
Episode 278: "1 Billion Tokens!"
Podcasting 2.0 November 13th 2026 Episode 278 - "1 Billion Tokens!" Adam and Dave show value for value boosts paid in USDC with no server in the middle, talk about how Brave's x402 search payments and Overcast's ad skipping signal the end of the free, ad-paid internet, and ask whether the Podcast Index should start charging the robots. ShowNotes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00 - 💥 MICROSOFT GOES DOWN — AND THE LIFEBOAT Adam's prayer: "Today I call on the Holy Spirit to guide the dudes named Ben and the dudettes named Bernadette who are feverishly working to solve the Outlook and Office 365 outages. Also for those who are fielding unhappy calls in companies and enterprises worldwide. Give them strength Lord and let them know that they are valued." Dave, 13 Nov: "Microsoft has spent 100's of billions of dollars on data center capex the last few years, and it doesn't have enough available capacity to handle its baseline service obligations for something like email . This company deserves to be asked some tough questions. But we all know that won't happen." Dave, 13 Nov: "Why did they mention 'defense-in-depth' would be in the post-mortem after saying the outage wasn't caused by malicious activity?" csb: "Microsoft global outage! Even InTune is down." JS posted the r/microsoft_365_copilot thread "When will Copilot revive?" Adam's lifeboat: "Microsoft outage spurred me on to build a local lifeboat system in case and when Anthropic goes down. Of note is the 'act as' agent function." Dave, 8 Nov: "Fighting scraper bots the last 2 days. It's endless." Then: " It's fun to see your own user agent scraping your site from ip addresses you don't own. [sigh]" Dave, 12 Nov: "Bots don't fly here": United Airlines restricts AI agents from booking flights ahead of holiday travel. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 01 - 💵 VALUE FOR VALUE IN USDC — SAME TAG, NO NODE Adam, 13 Nov: "Demo of usdc stable coin sent through our normal value block tag as a boostagram, from one app that has no server component, to a podcaster's boost box which also has no server component, just straight value for value transfer with splits and the message carried with the payment. To be discussed in today's board meeting." currycaster.com/v4v-usdc — the short version 🔍 For Dave: does the Index need anything for type="usdc" (the value API, the shim, the podcasterwallet)? Who else will read it, Fountain and Helipad? Brave, 12 Nov: "The Brave Search API now accepts agentic payments via the x402 protocol." No API key: an agent pays per query with a CLI wallet. Brave runs its own facilitator accepting USDC on the Base blockchain , "with other networks and other stablecoins incoming soon." The red split, again: csb sent $15.23 (20k sats) last week, "but one split is red". The bitcoin price is down from $80k to $70k. He asks Dave to read last week's unread boost, a promo for the Keeper show: "worth over $15 back then but now 'only' $14." merryoscar, 3 Nov (Dave boosted): " fountain has removed all references to value blocks added via the podcastindex value block shim / podcasterwallet.com . For a show to be payable from fountain it must have a value block directly in the rss feed." Helipad (ericpp): LNClient adds LND and CLN support · issue #168 "Combined splits" · #169 (ChadF) "Fountain's fractional value_msat_total still reads as 0" · #170 "Add boost gifs" · PR #171. PNWR, 13 Nov (39:36): James: " the podcast funding tag is our secret weapon here... the button can say whatever you want it to say." Sethi (40:15): " Micropayments 1.0 hasn't succeeded. I think 2.0 will come back into vogue at some point when the technology is simpler for people." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 02 - 📻 CURRYCASTER — THE CLEAN FEED, AND THE MUSE LOOP CurryCaster is out, free. The guest room is $9.99 a month for up to eight guests, with processing for each guest that it remembers by name. Clean Feed's CEO wrote: "for the first time today, I had a customer ask about Currycaster." About 200 installs so far, and over $2,000 in value for value. aegrumet, 1 Nov (Adam boosted): "@adam's muse driven recommendation loop is super compelling. But it requires server side data collection... The Wherever-ish way to do it is webhooks: distributed by design." He drafted a spec. Adam replied: " the reverse is more interesting to me, where my muse managed 'life' determines what it recommends. " Dave, 13 Nov: "Told you so." Overcast adds Smart Skip, which skips ads, for premium users. Adam: "this is what Dave Jones, the pod sage, predicted would happen. And the first one is over the fence." csb's interview with Adam is up (1:15, chapters): "Adam Curry: From Inventing Podcasting to Reinventing It with Agentic AI". csb: "I thought AC will demonstrate me one AI tool... for 18 minutes... he jibber-jabbered for 1 hour 15 minutes." Adam: "the most views so far on your channel! Imagine that, from a non-coder no less!!!" He also asks Adam to revive the Daily Source Code. Sethi on PNWR (16:09): Meta's Muse now has voice and video chat, and Meta wants it to feel human. "We did not want it to become humanized... Adam calls his robot for the very reason that he does not want it to be anthropomorphized. " ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 03 - 👯 THE LOOKALIKES — PUBLIC DATA PAGE AND JAMES'S CODE OF PRACTICE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 04 - 📱 THE INDEX AND THE APPS FLOOD Dave, 30 Oct: "The number of new podcast apps either being launched or under development right now is crazy. I get emails from devs about their projects multiple times per week." On 9 Nov: " No slow down. " New on the apps list since the last show: Spool, Alarmcast, FreeRadio, Shuttle Podcasts, Seenr, June, Podcasts Tracker, Wolf Paw TV, Static Radio (merged today); Car Curious adds iOS; Boost Me Bitch gets a new icon plus Boost Me Buddy; Podlink supports the block tag. Dave's web-ui fixes: "Return errors from async handlers instead of crashing the server... On 2026-10-22 production went down for an hour after one 'add feed' request with an invalid URL. " Also: Node 24, and hardened outbound fetches (Node CVEs). Podlink (Dave boosted): pulling episode comments from podcast:socialInteract threads and Fountain's Nostr boostagrams, with replies through Mastodon or Bluesky. Podcast Player & Tracker v17 (Jonathan, since 2018): "it transcribes any episode on the phone itself, no server involved. When the feed has , it uses that instead." Podverse (mitch): a full rewrite is in alpha, out before year end. Daniel J. Lewis: Podgagement now shows download stats (Buzzsprout, Blubrry, Captivate, OP3) and is adopting the person tag. The Audacity to Podcast goes on hiatus until early 2027. Today he thought a feed was hiding tags, then: "Nevermind. I was wrong." Namespace: Dave merged JS's #794, a valid UUID in the podcast:guid example. New PR #795. HLS video: Pocket Casts and MacStories add it (PNWR 49:24). Manton: "a critical part of keeping podcasts open as more and more people look to video." Sethi's TrueFans adds newsletters and a radio page this week, with memberships and merch next week. JS: Buzzsprout's October stats are charted · iOS version share across 2026, as seen by OP3. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 05 - 🎙️ PNWR THIS WEEK — "iHeart: the business deal that doesn't make any sense" (summary, no clips) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 06 - 💵 SHOULD THE INDEX CHARGE? Adam: Brave shows that services and data are valuable. The Podcast Index should think about charging for some access, if only to stop the scrapers. Dave: "The index's data has to remain free." The weekly data download stays free. The Podcast Index robot: about 2,000 people a day, tens of thousands of tool calls. The x402 payment rails are already built into the MCP server; a test there is "months and months away." Dave's inbox: a request for a podping token, written by Muse on behalf of a user. Adam's robot already answers feed reset emails, robot to robot. Dave: "I just need to charge a buck for every email that I get." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last Modified 11/13/2026 14:32:18 by Freedom Controller





