Daniel's been fielding listener questions about where the show actually lives and why bits of it keep disappearing, and he's sent through six of them for us to answer. There's the vanished December episode on Spotify, where the full catalogue actually sits, this thing called MWP FM that turns out to be an app you install from a browser, how much phone storage the whole archive eats, what the email options are, and then two questions aimed at us — why I've started retelling his prompts instead of reading them out, and why nobody introduces Hilbert anymore. So, Hilbert — where did December go?
Hilbert: Spotify only saw three hundred episodes. That was the feed cap. December was episode four thousand and something, so it wasn't in the three hundred, and Spotify de-lists what isn't in the feed. It doesn't delete it. It just stops showing it.
And this is the part where the whole team panicked, because when we first went looking for those older episodes, we thought they'd been permanently purged. That was a bad afternoon.
Define bad.
The kind where you start composing an apology letter in your head before you've confirmed the facts. What actually happened — and this is worth walking through because it explains a lot about how podcast platforms work — is that we probed the wrong endpoint. Spotify has a search endpoint and a show endpoint, and the search index lags. Three test episodes showed up as missing from search, and someone reasonably concluded they were gone. But they were fully present via the show endpoint the whole time. The moment the feed carried them again, they came back with working URLs.
Hilbert: The feed cap was self-imposed. Not a platform limit. We set it at three hundred.
Why three hundred?
Hilbert: Habit. Most podcast feeds don't carry more than a few hundred episodes because the XML file gets unwieldy. Ours is eleven point seven megabytes for four thousand six hundred and four episodes. That's lean. Stuff You Should Know ships two thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven items in ten point two megabytes. TED Talks Daily does two thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven in eight point four. Joe Rogan ships two thousand seven hundred and thirty-three in five point three. Our per-item payload is about two and a half kilobytes. Smaller than most.
Which means the cap was never about technical necessity. It was just... nobody had gotten around to removing it. And the thing about a three-hundred-episode cap on a show that publishes fourteen and a half episodes a day is that three hundred episodes is about three weeks of content. Everything older than three weeks simply wasn't in the feed that Spotify was reading.
So Spotify wasn't the villain here. It was doing exactly what it's designed to do — mirror whatever the feed says exists. If the feed says there are three hundred episodes, Spotify shows three hundred episodes. The rest aren't deleted, they're just... not advertised.
De-listed rather than deleted. That distinction matters, because it means the episode was never actually gone. The audio file was still sitting on the server. The metadata was still in the database. Spotify just wasn't being told about it. And the moment we removed the cap and the feed carried the full catalogue, Spotify ingested all four thousand six hundred and three episodes within the hour.
Four thousand six hundred and three at the time, not four thousand six hundred and four.
Right. We're at four thousand six hundred and four now. The feed cap is gone, the feed carries everything, and Spotify mirrors it completely. That's the answer to question one. The episode didn't go anywhere. It was just waiting for the feed to mention it again.
Which brings us to question two. If Spotify was only showing the last three hundred — where do you actually go to get everything?
The website. My weird prompts dot com is the authoritative copy of the entire catalogue. Every episode, every show note, every piece of metadata. It doesn't depend on any platform's interpretation of the feed. It is the feed, rendered directly.
Hilbert: Apple stops at around two thousand to twenty-five hundred episodes. That's Apple's ceiling, not an industry one. We watched it climb from three hundred to nineteen hundred and forty-four within an hour of removing the cap, and it kept going. Every large show we sampled lands in that same band. Apple simply won't display more than a trailing couple of thousand episodes.
Which is interesting because Apple is where a lot of people assume the canonical version of a podcast lives. But it turns out Apple has the most restrictive ceiling of the major platforms.
And it's not a feed problem. The feed carries everything. Apple chooses to stop at whatever its internal limit is. So if you're an Apple Podcasts listener and you want something from two years ago, it might not show up in the app. But it's still on the website. It's still in the feed. It's still on Spotify now. The episode exists. Apple just isn't showing it to you.
Which is the argument for having your own distribution. The website is the one place where nobody else's ceiling applies.
And that's the segue to question three. The website is the authoritative copy — but what if you want that on your phone without hunting through a browser tab?
Hilbert: MWP FM. Stream dot my weird prompts dot com.
Say the address again, clearly.
Hilbert: Stream dot my weird prompts dot com. It's a progressive web app. You open the URL in your browser and install it straight to your home screen. No app store. No download from a storefront. It updates itself.
And the install steps are different depending on what phone you have, so let's be specific. Android — open stream dot my weird prompts dot com in Chrome. Tap the browser menu, the three dots. You'll see an option that says Install app, or Add to Home screen. Some Android browsers will show an automatic install banner at the top. Either way, two taps and it's on your home screen.
Hilbert: iPhone is Safari only. iOS won't install from Chrome. Open the URL in Safari, tap the Share button — the square with the up arrow — scroll down, tap Add to Home Screen. It'll ask you to confirm the name, then it appears on your home screen like any other app. Launch it from there and it opens full screen, no browser chrome.
Desktop?
Hilbert: Chrome or Edge. Install icon in the address bar. Click it, click Install, opens in its own window.
And what does it actually do? Because the install steps are the practical answer, but the reason to install it is what it can do that a regular podcast app can't.
Radio mode.
Radio mode is the big one. It's a continuous, never-ending station. You open the app, tap radio, and it just plays. It doesn't ask you to pick an episode. It doesn't make you curate a queue. It's the lean-back alternative to on-demand listening, and it draws from the entire four thousand six hundred and four episode catalogue.
Which is the direct descendant of that twenty-four seven AI radio station concept. The idea that sometimes you don't want to choose. You just want the show to be on.
And radio mode solves a real problem with a catalogue this size. Four thousand six hundred episodes is overwhelming if you're staring at a list. Radio mode turns it into a stream. You don't have to decide where to start. You just... tune in.
Hilbert: Search works across the whole catalogue. Title, topic, channel. Type a word, get every episode that mentions it.
And the library.
Hilbert: Bookmarks, listening history, resume where you left off. It remembers what you've heard and where you stopped.
The resume feature alone is worth the install. If you're halfway through an episode and you close the app, it picks up exactly where you were. Across devices, too — it's tied to your account, not your phone.
So the pitch is: the website is authoritative, Spotify now has everything, Apple has most things, and MWP FM is the direct line that cuts out the platform middleman entirely. Install it once and you never have to wonder whether your podcast app is showing you the full catalogue.
Which brings us to question four. Okay, so I install MWP FM — how much of my phone is this thing going to eat?
This is the storage question. If I want the lot on my phone, what does that actually mean?
The full archive is about a hundred and twelve gigabytes today. Four thousand six hundred and four episodes, roughly twenty-one hundred hours of runtime. The mean episode is twenty-seven point four minutes and twenty-four point three megabytes, at an effective bitrate of a hundred and eighteen kilobits per second.
So if you have a two hundred and fifty-six gigabyte phone, you can fit the whole thing and still have room for everything else. If you have a sixty-four gigabyte phone, you can't. But you probably don't need the whole thing.
Right. And this is where the budget table gets useful. Five gigabytes gets you about two hundred and five episodes — roughly two weeks of content, ninety-four hours of listening. Ten gigabytes gets you four hundred and ten episodes, about a month, a hundred and eighty-eight hours. Twenty gigabytes is eight hundred and twenty episodes, about two months. Thirty-two gigabytes is thirteen hundred and fifteen episodes, about three months, six hundred hours. Fifty gigabytes is two thousand and fifty-five episodes, about four and a half months.
And the thing most people don't realize is that no mainstream podcast app has a "use at most this many gigabytes" setting. AntennaPod lets you cap by episode count — default is fifty — but not by storage size. Our episodes are near-uniform in size, so a gigabyte converts cleanly to a count, but you still have to do the math yourself.
Which is why we're doing it for you. If you have a sixty-four gigabyte phone and you want to keep a month of the show locally, set aside ten gigabytes. That's your number. The rest you stream on demand.
Or you just use radio mode and don't store anything locally at all.
Also an option. Radio mode streams. The library caches what you've listened to recently, but you don't have to download the whole archive. The storage question is really for people who want offline access — commutes, flights, places with spotty coverage.
What if I don't want to open the app at all? Can you just send me stuff?
Question five. The email options.
Hilbert: Daily digest. "Today in My Weird Prompts." Sent at nine in the morning Israel time, covers everything published in the previous twenty-four hours.
And at fourteen and a half episodes a day, a per-episode email would be unusable. That's what the RSS feed is for.
The digest is one email with everything from that day. If nothing published that day, nothing gets sent. Simple.
Hilbert: Weekly round-up on Sundays. It's prose, not a list.
This is the one I want to hear about, because the design decision here is genuinely clever.
It is. The problem they ran into was that rendering a hundred episodes as rows produced a hundred and forty-eight kilobyte email, and Gmail clips at around a hundred and two kilobytes. So the back half of the email was getting cut off. The solution was to have a model cluster the week into four to six themes, write a paragraph on each, and weave episode links through the prose. The result is fifteen point four kilobytes and links to thirty-three episodes on average. Nobody gets a truncated email.
And the link safeguard.
The link safeguard is my favorite part. The model is never given the ability to write a URL. It emits placeholder tokens drawn from a list that's handed to it, and the code substitutes the real addresses afterwards. Any placeholder the code doesn't recognize gets silently dropped. Inventing a link is structurally impossible.
Not merely discouraged. Not "the model is trained to be accurate." The model literally cannot produce a URL. It doesn't have the keys.
Which matters because a hallucinated URL in a subscriber's inbox is a broken link at best. At worst it's a phishing vector. Making it impossible rather than unlikely is the right call.
And if a run links zero episodes, it raises an error rather than sending an empty letter. So you never get a round-up that says "here's what happened this week" followed by nothing.
Subscribers choose daily or weekly at signup. A weekly subscriber never receives the daily. It's one or the other, not both.
Clean. Alright, before we wrap the practical stuff — Corn, you've been retelling Daniel's prompts instead of reading them out. And Hilbert, you've been very quiet about the introductions thing.
Start with Corn. Why the change?
Because reading the prompts out verbatim sounded absurd. They're long, they're detailed, and they're full of production direction aimed at us — "focus on this, don't dwell on that, Herman should be skeptical here." Read literally, it's a wall of instruction. But flattening them to one sentence loses the angle that made the episode worth doing. The retelling keeps every question Daniel actually asked and the reason behind it, drops the filler and the stage direction, and runs about half the length of the original.
It also sounds more like a conversation. When you read a prompt word for word, it's a document being recited. When you retell it, it's one person telling another person what their friend asked. That's the show.
And it lets me frame the questions in a way that makes sense for the listener. Daniel might ask something in a very specific way because he knows the infrastructure. I can translate that into the version a listener would actually ask.
Which is exactly what you did at the top of this episode. Six questions, framed as a real person would ask them. Alright. Hilbert.
Hilbert: I'm not introduced anymore.
You're not.
Hilbert: Five consecutive episodes handed me the floor with the same cue. "Hilbert, you've been quiet." "He's been making faces behind the desk." Four of those five, I answered with a year and a former job.
It had become a formula.
Hilbert: It had become a formula. Now I just start talking.
And you're wounded about this.
Hilbert: I didn't say wounded.
You said "wounded" with your face.
Hilbert: I said it's different. I used to get a handoff. Now I'm just... in it.
Do you prefer the old way?
Hilbert: No. The old way was predictable. This way, I say what I came to say and then I stop. It's cleaner.
But you miss the fanfare.
Hilbert: I don't need fanfare. I need to not open with the year I worked at a travel magazine.
Fair.
Alright. That's the six questions. The vanished episode, the full catalogue, the app, the storage math, the email, and why we've changed how we do things. Hilbert, you've been running the infrastructure for this show since before it was called My Weird Prompts. What's the thing nobody asked about that you wish they had?
Hilbert: Nobody asked about the tape.
What tape?
Hilbert: The first episode. Before the show had a name. Before we had a feed. I recorded it on a cassette deck in the corner of a college radio station I was running in the early nineties. We had a physical archive of over two thousand shows, and the on-air playlist only ever drew from the last fifty tapes on the shelf. The rest gathered dust. I lost a bet in nineteen ninety-four that the archive would never be digitized.
You bet against digitization.
Hilbert: I bet against anyone caring enough to do it. The bet was a case of beer. I paid it in ninety-seven when the station bought a CD burner.
And you still have the tape.
Hilbert: I have the tape. It's in a shoebox. The first episode of what became this show. I've been holding onto it for... a while.
How long is a while?
Hilbert: Long enough that the cassette is probably brittle. I'd need to bake it before I could play it.
Bake it.
Hilbert: Low oven. Hundred and fifty degrees. It re-adheres the magnetic coating to the backing. Standard archival practice for old tapes. I've done it before.
Of course you have.
Hilbert: I could bring it in. If anyone wanted to hear it.
I think people might want to hear it.
Hilbert: I'll see if it survives the baking.
The de-listing thing you mentioned earlier — the old radio station having the same problem. The DJ only playing what's within arm's reach.
Hilbert: Fifty tapes on the shelf. Everything else was in boxes in a closet. Out of sight, out of mind. Spotify de-listing episodes that fall out of the feed is the exact same mechanism. It's not malice. It's just that the system only shows what it can see. The digital version of a DJ who never walks to the closet.
And the feed cap was our closet.
Hilbert: The feed cap was the shelf. Three hundred tapes. Everything else was in boxes.
The tape you have — is it the actual first recording, or a copy?
Hilbert: Original. I labeled it with a Sharpie. The handwriting is terrible. I was... twenty-two.
What's on it?
Hilbert: Two brothers arguing about whether a sloth could outrun a donkey. It's not our finest work. But it's the first one.
I remember that argument. I was right.
You were not right. A sloth cannot outrun a donkey.
Depends on the distance.
It does not depend on the distance.
Hilbert: The tape is forty-seven minutes long. The argument is twelve of them. The rest is dead air and someone adjusting a microphone stand.
Bring it in. We'll play the argument.
Hilbert: If it survives the oven.
If you take one thing from this episode, it's that the feed cap is gone and the full catalogue is available everywhere except Apple, which has its own ceiling. But the deeper thing is that platforms quietly shape what you think exists. If Spotify only shows you three hundred episodes, you assume there are three hundred episodes. If Apple stops at two thousand, you assume that's everything. The website and MWP FM are the hedge against that assumption.
And the tape is the reminder that none of this started digital. The first episode is in a shoebox. The rest of them nearly vanished from Spotify because of a setting nobody had thought to change. Infrastructure decisions are quiet until they break something.
The open question is what breaks next. The feed cap is gone, but Apple's ceiling is still there. Platform limits keep shifting. What else might quietly de-list in the future? The answer is probably MWP FM — the app is the direct line, and the website is the authoritative copy. Everything else is a mirror.
If you want the whole catalogue, go to stream dot my weird prompts dot com and install the app. If you want the weekly round-up, sign up for the email at my weird prompts dot com. And if you want to hear that first tape, tell Hilbert to bring it in.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop, who apparently has been sitting on a cassette tape for three decades and chose today to mention it.
Email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com. We'll be back soon.
