no royalties for anything you do on social media.

There's, in fact, royalties for acting have completely gone away with the streamers.

Yeah, you get paid up front and that's it.

That's amazing.

Yeah, and with Podhome itself, the hosting side, I got a couple of hundred customers that's going well and it's making a small profit.

That's good.

And it grows, you know, slowly, but surely it still grows.

Nice.

So it's great.

And so the app, why, like, what made you jump in that hole?

Because, I mean, did you, was it to help Podhome?

Was it because you could not find an app that suited all the ways you like listening?

Everybody has a different itch.

What was it?

It's like three things.

First of all, I didn't really find an app that I thought, you know, this works exactly like I want it to work.

Number one reason software developers make software.

Yeah, and so I thought, you know what?

The best thing I can do with my life is just to pour a year into building this thing.

Wow.

And the second thing is that now I have the whole ecosystem.

So if there are shows out there that get censored for whatever reason, I can still host them in Podhome and then listen to it on my Podhome player.

And I have the whole circular thing.

That's also good.

And then the last one is indeed, yeah, to help Podhome as well, because it's kind of an advertisement thing as well.

As in, you know, you get the name out there, people see it, people can use it.

Well, this is- And get some customers as well.

Yeah, this is rather interesting, because as far as I know, I think you are, in fact, the first hosting company that has an app.

I don't know of any- A listening app.

A listening app, yes.

A pure listening app.

I think Podbean also has it.

That's right.

I'm not sure about it, but yeah.

I think they did, and then they're- Well, Acast had an app too, but they dropped that.

But I think you're right.

I think Podbean had one, but if I'm not mistaken, I think their big focus was live.

Yes.

Because their live stuff only worked through the web and through that app.

That's it, yeah.

Now, and I find this interesting, because I would say, right now, most hosting companies are expanding with subscription options, dynamically inserted advertising.

Do you have anything in that realm, or are you just straight up hosting and let everybody else integrate with anything they want to?

No, so the hosting part is already pretty advanced, at least I think so.

There is dynamic audio and dynamic text, which is not dynamic ad insertion, but that means you can upload, let's say, a two-minute clip of your ads that you recorded or that you got from somewhere, and you can put that somewhere in your audio, or you can say at the beginning, at the end, or just put it at, I don't know, minute 20 for this specific audio, and then it will paste that in there.

That works well for most people.

I don't do any ad integration with an ad platform or anything like that.

The funding tag we have, which is well used by our customers.

Great.

Obviously, V4V as well, you know, dropped off a little bit, but still lots of people are using it because we also have lots of very advanced people.

We have an API.

I think you talked about that last week as well.

We have an API that does all sorts of things.

You can publish episodes.

You can get all your episodes.

You can even get episodes, download statistics.

There are people that created all dashboards with that.

Here is the draft episodes, and if you send us, I don't know what it was, 20,000 sets, we'll publish it earlier, and then it goes automatically out, which is super cool.

There's lots of stuff like that, and then I'm thinking about building kind of like, yeah, what's it called?

A Patreon-like thing, but then that integrates with the hosting very tightly.

It's kind of an augmentation and an easier setup for the funding tag for podcasters, where they can just say, you know what?

I don't have a Patreon or anything like that.

Just set me up with this thing.

Just click, click, and it should be done just to make it easier for people.

That thing can also be a tight integration with the podcast player app, of course.

What are you going to use under the hood for that?

Any 402 stuff?

No, well, maybe.

I don't know.

It's very difficult because I cannot be a money custodian.

I cannot hold any money.

You know, I live in the Netherlands.

I would go to jail very quickly if I touch any money.

It's okay.

You can deal drugs anywhere you want.

Oh, that's fine.

Oh my, please don't hold on to anybody's crypto.

That is a problem.

Well, it's super tight here.

So crypto on and off ramps, for instance, and anything to do with money is super well regulated.

Well, well regulated.

It's super tightly regulated.

Yeah, right.

Which means I need a PSD2 or something license to do anything with that.

That means I need to hire five people for life and pay a hundred thousand.

And they get a 13th month vacation money.

And yeah, everything possible.

So what is the, because I've kind of lost track of it.

I know that there was a real surge of podcasts going on for a while.

And then I think the Danish company, Podmo, what is their name?

Pod?

Podimo.

They came in, they bought a bunch, or they, I'm not sure exactly what they did.

What would you say is the podcast scene in the Netherlands right now?

In the Netherlands, there are some popular people with Podimo indeed.

And they are behind a paywall basically.

Paywall, yeah.

Belgium as well.

They do have that as well, but it's small.

And there's lots of small businesses that do podcasts.

Yeah.

And lots of hobbyists as well, but it's going.

Lots of people have podcasts.

Pretty cool.

Right.

All over Europe, really.

But there's no, there's no like Joe Rogans or anything like that.

No, no, no, no.

You know us, the Europeans, we keep it small.

Keep it small.

Just don't, be quiet.

Don't be popular.

Keep it small.

Be yourself.

Be normal.

Do normal.

Yeah.

That's like a- Do normal.

Do normal.

I saw James say that there's like 50 million dollars in political advertising in Europe.

And there's like 2 billion here.

Yeah, that's, you know, like we do everything.

We overdo everything.

Yes.

Here.

But what's the, so what was it about, at, what was it about you building your, or excuse me, what itch were you trying to scratch with your app?

You said you didn't really, you weren't satisfied with the way the other apps worked.

What was the main thing?

The main thing, let's see, it's a combination of things.

So I have an iPhone, which means iOS.

I like it, you know, shirts, spy phone, whatever.

They all are.

Well, not all, but you know, you can get a, an unspied phone.

But I do like Apple podcast because it's just, it's a pretty app.

It works well.

It has lots of nice features.

It's fast.

So I, I want something that is pretty, but does everything else that does live chapters, transcripts.

Although Apple podcast also does, does that.

Has all the podcasts that I want in there.

And you know, most importantly, when I start to listen to something, I want to have one list where all that stuff is.

Because in most podcast apps, I just lose stuff.

I just click on something, listen to something, and I didn't queue it or add it to playlist, blah, blah.

And then it's gone.

And you know, that confuses me.

So now when I start playing something, it goes immediately into the up next queue.

Basically.

I can also add that manually to the up next queue, or when I download something, it goes into the up next queue.

And so everything's there.

It's nice.

Yeah.

That's similar to what we've done with Godcaster with our queue.

Same thing.

It's kind of inbox thing, but it's, you know, people, it needs to be simple.

The posture of this app is, is you don't have play.

You just have one, essentially one playlist, which is the queue.

Yeah.

See, I'm kind of that guy too.

I don't like my Castamatic is still my daily driver and it's, but I only use the one default playlist, which is unlistened.

And like, I just essentially use it the same way that you're talking about, because I can't, I've tried, I've, I've spent hours in the past going in and curating my playlist and segregating these things.

Okay.

These are the things I'm going to listen to every day.

And you don't, you don't, you don't ever use it.

You just don't.

I really like the, you know, I, I have two, I use a podcast guru, but increasingly I'm using the Godcaster app and I have an advantage because I have a station and I can add whatever I want into it.

So I'm not necessarily limited to what other stations have put out there.

That's your queue.

Well, so we have a programs tab and it shows you the most recent of everything that you're following.

And so in the morning I, I literally will look at that and I'll go click, click, click, click, click.

I determined the order that I want to hear them in.

And then I hit play and then it just goes.

And so it's typically like a SRN news.

There's like a Fox news hourly report.

So I get a, I get a real quick update, uh, seven, seven, seven salty crayon.

Um, and you know, then I'll, I'll move into something maybe a little bit longer form and I'll kind of queue it up that way.

And if I get bored with something, I just tap on the next one.

I can go back and pick up that other one previously if I want to.

So I'm kind of curating my daily listening based upon how I feel at that moment, not based upon what was published most recently.

Yeah.

And I kind of have a similar thing as well.

So on the home screen you have your new episodes and that's just everything that is new from all the feeds that you follow.

And then you can just say, all right, this one.

Yes.

This one.

No, this one.

Yes.

I don't want to listen to this.

And then, you know, it fills it up and up next and then you have your, your queue.

Yeah.

Now that's cool.

So are you guys also in the app stores now?

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We just got our notification of age verification APIs.

Oh yeah.

I got that too.

It's coming people.

Digital ID is next.

It's on its way.

Yeah.

I mean, that's, yeah, that's active now.

Cause my, my daughter, we got her, she's my youngest daughter.

She's 15.

And we got her a iPhone for the birthday.

You got an iPhone because you don't love your daughter is what you're saying.

Hate your child.

I got her the specific specifically.

I got her an iPhone mini 13 is like a couple hundred bucks off Amazon.

And the reason I did the iPhone is purely because of the parental control.

Yeah.

You can spy on her.

Yeah.

The parental controls on, on Android or any is non-existent.

It's laughable.

Yes.

It's laughable.

So I can, I have the thing locked down so tight and the, where, you know, where she can't use it during school hours, except these, these two apps or whatever.

Can you do location-based stuff?

Like you can, you can use this, but only at home.

I don't know.

I haven't even looked at that.

I've used the time.

There's like time restrictions, you know, after you can use, you can use it.

You cannot use these apps after this time at night or during this time period during the day.

What apps, what apps is she?

I'm very curious.

What apps is she allowed to use during playtime?

During playtime, she's 15.

Well, she's, so I have a list, there's a list of apps that she's allowed to use all the time, which is like Spotify, photos, you know, just the, the basic stuff that the phone does, listening to music, taking pictures, that kind of thing.

Anything like Safari or any, or that kind of thing that, anything that accessing the internet.

So, but how about social networks?

Oh no, she's not doing, all apps have to be approved before they can install.

And she already knows I will never approve any social media.

So she doesn't have any of that.

But you don't even let her use Safari.

That makes sense, I guess.

Yeah.

Not during school hours, you know, like she can't afterwards.

But she can use Safari for every, for all the social networks.

You can use it for Instagram, for X, for Facebook.

Oh, you, it's impossible to use a browser for that crap.

Oh, I use my browser exclusively for X.

I don't, that's the only social network I'm still on.

I also, the same for Mastodon.

I use the browser.

Anybody younger than 30 doesn't use X anyway.

So they, it's like it all, all that matters is Instagram.

Instagram basically makes the browser experience, unless you have an account, they make the browser experience non-functional, basically.

I mean, I have an account and I only use it to check on my daughter from time to time, see if she's still breathing.

Yeah.

That's if you have an account.

Yeah.

If you don't have an account, they intentionally make it so broken that you can't use it.

That's like Facebook.

People send me Facebook links all the time and it'd be like big splash screen.

You may be, you'll be able to see the video or half of the post, but that's it.

Then Facebook goes, no, you got to get the app and log in.

I won't do it.

Yep.

And so when it popped up the other day, it was yesterday actually.

She said, she was like, for some reason, my Spotify just doesn't work.

And it's because I had the parental restrictions set to not allow explicit content.

Yeah.

And that was pretty much everything.

And so, yeah.

And it was first, I think that's part of like tied into the age verification, because it's always worked before.

But now that the age restriction stuff has come into play, like it knows her age.

And so then it, it just stopped it.

And so I had to go in there and like, do like, do like allow this stuff, but it was, it was basing it on explicit content in audio books.

Huh.

And so it's somehow that as the Spotify manifest has something going on there, where it's triggering that.

But I thought that was interesting because I've never seen that before until, and just started happening a few days ago.

And I think that's when all that stuff went into play.

You're cranking, they're cranking it up now.

That'll be interesting.

They don't want the lawsuits.

Yeah.

Yes.

I guess.

Yeah.

That's what, what are you, what are you building this with?

Or is this.net under the hood?

Yeah.

So this is.net Maui, which is a cross-platform framework based on a C-sharp.

And by default, you use XAML with that, which is a, like an XML format to style things.

I don't know how that works.

So I use it with a Blazor hybrid.

That's also a thing you can host there within a web view.

And basically everything you see in the app is HTML rendered HTML, CSS, JavaScript, which is lovely because I know how that works and I know how to make a UI with that.

So this is kind of like a, it's kind of like Flutter or a framework.

Yeah, kind of.

Yeah.

So the.net Maui itself allows you access to, you know, the platform API so that you can call audio player.

And obviously then I call very specifically AV player on iOS and XO player on Android.

And all sorts of other things like a haptic feedback, the subscription APIs, you name it, all sorts of stuff.

So.net Maui just enables that for you, which is still painful because the whole build tool chain, every time you build and you debug, you know, that can break so easily.

Oh yeah, I'm sure.

It's very brittle.

And so all this would have to, you're having to do all this on a Mac, I'm assuming, because then you have to sign the executables and all that.

Yeah.

And that's also very difficult.

I find with the app store, like I got an email yesterday or something like, Hey, your certificate for something, something's going to expire and things will stop working.

You need to update your certificate.

So what LLM do you use for vibe coding?

I don't vibe code.

I'm a professional.

Oh, wow.

Slap, slap in the face.

I'm just going to mute myself here.

I'm proud of my vibe coding.

I'm, I'm, I'm a developer now.

I is a developer.

No, I'm happy that, uh, you know, your AI assistant is helping you to create codes.

You know, my AI is writing the code.

I'm the one that's debugging it.

That's all I'm doing.

Sarcasm in Dutch is just as effective as it is in English.

So you need to be a pretty good developer to actually, uh, you know, use those tools because it spits out all sorts of stuff.

And if you don't understand what it does, then you're going to get a crap product.

I think I, because I have 30, 40 years of basic Linux command line experience and understanding of sockets and, you know, like, well, of course, back in my day was Apache and now it's Nginx.

Um, you know, some, just some of that basic stuff because I, I know what it's supposed, how it's supposed to fit together.

I think that's why I can actually get something done.

Uh, because I've just been around it so long, but I can't write a lick of code.

I can, of course, now look at the code and go, oh, okay.

Cause it, I have to say it documents pretty well.

So this is my question.

This is, this is, this is the thing that I'm waiting to figure out because what this is, I mean, you're building full blown, you know, products, products, baby.

Oh yeah.

With UIs.

I mean like this, this is the, so I, and I have two questions here that I want, because what this is, is a real time social, this is a social experiment.

And like you are building something that is going to actually go into production with customers.

Yes.

And that is going to be like, uh, the biggest social experiment in real time that I can think of because, but here's a serious, so here's the question.

Number one, at what point will you find that you actually can code in Python just by looking at the vibe coding output for months or years?

Yeah.

At some point, will you actually have begun to understand what you're looking at and could actually write it?

Okay.

So I already can understand what I'm looking at.

I really don't think I'll ever be able to write it.

I mean, I've, I've done, cause it's all Python.

Um, and I've, I've done a online Python course in the past, you know, so I understand all of the mechanics of it and modules and virtual environments.

And, you know, and I think I've, I think I have a lot of that down and understand it, but the actual writing of the code with indentations and curly brackets, heck no.

No, I don't think I'll ever be able to write it.

I really don't.

Well, the difference between the, see the, the difference between taking a, taking a class and doing what you're doing now is the, I'm a firm believer that you will, that you cannot learn a language, a programming language that you are not coding in for an active project.

Like, I mean, something that actually is meaningful to you.

I mean, let's put it this way.

I do a lot of customization of the code because it's simple stuff.

Environment, you know, value, environment values, um, minimal UI tweaks and stuff.

I do that.

Okay.

Follow up question.

The things that you say, you just made a comment that it is quote, simple stuff.

Would these things that you're talking about, these tweaks you're making, would you still have considered them to be simple stuff nine months ago?

Yes.

Because you started vibe coding.

Yes.

Because environment values and that's all the stuff I already understood and was tweaking before in things.

So that, I mean, I have to, I have to be fair and honest.

I mean, it's to me that I've, it's like flying the Cirrus aircraft.

I have a ballistic parachute known as Dave Jones.

I know that if I really crash and burn, I pull the chute and then Dave will come in and say, let me see what's going on.

So you have never pulled the chute before.

No, I have not.

No, I feel very confident.

You know, it was like, oh, you know, if it really falls down, but for instance, um, it's, it's the stupidest things that no vibe coding can tell you why your server is running at, you know, at a load 18.

You got to go in and figure it out and you got to use tools and, you know, H top, you'll start there.

Okay.

What's running?

Why is this running?

And then you find out that where you thought you were only running 30, uh, channel streams, you were actually running 300, you know, like, oh, okay, well that kind of makes sense.

You know, you know, just stuff that fired up and you, you never noticed it before.

And there was actually all, all vibe coding mistakes, all LLM mistakes.

I mean, these things, they don't, they think, uh, they don't, they don't actually, the way that they code stuff is not the same thinking pattern that you write code with.

Does that make any sense?

It's like, you got to be pretty strict about how things happen and how things are done, but it'll just add some other things that it won't even tell you that it did.

And like, well, what, what is happening here?

Well, I fired up these 15 processes over here and I did that over.

It didn't, doesn't tell me that I've got to go in and look.

So what is this?

Oh yeah.

No, I thought that would be handy.

You know, it's like stuff I didn't tell it to do.

Chat F, never ask a vibe coder what the changes in their commits mean.

No, I mean, we already went through this before.

It's like final this time for real dot B-A-K.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's question.

Okay.

So question two is, and this is, you know, well, it's not really a question, I guess.

It's a, it's a comment.

At some point when you're vibe coding, you're going to be producing code and putting it into production that you don't fully understand.

No, no.

I know what everything does.

But what I'm saying is, do you know if there is, do you know if any of the OWASP top 10 vulnerability, web app vulnerabilities apply to your code or not?

No, no, you're absolutely right.

I don't.

I'm sure that the security issues, I'm trying to be really good about it, but I'm sure that no, I mean, of course not.

I feel like there's a separate suite of things that need to happen there for vibe code output where you come along and say, okay, now you use some sort of agent to then test for other things that could be wrong.

Like, hey, here's a web service running on this, you know, this URL.

Please test this for the top, you know, 10 web, you know, web vulnerabilities cross, try to cross a site script it, try to SQL inject it, where you could hit it with some other agent to double check, because you won't, you won't, since you didn't code it, you won't know in advance if any of those things were done.

Yes.

And, and to be fair, the things that I'm doing, I mean, there's, there's not a SQL database in sight.

I mean, there's, there's, there's not a lot of that going on.

And the best thing I, the best two things I learned, one is, is something that you're going to interact with this, just spin up a $5 Linode, put it all on there.

Thank you for teaching me that.

Just put it all on there.

And then if that screws up, it won't take down everything else.

And the second, yeah, the second thing that I'm really, I'm struggling with, but I'm getting better, is connecting everything to GitHub.

I have to do, I had to do that because now I have three, four customers, quote unquote, of this one product.

And so, you know, if I want to make an upgrade, it's complicated, you know, because now, now you're copy pasting code between, between Linode servers.

And none of that's good.

And I can do that with four, but not with 10.

Right.

It'll become crazy.

So I think it's still all very limited, Dave.

I really do.

And you have, if you don't really know what it's supposed to do, then I don't think you can have a lot of success with it.

Yeah, okay.

I can do a check-in thing for my office when people swipe a badge or something.

I can see that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, you know, a complete streaming server, radio station with an admin interface, you got to know what you're doing.

You got to know how the, how you really want the system to work and what you really want it to be.

And then it actually, the LLM made some assumptions, which I liked.

Like, okay, now I like this click, expand, drop down.

That's a good way to do it.

And so I'm sure someone else did it somewhere and it's in the corpus.

But I'm a user, you know, I'm not just someone who's just building something for a customer.

I'm a user, very much like Barry with his apps.

Like, I know exactly what I want this to do because I've been doing it for, you know, 45 years.

Like, I know what this thing has to do.

And see, I think that's where you really learn how to code is when you have something that you're, when you have a project that you're intimate with and you just find yourself in the code all the time.

I think, I don't know.

I feel like there's some sort of osmosis that happens.

I don't know, maybe a year from now, I feel like you'll look at that and say, you'll, I feel like you may end up like knowing more Python than you realize.

Yeah, don't hold your breath.

Maybe I'm, maybe I'm wrong.

Hey, I will say this.

I'm an expert at Nginx configurations.

I know this thing hands down.

There you go.

But that's a config file.

You know, it's like, okay, I can see what this is doing.

I understand.

Well, look, I mean, code's just a big config file.

It just configures your system to run some code.

You know, yeah, true.

But it's all this, like, oh, okay, so you change this.

Well, you've got to restart the system service.

You know, it's like no LLM is going to tell you this unless you go, it doesn't work.

And then it'll take you through recompiling your kernel.

Like, okay, yeah, good.

Stupid stuff.

Do you use any of that stuff, Barry?

Are you just, are you raw dogging it?

No, no, I use a Visual Studio, sometimes Visual Studio code.

And there's like a GitHub copilot baked into it.

And when you use that, you can use all sorts of models, including a GPT, Cloud, all sorts of things.

I keep it small.

So for instance, it does, it's very helpful on some things.

Like with the Podhome hosting, for instance, I do stuff with FFmpeg.

And you know, those commands can be very, very complicated.

FFmpeg is my bitch.

It's super useful.

FFmpeg, FFprobe, these, I mean, I built an RTMP audio video conversion system that takes just the audio of RTMP from BoxCast, which seems to be most of our customers are using that, or OBS, and then sends it to an IceCast server.

And I figured out that you can very easily do a takeover if you use an alternative mount point.

I mean, there's all these things that I've just kind of learned on the way.

But FFmpeg, I mean, you can change the world with that thing.

Yeah, it's awesome.

So, you know, when I need a very specific command, I just ask, you know, I want FFmpeg to do this with this input and then it just spits out something.

And I'm like, oh, why is the, I don't know, dash R in there?

And it explains, well, dash R does this and blah, blah, blah.

That's a good point.

I have definitely learned the commands that I use on the command line just for getting stuff done and replacing stuff.

And as you say, all the different switches for FFmpeg, yeah, by doing it, you learn it.

And then like, oh, I can type that.

I don't have to ask Grok, what is the command to do this?

I know what it is.

Yeah, well, you know, and that's what, and that's what coding, that's what coding really is.

Yeah, it is, it is learning.

There's, there's, there's two aspects of coding.

There's learning the syntax of the language you're in, which is one, which is, you know, that's one aspect.

And then that, that's actually a very small thing.

You could learn that for most languages within a couple of hours of, of just kind of playing around in a REPL or doing something like that.

That is actually, learning the syntax is not that hard.

The, what most people find the biggest learning curve is to learn the standard library of whatever the language they're in.

And that takes time because you begin to see that you're using the same functions of, of the standard library or standard module packages over and over and over again.

So that you learn their syntax.

Like OS, YAML, my favorite YAML, do a lot with YAML.

I love, love me some YAML.

YAML, the Python of config files.

Yeah, well, actually what was, what was kind of interesting was the podcast index API, or I should say the Godcaster API, which is a derivative, just getting out of it what I wanted to get out of it.

Every single LLM really did not consider the way that we use our API, which is straight up, you know, dash H header, you know, no bearer tokens, you know, and it would try all kinds of stuff, said, no, this is, do it like this.

And then it would work.

And, and no matter how many times, you know, I go back to it, I always wind up, you know, setting the, you know, the, like the get or the post, the get, I guess.

The method, yeah.

The method, thank you.

I was setting that, wind up setting it myself because the AI just can't, it doesn't, it won't compute for some reason.

It always wants to do, oh, this is how we've always done it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's, that's the thing.

Yeah.

And I find that that's probably where most things fall down is it's in the, it's in the details.

If you'd have, if you're doing anything slightly out of the off script or out of the standard playbook, it's just like, it just barfs.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But also architecture things, right?

So if you, you, you build something and you let the AI think about it, but you need to think about how to make that scalable.

Like, how do I do this for a thousand customers?

Let's say this is going to be very popular.

Does it still work?

Well, so is it secure?

And that's the perfect example because I started, I mean, it took me three months to get a working version of the channel stream, which is basically, here's, here's a feed of podcasts, play the most recent episode on an Icecast stream and keep rotating those.

And oh, by the way, put a station ID in the middle of them.

And I wound up with like a working system that had three different scripts.

I'm like, this is ludicrous.

And so I was able to, you know, completely refactor it.

And within a much shorter amount of time, I created one script.

It does everything.

It's, it's low memory usage.

It's very low on CPU.

And, you know, so it took me like four tries to really, like you said the last week or the other week, Dave, like software, you really have to rewrite it three times before you really get it to where it has to be.

So, so now you're becoming a software architect.

Can I put that on my LinkedIn?

Yeah.

The great, the great thing about it too, is like I still have functions and methods.

Like anytime you have a project, at some point you're going to end up with a quote, utility class where you, you know, where you just pile in a bunch of one -off functions that you need.

Yeah.

And so, but the good thing is like, over years and years and years, you begin to like compile it.

This becomes a toolbox that you just drag forward from one thing to another.

And it's like, I know I use the same URL fetch code today that I did 20 years ago, because it's exactly what I want.

And it works the way I need it to.

And like, you'll be, you drag that forward and then you don't, you forget what's even in that function.

Cause all you do is call it, you know.

Yeah.

I got this one that I didn't make it, but Werkzeug.Utils.

Werkzeug.

It was like, it's like worker bee kind of basically.

It sounds Russian.

It does all, they're German.

It does all kinds of cool stuff.

Yeah.

Report lab platypus.

Woo.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, it's fun.

I'm having a lot of fun doing it.

Takes me away from life, but I have a lot of fun doing it.

Barry, what is, what is your, what is your success rate with your, with your app?

Are you seeing some good adoption?

Oh yeah.

I can see it in an Apple podcast or the Apple podcast, the iOS store thing, and also the play store for Google.

Like combined is I have 1500 downloads and people actually open it as well.

So that's good.

Yeah.

That's great.

So I sync minimal data to the backend so that I can send notifications to people.

And that's when you, when you log into the thing or you don't even log in, when you start the thing up, it creates an automatic account, which is a pin code.

If you take that pin code to a different device, log in there, and then it syncs all your subscriptions to the different devices as well.

That means I can see all your subscriptions in the backend.

I have no idea who you are or where you are.

I can just see it to a pin code and a user.

So I can see how many people subscribe to things, which is cool.

Based on that, I can see, you know, there are, I don't know, 500 people subscribe to Joe Rogan, a couple of people to podcasting 2.0 and all sorts of other shows as well.

So I got, what was the last one?

Let me see that now.

And you're selling that to a Meta?

Yeah.

Meta, that's a disgusting company.

Come on, man.

Come on, man.

It is.

Well, okay.

No, we can pull a couple of thousand podcast subscriptions, like unique shows that people are subscribed to, which is pretty cool.

So this is a thing that I've been throwing around forever.

And I feel like I just need, I'm just going to have to do it.

And this is a perfect time to ask your opinion on this is, since I've talked about this before, since the index does it, since the podcast index does not have any first party subscription data, we don't know who subscribes to anything.

We just try, I just try to use heuristics to sort of figure out what's popular and what's not.

And having some way to send back an anonymized batch of, here's the top podcasts that pod home app subscribers have subscribed to, would that be something you'd be willing to do?

Yeah, sure.

Okay.

That should be super easy to send that, to set up as an API or something, or how do you want?

Yeah, what format would, do you think it should, how should that thing be pushed back to us?

Because it could be a big batch of data, you know?

Yeah.

If you open up an API for that, I can just send something.

Okay.

I thought about CSV upload or just a JSON object.

It needs to be something that I can easily automate so that I don't have to think about it anymore.

What is that for you?

What would that be?

So I have all sorts of things running in the background, database cleaners, all sorts of things.

And this can be just one of those jobs that occasionally checks, you know, these are all the subscriptions and then send it to one of your endpoints.

And that's it.

Okay.

I'm going to build something because I have a, the reason this is coming up in my mind again is because Franco told me that Apple stopped supporting a way in, stopped supporting in their API, in the iTunes lookup API, where you could ask for a genre with no podcast specified and have it return like a list of recommended shows.

Like, I guess when you did not specify a particular podcast and you just gave it a genre, it would give you like maybe the top of that genre.

And he said that recently stopped working.

Oh, did you?

Okay.

He said that recently stopped working.

And I was like, well, I can work on giving you an equivalent to that.

I'd be happy to do that.

And the first thing I ran into was, well, how do we rank these?

I don't have anything because I can't, I could just give ran, I could just give a batch of, you know, a hundred back randomly, but they could just be complete garbage.

If it's not something that people is this, if it's not things that people are actually interested in, then I don't, it's not useful.

If you open up an endpoint, I can send you some stuff and I'm sure all of our app building friends can also pretty easily then just send things if it's the very, you know, easy API call.

Yeah.

And I can aggregate that and then just give it back in the genre lookup endpoint.

Yeah.

And then, you know, maybe filter are these actually recently updated shows and things like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right, cool.

I'll put something together and I'll ping you.

Yeah.

So, you know, everybody that's listening, that's also building an app, please then also send stuff to Dave's lovely new endpoints.

Right.

Yes, it will be easy.

Before I forget Dave, I was listening to Power and I heard Jay, he may have pinged you about this.

James was looking to see if he could get an endpoint on the API that is most recent that has location tag.

Yes.

And I emailed him about that a couple of months ago, I think.

And it's on my to-do list.

When I, I think, so, you know, with the Godcaster stuff, I'm building a location-based thing right now.

Right.

For search.

Location-based search.

And I think I'm going to take, I'm going to take that code and then adapt it over to the index.

So I think I'm going to be able to get him what he wants.

Cool.

Okay.

I just want to make sure we service our customers.

I'm an advisor.

Sorry.

Through the show.

I'm an advisor.

Yes, I'm an advisor to this.

You're advising right now.

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing.

So what's next, Podhome Barry, as most people call you?

Is that right?

So yeah, for Podhome hosting, we're going to build something for the funding tag, where people can just easily set up a page.

Like I think Buzzsprout has a similar thing as well.

But yes, they have a page and you can just send money and that will just go to you.

But that's one thing we're going to build.

We're also thinking of building like a very rudimentary recording thing where you can just, in the website or maybe in a different app, I don't know yet.

And or also just click a button, record some stuff, upload, and then that's it.

Just to make it easier for podcasters, because that's the whole point of Podhome hosting.

We've built so many little tools that just take away things that podcasters otherwise need to buy somewhere else or use from somewhere else.

So we have the AI that's in there.

You get a website that we generate for you.

All that type of stuff is just, it's all in there.

So if we also can do something with recording, audio of course, that'd be very cool because we kind of already do that for, for instance, when people do a live show, you get to click a button where you say, record this stuff and then we record the live show and we put that as an episode within your show and you just hit publish and then pops your uncle.

So we could do that, but you know, it's, yeah, we're thinking about that.

You keep saying we, is this the royal we?

I was wondering about that myself.

No, so it's me and it's Jurre and Martijn and those guys are freelancers.

They don't work full time, but I hire them for customer support, bug fixes sometimes and sometimes to build features as well.

Oh, great, cool.

So yeah, how is support?

How much of a burden is support on you?

Has it been bad or?

No, it's actually pretty, pretty okay.

I think the UI is pretty user-friendly.

You know, obviously we're dealing with users.

So sometimes we get difficult questions.

Tell me about it.

Our software would be great if we had no users.

Oh, that would be awesome.

One thing that people do is of course, upload their audio, right?

So you go to a thing, you hit a box and then you get to choose your audio file and it goes to upload and you see a little bar going from zero to a hundred.

Obviously you need to keep your browser open.

Oh no, no, I can close that tab, can't I?

I can refresh this page, can't I?

Yeah, I can just go away.

Just, you know, turn off your computer and then be surprised that it's not uploaded.

So there's questions like those, but those are rare.

In the immortal words of Tom Rossi from Buzzsprout, if you put a box on a screen, somebody's going to type in it.

That's right.

Hey, what's this box for?

Let me see, what can I do here?

Yeah, that's true.

It's been okay, it's been okay.

Yeah, it works pretty well.

It's pretty self-explanatory, the UI.

What are you doing for marketing?

I mean, how do you exactly- Yeah, marketing, that's not my strength.

I do have hold home accounts on all the social media except for Facebook because I really don't want an account there.

I do have one for Instagram though, which is same company.

And you know, just put some Canva generated pictures on there with a link, with what's it called?

Buffer, that's one of those things where you can just schedule all that type of stuff.

Yeah.

And that's it.

And, you know, sometimes I go on podcasts like these.

You'll get three new users.

Sure, over the next six months.

You know, it doesn't have to, I don't need a thousand users.

Amen, brother.

That is, you know, that's really the thing.

Scale is overrated.

There it is, scale is overrated.

Dave Jones, the pod sage.

If I could pay all my bills, I'm happy.

Yeah, for real.

I mean, it comes with a whole set of problems that you don't want.

Yeah.

Yeah, but not everything needs to grow indefinitely.

Like that's the trend, right?

Every company needs to grow.

We all need a growth mindset.

I think that's- We don't.

No, we need quality.

And if you have quality, you know, things will come to you.

And everything will be okay.

There's a level of customers where life is good.

And there's a level above that at some factor where life becomes really something you didn't want it to be.

Yeah.

And you aim for the sweet spot.

Not over, not under.

Yeah, I know.

So, you know, this is fine.

It's fine.

Yeah, exactly.

It's fine.

Yeah, no, it's fine.

Yeah.

So, yeah, but marketing is a difficult thing.

You really need to be like an ad guy for that.

I'm not.

No, we're not either.

That's, that's, I'm allergic to it.

I do the same.

I just do interviews.

Hey, I got a product.

You should check it out.

Put me on your podcast.

Yeah, but you're famous.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, I did a speech for some 25-year-olds a couple months ago.

And, you know, I kind of got my stories right.

You know, my stories from the past.

And these kids never even seen a music video on MTV.

They see me on Rogan.

You know, they heard of me there.

Oh, yeah.

And I'm like, you know, you know, this time with Prince and I can just see them all.

Who?

They don't even know who Prince is.

And then I said, Elvis?

No.

No, my grandma knows about Elvis.

Yeah, OK.

Oh, man.

Yeah, but I thought Prince, you know, I mean, I thought some of that stuff was still sticking around.

No, not at all.

Not at all.

So the youngins, they're completely oblivious.

The youngins, man, it's no good, these youngins.

Come up here, sit on Uncle Adam's knee.

I'll tell you what we used to do back in the days when we played videos on MTV.

Back before the reality TV show.

That's right.

That's right.

How is Godcaster doing, like, customer-wise?

Well, thank you for asking.

We, we're discovering a lot about the potential customers.

We have, I think we're up to 290 stations and frequencies, but increasingly.

Nice.

Yeah, we're seeing, we're seeing churches who, it's interesting, the sales cycle for a radio station who, it's like, I think they all know that digital is where they have to be because, you know, we do a mix of on-demand and live streaming and, you know, so they can put their streams, you know, most radio stations on their website have a page and there's a button that says, listen live, and that's it.

You know, then they have players, like they'll use an RSS.com player, a widget.

And so, you know, they're losing their actual audience.

They're sending their audience away to go listen to these things elsewhere because every single program, certainly in the faith-based radio programming, is a podcast and, you know, they all, almost all exclusively work on a version of Value for Value.

Some of the bigger ones, they charge, okay, so it'd be like $5,000 a month to be on our airwaves.

And we're in this point where they all know that FM radio in particular, some AMs out there still, but FM radio, you know, it's going away.

I mean, obviously it's not going away, but people are looking for stuff online.

And, but it feels like they still want to hold on to that FM signal.

You know, that's the mothership.

And so the sales cycle can be significantly longer where if you say to a pastor of a church of, you know, a thousand people, hey, I'm going to turn you into your local radio station.

They're like, okay, great.

Sign me up.

You know, they get it, even though they have no idea what they're doing, which is why I built the interface for it.

They immediately get the concept and they have nothing to lose because they have only to gain.

See, that's what's interesting.

And we're running into, I would say in some cases, well, this just can't be good enough.

I mean, this is a relatively small monthly charge that we charge them.

And I think that that actually works to our detriment in some ways because to be true.

Yeah.

You know, like a web company comes in and they'll have consultants running around and it's all hogwash.

You know, it's like we've done this, but it doesn't work by saying, hey, we've been doing this for, you know, for 20 years.

We understand how this stuff works and we understand how it works.

I mean, there's customers who have built entire backend systems.

It's all legacy.

And I understand how it came to be, where they will download the actual wave file from a service to a radio show that is freely available on RSS feed as a podcast with an MP3.

They've built data stores and SQL databases just to put it on their website.

Yeah.

You know, and then, yeah, Dave.

No, I mean, they built like, they built a whole CDN to redistribute something that you can get from the source.

I mean, hundreds, you know, it's got to be a thousand dollars a month, at least worth easily cloud front cost, you know, just, yeah.

And then the one thing that's been really and all props to Dave, because we have, we also have a, an embeddable player, web player.

Holy moly.

The web is such a mess, you know, and just horrible.

Myself as well, yeah.

Just when we thought we had everything all set, you know, a customer comes along, it's like, well, it doesn't work on Wix.

Yeah.

It's like, whoa, okay.

They hadn't been there.

Luckily, Dave is, he sees this as some personal challenge, you know, like he's in an episode of Kung Fu, like I'm going to get this enemy.

But the web.

Customized GML elements for the win.

Yeah, the web is, you know, and the worst is if you have a, a customer who thinks they know what they're doing, or actually kind of knows what they're doing, then it gets even worse, you know?

And well, we've, we've made this color change here.

You click this box.

Oh, but I was going to do it with a style sheet and, you know, and a, and a different style CSS property.

Like, well, you just click this box and it turns it into the color you want.

So it's, it's interesting.

Customers are very interesting, but I would have to say we're having a really good time doing this.

Yeah, it's fun.

I mean, it's, it's, it's an amazing product and how that all fits into the Godcaster app.

I just love it.

I mean, it's, it's kind of the app that I was always saying, you know, create an app with an attitude.

You know, our attitude is Jesus.

Okay, there it is.

You get this app, you're going to get Jesus content.

And which can go from, you know, news to opinion to all kinds of different things.

Um, but it's also aggregated by, it has a lot of 2.0 philosophy in it where, uh, you follow a station and the station is in a way like a mini aggregator.

Um, it has pod role type, um, of properties to it.

Am I, Dave, how would you, uh, would you want to add anything to that?

Yeah, yeah, that's, I mean, that's right.

It's complicated because if you're trying to keep the station or the church as the center of the universe, then you, then it really, the programming becomes almost secondary.

Like if you want to listen to a particular show, uh, you don't just go to that show.

You, you have to find a station or a church that's, that's publishing that show or republishing that show because like, you know, your local station, that's where we want to drive people.

We were, I mean, you know, we're all about saving radio stations and turning churches into new radio stations.

And so you want to keep people, keep audience attached to that radio station.

And so you, you want to be listening to, you don't just say, um, listen to a living on the edge, uh, with, you know, uh, Chip Ingram, you say living, you know, listen to living on the edge with Chip, Chip Ingram on WDJC in Birmingham.

Right.

So like that's, that's everything becomes show on station, this on this, this on this.

And so there's kind of like a, it's kind of like a, um, well, it's like the station is the promoter of the programming.

That's the whole idea.

And, and now they can mix in local content, like hyper-local content, um, from someone in their church or the church, the pastor's podcast can be on the associated radio station.

And it turns out listeners enjoy that a lot.

They want to be told what to listen to, you know, and podcasting has never had the real discussion.

You have your podcast pulse, uh, but that's, that's a one example in an ocean of any app doing that.

And it turns out that people really just want to be told, oh, okay, here's some good shows.

I'll listen to that.

They're, they're not necessarily seeking out for something new.

It's one thing that's interesting, Barry, is that when Adam created the channel stream thing, where you, where it takes all the, all the episodes that you're, um, that you're publishing and puts them into a continuous stream.

So it's like listening to a radio station, a live stream, and it's been a really interesting experience to listen to that.

And you, you feel we've all gotten used to having total control in the on-demand world where we can listen to whatever we want at any time.

And when you go back to this sort of radio experience where you don't have any control, where you're tuning into a stream and it's just playing something, even if it's stuff that you like, it's stuff you're subscribed to.

You drop into the stream.

Yes.

And just, yes.

This is like, hey, what's this?

This is exactly what Tom Webster was talking about when we had him in the boardroom.

And part of that came from that conversation.

And so more often, because we have, so I have Hello Fred, which is our music station here for Fredericksburg and has promos for podcasts that are highlighted by the church.

And then we have Bridge Church Radio, which is those podcasts and they're just playing on a loop.

The most recent one plays and the algorithm is very simple, but it actually works really nice.

And very often I'll be in the car and I'm like, oh, I've heard this song and I'll go to Bridge Church Radio and I hear like, oh, this is my neighbor, Laura Logan.

And she has a really interesting guest and I'll just drop right in the middle of it and I have a choice.

I can just sit there and continue to listen from where I dropped in, which is pretty much happens 80% of the time.

Or if it's really good, I can follow that program back to the station or back to the program itself and then see that episode and all the other episodes.

So you can kind of, you get your serendipity of discovery, but then you can also go back and start over and listen from the beginning.

But that, and you can see it happening because of course I see all the IceCast servers and you literally see people listening to something and then you see him stop and you see him go and play the episode.

So it's a great discovery mechanism.

It's interesting.

It's almost like it's not the same, but it's similar to the experience that you get going from when you're listening to one and a half speed going back to one X speed.

You feel like you're giving up control and there's this initial sense of like loss and disappointment and irritation, but then you accustomed to it.

And now all of a sudden you feel like you're getting a better, you're getting something valuable.

Yes.

I won't say that it's better.

You're just getting something valuable out of it.

It's great because I'll tune into your stream KDEV and I'll get like, you know, it'll vary from Bill Maher, which I don't necessarily go and seek out, but I'll drop in the middle like, oh, that's interesting.

Or maybe Grace Bayou radio, which sounds like it's from 1930.

But it's really, we've built, what we're doing here is radio re-imagined.

Re-imagined.

Re-imagined.

Nice.

That's what we're doing.

That's what we're doing.

So Dave, are you going to be able to quit your day job?

Oh Lord.

No.

Have I told you that we start every meeting with prayer about this, Barry?

No.

Not yet.

Not yet.

Not yet.

Not yet.

No one's quitting their day job yet.

But that, that would be nice.

But we're, I think we have different reasons for doing it, actually.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm not too worried about that.

Yeah.

Hey, wow.

Did we already yap for an hour and a half?

Let's thank some people because Dave has to get back to his actual day job, which maybe, is it calmer now?

Did everyone just not come into the office today now that it's the 17th?

No, it's a ghost town.

Oh, beautiful.

Beautiful.

Let's see.

Triple seven from Salty Crayon.

He says, I came for the audio, stayed for the value.

Audio is king in the pipe.

Yeah.

Martin Linjeskoog sent 420 sats.

A Dutch 420 boost.

Barry, how is the internet connection at the coffee shop in Amsterdam?

We will have a beer at Het Amsterdammerche in Gothenburg someday.

Is there an actual coffee shop in Gothenburg called the Het Amsterdammerche?

I guess.

I don't know.

That's interesting.

Chad F with the triple seven, heard that come in earlier.

And I hit the delimiter.

So take it away, Dave.

Oh, I guess.

Let's see.

We got no one-off PayPals.

But we did get some monthlies.

I think people are broke.

Well, you know, we didn't even talk about the ridiculous economic stuff that's happening right now.

I mean, yeah.

What's the ridiculous economic stuff?

That nobody can afford anything?

Is that what you're talking about?

I mean, gold is $4,400 an ounce.

That's amazing.

And I mean, Bitcoin crashed hard.

Oh, that's fine.

Nothing's new.

Nothing's new.

We've seen 30% drawbacks in bull markets.

So that's typical.

Oh, sure.

But it's why people take money off the table and are piling into gold.

Because usually they go up together, you know.

Wasn't Tether buying gold?

Oh, they're everybody.

Well, I was on the Gun, Goats, and Gold podcast earlier this week with Tom Luongo, who I respect a lot.

And his theory was very interesting.

He says, because of the nature of gold, and obviously it's not easy to ship around the globe.

There's all kinds of issues with that.

He believes that right now the US and China are in a coordinated tug of war to actually tap the price of gold up to, I think he said, $15,000 or $16,000 is what he expects.

And it's literally like, well, we're going to do a 500% tariff.

Well, we're going to tax you.

We're going to export restrictions on rare earth.

And oh, we're going to do this, we're going to do that.

And it's back and forth.

If you look at the timing of President Trump's social posts, it's always like just either an hour before the market opens or an hour after it closes.

He knows what he's doing.

And it would not surprise me if we're in total cahoots and it's over gold.

Because obviously the US, supposedly, I'm still waiting for Elon to show me the live cam of Fort Knox.

Supposedly, we have 800,000 tons of gold.

I believe it when I see it.

Valued at $42 an ounce.

That's what is on the balance sheet.

But if it's $15,000, and then you say, OK, we're going to just change this number here to what the gold is really worth.

Then guess what?

All of a sudden, our debt almost gets wiped out.

Well, have you seen, I mean, gold is one thing.

Silver.

I know.

Silver is to the moon.

I mean, it's like, didn't it touch 50?

Yes.

Someone gave me, had an instant night donation at the meetup.

It was a bag full of gold coins, of silver coins.

I mean, like it's outrageous.

Silver is outrageous.

I mean, and the silver, the gold silver ratio got up like, I think it was like 100 or more.

And now it's back down below 80 or right around 80.

Yeah, it's pretty wild.

I mean, I would think, I agree with Jeff Snyder.

I think this is a deflation.

That's the economy guy.

What's his name?

The euro dollar guy.

Euro dollar guy, yeah.

I think this is a deflation signal.

I don't think it's an inflation thing that's happening.

I don't think so either.

Yeah, I don't think that's the case.

Just hold assets that are not fiat money.

$54.33 silver right now.

$54.33.

Yeah, you're right.

You're right.

Because I mean, gold is not ledger money.

No.

It's just not.

I mean, that's not the way it functions anymore.

It is an alternative store of value.

And I don't think it's a risk hedge either.

I mean, not a risk, but an inflation hedge.

No.

I think it's purely an alternative investment.

And I think people are getting spooked by the equities markets.

They're starting to ease out of that thing because the AI bubble looks like it's.

Oh, it's got years to go.

I think it's got years to go still.

If the deflation stuff hits hard, I think people are going to just fly to the, just going to fly out of that stuff.

Well, the Bitcoin thing is obvious because if an hour after the markets close, you say, oh, China, we're going to put 100% tariffs on you.

There's only one market that's open.

You're like, you want to cash in?

You can't cash in gold.

You cash in your Bitcoin.

But the crash continued, even though, even into the equity market.

Well, of course, everybody's selling.

Of course, weak hands.

Where's your diamond hands, people?

Where's your diamond hands?

Come on.

See, C-Loss on Linux has diamond hands.

2222 through Fountain.

He says, as a Rodecaster Duo owner, I disliked Daniel saying that today, just plug and play and things just work.

Yes, I agree.

I disliked that too.

It's true.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Barry experienced that before the show.

C-Loss coming in hot again.

5432.

He says, the FFPMEG thing reminded me of what I did about a year ago.

I had a command line tool using FFMPEG to turn a YouTube or Twitch live stream into a live Icecast MP3 stream.

I wanted to build an easier tool to stream in RSS myself, but then decided that there weren't any good RSS live listening apps or websites yet.

Started bouncepad.live, which is bad and semi -abandoned now.

So I'm left with kind of nothing.

Does anyone have any motivation tips?

So what does he actually want?

Motivation tips.

For what though?

He wants us to motivate him to get back to work on his project.

Well, bouncepad.

This, by the way, I've been, oh, interesting.

I've been trying to, you know, to do all kinds of conversions from YouTube to audio.

And I mean, it's, YouTube really doesn't want you doing that.

It's really a cat and mouse game that is just not worth it.

No.

It's so hard to do.

They keep changing things.

And I wonder how all these, like Podbean.

Podbean has a convert your YouTube channel to an MP3 podcast.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

I wonder how.

Tell us.

Get to work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Get to work, man.

Get off your lazy butt and do some code.

The Ugly Quacking Duck.

That's Bruce2222 through Podcast Guru.

He says, one of the reasons I enjoy the show is it displays life.

It is not about a stagnated thing.

It encompasses much talk and change, which to me shows life.

I'm glad to be part of something that is still growing.

Thank you, Adam and Dave, for the new episode.

Always enjoy the guests that prove it also.

Thank you, Daniel J.

Lewis, 73.

And I will say that it's.

Thank you, Bruce.

You know, we knew this.

We knew coming into this that all this stuff takes time.

And here we are in our sixth year, I think, fifth or sixth year.

And stuff's coming, you know, stuff's coming.

Chapters will be coming to podcast, to Apple podcast.

We've got, you know, we've got all kinds of new, innovative, or as they say in Europe, innovative hosting companies and different types of apps.

There's still more coming.

So it's I feel very bullish.

Now, if you're if you're in this for the podcast industrial complex money making machine, yeah, I can see where you might be a little discouraged.

Yeah, then then you just punt and and produce 3000 episodes a week.

And they ask a lot.

Exactly.

Problem solved.

Yes, exactly.

Like we said before, the goal is just stay in the game.

Yeah, exactly.

And we're staying in it.

We're staying in it for sure.

Comma Strip blogger, The Delimiter 14190 through Fountain.

He says, Howdy, Dave and Adam.

Are you bored of tech podcasts from Leo's LLC?

Then subscribe to podcast called Two and a Half Bens available at www.twoandahalfbens.com.

A podcast about AI and other tech by Bim Rose, the ruler of No Agenda Stream.

And by Phone Boy, the infosec super expert and his Polish American girlfriend, Phoenix.

Yo, CSB, the AI arch wizard.

Ooh, throwing down the gauntlet.

I'm going to say that arch wizard was a bad choice of words.

It should be arch mage.

Now, that's even cooler.

OK, only only just a just a little tweak there.

Monthly's.

We got Terry Keller, five dollars.

Thank you.

Silicone Florist, ten dollars.

Thank you, Silicone.

Chris Cowan, five dollars.

Paul Saltzman.

Hey, Paul.

Twenty two dollars and twenty two cents.

Derek J.

Viscar, the best name in podcasting.

Twenty one dollars.

Damon Casajak, fifteen dollars.

Jeremy Gertz, five dollars.

Michael Hall, five dollars and fifty cents.

Gene Liverman, five dollars.

And Timothy Voice, ten dollars.

Wow.

Thank you all very much.

We appreciate the value you send back for the value that we bring with the podcast index, which is a completely open project.

Podcast index on social.

If you want to follow us over there on the Mastodon or if you need an account, hit us up.

We'll certainly give you an account.

It's not to just promote your podcast, but to participate in in this grand project.

And a lot of people who started are still here.

And I think we'll be really proud that we have not had any big blow ups.

There's no forks.

Everyone kind of still loves each other.

No forks.

No forks has been amazing.

Go to podcastindex.org at the bottom.

There's a big red donate button.

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But man, we love booster grams as well.

And of course, you can also send it on chain if you want.

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Anyway, you want to support us.

Time, talent or treasure.

That is the value for value model.

Barry, thank you so much for everything you've been doing.

Thank you for being a very innovative hosting company.

And of course, congratulations on the app release.

And I very much look forward to what you're going to be doing with that very tight integration, because I think that you're pioneering something here that most hosting companies have stayed away from because it's very hard to show the value in a podcast app for the amount of work that has to go into it, I think.

So I think it's really, really cool you're doing that.

Yeah, thanks.

It was fun.

It's always fun.

It's always fun to have the Dutch guy on.

All right.

So brother Dave, you even going back or is the ghost town not worth it?

You're just going to stay home?

No, I'm going back.

It's the best time to get work done.

Yeah, exactly.

All right.

Barry, come back anytime.

Boardroom, thank you very much for being here.

And we'll be back next week.

Right here on podcast 2.0.

It is the boardroom where it all takes place.

We'll see you then.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

2.0.

Visit podcastindex.org for more information.

Go podcasting.

Hey, what's this box for?

Let me see what we're going to do here.