Podcasting 2.0 - 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

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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.

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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