Adam Curry: podcasting 2.0 for June 7 2024, episode 180 to drop
the dongle if it's Friday, it's podcasting 2.0 Hello everybody
welcome to the show where we talk about podcasting the
future. Today will actually be talking about the past as well
and what they can bring into the future confused yet don't worry,
you won't be everything happening in podcasts index dot
social, the namespace podcast index.org And this is the only
boardroom that celebrates the heroes of podcasting. I'm Adam
curry here in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and an
Alabama the man who can't get aggravated even by comic strip
blogger who say hello to my friend on the other end the one
and only Mr. De Jones.
Dave Jones: I can get aggravated by comments your blogger I just
choose not to.
Adam Curry: I have known him for I want to say 17 or 18 years.
And he still doesn't aggravate me he is a feature not a bug.
Dave Jones: That's a long time to know comic strip blogger.
Adam Curry: Yeah, I've actually met him once in person. How
about that
Dave Jones: his own parents don't haven't known him that
long.
Adam Curry: That's a good way of looking at it. Man oh man. Oh,
man. Here we go. We got a great guest today. I can't wait to
introduce him to everybody. Very excited having spoken to him and
I don't know 10 years.
Dave Jones: That's a reunions family
Adam Curry: read it is it is a family reunion.
Dave Jones: Heroes a podcasting? That sounds like a document.
Documentary. You
Adam Curry: know, I have done at least three documentaries
interviews for documentaries. Not a one has ever come out. Oh,
that's great. Yeah. No, it's important to be documentaries to
get them funded. It's impossible. And then once you
get it funded, nobody ever makes their money back. I mean,
documentaries is a horrible, horrible business.
Dave Jones: Netflix kind of killed the whole documentary
thing, didn't they? Because they just pay they said okay, we're
gonna You're gonna pay everybody up front. There's no long term
benefit to this.
Adam Curry: I would say no, I would say this even worse than
that Amazon Prime really killed it. They take some astronomical
amount like 80% and and you know, then they just kick you
off and they you know, it's it's a mess. It's a mess. Which is
why I hope our boy can get into hub up and running value for I
think value for value documentaries. I think there's
something there I really do.
Dave Jones: I forgot to send him a pod ping token, golf Katrin.
Okay. Oh,
Adam Curry: write it down. Right. It's a bit It's okay.
It'll show up in the AI transcript summary. Now here's
long as the reminder Dave needs to send in the hub dude, a what
kind of token pod paying? Token Yes, pod.
Dave Jones: Siri remind me to send nd hub due to pod pink
token in three hours.
Adam Curry: Wow. And here's the guy who's upset about the window
snapshot you just reading your life into Siri, what's wrong
with you, Dave Jones.
Dave Jones: Here's what here's what the reminder came through
as sinned. Indeed, due to PP token, there you go.
Adam Curry: Okay, whatever, that's gonna save the world.
Everybody is gonna save it, it's gonna save. It's gonna be great.
All right, I gotta talk about wallets for a moment. But just
want to make sure everyone understands what's going on.
There, it looks like albies Having some some issues today.
With the incoming, the last incoming stats I got on my lb
wallet was about eight hours ago. And this is, of course,
what I warned about this is your centralization. I would like to
explain the solution to everybody for podcast, app
wallets. Please do. Okay. So first, let's understand how the
system works. No matter what you're using, somewhere there's
a node. And that node needs to be online. And for sending that
node really only needs to be online the minute it has to send
something and then it's really not that important. And we'll
talk about podcaster wallets later on. But this is just
purely from an app perspective. So we have all kind of
consolidated on the lb API because it was easy to do. Don't
have to think about how the Lightning Network Function. So I
want to give a a high level overview and then present people
with a solution because ultimately, the PERT in a
perfect world. Everybody would have their own node and it would
just you know, you'd connect your app to it. And it would
work. Of course, that is very imperfect world because you're
not going to ask your app users to start up a node on Umbral or
start nine or anything like that. However, there is a and in
addition to that, just bringing up a node doesn't mean the node
where works, you need channels and you need money in those
channels. So liquidity, liquidity Yes, you know, so that
that requires money, which is another thing you just kind of
don't want to ask your users to do. However, there has been a
solution for several months. And, you know, as as always, it
doesn't really matter until things fall apart, and we have
to go in and fix them. And from what I understand Alby is no
longer going to create wallets for US customers. And there's,
it's just very unclear where they're at. And I don't blame
them, I understand it. They're Germans, they, and they don't
mean in a bad way. They, they, they're like the French, the
French pulled out, the Germans are pulling out, I get it, our
regulatory environment is confusing. However, having your
own node even in the App Store is completely okay. This has
been proven by the breeze app, if you've never used the breeze
app, I suggest developers grab the breeze app and just play
with it for a little while. Because it really is a wonderful
system, you get the app, you load some bitcoin into it, you
can buy it, or you can send some from on chain or lightning or
wherever you want to get it from. And even that, that's it,
you haven't opened a channel, you haven't done anything, it
opens it for you automatically. And when you send it make sure
that your channel is big enough to send it does it all
dynamically. This is what Roy has taught us over several years
ROI from breeze. This is what a lightning service provider does.
And this is what Brees has always been their app is really
just a reference app. And so they're finally rolling
everything out and things are going quite quick. Cake wallet
just added or is about to add, I think July, the breeze SDK. And
so what you need for every user of your app is a node. Now, you
can have a node that is separate from the app. Or you can have a
node a very slimmed pared down version of the node that only
uses the pieces of that node when necessary in your app
through the free breeze SDK. You add that, and I'm simplifying it
because I've never added an s actually, I have added an SD I
once built an app. And I did put an SDK in so I have I have seen
works. Yeah, I actually built an iPhone app back in the day, the
big book show.
Dave Jones: Oh, I remember that. Yeah, you had a freedom
controller page for that.
Adam Curry: Correct. So I so I do know how it works. And that,
you know, there's calls inside of that to send a payment. And
the beauty of it is that the breeze SDK automatically comes
with this lightning service provider that is provided by
breeze and they take care of all the stuff. So you don't have to
worry about it. All you need to do is make sure that when it's
time to send a payment, that you make the key send call, it sends
it to the appropriate splits. And you're done. Because you've
basically given your customer, your user a note. It works. Now,
what do we do with webapps? Oh, it doesn't work? Well. Here's
the beauty of it. Green light, which is working very closely
with breeze because breeze again, is a lightning service
provider has an API. Now you can download green light and run it
on your own server. But it's probably seems much easier just
to use their API since that's what developers like. And you
could even do this from your app if you want. Although you'll
find out why there's reasons not to. And the minute you need to
make a payment, you send the call through the API, Greenlight
then spins up a node real quick, like within milliseconds, makes
the payment waits to see if there's something else coming
and then shuts down again. And then it's the same nodes, we
have the same node address and the lightning payment and all
the plumbing is done by the breeze lightning service
provider. So what you're doing is you're giving your customer
your user in that case, their own node that they operate, and
it just goes up. The reason why it's very efficient is because
it doesn't have to stay online all the time, because it's
really only sending payments. And Greenlight gives you 1000
nodes for free just to start testing it. So that's if you
have a web app, I'm thinking Sam Sethi, or if you don't want to
use an SDK. Now above that, they say hey, give us a shout. Give
us a call and we'll figure out what you need. If it's more than
1000. I'm sure many people will expect to have more than 1000.
But I'm pretty confident that if it's comes down to Sam Sethi,
he'll negotiate Get the heck out of it with those guys, they will
probably wind up getting 10,000 for free. Right. But this is the
way forward. In addition, both the breeze SDK and the green
light API use core lightning, which appears to be a lot more
developer friendly. And they have also already implemented
Bolt 12, which is really the next, the next step and where we
need to go with wallets four v four v streaming and boosting.
That's where we need to go. And so I have actually try this, I
got the developer, I got my token, I copy pasted some code,
and it works, you can send a lightning payment, right from
the command line. And it works beautifully. Now that in
addition to this great system, you also have a choice of
lightning service providers. So you don't have to use the breeze
SDK, or green light with the breeze lightning service
provider, there are others, Olympus being one, which is
Zeus, Zeus app uses that. So there's no upfront cost for your
users, it just works. And these guys are already putting in on
ramps right into their system. So it's, you know, relatively
easy. You never know, you know, your mileage may vary depending
on your country, and, you know, all kinds of fuzzy stuff that I
don't know, and people might have to steal KYC. But it's
relatively easy to buy into get bitcoin into your wallet, even
from on chain, etc. And it's pretty much sovereign. So you
can tell your users, hey, you've got the keys, don't lose them,
because that's on you. And there's nothing else to support.
And I have a feeling just looking at the world that more
and more people are going to actually be interested in
podcasting with Bitcoin than we realize. We're getting to a
point where bitcoin is in the public eye they have some people
have it in their 401 K's some people have it in their own
retirement accounts. The Wisconsin Retirement System
actually just bought $100 million dollars worth of
bitcoin, there's a very conservative retirement outfit.
And more and more people are going to be interested in how do
I get some of that Bitcoin. So on the podcaster side, we have
some work to do, because this Greenlight system does not work
with key sand, but the bolt 12 side will work. So I implore
everyone to take a look at that, because I don't feel very
confident with what I'm seeing from our Alby brothers. And, and
I know it's work. But I really truly believe that this is the
way forward. I've been saying it for months and months and
months. And I've even I even tested it myself. This took a
lot of work on my part. This is very hacky, the way Adam does
stuff, but it really does work. And go ahead. Can
Dave Jones: you tell me exactly what you did? Because you said
you said I tested it from the command line and it worked. I
mean, what did you do? Yeah,
Adam Curry: so green light, I only I only tested the the green
light and the LSP part. So I got the green light, you get a
token. So you can use it in a Python script. I think it does
rust, Python, a couple other languages. And I just copied and
pasted their demo script and sent a key send payment.
Dave Jones: And it worked greenline This is not the breeze
SDK. No, the Yeah,
Adam Curry: exactly is the the breeze SDK is only for apps. But
the greenlight API uses the breeze lightning service
provider to take care of all the liquidity so you don't have to
worry about that. So it just works. I didn't have to fund a
channel didn't have to do anything at all. It just worked.
And
Dave Jones: you're saying that you're saying that the the
greenlight nodes do not support key send
Adam Curry: no they support key send out but the way they
operate is a spin up the minute you need to send this is kind of
the problem that sphinx had back in the day is they couldn't
figure out how to start up little mini nodes for everybody
with liquidity built in. Because it just wasn't available. The
lightning service provider piece wasn't there yet. So that's now
here and I don't know what Sphinx is doing anymore. But
Greenlight basically just spins up the node when necessary. The
beauty of it is that they do Bolt 12 So we could move to bow
All 12 and in Bolt 12 Incoming as far I haven't been able to
try that, as far as I understand does work because they will
trigger the bolt 12 invoice procedure. So it will start up
and you'll receive it in your interface app, whatever it is.
Right. But now I've asked Oscar who has gone quiet? I don't know
why. I've asked him if the if Zebedee if they're using lnd or
CLI? I don't know, I have a feeling they're using lnd. But I
don't know for sure. Possible, because if the using CLI, then
we can just move to bold 12. And it removes a whole bunch of
problems. But in the meantime, hosting companies are certainly
able to provide some kind of services to their podcasters in
Wave Lake has done it. You may not want to do it. But I think
moving towards the future hosting companies should be also
providing wallet solutions for their podcasters.
Dave Jones: So the that listen, if there's outbound keys, and on
the listen on the listener wallet side, that I mean, that
is fine. Let's purchase. That's that's that's perfect.
Adam Curry: That's exactly what we need. Yeah,
Dave Jones: Brad's exactly what we need. The the issue, you
know, on the on the receiving side? Is the less Tim is less of
a problem at this point in time? Yes, correct.
Adam Curry: It's a solvable problem is just how people want
to solve it. I again, think it should be the hosting companies
that do this. Because the model has been set. I mean, the model
is there. And there's many ways to solve that. You know, there's
people pay for services. So you know, there's ways to solve
that. I'm seeing a path and that path is through Bolt 12. And
Bolt 12 already works on core lightning.
Dave Jones: The developer of core lightning? Is the wrote the
initial spec for Bolt 12.
Adam Curry: Yeah, that's why it works. Yeah, Rusty?
Dave Jones: Rusty Russell, I think is the name. I don't know.
I don't know. I think he's the core developer for certainly
developer for core lightning. But the, the bolt 11 which is
what the main, the main thing that lightning has used since
day one, in my opinion, was always a big mistake. Always, no
other payment, no other payment system requires you to have the
receiver send you an invoice first before you're allowed to
pay them. Right. If you think of any other any other payments,
payment exchange architecture, whether it's PayPal, or cash
app, or Venmo, or even your bank, you never have to get
permission to send the other person money. That's just a it's
just, it's,
Adam Curry: it's weird. It's very weird. It's very weird.
Yeah, I
Dave Jones: understand. If you look at the technicals, you
understand why they did it that way, because they they do the
preimage. And then they they're going to you know, they need to
reverse the encryption out of the onion as it goes through the
the node hops
Adam Curry: reverse the encryption out of the onion
captain.
Dave Jones: But but it's still raw, it's still the wrong
solution. You just you just you have to do a different you need
to architect a better solution. And that better solution is both
12 Yes. And and it's, it's unforgivable, in my opinion that
l&d has existed for six years, and still does not have Bolwell
support, right.
Adam Curry: So now, of course, in our world, fountain is an
important player in value for value, if they don't have both
12 It's not going to be a great starter to move to bolt 12 Now
we can have options, and, you know, send keys, and if but, you
know, I just don't know where they're at. I don't know what
they're using. And lnd may have a complete different gameplan
you know, who knows what they're doing? They're doing all kinds
of stuff that is not necessarily implementing
Dave Jones: Bolt 12 They are. I mean, I see I see their roadmap.
They send weekly emails, but as it's like they just started. I
mean, like, they just think the version 18 of l&d is just
putting in the very beginnings of bolt 12 I mean, it could be
months before it's ready.
Adam Curry: Now the I'm seeing cake wallet. I'm seeing them
making interesting moves. It's very possible that after they
implement the breeze SDK that their desktop wallets may also
implement a Key send receive through the LSPs. You still
don't want I mean, even Zeus wallet who are CLI back end
through Olympus, they said, I saw a thread on the on podcast
index dot social, that they are going to make something so that
you can run their app in the background persistent. I don't
know how that does with battery life, that you can have keys and
receive, but it's not really the optimal solution. Because you
lose connectivity, you lose connectivity, you've got no
money, you got no money coming in. Right. But, um, I really
would like developers to consider implementing the breeze
SDK or you know, or through the green light API, if SDK is not
your thing. Because it is somewhere, someone has to run a
node for all this stuff. And when Bolt 12 is fully
implemented, you'll see lots of wallet solutions that people can
just use for receiving, and then maybe there'll be ways to tie
that in, etcetera. But if we, if we don't bridge this gap, we're
going to lose momentum.
Dave Jones: Oh, for me, certainly. I myself. I mean, I
was ready to give up this past week. I mean, I was really
serious, seriously, I mean, that just the idea of having to go
back and re architect and completely different solution.
And all this stuff was right. I mean, it, it's it's frustrating.
You know, it's frustrating is a momentum killer. And, you know,
that so I know, you're right, you're right. The other the
other thing is this, I mean, let's let's kind of look at the
landscape a little bit. This was all this was all okay. Until
this until this administration, this current presidential
administration just went full on nuts with with with attacking
Bitcoin. And, you know, not just not just the samurai wallet
stuff, and in all the coin mechs or prosecutions, but with the
with vetoing the bank, you know, bank custody of, of
cryptographic assets, break regulations out of the SEC. I
mean, there, it's gotten now, it's now it's is known, it's
such an odd sort of, like, cognitive dissonance going on,
because you have the approval of ETFs, and large institutional
buying and big banks, and everybody has now embraced fully
a bit, you know, Bitcoin as an asset. And at the same time, you
have the executive administration, just pulling the
rug out from so many people, by saying, by just intentionally
putting forth this idea, this uncertainty and fear that you
could be prosecuted as a money transmitter, for for anything
for anything, they just happen to not lie. Right.
Adam Curry: Well, so I agree. But I, my gold standard, if you
will, is I look at the app stores, the most conservative
people there are, and they are fine with this solution. No,
Dave Jones: I'm saying like, no, yeah, I'm, I'm on the same page
with you. Because what I'm trying to get at is, is the the
answer is going to be noncustodial. Yes. That's
Adam Curry: the oh, that's that. That's always been the answer.
We I think we know that even when we looked at LM pay I mean,
it's it's forget the the money transmitter part. And I think
Zebedee has money transmitter licenses in every state except
Florida, then maybe one other one. Which is odd, but okay, is
what it is. So, fully, self owned. noncustodial has always
been the way to go. We've always known that that's what it was
because of the overhead of just managing a single node. I mean,
we are not alone when something goes wrong and has to be
restarted. Well kissed five hours goodbye. Right? Yeah, it
takes a lot of a lot of work to keep it all running and
liquidity and make sure all that's fine and there's just a
lot of stuff that's going on.
Dave Jones: Right? And this there's gonna be you're gonna
have to either be not, you're gonna have to either be
noncustodial or have a, an AP lot and a custodial APA API
layer in front of an institution who has all the proper licensing
exactly as your does your your two choices and
Adam Curry: you You can't trust that.
Dave Jones: No, I mean, you can't. Well, I mean, I don't I
don't think I agree. I think we mean two different things. I
think I understand what you mean. You mean, you can't trust
it? In the sense that, you know, not your not your keys, not your
corner?
Adam Curry: No. I mean, just like, exactly. You know, it's
like, if something goes down, all the wallets are down.
Someone decides they don't want to play anymore. Everything's
gone.
Dave Jones: I'm a little looser with my, you know, with that
kind of stuff. But
Adam Curry: yeah, but I'm from spaces. We don't mess around
here.
Dave Jones: Right. Yeah, you could have a 380. But you got a
45.
Adam Curry: That's just saying, I'm just saying, you
Dave Jones: know, the the custodial solution, but backed
by a bigger player. It's I mean, that's, that's, that's achieved.
Is that 38 special?
Adam Curry: Like a 22? LR. Okay.
Dave Jones: long rifle. long rifle. Yeah. So those are really
only two solutions, the days of the days of ln PE. And you know,
and Alby, and these companies that like kind of like flying
under the radar, and really told us this, maybe he did a year,
almost a year ago, he said, he said, everybody is just on the
regulatory side of things. Everybody's just sort of like,
doing it and hoping that everybody doesn't notice. So in
so those days are kind of those are those are coming to an end.
Yeah.
Adam Curry: Oh, yeah. And but the thing is, is not, not
unexpected. And you know, so I see today, I don't know what's
going on with Albie, you can certainly you can stream and
boost Albie, Albie wallet fountain two lb seems to not be
working which is a bummer because you know, I'll be
without a doubt head and shoulders above everyone else
with with the with the V for V payments. But I remember when
everybody was integrating lb everyone was on podcasting.
Nick's out social trying it out and sharing the information with
each other. And we got it done. And I I know I mean, I spent
days trying to figure out how to how to test this Greenlight
thing, I get it. But it
Dave Jones: is Michael, Michael and more it Sir Michael and
Moritz are coming on the show here in a couple of weeks. And
you know they can they can fill in the gaps of our knowledge
about exactly what is going on, on their side, because I get the
feeling that they are just just from what I'm seeing they the
the reports I'm seeing from the UK because I exchanged an email
with them too. And I have a sense from the outside that they
are trying to read sort of like rebuild the plane in flight.
Yes, they know, they don't they don't want to. They don't want
to mess up anybody.
Adam Curry: I'm not
Dave Jones: saying there's yeah, there's real regulatory issues
to be done. They're trying to like, they're putting stuff,
they're putting solutions in place, like all over the place,
trying to figure out how to do this in a way that doesn't just
that doesn't really screw everything up.
Adam Curry: So they I know, I know, part of what they're doing
is they're going to also implement lightning service
providers, which makes a lot of sense. But somewhere still a
node has to run. So are they going to be just an API on front
of green light in front of an LSP? I mean, that's possible.
But when I when I see things about well, we can use the Apple
App Store boost API like hard No, no, right? No, just hard.
No, no, that's not a solution. And and you know, there's
there's just a lot of attention has been focused on other things
and here we are. A
Dave Jones: lot there's a lot of a lot of these problems are left
over largely uninteresting artifacts of just LMDS
structure. Because you know, I don't know how core lightning is
but lnd. Is, is an age so it's a one to one relationship. You
have a wallet. When you have an lnd node you have a wallet Yeah.
And that that wallet is tied to a to a and to an on chain
wallet. There's no sense of of different wallets or different
users all on the same on the same node. If that was the case,
if lightning wallets themselves on an l&d instance, if there
were many wallets tied to one bitcoin back in node, and those
each one of those lightning wallets had a key had a Q key
feature for unlock or spin Then or something like that. That
would make all of this much easier to
Adam Curry: do. But I don't I don't see that happening. I
mean, that's not the way core lightning works either.
Dave Jones: No, I don't see that happening. But I'm just saying
that like, that's, there's a lot of technical debt here. I think
that both fronts because from the beginning, these things
should have been designed differently, like Bolt 11. And
that kind of thing. No, yeah. So we're, you know, these are all
just in a similar way, to me in a similar way that we're that
Ellen URL, is a hacky workaround for the limitations of bolt 11.
The same thing LSPs or a workaround for the lack of, of
having hosting multiple wallets on the same node?
Adam Curry: I don't because then I don't see I don't see that.
Dave Jones: Well, if if let's let's say that I'm, let's say
that I'm pod verse, and I want all my own all my URL. And
here's a better example. Let's say that I'm pod home. And I
want to host a wallet host wallets for all cat podcast,
right? Well, that's
Adam Curry: so that's something different. We're talking to this
as I think this is where the confusion sometimes comes in.
Okay, that's the receiving side. That's the podcast or side.
Right?
Dave Jones: But um, but I'm just trying to sit Okay. All right,
fine. Let's let's do pod verse example. Some pod verse, I want
all my users to have to have a to have a wallet, I could spin
up a node, and then start hosting wallets. And if they had
a key, if they had a private, a key, a key spend or a keyed
interaction, architecture for multiple wallets on a node, then
I could just spin up the wallet hand the keys to the user. And
I'm and and all I'm doing is, is funding the node. I don't have
the right to spend anybody's money. Yeah,
Adam Curry: but that, yeah, but that solution doesn't exist. And
that's not where it seems to be going that the lightning service
provider part is literally opening and closing channels to
each individual node that is that is brought on either
through the SDK or through the the green light architecture.
Right?
Dave Jones: So but it's because of this is because it's because
lightning nodes themselves can't host multiple wallets.
Adam Curry: Right. But I think that but I also think that's the
right way to do it. The right way is to have self custody over
your node, and over everything that's happening with your node.
But I just don't, otherwise, this is exactly where we landed
is then you're a money transmitter, you you are
transmitting money on other people's behalf. That's why you
can't really have a node and have multiple wallets on it.
Dave Jones: Well, I think I think we're just I don't want to
get too wrapped up in that think we're saying different things.
Because I'm, you know, it's largely irrelevant. But what
I'm, you know, what I was getting at is that if you if, if
you can host multiple wallets, that then you are your own LSP
if the what as long as the wallets are protected, where you
can't spend the funds than your if, if I have if I have a
lightning node that can host multiple wallets. I'm not
talking about LNBs. I'm talking about if the lightning node
itself implements this at the base layer. I'm talking about
that. If that's the case, then I'm just done. I'm just opening
and closing channels, I don't have the rights to spend
anybody's anybody's funds, because I don't have the keys to
their lightning wallet. But, you know, so the LSPs were born,
basically as a workaround for, for that issue. Right. But it
allowed allows everybody to have their own node, because and
nodes can host multiple protected walls.
Adam Curry: Right. But I also don't see, unless you're seeing
something I don't see any roadmap where that's going to
happen. No,
Dave Jones: I don't either. Because like I said, it's
largely just an academic argument. I was just, I'm just
saying that, like, so many of these things. Ellen URL LSP.
It's, it's just unfortunate, because some of these things
were ill designed from the beginning, and Ellen URL and
LSPs are having to her having to fix these fundamental flaws in
the architecture. Right, you know, well,
Adam Curry: I mean, that's the argument. Is it a fundamental
flaw in the architecture? Or was it always the intent for every
every individual to have their own node?
Dave Jones: Do a maybe so that's maybe that's what I think
Adam Curry: the intent was. Everybody has their own node,
which is why we have start nine and I'm rollin all this stuff,
but if that's not user friendly, it I can see a podcaster doing
it. But there are hosted node solutions. I think as cheap as
five bucks a month, but you know, and now with LSPs, that
actually makes it doable for a mere mortal. Because the minute
you have to get into, you know, Ride the Lightning and all this
stuff, and you have to start managing channels. It's a whole
an all I guess all I'm saying is that I think a lot of app
developers were happy, they didn't have to learn how
lightning works. It just works, you just tie it into the API.
And now, so that's why I just tried to say, look, I if you can
just a little bit of just read the docs of breeze SDK, or green
light, and it's pretty clear that you don't have to still
don't have to know much about it, I just want to make sure
that the underpinnings were clear, because I do not see
hosted solutions, having much of a future
Dave Jones: the only way they would have a future is, is with
a raise with a change to raise it to the regulatory landscape.
Adam Curry: Yeah, which I which I can see that just want to.
That's not happening.
Dave Jones: Yeah. So you would have to have it, you'd have to
have a listen, to be honest, you'd have to have a US
administration that would come in and say and, and make it
clear, like with merit, like you know, like with marijuana laws,
they're still just as confusing. At the federal level. Nobody has
ever fixed that. As just as messed up as this where you'd
have to have somebody come in and say this all in just fix it
all. And say this is fine. I just want to say Fernandes No,
see, you can't hold out hope for that. That's, that's just kind
of like, you know, peeing in the wind
Adam Curry: or head says all this spontaneously spun up
channels seems like a poor idea long time as the fees rise? No,
because they are connecting channels, just like a virtual
channels, like a private channel that comes from their own
lightning infrastructure. So has nothing to do with unchained
fees. There is fee for opening submarine swap? Yes. Not even
that. I mean, they literally are splitting off their own channel,
they have channels open, you just getting a piece of it. The
way I understand that, so it's not like you're opening a
channel and no, it's it's immediate. The minute you
receive a payment, it takes the payment plus 100,000 SATs and
there's your channel. And then if you'd want to send more than
100,000 sets, they they increase the channel on the fly. That's
how it works. Now, they do take a fee, but it's more like a
lightning fee. And it's not an on chain fee. But ultimately,
and I can just never see this changing because you then are if
you're not using that type of a system, you're a money
transmitter. And you know, that's why Zebedee is doing
okay, except for one or two states because they have all the
licenses. And they've been you know, they put a lot of time and
money into getting those I'm sure.
Dave Jones: So what else supports bolt? 12? I mean, can
because if, if the other side of this is if you're a podcaster
and and thing like like cash app supports both 12 Then
Adam Curry: you'll be able to really go around then then
you'll be able to receive on your cash app. Absolutely. And I
think don't don't go Yeah, yeah,
Dave Jones: I think that I don't know if they support that yet. I
don't know if any of those big the big players like Cash App
strike PayPal. I don't know if they support biltwell
Adam Curry: Zeus I think supports Bolt 12
Dave Jones: Okay, well, that's uh, that's that's the thing.
Adam Curry: Yeah. Hold on, hold on a second day. Hold on.
Something happened with my recording. That's my damn disc.
I think my disc is rotten. Or we screwed now we're good. I have a
backup recording running no worries. But it just seems like
that's what everyone's waiting for. Core Lightning has it
already. I think cord lightning is moving ahead. They they
already are implementing it. So you're gonna see wallets
everywhere that implement Bolt 12 And that'll make the
receiving side super easy for everybody if you just grab a
wallet that supports Bolt 12 the again the issue is where is
where's fountain? Are they using lnd or core? Can they do Bolt 12
Or whenever Bolt 12 comes then that'll work but in the
meantime, we have a little period to bridge
Dave Jones: Yeah, I need to we need to get an S from Oscar on
that. LD il sir Spencer says core lightning Eclair breeze SDK
LDK. Which is lightning development kit is all support
both 12. Well, if LDK supports both 12 Then you would think
cash app should because it's built on LDK Yeah,
Adam Curry: I don't know. I
Dave Jones: don't know we can we can test because yeah, I mean,
I'm I mean we so we just closed phase seven. So we're about to
go into Phase eight. You know here soon and bolt 12 is a
logical thing. Just go ahead and start putting in there. Yeah. We
need it's time. Yes,
Adam Curry: it's time. It's time Dave Jones. it's time it's time
to do it.
Dave Jones: Is it time is for our guests.
Adam Curry: Well, before we get to our guests, I wanted to do a
little plug. I have zero financial interest, no shares,
no nothing. I just love this kid. I love Fernando who built
the the pod mobile device, which is yes, if I was a podcast
hosting company, I would offer these I would pass it through
but I would offer these to my customers. This device is
awesome. And I and so he sent me the new version. I now have 10
of these things at home in actually I think five probably
cuz it keeps sending me let's try this version. Try that. I'm
just trying to help them out. You know, trying to help a
brother out. Listen to how good this sounds. So I got this one
yesterday came straight from the Assembly factory. I plugged in
my mic straight in my Eevee 320. I plugged it into the computer
with the with the USB. And now what he did is he made this
little he has this little mix knob so you could mix between
what your Hello Phoebe, you can mix between what you're playing
on the computer. So it's basically it's not just an
interface, but it's also a mixer and it has the it has Adam curry
approved sound in it, including noise gate EQ. This is a minute
of audio recorded I send it to him this morning. And it's set
up in literally five minutes. Listen to this. Alright,
currently I am on D noise blue equalizer orange. And it's on
the voices Evie 320 That is the microphone that I'm using. I'm
kind of digging the sound right now and for Yeah. That's exactly
the way you want it. So now I'm actually just got my finger on
the mixed button. There's the dog in the background. Just
using it to talk over it picks up the dog but it doesn't want
I'm not supposed to. See that's completely quiet and I have the
door open. You don't hear any background. Man. I think you've
done it, brother. I think you have done it. How about that?
How good is that sound?
Dave Jones: That sounds fantastic.
Adam Curry: I mean, he's got some Priya and you can even plug
in an SMB seven without a CloudLifter
Dave Jones: it's amazing. It's got built in pre Yeah, it's got
everything. Well, I mean the RA 320 is a hungry mind too. It
needs a lot of pre does. Yeah. And I don't think it's as much
as the SM seven V but it's pretty close. Yeah.
Adam Curry: Yeah, it's it's doesn't need as much but it
Dave Jones: needed a cloud lifter with my own really
before. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. If you don't have a bit of meat if
you're if you don't have a decent preamp for the 320 It's
It's suffers.
Adam Curry: I'm just blend. You know the price is like 320 bucks
or something for the two mic version. Dude, it's amazing.
This is what I wanted to build. This is exactly what this is
what I wanted to build. It's it's all DSP now. It's nice.
It's really nice. Pretty sick. Yeah. Got it. Yeah,
Dave Jones: that's a that's a you were at equalizer orange.
Yes.
Adam Curry: Well, there's, there's like four different EQs,
which are predetermined. And that was the second step and so
that the other ones just came to Bumi for me. But it's the D
noiser. So you select kind of a gate, one that doesn't cut out
too much. And then you hold and it's just a capacitive touch
button, you hold that. And then you you're just quiet and then
it sets to the noise level and you let go and then it's
completely quiet. So it does all that dynamically. It's, it's
it's exactly what you want for someone who just wants the
podcast, you know, just watch the equalizer aren't exactly
exactly what it is. Anyway, that I'm just saying. If I was a
hosting company, I would consider offering this to people
sell
Dave Jones: them at a at a discount like a starter kit.
Yeah, yeah,
Adam Curry: you can I'm sure you can get them wholesale from him
for much cheaper. Yeah, that's cool. Good to go. I mean,
hosting companies, wallets, and devices you go. If you want if
you want to. If you want to diversify, diversify yourself or
make yourself unique from others, or just try to sell
yourself
Dave Jones: it's always an option.
Adam Curry: We're waiting to find out who it is. We're all
curious or we're all waiting we have it You are with bated
breath. Yeah. Who's fallen down?
Dave Jones: I had to. I had beer with Tom Rossi from Buzzsprout.
He was in Birmingham. We have winds Wednesday night we had we
had beers and talk shop and it was fun. Great. Great to see.
Adam Curry: Those guys are great. Alright, so we bring in
our guest who's been waiting patiently in the wings. He's
probably fallen asleep by now. But hey, it's been 10 years at
least since I've spoken to him in person on the phone. And I am
Lou is it Adam? Well, and he's been going through his archives
and posting stuff on podcasts index dot social things I had
long forgotten one of the first people who showed up when I
started tinkering around with the with Apple scripts and
trying to figure out how to make a pod catcher. Please welcome to
the boardroom, the one the only the hero in my mind of the app
developers of podcasting. Hello, Andrew Gromit.
Unknown: Hey, guys, how you doing? You're awake to the
boardroom.
Adam Curry: Sorry, sorry for taking so long man had to get
that out. It's all good. I'm learning stuff. Well, since
you're developing, developing a web app, maybe might might be of
importance to you. Yeah,
Unknown: yep. You're I think you're a few hours ahead of me
checking out that SDK, but it's on my list.
Adam Curry: Andrew grommet, I have to say, I only stopped
smoking weed about a year and a half ago. So a lot of the
history of podcasting is fuzzy for me. Particularly those early
early days when I was in the castle in Belgium and tinkering
around, tell me when we first got on each other's radar.
Unknown: Oh, man. So maybe it was blogger con, right in 2003?
Adam Curry: Was that where was the blood was? Uh, I remember it
was was in California? No,
Unknown: no, it was in
Adam Curry: Cambridge. Right. Right. Right.
Unknown: I want to say that's where we met.
Adam Curry: And do you remember the meeting?
Unknown: Probably coming out of one of those, you know, panel
sessions or something, but, and I wrote about this on on, on one
of the posts on social but, you know, I don't know something
like within the first 60 seconds, you know, we were
talking about enclosures. And RSS. Wasn't that super groovy at
all but you know, with a little apple script, you can, you know,
download it overnight and sync it immediately to the device.
And you know, I think this was this was before the iPhone,
right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was. What did? I can't remember is
your Dave Winer. But someone called it the click weight
system, right? That was kind of the problem. So you would click
the download and an hour later, yeah, no experience. Yeah, yeah,
exactly. It's
Dave Jones: 2005.
Adam Curry: No. 2003 2000 3003. Okay. Yeah.
Unknown: And I My mind was blown, because, you know, I
think enclosures had been around since 2000. Maybe? Yeah.
Adam Curry: Yes, 2000 Dave and I were sending, like 100 megabyte
QuickTime movies to each other through radio user land. And
that was the extent of it. Right? It was basically a movie
of the Grateful Dead that he would send, you know, playing
some Grateful Dead song. And I'd probably send some porn movie
back. I can't remember back in the day, that's always and then
once Napster came out, you know, it would be a song or something.
And, and I remember that when I saw my first iPod, I'm like, Ah,
radio receiver. Perfect. And that's when I started tinkering
with the script. So then what happened? So after after blogger
con, how did you find me? How did we connect? Because you, you
and I mean, I don't really remember all the people who
showed up anymore. I remember the guys from Australia with I
Potter X, I want to say you had iPod or lemon. I was I was
building the directory with OPML there
Unknown: was probably a good year in there of just kind of
messing around and, you know, connecting by, you know, on mail
lists. And I think Yahoo had a mail list system and like some
of those mails I still have in my inbox, but I Potter dash Dev.
Yeah,
Adam Curry: I know man. Forgot about that. Yeah, yeah.
Unknown: Yeah. But yeah, we worked. We were working with
different people. The iPod RX, guys. I think we're in Canada,
right? That's That's right. August
Adam Curry: and Ray. Oh, all right. Yeah. Canada, okay. Yeah,
I
Unknown: still trade emails with Ray of that race, the Kinsky.
Adam Curry: Now, what were you doing at the time? What were you
Where were you working? Yeah,
Unknown: so this was like, there was kind of a stretch after I
remember the web 1.0 boom and bust?
Adam Curry: Yes, yes. So
Unknown: fondly, yes. fondly in the wake in the wake of that
bust? I was doing I was consulting. Like I kind of go
back back and forth between, you know, real jobs and kind of
messing around. So this was all side projects stuff while I was
consulting, you know, to pay the bills. But what we,
Dave Jones: what were you coding in at that time?
Unknown: For I Potter are generally, generally Yeah. Oh,
you're gonna like this. So we were using, like professionally
for, I don't know, three or four years stretch, we were using TCL
tickle.
Dave Jones: Oh God.
Unknown: Remember that now?
Dave Jones: Yeah, that's old Unix man.
Unknown: There was actually good reasons. You know there was if
you remember. Yeah, if you remember cgi bin that was kind
of state of the art back then yes, go
Adam Curry: to my website, domain name.com/cgi, CGI dash
bin slash script,
Unknown: I mean, the way that would work is you know, you'd
make a call to the web server, the web server would kick off a
Unix process from scratch, and that would run your thing. And
so there were these guys in the mid 90s called NaVi soft and
they they were like, hey, this tickle language is really great.
You know, it's, it's, it's embeddable, it's got this nice
clean syntax, and they built a web server around it. And what
they would do is pre load a bunch of, you know, sort of
clean tickle interpreters. And those could all be run, you
know, within the same process. So I mean, it's all stuff we
take for granted now. But they had sort of done it, you know,
really early. And so I worked for a few years at a company
where we would build out websites, dynamic websites that
ran tickle in the in the web server and Oracle databases on
the back end while
Dave Jones: I was I don't remember TCO from from web
stuff, I remember it as the as the GUI the way you did GUI.
That's right. That was the TK part. Yeah, TK Yeah, TK Yeah,
TCL TK was like, you know, your, your, your GUI programming, Gui,
Gui, x.
Unknown: So this was like a lesser known use of the of the
scripting language, but one that you know, it was a great base to
build on for a few years there.
Adam Curry: TCL now we'll we went through that. I remember,
we were all Mac based. And then you came in and you started
building the windows podcatcher, as we call them. Yeah. That was
I mean, that was just you or the other Pino who were in your No,
no,
Unknown: it was. So the early group it was actually there was
there was this company in I don't know if was Amsterdam or
Rotterdam, but there was, you know, in the Netherlands, there
was these guys called activate. And a few of them. Were sort of
interested. You know, this wasn't a super structured thing,
right? A bunch of us just came together on iPod or Dev, but
they contributed a few a few guys. And it was me. And so
Martin.
Adam Curry: Home Herod. Yeah, I remember. I remember Martin.
Yeah.
Unknown: Martin, Fen, Roy, and Eric the young. So it was me and
those guys and there was a guy parrots, I had to go look this
all up. But, but and then I want to say Ray was there a little
bit but then he peeled off to do AI Potter x. And then later on,
we had a guy from Australia Garth kid came in and Garth
Garth made, Garth made all the Bit Torrent stuff work, which
was was really cool. Right. But um, yeah, the kind of genesis of
it for me was I was watching all this stuff going on. And you
know, you had you had done some scripting, I think, yeah. And,
you know, there were guys who were interested in making it
work on Mac OS economy. Adam
Dave Jones: did some scripting this past week.
Adam Curry: It's what I do. All
Unknown: right. But, uh, yeah, I want to say a lot of the work
was was on Mac, and you know, I Mac was was kind of the groovy
thing back then, I don't know, there was sort of the new
hotness where all the developers were paying attention. But it
was still a really low percentage of the market that
went and looked it up. It was something like 5%. And so I
really was interested in Hey, can we make this work well, and
in Windows, and we actually wound up using cross platform,
you know, windowing, tech and Python and you know, eventually
built something that worked on Windows, Mac and Linux, but you
know, my focus was making sure not just that it worked on on
Windows but that it had a had a GUI, you know, had a nice
installer, like a click click click installer.
Adam Curry: Yeah. That was I remember, what was the what was
the Windows installer that we all use at the time? What was
the
Dave Jones: no soft was then it was one of them, or what was
that those
Unknown: guys are great. Yeah, I mean, that that's what we use,
right? I sort of had zero interest in downloading. What do
you call it? executables? No, no, actually, I was thinking
about the like Microsoft, even though I wanted it to work on
Windows is sort of by no means a kind of Microsoft programmer and
So I wanted to have nothing to do with Visual Studio and which
is kind of funny now, because VS code is what everybody uses. But
there was this whole Developer License thing you had to buy
from Microsoft for like, yeah. Remember that? Yeah. And then I
found the thing with from these nullsoft. Guys, right, which was
just, you know, write a few lines of code, and bam, you have
a Windows Installer. So that's, that's what we need. That's for
us.
Dave Jones: I want to say that there was some, and I'm trying
to remember if the, the, if I'm remembering this thing, if I'm
remembering this, right, but there was something that was a
an installer kit that came out like a spun off from the wind
app, guys.
Unknown: Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
Dave Jones: Right? It's called an XSL. Soft. Yeah, it was. Came
out a llama sauce. Right. Okay. Yeah.
Unknown: No soft, scriptable installer system. It's still
around. I ended
Adam Curry: up sciences. I remember that answers. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Unknown: So that's how we built the installers. I think for for
Mac it was, you know, it was much simpler. I think there was
just like a, you know, you make a DMG or something like that.
Yeah.
Adam Curry: Mount the dmg. Yes, yes. Oh, man. Oh, yeah.
Unknown: But that was that was really what got me involved was
was was also a scrap. Remember that that expression? open
sources are scratching your own itch I, like I was always
interested in listening to, you know, body Oh, time in a time
shifted way. I think, I think sometime in the late 90s. Like,
remember real audio streams, of course, of course, it was kind
of this protected thing. And I really liked this radio program
called This American Life, right? It was, but you had to be
sort of listening to it on the weekend at the right time. And
then it was an hour long, and maybe you're, you know, doing a
10 minute car ride or something. And so there was somebody
created, this was probably not totally on the level, but there
was the software you could use to download and kind of burn
gate, you could reveal the real audio string. Yeah. So I used
to, I used to burn those things to disk for long car rides. So I
kind of was doing it. Some, you know, version of, hey, can we
take this thing from the internet and time shift it for
when it works for the listener? So when I think when I met Adam,
when RSS was really heating up, and closures were starting to
get adoption, it was sort of like this, it was the set of
tech that I had been waiting for to solve a problem. Some
Adam Curry: of the early things I remember. One was there was
this huge ongoing conversation, which I think might have
ultimately led to the creation of atom. Atoms. Yes. And that
was about the show notes. And the end there. Were just
developers yelling at me, like, when you Where are you going to
put your show notes? Because I'd come up with the concept of show
notes. Yeah. And I said, well just put it here in the
description. Then there was like this. Well, we need a show notes
tag. And Weiner was like, nope, Bill, just nope, nope, nope,
nope, nope, go out and do a namespace. And then and then the
atom guys came in, I don't even know. There was a lot of
confusion. I really didn't know what's going on. Just like it's
working. I'm doing a I'm doing a podcast, that's all or a little
bundle of joy as we called it, then, ya
Unknown: know, it was contentious. I still, you know,
today, I remember it being contentious more than I remember
the details of, you know, what we were what everybody was
fighting about. I
Adam Curry: remember cool stuff, like stuff that we that we
discovered kind of on the fly. And here's the one I remember
the best. Where and I don't remember what what app it was.
But we we figured out it was probably not a good idea. When
you subscribe to a feed that had already existed for a while to
then download all the episodes right away.
Unknown: I'm not you can't see me, but I'm not nodding my head.
Adam Curry: Because back in the day, I mean, we hadn't there
was. I mean, I was putting stuff on my Mac drive. Yeah, we're dot
Mac, I guess it was what it was called or whatever. And you
know, and it was it was a nightmare, because there was no
bandwidth. And it was just, you know, you'd crush it trying to
download 20 episodes all in one go. I mean, what do you remember
any other things that we learned that were kind of like that? The
early? Yeah. That's,
Unknown: I mean, there there was, that was definitely a
thing. And because, again, you know, it was about downloading,
where's today, or network connections are so fast that
it's just not even a conversation. But I think
another big one in that same bucket was resumable downloads.
Oh, yes, yes. Maybe you downloaded half and then
something bailed out and there was some kind of header somebody
had to set maybe it's the range header. So we started keeping
track of like, okay, we've downloaded this many bytes. So
that if we needed a resume, we could just issue a range request
to get the Rest.
Dave Jones: Wow, it's amazing how long it took the range
request idea to like, become fully fleshed out and functional
across most of the web. And there's still parts of the web
that range request still not don't work to this day. I mean,
like, it took way too long for that to actually gained
traction. Is there
Unknown: I mean, one thing I had still is mysterious, mysterious
to me is, you know, when we put, you know, these, you know, links
up that start playing some audio file midstream, you know, you're
doing like a clip. And I assume that's a range request, but
somewhere, the, maybe it's the client figures it out, but
somebody's got to kind of figure out, you know, what the timeline
offset how that maps to the number of bytes? Which I don't
know for, for stuff that's, you know, a constant encoding rate.
That's pretty straightforward. But
Dave Jones: variables all over the map, though. Yeah. But it
seems to mostly
Unknown: work, which I'm surprised at. And I don't really
know how it works. But is
Dave Jones: it does it does it actually work? Or do we give it
so much? So much mental leniency without realizing it? Yeah, that
a 32nd, or minute swing one way or the other? We don't really
notice. That's,
Unknown: maybe the browser's just doing a lot of work. And
the network connections are fast. I hope not. But what
Dave Jones: is the one thing I was curious about? Is if you go
back to Okay, the enclosure started to happen. 2000 2001. At
what point did it become and it was all radio user land? stuff,
but then what was the first sort of big adopter? Were you were
y'all were like, yes. Awesome. They're in there, putting the
enclosure tag in their feeds.
Adam Curry: I'm gonna say it was WGBH in Boston, Tony Khan is
what I think.
Unknown: Oh, good call out. Yeah, I'd forgotten about that.
Adam Curry: There's a guy that to NPR station WGBH in Boston,
Tony Khan. And he somehow came into the community. And he's
like, this is civility. This is fantastic. You guys are onto
something big. And I think he puts up some of the first GBH
programs on podcasting. And the BBC came in pretty quick to
actually they started doing stuff, they start experimenting.
What
Dave Jones: year do you think?
Adam Curry: 2004? Five around there, I'm gonna say,
Dave Jones: okay. Yeah, I
Unknown: mean, it was one of those kind of, you know,
bootstrap boot up cycles, where we had to get the software out.
And, you know, Adam started daily source code, you know, so
that there was content to develop against. So sorry, Adam.
I said content.
Adam Curry: At least you didn't call me a creator. Yeah, sorry.
Unknown: Yeah. But, you know, we kind of had we kind of had to,
like, boot it up in cycles to the point where I think I mean,
you know, we're folks like Tony Kahn would see it and see there
was a distribution channel there and that he could reach people
in a new way. And there was also, you know, Christopher
Lydon. Oh, yeah, right. Yes. Yes. Yeah. He ki had had some
kind of fallout with, with the radio. Right, which I think he
got fired by EUR. WBUR. Yeah, he was also one of those folks I
used to listen to on WBUR all the time. And, and then he
showed up in, you know, the Berkman. And I think, I think at
the blogger con, I was actually handing out discs, you know, CDs
of the recorded interviews that he had done with Dave Winer that
the David distributed to essentially, you know, radio
user land users. Yeah. Anybody else that could support
enclosures, but, but just to kind of like, turn, you know,
get more out into those conversations out into people's
hands. I think I was handing out CDs at Bagram.
Dave Jones: That's funny that this is like because I think
about our own, I think about what podcasting 2.0 You have
those sort of hits where you're like, we're new people come on
board and do an adoption. And it's really exciting. And it
makes a big, it makes it big and moves the needle a bit a lot
within the project. You know, and it's like, you know, this
person adopted the transcript tag, this person adopted the
chapters tag this person, you know, you have all these sort of
like milestone markers. Do you remember any more of those where
everybody in the potter community gets super jazzed?
Hmm.
Unknown: I mean, the one the one that sticks out, of course, was
was, you know, Apple, releasing the feature. I mean, obviously,
as, as, you know, we're sort of ambivalent about it as as an app
bill. There's because I was going to kind of succeed, suck
all the oxygen out of out of you know, that effort, but it was.
Yeah, it was also kind of a, you know, it was it was an
affirmation that this is this is, you know, a great idea and
you know, we cases
Adam Curry: where people started to hate me.
Unknown: Now it's true with the Apple thing.
Adam Curry: Yeah, for two reasons one because I had
brought in the evil beast. And I think probably one of the
biggest issues we had was one click subscribe, because it back
in the day it was go to my website, look for the RSS icon,
right click copy, then go to your podcatcher hit Add feed,
and then paste it in, and you're good to go. Do you think wallets
are a problem? Now think about that.
Unknown: Yeah, that was a huge issue. And
Adam Curry: and so Apple came in, and they created one click
subscribe, because they could because they had no they had the
whole thing because they basically because they had the
index, they had the database, which I was running I potter.org
which was a, a world outline of OPML files, which was actually
pretty cool. But it didn't at all, there was no infrastructure
for it wasn't it really centralized that in a way, of
course. And I and this and I learned a lot from this period,
actually. Because what happened was I became the face. And I was
going around and people say yeah, you invented podcasting.
And I was like, Yeah, it's cool. And a lot of people didn't like
that. And I really forgot to honor the people that actually
did the work. And I was just be I was young. And I was stoned.
You were young. That was stoned. And I was just happy to move it
forward. You know, I was just happy to move it. And I know
Dave Weiner got very, very, very angry. He's probably still
angry. Maybe not? I don't know. But I think that I think that's
kind of where some animosity came about. I don't know if you
ever felt that, Andrew, whether I'm sorry.
Unknown: No, none at all. I think that, uh, you know, I
mean, I think you lead something, right. Like, these
things don't just sort of happen. Someone's gotta gotta
lead. And and I think he did that. You know, sometimes I look
at things like Wikipedia, and you know, you look at the story.
And if you live the story, you're like, wow, that's not
quite how it happens
Adam Curry: at all. Oh, and that was, that was the best part.
That was the best part because there was this history of
podcasting. And, and I was like, No, that's not how it happened.
I was there. So I went in and changed it. And then all of a
sudden, people like you change it to make your role bigger. I'm
like, No, I just, I didn't know that you're not supposed to
change anything in Wikipedia that, you know, that that you're
a part of. So I had no idea about that conversation.
Unknown: There was some kind of, you know, no, no, no, no moment
where somebody like, did the screenshot of the IP address.
Like
Adam Curry: Rogers Cadenhead. Oh, jeez, that's that. Then he
just wrote these horrible, horrible blog posts about me. It
humbled me, though, I'll tell you that humbled me.
Dave Jones: But so what at what point did At what point did you
start to work like, so at some point, Adam, you hired Andrew.
Yes.
Adam Curry: So here's so Steve Jobs called. And Eddie Q
actually, and says, Do you want to meet with Steve? So I had
that one hour meeting with Steve, which was mind blowing,
of course. And then I had one email exchange with him
afterwards. And he said, I think your idea and listen to this,
everybody's pay attention. I think your idea of advertising
on podcast is a good one. And I'm connecting you with Kleiner
Perkins and some other venture capital guys. I know, I think
you should try and go for that. And that was that was the last
contact I had with him. And then I called Ron Bloom and who I
don't think new ideas with, and then we went out and we raised
money from Kleiner and Sequoia, and Sherpa, low and a couple
other high end VC firms. Now, that's where it all kind of,
there was a lot of things wrong with that. Another big learning
moment for me, but you know, they're like, No, you have to be
in San Francisco. I was living in London at the time. Now we've
got to have the office in San Francisco was the antithesis of
a cool hip media companies to be in San Francisco. And but we had
to do that and Andrew, I think your employee number one,
Unknown: I don't know if I was, I mean, it was Early for sure. I
was in Boston, right. And you were in London. And we started
talking and working together on things as early as like the
summer. Right.
Dave Jones: But What year was this?
Unknown: 2005? I think. Yeah. And I think I just, I just had
a, you know, my family just grown by one. Yeah. And Adams
like, Hey, we're doing this thing in San Francisco. And
Adam Curry: didn't you? By yourself for a while for I
Unknown: did. Yeah, I did. Yeah. I was hopping back and forth for
for a few months or a month or two. But eventually, we got
everybody out out to San Francisco. And yeah, there. We
had a little office on
Adam Curry: Second Street.
Unknown: Yeah, but there was one even earlier than
Adam Curry: that. It was on Oh, goodness. Yeah. We had that
little basement place. Yeah. It wasn't
Unknown: Brannan, it was it was like, it's another B Street a
couple blocks over Yeah, remember now. But there's
probably no more than 15 people in that building. It was very
Yeah. It was early days for the company. For sure.
Dave Jones: 15 people and how many of those were in sales?
Yeah, None?
Adam Curry: None? I think None. None? No, we had, we had
podcaster relations, which was the job you really didn't want.
So we what we did is we we went out and we got all the cool
people at the time. Don and Drew, Michael Butler, Callie
Lewis, Kelly Lewis, Maj. Weinstein, the bloated lesbian.
And we set them all up, we kind of ran it like a record company,
but fair, we set them all up with LLCs. And we gave them in
advance and we paid them on a regular basis, you know,
guaranteed income. And then we went out then we went out and
tried to sell and that was I did that most of that trying to sell
and what? There's a lot of things we did technically which
I want Andrew to talk about. But what it really came down to at a
certain point was discount codes. So we figured out the
discount codes were a great way to make money because the brand
guys I mean, even then I remember BMW. Somehow BMW ran on
maj Weinstein's bloated lesbian podcast and they cut us off in
the agency cut us off, no more brands not brand safe.
Dave Jones: And but we'll still be on a podcast by lesbian.
Adam Curry: Yeah, bloated lesbian, which is really, really
a dude, which is even funnier. And, and then we got, I think,
GoDaddy, probably the first one. Because GoDaddy was just
exploding. And if you use their discount code, then you'd get a
nice VIG for it. And that was how podcasters were, we're
making, we're making money to offset, you know, so we could
recoup off of what we had given them upfront. But pretty
quickly, it turned out to be just an SEO game. Because all
you really needed to do was make sure that if someone typed in,
you know, GoDaddy discount code that yours popped to the top, so
everyone, but they will do a podcast, but people weren't
getting the code from the podcast, they were getting it
from Google search. And it really became scammy at that
point. And then, and then, of course, YouTube came in, and
then we had to, oh, you got to do video, got to do video. And
that and for my money, it was just all downhill from there.
And at certain point, it's just like, we're trying to create
content as cheaply as possible, and then put, you know, put ads
all over it. It was horrible. It was horrible. But we did some
cool stuff I saw you post about the golden ticket.
Unknown: Yeah, yeah. I thought it might be fun to talk about
that. Go for it. Yeah. So first, an apology, right? Because that
whole Tech was built on dynamic ad insertion.
Adam Curry: Somewhere in 2006, we are inserting ads people.
Yeah,
Unknown: yeah, it was, I remember having to dig around
and through the mp3 spec. And I built a system that pretty much
lets you do everything on the fly. We weren't doing mid rolls,
like we didn't, we didn't sort of have, you know, enough
processing power to figure out, you know, topic changes or gaps
in audio or anything, but pre roll and post roll was pretty,
pretty easy to do, even back then. And so we had a system
where you could, you know, upload your your ads, you know,
into essentially like an ad server. I don't know, there was
all kinds of banner ad server tech floating around. And so we
might add one of those to allow you to upload audio assets. And
then you could provision it with you know, what, how much was
that? What's the term analogy like the run the number of
impressions for the run or something and the timing, and
you know, you could schedule it. And we had a way to say, Okay,
this is a pre roll, and this is a post roll.
Dave Jones: And like for the ad campaign or whatever, yeah,
yeah.
Unknown: So we were doing we were doing dynamic ad insertion
back then. Apologies. retroactively. And
Dave Jones: what was the what was the tech stack for this,
Andrew? Like, how are you doing these insertions? Oh,
Unknown: I wrote it. I mean, the the the ad server stuff was all
open, it was called, like, open ads, or something. I think
later, they became open X. But it was this open source banner
ad server thing that knew about banners. And so I kind of hijack
that to do our audio. And, you know, the, I think people had
figured out, like, for certain conditions, you know, you can,
you can just sort of concatenate the audio, but you have to, you
have to separate out the tags. And you've got to match the
encoding rates, and, you know, stuff like
Dave Jones: that. You but as long as you break it on a frame
boundary in like, Yeah,
Unknown: well, we weren't doing mid rolls either, right. So all
you needed to do was be able to you all you had to be able to do
was break off the ID three tags, since the encoding rate, and oh,
this was fun. Sorry, it's gonna get a little nerdy. But go for
it. I think what we figured out, or what I figured out was that
you you didn't, because this was all all the audio was being
uploaded by the podcaster. So a priori, you didn't know what
encoding rates they were going to use. And we didn't like
restrict them or tell them, you know, reject files if they were
the wrong rate. But the ads themselves were really short.
And so what we did was just grind over each ad asset and
encoded and all the different rates. And then on the fly,
when, when the ad request came in, we would say okay, like
we've already saved the metadata for the podcast, you know, we've
broken it apart into pieces. And on the fly, we would assemble
the ID three tags, the ad with the matching encoding rate, the
audio file, and then the post roll. And then we didn't even
save all that, because it would have been a lot of space on our,
you know, on our hard drives. Remember, we weren't at the
beginning of the company, there was no, we weren't doing cloud,
right? I think we even started before Amazon offered s3. So
just so that we weren't getting swamped with with kind of
storage. The we would write the finished file directly to the
CDN. Right. So the CDN is where, you know, that final file would
actually appear for the first time. And then, you know, if if
the same ID if the same ad ID was requested again, which, you
know, if you're doing the 1000s or millions of impressions,
that's fine. But
Dave Jones: what's the point, Adam is Akamai is that the CDN?
I
Unknown: think it was Limelight if you look at the limelight,
yeah. But you know, they never, they never came back and
screamed at us for using too much of their space. So I think
we I think we manage that. Okay. But Adam comes to me one day,
I'm pretty sure tell me if I get this wrong. It sounds right.
Hey, hey, can we can we can we use that system to do a golden
ticket? Which is, you know, if you've seen, you know, the
Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka, right, the idea was that we were
going to we were going to put, I think we don't want to be a post
roll. But we're going to put some special audio in exactly
one download. Right? So in other words, if you were everybody was
set their subscriptions, and they were getting, you know, the
downloads overnight. And so if you're subscribed to a certain
podcast, maybe it was daily source code, I can't remember
but it was, you know, it was it was, well, we
Adam Curry: actually sold it at one point, the whole the whole
idea was, you could do a contest. And at random, like,
you know, we'd say the one after 1000 downloads or something,
then it would insert this this audio. Yeah, that was and it
would be me going. Congratulations, you got a
golden ticket. Yeah. And
Unknown: we actually did this, right. Like, I think the hard
parts were, aside from what we talked about already was we knew
people were going to write little scripts and you know, try
to just, you know, keep downloading and that you know,
so I think we wound up you know, I don't maybe we like restricted
it to a specific time window to try to combat that a little bit.
But we did
Dave Jones: we all know that we all know that every every
download is an actual listen. So you know that some
Unknown: days I think there was an element of call and response
and that, you know, if if the if nobody had gotten it within a
certain if nobody had, you know, claimed the ticket within a
certain amount of time, we probably issue another one. But
there wasn't actual action, the person who got it had to take
and they did if I remember correctly, but we didn't know we
started didn't know when you know, there really was a random
number generator in there and we didn't know what And the ticket
was going to be served. But we coded it in such a way that
would only be served once. Like there was even though there was
a content distribution network, you know, if you looked at the
contents, if you looked at the the RSS feed for the show, and
the URL we put into the enclosure was not a media file,
right? It was a redirect or just like we see all the time now,
and that redirector would only issue the winning number, you
know, once, so that, you know, it would be served once. And
then if somebody got it, they claimed it, you know, you win.
And if they didn't, you know, maybe we'd reset and start
again. That
Dave Jones: was just across the whole network, or just one show.
I
Adam Curry: think it was, I think it was a number of shows
maybe? Yeah, it was,
Unknown: I think it was probably a small number of shows, but I
think we did it more than once. Yeah. Yeah. But that was That
was wild.
Dave Jones: Did anybody win?
Adam Curry: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. The, I'll just cut to the chase,
we have to go through the whole pod show, which later became
bvo. The VCs were very much in control. Then we had to bring in
an Israeli tech guy to run the tech part, which I apologize
for. I should have fought much harder. But at that point, I was
just running around trying to raise money all the time,
because we weren't making it. And I Al was a nice guy. Al
cheviots. Al, number one remember him? Yeah, absolutely.
And then basically, you wound up working for him, which I'm sure
was marginally fun. Oh, it was all right. Yeah. Very, very
nice. Nicely done, Andrew. And I just certain point, I just left
that when I was going through all kinds of stuff. Personal
stuff. It was it was it was messy. Yeah. And and then where
did you wind up going? Because a lot of people went to plunk.
Unknown: Yeah, a lot of people went to Splunk Splunk. I
actually, I kind of, I think I think the company was pretty
nice to me on the way out, I think, you know, there was I got
some severance. And no, we always took sorry, our people we
always do. Yeah, you know, some time to some time to just be
available to consult if we needed the company than
anything. But I kind of floated around for a couple of years.
Did consulting, I wound up working for stitcher for a while
as a consultant. I don't know if you remember this, but and we
had made a big move. And probably 2011 off of a server
farm like our own, you know, in a colo remember colos?
Adam Curry: Now known as compute, yeah, yes.
Unknown: We made a big move off of off of, you know, our own
colo into AWS. And so I learned a bunch of stuff about how to do
that, and wound up working with stitcher through the same thing.
You know, they were they were just down the block from from,
you know, pod shows old office. And, and I think I cold called
the guy and just today, look, I know some stuff about this tech,
and you know, I know some stuff about cloud, if y'all ever need
any help. Just give me a ring. And Peter, the founder, you
know, the technical founder, you know, ping me one day. And so I
wound up doing some consulting work like that. I did a small
startup for a while, just, you know, doing city guides with a
couple people in Berkeley. And, yeah, more consulting. So I sort
of go back and forth between consulting and startups. And
this was, you know, consulting phase.
Dave Jones: Now, was, was all the, was all the tech and bvo
plus show was at all I mean, it was at TCL. Or was
Adam Curry: Python, if I recall, was a Python. No,
Unknown: it's PHP, actually. The dynamic ad insertion stuff was
all Python. Actually, that was all back in scripts. except the
one we're pretty sure when we wrote out the final, when we
assembled and wrote the file to the CDN, that might have been
PHP, I'm pretty sure PHP is able to sort of open a connection and
do dynamic things if you want to, you know, at that time.
Yeah, yeah. Well, PHP, right on
Dave Jones: the end of the the podcast is runs on PHP, it's,
it's super, if you want to run with scissors and live update
your production. That's the language of choice. That's the
way I was,
Unknown: there was this framework that I never got to
use in any real way, but called Laravel that I really thought
was was nicely done on top of PHP, you know, pretty good stuff
there. And so
Adam Curry: the, where are you now and how many kids do you
have now?
Unknown: I'm in San Francisco, my, you know, kind of on the
verge or maybe now empty nesting. So I got, I got I have
a couple of daughters who are either in school or out of
school. But still in San Francisco where I moved to do to
do pod show. Oh,
Adam Curry: man, that's so awesome. Yeah. I want to talk
about Wherever dot audio, yeah, your your web based podcast app
or framework I might even call it. Before we do that. I want to
take us back for a moment for the song today, which is not on
the this is not a V four v song. But I'm going to pull it from,
from SoundCloud which actually it should be V four v. Because
we also had something at the time called podcast Music
Network. podsafe music networks,
Unknown: safe music. Yeah.
Adam Curry: And we had a license. And the whole idea was,
you upload your songs to the podsafe Music Network, and it
was a closed network, so you had to register for it. And as a
podcast, you could come in, you'd agree to the license,
which meant that you would put the song with a link to the
whatever the artists wanted, into your show notes. And then
you could play it and then you'd register if you played it. And,
and actually, a lot of people uploaded this stuff, even some,
some older established artists who, you know, who own their
catalogue again. And it was it was, I mean, we had all the
right ideas, Andrew. Yeah, we were just, you know, a decade
too early. Early, just a little just a little bit early. So do
you remember cruise box? Ah, sounds
Unknown: familiar. I heard it on a podcast, but I definitely
remember that song. Yeah. Okay, so
Adam Curry: this is the explicit version. That's the only one I
have. I'm gonna play that and we'll be right back after after
you listen to this. This is going back to mid 2000s
Unknown: Do you remember way back last summer when mainstream
radio was such a fucking bomber? No Indian music nothing's being
funny. Clear Channel buggers the bottom on it and now you should
have heard it rockin fucking radio you want it? Got it? Just
download it and jazz no one's gonna stop in Devon FCC this
kick in
Do you remember your first computer that pieces said was
lack of breaking now we've got a Wi Fi download downloading files
fast and this meant everyone who's ever done podcast each and
every nation reading was good Sarum me that song saying Mashi
mix it
now
SEC
rock and luckily got it just download
the FCC sticking out
shares
Adam Curry: yeah cruise box
Unknown: nice.
I was like an anthem. It
Adam Curry: was and we had but we have the same vibe now. You
know. We have a lot of that that vibe is still there. I love it.
I love it a lot and but I can't imagine I can. I'm just
realizing now that I didn't balk at the word pod. They pod it
really? Okay. Had I even allowed that to happen?
Dave Jones: No, that slipped through you did
Unknown: where it started.
Adam Curry: I don't know. I don't know what it was good
times good times. And, and I love that we're here we are
again. And now we have payments and splits and, and lots of
apps. And we're independent. You know, we're not. We're not
beholden to VC in general. We're not beholden to Apple or
anybody. We're rebels.
Dave Jones: That's right. Rebels. So umbilical? Oh, yeah.
Really? The the heart of what? That's where you're living at,
right? I mean, as far as a core goes, yeah,
Unknown: there's there's sort of three, three things. But that's
where really where, you know, I stepped into the social room.
Because I got interested in, you know, this kind of goes to what
Adam was just saying, right? I like, as a developer, I sort of
balk at the idea of having to go ask someone's permission to put
some new code into the world. And this, you know, this isn't
new, but the app stores? I don't know, I feel like they, they
kind of, I don't know, pull the wool or something. Like,
suddenly everybody thought, well, this is just how you do
things. Right. And it is where the audience is. So I kind of
get it. But it was really a I was never quite down with with
doing app development. And, you know, I think there's some
kindred spirits in the community. I was listening to
Oh, yeah, he's
Dave Jones: real. samsat Yes, exactly. Right now, you
Unknown: know, that was the call out I was about to do. And I was
listening to Sam talk about it. And I like instantly like, Amen,
brother. You know, yeah. So, so that's kind of where I was
coming from. And, and I started thinking, Alright, well, looking
browsers have an audio tag, I can browsers can play audio.
And, you know, I was thinking, Okay, well, how do I get RSS
feeds? And maybe I'll write some kind of server based thing that
parses the RSS and returns JSON and, you know, mess around with
that for a while. And then I thought, wait a second, like you
put a parser in a browser, like parsers. There's a remember
Ajax.
Adam Curry: Wow, let me stop moving on the screen.
Dave Jones: Okay, let me stop you real quick, every everybody
who has gone through, like, everybody who's who's a web
developer has gone through this thing. When they get into RSS,
and you're like, you're like, oh, I can, I'll just build it
all in the browser. And then you start building, you start
writing stuff, and then all of a sudden, it dawns on you same
origin policy, he's gonna kill you. And you're like, Oh, crap,
it was such a good idea.
Unknown: Right? Well, that, I mean, that's the setup really is
umbilical was, okay, there are certain things we just can't do
on the browser. If you want to pull an RSS feed from some other
domain, and they haven't set course headers, you're dead. If
you and I know this one's controversial, right. But if you
are serving your browser application from HTTPS, and the
feed is on HTTP, you know, most browsers today will refuse to
pull it content. Yep, mixed content. And so I started
thinking Look, I don't want to give up on this idea of being
able to do everything in the browser but and this was was I
think my first post on podcast index social was hey look, if we
can't eliminate the server completely, let's just make it
you know, open source cheap you know, anyone can run it and
let's just put as little as possible into the server side
right let's just put let's just make it as minimal as possible
let's it won't have any state that with an asterisk being
talked about that but you know, it won't you won't log in and
have an account there all it's only it's only purpose in life
is just to kind of bridge the gap or or be your lifeline or
umbilical cord. I'm not a branding guy but like I got it I
got it. Yeah, yeah, but that was the idea. Yeah, and so I started
there and
Dave Jones: and so you're saying you know your your idea is like
just make it where I can I can just run it on a $5 a month lens
and done with
Unknown: it and yeah, I think I even put some code in the
project that shows you how to do that with you can run it for
free like there's a few different gets a little in the
weeds but there's a few different ways you can run
something like this like you can run it as an edge worker whose
only job is to fix the the cores and mixed content issues. And
then it's pretty much free I mean, I think den Dino lets you
run Dino workers for free and Cloudflare it's cheap, if not
free. But you know, that gets you part of the way there if you
want to do stuff and this was all like later learning for me
once I once I hopped on the into the community and started
learning about how all the other tags work. If you want to do
stuff like offline Web Push notification, you have to be
running all the time. You know, slurping down John Spurlock's,
you know, pod ping feed, I mean, unless you want to run a hive
node yourself or something, but for that, you need to be running
all the time. And that is five bucks, you know, the low low
price of five bucks a month to have an always on server with
digital ocean. And then you can basically serve as a relay for
your users who want offline notifications.
Dave Jones: That that's, I mean, that's a big deal. It's a big
deal that you've done this, because that's a that's the
things like this, I see things like umbilical, the same way I
see. Britt, like bridges that like like the activity pub
bridge, and things like that, where you're taking your, you're
trying to, you know, bridge, bridging One Pro thing to
another, is a way to get developers that you know, are
over here, to have access to a world that you're trying to get
them access to. Because you there's tons of web developers
out there who are really good at web, but they're just no good at
running servers. And when you get when you can, when you can
make all of that sort of simplified for them, it makes it
you open yourself up, you open the whole world up to lots of
new developers, they can coat do cool stuff that they couldn't
otherwise do.
Unknown: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And, yeah, so I mean, that's
just a piece of the puzzle, but that, you know, be able to kind
of make fully what PWA is what I guess we say, but being able to
make these sort of PWA players not have to depend on a central
system, right? Because at the end of the day, this is, this is
kind of like, I was trying to think of like, what's a good
metaphor for what wherever tries to do, or any other consumer of
umbilical, and it's really like a, like a, like a noncustodial
podcast app. Yeah. It's like, everything you do is in your
browser, and not just like your your browser, once you log into
Google, it's that browser, which means you want to test stuff or
mess around or listen to something and immediately throw
away the history of what you listen to, you can do it in
incognito mode, right? Like it, browsers are amazing today, I
don't know if you know, people dig around. And, um, but they're
incredibly capable, you can build a fully capable app, you
know, with the exception to these umbilical use cases,
browser side. And so you basically have everything you
need, you can kind of run the developer tools and watch the
network traffic, and you'll see that the only connections out
or, you know, to the podcasting systems, you know, to H to kind
of like the wherever domain just to check for updates, you know,
or if you're using umbilical to do things like cores and
whatnot, it'll it'll reach out to that for proxying. But you
know, there's, there's no phoning home, there's sort of no
extraneous traffic on the network. It's completely
isolated.
Adam Curry: Where do you want to see this go? I mean, is this
pure altruism? Is it just for yourself? I mean, obviously,
it's like, I see it as a framework, because, you know,
there's not a lot of design in it. Yeah, yeah. No, I
Unknown: mean, it's like a really good question. It sort of
serves a few purposes. You know, one is for me, it's like going
to the gym for, you know, for programming. So it's just kind
of a way to learn new things.
Adam Curry: And some guys go to Pornhub. Some Yes. Go to the
gym. Andrew builds cores
Unknown: apps. Oh, it's true. It's true. But I also, it's my
daily driver, you know, I listened to it. It's obviously
really easily and cheaply shareable, because it just
downloads as a static, you know, it's just a bunch of static
files that download. So, you know, I'm not about to open a
customer service and a sales team and all of that stuff. But,
you know, it works. It's there. Why not put it out there.
Adam Curry: So are you are you going to check out the
greenlight API?
Unknown: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I love you. Yeah, for sure. No,
Dave Jones: I just settings page and wherever that audio just
cracks me It's amazing.
Adam Curry: Do you want us your search provider? URL? Yeah,
Dave Jones: never all these strings. Yeah. Well, so
Unknown: the idea was, some of that definitely needs cleaning
up. But the idea was, you know, anybody could just like just
like with the fediverse and Mastodon, right, like Mastodon
is the thing that many people install and and, you know,
people go to different mastodons. So here, if a bunch
of people installed umbilical then and they wanted us wherever
they could point at that one. You know where you can. I think
I've invited people on the social to ping me. There's a
there's a created like a link, a way to create a link where if I
just send you that link and you click it, it'll pre populate all
the fields, so you don't have to mess with it. Right. But yeah,
that's that's kind of where that is. One thing I wanted to call
out was the other piece of all this is, you know, if you kind
of my vision for all this stuff is that it's it's open and it's
distributed and and you can't go shut it down. And I think that
the GUID, it became really clear to me early on that the the
podcast 2.0 guid would play an important role in this. And so
that's what that's kind of was the genesis of the lookup
service. Right? Which is what that's what what does it look up
that wherever that audio, but it's really just, you know, a
subset of what you're building in the podcast index. And the
idea there was just again, with with cores or developer secrets,
I didn't want that to get in the way of people using the goods,
right, because if you throw a GUID into your, into your listen
link, or whatever kind of archival link you want to share
out to the world. And you know, if the if the person if the
podcaster changes hosts that we can use that guid to look up
what their current URL for their feed is. And then you can
publish out these sort of durable links. And we're not
relying on at the end of the day, this goes back to like, if
you look at, you know, any of the links, you'll click off of
episodes, FM, you know, a lot of them have system specific
identifiers in them. Which, you know, it's cool, like, it's
always a problem, but I was I was hoping to not have to do
that. Because the whole vibe of wherever is just an umbilical is
just that it's distributed, right? There's no, there's no,
there's no flex point to shut things down from
Dave Jones: I find this, this is the case with a lot of things
that we open, open source, I don't know what your thoughts
are, but you have a you have a vision of a way. Okay, we'll let
me say it this way, you get into a mindset, where everything's
gonna be open each day, just after a while of doing things of
developing that way, that's just the way you think you're like,
Okay, I'm doing this, and it's going to be usable by many
people. So everybody needs to be able to run it themselves. So
you just sort of always build in that mode. And then, but you but
there's this other sort of counterbalance, where people
where people don't necessarily get on board, they just use the
thing that you build on your own on your own system. And they
don't, they don't run it themselves. So I'm thinking
about things like the the pocket the activity pub bridge, from
podcast index, I mean, it's, you could go and download that right
now and run it on your own system. Anybody can but but the
likelihood of somebody doing that is going to is is
realistically very tiny. They're just going to use the one that
we're running. And the one and when us when you're talking
about goods, you're reminded me of this, that, you know, the
whole idea of goods is that everybody keeps these databases
of goods. Everybody reads them, we all so nobody needs to do a
quote unquote, guid look up from some central repository, because
the goods are just all there for us all to see all the time. We
all need to have databases of goods. But but I don't.
Adam Curry: Honey, honey, we need a database of goods. Yeah,
right.
Unknown: I guess I kind of realized that later, is a lot of
the a lot of the companies are just running syncs behind the
scenes and working from their own copyright. Yeah,
Dave Jones: and I wish you know, because I don't want I don't
want us to become this has always been the difficulty with
podcasts. Index is that we, we want everybody else to do these
things, too. We don't want you know, I don't want to become the
thing that everybody depends on for the for for data, you know,
but but there's that it makes, you know, but you can't force
that. I mean, it, it just, it has to be an organic thing. But
a lot of times, it's just I will say that way.
Unknown: I definitely appreciate the, you know, the algo or
whatever that you use to create the GUID is just based on, you
know, what is the first URL you encounter for that feed? You
know, maybe we could come up with some way to allow those
updates to be broadcast, right. Like right now, I think, you
know, the podcast index is authoritative. Essentially, we
treat it as authoritative for keeping track of, you know,
those guid update damn right. But maybe it doesn't have to be
I mean, if that's what you're talking about,
Adam Curry: eventually, you know, eventually it has to be
just a thing that's out there that it exists
Unknown: means. Yeah, right now the resolver system I built you
know, it just pulls the weekly exports right but that's an s3
bucket now, right? It's going to it can live forever if we want
as effective for our purposes forever. We can you know, export
out copies of the s3 box I think there's a way to do that if you
want to spend the money.
Dave Jones: Yeah, I would like to do that I would I would like
to start exporting this stuff out through in the in
eventually. You know,
Adam Curry: I've got don't want that on the fediverse. Dave
Dave Jones: on the shoe. Yeah,
Adam Curry: can't that be an activity pub and you just look
it up, and it just shows up somehow.
Unknown: It just, it just all works is it actually it feels
more like a blockchain kind of thing. Like the podcast or, you
know, broadcasts a new URL whenever they change, you know,
hosts and that there's some, you know, historical and immutable
history of in,
Dave Jones: but oh, one of the
Adam Curry: making an ordinal make it an ordinal.
Dave Jones: A rune, the rune that was one of the original,
like, we had some, like for lack of a better term of verbs that
we wanted to use in, in pod paying, you know, for a day live
live. And that can change was one of the ones that we
discussed a lot was, you know, K feed change this, this, this
show moved from this host to this other host? Yeah, you know,
there's a, there's a, there's a spam Enos problem that you like,
yeah, a fraud issue that you would have to overcome? And
you'd have to say, Okay, well, we're not going to trust
anything that's not coming from these sources. And so that I
think that kind of put a damper on it, but didn't know if I'm, I
agree with totally with that thought that would be such a
killer use case. Because then you can see that come through,
and you're like, Okay, well, this is, this is authoritative.
This is the thing, you know, well, now we all just update our
feeds. And we're done. Yeah.
Unknown: I mean, it'll be good. Yeah, it'd be good not to have
to pull from the central source. But I did want to say something
about the the greenlight. The I think the thing that made Alby
really easy to do, like, you know, wherever, doesn't have
streaming payments, but boosts was pretty straightforward,
because it's all familiar tech for web dev, right, you know,
you do an OAuth sign in, you make some REST calls, you know,
boom, you've boosted. And I think that was a big
contribution to kind of abstract out, I think you already talked
about this earlier, right. But to abstract out nodes and
payment channels, and those kinds of things. And it looks
like from what I've seen that green light does all of that,
too. There's some kind of object model, you know, behind it,
right? Like you have Bitcoin node, you have lightning node,
you have payment channels, you have wallets. And that's all a
little gray, and MIT, but maybe you don't need to know about it
to be able to consume it. And, you know, it looks like, it
looks like the green light could be done in a web app. I think
that it uses G RPC, which, yes, that's, that's fine. And I think
it's all you know, your secrets, which means, you know, they
could be put in a browser storage. So it looks like it
should be doable, but you know, it's obviously like, many, many
hours later before he sounds like Adam. Sorry. I
Adam Curry: know. I make a song so easy. Yes. Yes. Yes. Easy.
Dave Jones: Just ran the command. Yeah. Worked.
Adam Curry: Ran, I ran the command. script.
Unknown: I totally feel the the, you know, not wanting to be you
know, bound up the whole vibe of all this stuff I've been working
on is hey, let's let's not try to be like tied up with any one
sort of system or provider or
Dave Jones: decouple? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think I think
that's, I think that's a big deal. And I mean, other other. I
don't know if there's any other apps running on umbilical, but,
I mean, anybody, any aspiring web podcasting app can start can
grab that and start going. Yeah, right now, I mean, correct.
Unknown: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's kind of hard to tell the story
of why it's this way, right. I think most people just would
love to get users who don't care about how any of this works, you
know, so I, you know, there's a deliberate choice here and
trying to build something that that achieve certain goals, you
know, above sort of, hey, how do I get the largest number of
people on my system but yeah, I'd love to hear from people if
they want to mess with it and try it out.
Adam Curry: What are you doing now? Andrew, do you have a job?
Unknown: I do. I do. Yeah. I don't want to sort of talk about
it too much but yeah, I work a day job let's just say it's
pretty interesting pretty far out
Adam Curry: Oh, wow, that's that's so obvious. Oh, man. Let
me let me see if I can play the jingle here.
Dave Jones: A spot the spook spot everybody wants to spot
this Yeah, that's it haha I know that I noticed you don't keep
pedia Yeah.
Adam Curry: For business cards
Unknown: but I will say You know, I run a run a software
team and you know, a lot of what I do there is sort of, you know,
direction setting and people work. And kind of going back to
that thing about the gym.
Adam Curry: Hey, make sure your mouth wet or guess what he's up
to?
Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, so you're familiar with with soft skills?
That's
Unknown: right. Yeah, this this helps me keep my skills sharp
and a lot of it transfers over. And so, you know, I learned
about things that I wind up using in the day job and yeah,
Adam Curry: I am I'm so delighted that you came on
today, Andrew, it's so fun to reconnect and just remember some
of the things but also, man I've said this before I so appreciate
that you came into the into the community and just throwing your
stuff in there. I love that man. It's really
Unknown: great community. Yeah, I get such a such I get a real
sort of like, hit of just, I don't know, enjoyment of seeing
everybody on the community and what everyone's doing. And, you
know, some folks have been really, really nice. I think
Dobby Das was like the first person to send me a V for V
payment for something. I was just I think I think it was
because of him that I opened that lb wallet, right? He's
like, Where can I send you? And I was like, I guess I should
open a wallet.
Dave Jones: But it's really is a great community. People are
just, they're just really chill and cool. 90% of the time. Yeah.
Yeah.
Adam Curry: 90% of the time.
Dave Jones: 90 days. Okay. 91 Yeah, maybe
Adam Curry: now. Yeah. So, there's a range is a range,
right? It's
Unknown: dynamic. It's mutual. I mean, yeah, that all this all
this cool stuff and interesting people. So thank you for that.
Adam Curry: Shall we? Thanks. Some people here Dave. Yeah,
let's do it. I have some live booths that have been going to
shut him. Dred Scott with the 23456 Nice Drib drabs got ma'am,
that another one of those Kiros podcasting 2.0 He says right now
I have a boring work meeting in my left ear and the boardroom in
the right ear. Continuing continuing my podcasting by
osmosis journey as I helped my wife launch her new show. A
humble thank you to all of those who have helped to continue to
help me learn go podcasting. I want to know what what is said
show. I want to Wayne Wayne show 333 from salty crayon he says PS
getting low on our booster gram ball fix the producer Tina give
me any time slots. Yes, she has me. She has me doing all kinds
of stuff that every day is like hey, Saturday and then also is
like well, I guess I won't be doing booster grand ball. Okay.
Dave Jones: So me and baby man.
Adam Curry: It's hard 1234 from Dred Scott. Thank you. Drib
another oh, here's the salty Crayon 1182 How the boardroom
was going to say something about the nostril bros but after
hearing Dave's sound down about the infrastructure, decided to
cheer him up with some Doom hold donation in the pipe go
podcasting. Donation. Dred Scott 775 Money transmitter go Burr.
Okay, the tone record 3333 excellent knowledge share at the
beginning of the episode set a review reviewing Part of the
stack with lightning payments and integration options. Yes,
thank you. Drive another 775 He says Just be careful while you
let your dongle dangle. That's for you, Andrew, don't don't
dangle your dongle everywhere. Roger that. pre show test boost
from grabs 777 and other tests from Chad F 333. And that's what
we have so far for the live boost. DAVE What do you got on
your list?
Dave Jones: Yeah, Chris Chris last reducer bracket. We got
some boost grams here. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm wrong. We
have a
Adam Curry: by the way. I love I love Christmas podcast this week
in Bitcoin.
Dave Jones: Yeah, it's good.
Adam Curry: I love that podcast. That's great.
Dave Jones: I almost messed up and did not read Oscar marry
$200.
Unknown: Sakala 20 is played on him. Paula.
Adam Curry: Thank you. Very nice, Oscar. Appreciate it.
Dave Jones: Let us know if fountain can do through Zebedee
Adam Curry: bolt. 12. Please let us know.
Dave Jones: We've got some guest booths. We got Chris from
Jupiter broadcasting 50,000 SATs. Thank you, Chris.
Appreciate that brother. He says I adore you both. But some of
your nostril take is really bad. Oh, you're right. Yeah, you're
right. We don't need a Twitter clone. But you're getting
distracted by its least useful implementation. I was skeptical
at first too. But having a front row seat to what the founding
team is building for their future releases as demonstrated
to me It solves problems. Things like nostril wallet connect
could very likely be useful to podcast and tip one on the
future. Also check out mutiny wallet, lightning. Lightning,
great UI, Albie But I'll be back to support. Okay, let me let me
clarify. I'm not, and I did, I clarified some of this on the on
the podcast index dot social, I am not critical of, of anyone
doing whatever they want to do with new protocols and
sandboxing new ideas and that kind of thing. Not at all. We
all do that. Now, I have built noster things I built the MK
Ultra chat. The Fountain chat is similar to what I was building,
it's not identical, but it was similar to MK Ultra. And, and I
still will bridge that back out to activitypub. I want to make
that happen. So I mean, I'm getting I get it, I'm not being
critical. The the critical illness of noster was from the
standpoint of seeing all of this development time from people
that I consider to be core lightning developers. All this
development time spent on these, these ideas that have like a 1%
chance of ever making any impact on anything, when at the same
time, we have core lightening infrastructure problems that are
still broken. And that's that's the that's the thing. I mean,
like, you know, I have people that are like, there are good,
good developers that are just doing crazy stuff on nostre. And
I'm like, Why? Why are you doing this?
Adam Curry: I just want to add that Nasr wallet Connect is not
a solution. You still need a node that does stuff. And it may
be okay for the noster network of people to set up their own
node and to connect that to Nasir wallet Connect. But it's,
it's it's not the solution we need. It seems like it but it's
not.
Dave Jones: And the thing the thing about the thing about
nostril that you that you really do have to remember. And and no,
but every time I every time we talk about this, nobody
acknowledges it is that there is a sizable chunk of nostril
development that is being funded by venture capital. And Jack
Dorsey money and opens at open sets the window when that money
goes away, the nostril ecosystem is going to shrink down to a the
size of a nut.
Adam Curry: And it's and what I'm seeing I follow J 65. Very
closely I biked if I follow this a lot of this stuff. Because I'm
never I'm never gonna give up on something. I don't want to miss
anything. But he's building a relay into his app. You gotta
wonder why.
Dave Jones: Well, I mean, a call that running the daemon running
the Domus last numbers I saw was running the Dominus relay was
costing him nearly $1,000 in mind. Yeah. And that's just not
sustainable on the long term for for an indie developer, where
he's getting no money other than grant money. So I just my those
are my concerns. I just wanted to be clear that the the you're
a hater. Well, yeah, and there's also easily Costello 2500 sets,
making it all work together. Thank you. Ainsley through to s3
through true fans. Oh, nice. Oh, wait, here's a look at this.
This is Andrew grommet. What
Adam Curry: 2022 row of dogs Oh, nice.
Dave Jones: He says Go go go. Kevin Bay 10,000 sets nice for
the those for the tune last week. He says boost
Adam Curry: Yes. Thank thank you everybody for boosting. First of
all, it just I haven't gotten a report back from music mama. But
if I take if I take a look at people pleaser, and that's
Ainsley sock 363 Satoshis and of which a significant portion went
to the collaborators on that song. And just so many booster
grams is so nice to see how the community came together for that
and really made it a good experience for them, though, and
that's more money than they would make on on on Spotify.
They know what
Dave Jones: a lot of these, a lot of these are for the song
last week. So I'm reading this. I'm reading the total SATs that
we're sending out. Of course, our portion of that was tiny,
very tiny. 4000 SATs through RP 1984 This is hurting on
podcasting. 2.0 Yeah, that's how you do Nice 4321 from even our
stupid verse he says value for value 2222 from Jean been
through cast ematic he says I wonder if strike it could be
used well as a podcaster and or listener wallet if they do Bolt
12
Adam Curry: Yep, then we can do it that what a solution that
would be for sure.
Dave Jones: We need to figure out we it's time to do some
testing and figure out where all Bolt 12 can can succeed that
yes, I think it's time to do that. I'm going to do the dwelve
part of the cast pod bros 32 768 F 32 kilo boost says I came for
the podcasting 2.0 chat and stayed for the philosophy. This
discussion had me thinking for a long time afterwards about
inevitability tech investment access journalism. And the bloom
coming off the rows around AI loves to comment about open AI
will become the we work of AI THANK YOU DID YOU that must have
been Yeah, that sounds like an Adam curry. No, that's not me.
Okay, no, Jean been a boosted the songs for 2020s As people
pleasers yet another great song Glad to hear it on the podcast
and people know podcast Randall black 3000s SAS for the for the
song fee for v is the way see we got a Chris You know 3000 SATs
nice keep them coming. user this is a great name. User 7493 and
3981
Adam Curry: Okay from where what app fountain Okay.
Dave Jones: says people pleaser. Nice thank you for that boost.
Ainsley Costello 2500 SAS is making it all work together
again and again. So that again oh, this is part two from Chris
from Jupiter broadcasting. This is 5000 SATs so he brought in at
55,000 total. Thank you, Chris. He's got a part two. He says we
need a skunk lab testing fed him 30 minutes support for boosts.
Maybe set up a podcast index Fetty meant Yeah, I guess we
should switch in.
Adam Curry: I gotta look into fatty mints.
Dave Jones: Yeah, no, no, I know the word as all I know. Yeah, it
is.
Adam Curry: It's it's you kind of pool your resources.
Interesting, interesting concept.
Dave Jones: That is kind of interesting. Okay. He says I'm
not saying we should switch over from lightning anytime soon. But
it would solve so many problems for listeners and podcasters no
channels various implementations rolling out today. I say we keep
an open mind some of this stuff might be useful to us in the
future. Maybe there is a reason all these smart folks are
working on this stuff. Yeah, we look into fed Amana. I just know
the word thanks Chris. Anonymous 2000 says he says boost
Adam Curry: boost boost to you.
Dave Jones: I said he may be a she see we got some of these are
repeats oh they must be like yeah, these are these are coming
in from the from the per minute G mean 2222. This is a now y'all
are talking about strike. Nevermind. Okay. Sir Bill 5000
SATs go podcasting. Thank you, sir. Bill. Appreciate you. Thank
you. Farscape Ian 10,000 SATs he says Adam hasn't seen biodome
tragic.
Adam Curry: It's on the list. Now. I don't want to seem like a
douche.
Dave Jones: That was surprising that you didn't remember a Pauly
Shore classic.
Adam Curry: And Pauly Shore irritated me to no end at the
MTV days. But he buddy yeah, I just couldn't handle it.
Dave Jones: Was he liked that in private or was that just an act?
Adam Curry: He was weird. Okay.
Dave Jones: 8008 Boob donation from Kyron. Fountain he says
I've missed some boosts. So here's an extra to make up.
Dave, you forgot to talk about the podcast and tupuna meetup in
late July. What's happening y'all?
Adam Curry: Oh, yeah. What is happening with that?
Dave Jones: Yeah, so we're trying to get get a podcast and
tympanum meetup around the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville
somewhere.
Adam Curry: Yes. The Costello's are going to be there with their
bands at Bitcoin.
Dave Jones: So we, you know, what are the current thinking is
that chi Well, Chiron is going to fly into Atlanta from Brazil.
So right around that time, so I'm going to meet up with him.
And we were like, Well, why don't we just turn it into a
podcasting 2.0 meetup and anybody who's around town in
Nashville can just meet up and have some have some drinks or
something. So anybody who is going to be anybody who wants to
do something like that? On one of those days, let's try to net
let's try to nail something down so that I know when that I can
be I really
Adam Curry: want to come and be could not be worse. Days
Thursday Friday Saturday could not be worse for me. Yeah.
Dave Jones: Which wouldn't I'm not going to the Bitcoin
Conference no no
Adam Curry: I'm not I don't do conferences nope don't do that
I'm
Dave Jones: not spending any money I'm not spending hundreds
of dollars on the ticket for anything like that so but but I
will go up there and have a meetup if people want to
Adam Curry: there is a meeting of the thank God for Bitcoin
dudes. Yeah, yeah. And they're pretty interesting bunch in
Nashville. I think it's a Bitcoin Park. Actually. There's
like round that there's like there's like four things there's
Yeah, it's the Bitcoin Conference and around that we
have the thank God for Bitcoin meetup. We have bands of Bitcoin
and Texas Slim's cattleman feast
Dave Jones: okay so if the bands that Bitcoin you don't have to
stay the cat on his face that sounds like a pretty good
meetup.
Adam Curry: Oh, no, that's that's an actual mea t meet up
for sure.
Dave Jones: Uh, me AMITA this so the bands at Bitcoin? Is that
going to be in the cut? Is that going to be part of the
conference? Or is that? No, it's
Adam Curry: separate as to the Embassy Suites. Okay, they have
the room they have room for 600 people in the audience. I saw
that Eric peepee and blueberry we're already working on some
kind of online system that not only can you follow along at
home watch the video of the bands playing but boost them as
well as something they can show on screens there. Excuse me. So
we can really show the round robin of how music in podcasting
and music and podcasting 2.0 in general value for value works.
Dave Jones: Okay, so let's get my my thinking is we try to just
put the 2.0 meetup pretty much around the banded Bitcoin thing.
Adam Curry: Now Buber is saying July 28. Is that? What is it? Is
that Sunday? When is July 28? To take a look at me say July. What
kind of what day is that? It's going to be sucked everything so
My life sucks. That's a Sunday breath. I have this crazy job
that just keeps me busy. I can barely go and my wife's taken me
away to Mexico for my 60th birthday. I'm like, that's fine,
but I'm going to be doing podcasts
Dave Jones: to 28 There's a Sunday yes that's a Sunday.
Adam Curry: Oh, that's a behind the scheme's episode they're
going to do okay all right. I'm gonna tell there's a lot going
on a lot going on but I even Tina's like you know, you should
kind of go to that like I really Yeah, but then I have to set up
Dave Jones: well it's just so close to me it's only two hour
drive ya know for you it's beautiful. It's nothing Yeah, so
I can make it up there for something like that. Bans
Bitcoin I'll figure I'll post something on the social but
please anybody who's going to be there let me know email or or
podcast index dot social let me know you're gonna be there so we
can put a meet up together. Yes. Because Karen Karen is he is
flying into Atlanta. See we got what else we got. We got I was
just delimiter let me check do we gotta make sure this is we
got Clark Ian Clarkin sent a song boost these 1000 SAS he
says V for v 20. I'm sorry. That was 20,000 SATs. Oh, beautiful
art. Yeah, Clarkin is my buddy. I know who that is. Jean in. C
we already got Jean Boehner so we got the delimiter 22,000 SATs
for comic strip blogger. Yay. Through fountain Thank you
chrome sir. Blogger he says. Howdy, Dave and Adam. I'd like
to again recommend a podcast by two Texans Ben and Jean. They
talk about fun stuff. Quote from the last episode. Jean. Ben's
more likely to do a show if he doesn't have to pay for it. Ben.
Well, and you know you're getting that podcasting. 2.0
money. So, Jean, what podcasting? 2.0 money. Ben,
you're the one who has the index listed and going on your
lightning node gene. Oh yeah. Find their podcast@www.ge Just
two good old boys.com Yo CSB.
Adam Curry: Do you understand it? Do you understand what that
was?
Dave Jones: No, I didn't know None. None. Absolutely zero
idea. We got some monthlies. Chad Farrow $20.20 Cameron Rose
$25. Pod page Brendan upon page $25. Mark gram $1 New Media
Productions or excuse me new media LLC. $1. Randall black $5
Joseph maraca $5 and Emilio Kendall Molina $4 And that's our
group's
Adam Curry: beautiful thank you all so much. It's a value for
value project, which means you put back into it whatever you
get out of it. That's up to you. We really appreciate all the
support people have been giving. Certainly our hosters who are
out They're thank you so much. And then even some of those apps
like, there you go, Oscar Mary Mary Oscar. Andrew Gromit, man,
thank you so much for being here with us today.
Unknown: Great talking to you.
Adam Curry: Don't be no stranger. All right. And
indefinitely see if you can erase some of my files that you
have there. Yep. Got you some some incriminating evidence.
Those pictures. Yeah. Anything else you want to close with
Andrew?
Unknown: No, it's all good. This was a lot of fun. Yeah.
Adam Curry: Thank you all very much here in the boardroom Dave
brother. Have a great weekend. You too, guys. Everybody take
care, Andrew. Thanks, man, my man. And we will be back. Wait
at the stop. Are we back next Friday? No, no, no, no,
Dave Jones: no fake news,
Adam Curry: fake news. We're not back next Friday because I'll be
traveling to see my daughter in Rotterdam. And we're going to do
the show after that on Saturday. Is that confirmed? Is the week
after the other week? That's the week after? Yeah, the week
after? Yeah, when I'm traveling back on Friday again,
unfortunately, is how it works out. But then we're gonna try
and do it on Saturday.
Dave Jones: Okay, I'm gonna get to email. I'm going to email the
lb guys ready to show and see if they can do
Adam Curry: Saturday. Good. Okay. So it's summer months, and
then in July somewhere you're going to right? Yeah,
Dave Jones: July 5 through the 13th. I'm going to be going
we're taking a family vacation. Oh
Adam Curry: man. The boardroom is falling apart. And crew
skeleton crew. That's right. Summer hours, everybody. So
we'll see you in two weeks right here on podcasting No.
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Adam Curry: Drop the dongle.