Please try to record the audio separately on both sides and merge them together afterwards. Such an interesting podcast deserves to be listened to.

I am wondering whether a comparison with relational databases would be more complete by including the concept of materialized views or indexed views on the relational side. The big RDBMS vendors offer this as a way of denormalizing and physically partitioning/distributing data for queries (although you can actually update them as well under some circumstances).
It is their answer to the scale problem, and works very well in my experience.

I haven’t worked on a problem of Amazon / Ebay / Google scale myself, but how many people do?

I can see that NoSQL solutions are critical for those systems that have extraordinary scaling requirements, but because it is the new cool kid on the block I get a strong feeling that it may be misapplied.

I think that SE-Radio need to review how they capture audio from participants in remote locations in order to ensure that they can deliver high quality podcasts consistently. In this day and age, there’s no excuse for putting out podcasts with such poor audio.