Wow I was not expecting this here. Thanks jger15 for submitting it.

Well, since we're here, can I share with you the tech side of this that most don't care about?

Instead of using one of the many many podcast hosting services, I wanted to DIY everything, self-host, etc. Everything is done on the command line.

I rolled my own RSS with a Ruby script:

https://gist.github.com/sivers/e3a90a742cfc0802ede9dbf553339...

Each episode is made using sox :

https://gist.github.com/sivers/b900bf4004e148b32a5ddf3fffbe3...

This one is especially fun. See the "pad" function that writes that many seconds of silence before bringing in the desired audio file. Then use that new file to determine the length of the pad to precede the next file, etc.

In the end I have about 8 WAV files that I do a "sox -M" to merge them all together into one combined WAV file, with all the timings correct, and tracks can overlap.

Then for hosting, I just stuck it on the same $10/month Vultr OpenBSD instance that I host everything else on. Nginx delivering static. And it's held up fine. I put it on its own subdirectory (m.sivers.org) in case I need to move it to a CDN some day, but I'm hoping I won't need to.

Finally I use lame -m m -b 96 to make the MP3 and https://mutagen.readthedocs.io/en/latest/man/mid3v2.html to tag the MP3 including adding the photo to it.

I picked up a lot of these tips from various HN threads over the past year.

Thanks for the inspiration, gang. And thanks again for posting this and the nice comments. I really appreciate it.

- Derek

Sivers’ blog, books and book recommendations are top notch. They helped clarify my thinking on lots of topics and provided clarity on life in general. He is a great teacher.

Derek Sivers is like a hacker friend you never met who takes your mind to the places it needs to visit.

He's like a mentor that "doesn't know I exist" https://sivers.org/ment

Such a brilliant idea that, using your own brain to give yourself advice is the best. We should all be taught this in school.

These podcasts are Sivers reading his own work. If you already subscribe to his mailing list, regularly visit his site, or prefer reading to listening; the content there is 100% the same.

If you prefer audio, this is for you.

For Pocket Casts users: https://pca.st/qyy5wnbn

I’ve been vaguely aware of Sivers for years but this is the first time I’ve consciously listened to or read his content. It’s quite inspiring in a very grounded "you know, this is actually sensible and practical" way. Just wrote my first diary entry in a good 7 years. And the thoughts journal is something I’ve been experimenting with conceptually and on paper for months now, but this has given me the push and guidance I needed to really put it into practice in a structured, consistent way.

Aside: it’s incredible that you can’t tap an RSS link (or long press and share) to open it in Podcasts in iOS.

You can.

I clicked on the rss link and it tried to open in Apple News and then I was immediately forwarded to the podcast app where a dialog was displayed to “Add a podcast by URL” with the url in it.

Ah. I don’t have Apple News installed. I get prompts to install it occasionally which I decline. I didn’t realise it was the default handler for RSS feeds.

I wish the submission title was better, I was wondering if someone found an aggregator was that listed all podcasts where a new episode was published on that day.