TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #210: Adam Curry

Episode Date: November 24, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Adam Curry to discuss: - Origins of podcasting - Podcasting 2.0 - Value for Value - Sphinx chat - Streaming payments - Automatic royalties/distributions - Self censorship and advertising - Open publishing and distributed money make sense together - Distrust in media - much more Follow Adam on Twitter Check out Adam's site Check out The Podcasting Index + Podcasting 2.0 Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app.

Sup freaks, it's your boy Marty here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt, a very, very special episode. I have the immense pleasure of sitting down with the podfather himself, Adam Carey, to talk about podcasting 2.0, Sphinx app, the media landscape, the future of podcasting, the future of money, the future of life on this planet. I think you guys are going to like it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was fanboying a little bit.

i hope you guys enjoy it and if you do listen to this make sure you download the cash app what's the cash app you ask what's the cash app you ask i'll tell you what the cash app is the cash app is an app it's going to allow you to stack sets and sets receive sets and sell sets if you so please we're saying sat sat sat sat stats because you can make sats the standard within the app we're no longer buying fractions of a bitcoin son we're stacking whole sats we're stacking millions tens of millions hundreds of millions of sats for you via the app you can dca in the sats as well set it and forget it you can uh buy daily weekly bi-weekly we're trying to front run matt odell in the morning in the early morning east coast time i think uh the front

runners are now running the market or on 4 15 a.m east coast we need to front run the front runners we need a 3 15 a.m daily buy uh to front run that cohort who was originally front running matt odell who was originally front running uh the the east coast market open on top of that you can stack silvers of stocks in the cash app if you want to uh if your favorite stocks a little too expensive you can buy as little as one dollar on top of that they have the boost program which allows you to go to partner merchants initiate their boost save a little money get that money stack some sats and cash app can be your bank account they're offering account numbers and rounding numbers if you want to get your paychecks direct deposited into the app

you can do so now so do you have anything to say about that no nothing speechless for the first time in a while a big smile when you download the cash app make sure you use the code stacking stats it's s-t-a-c-k-i-n-g-s-a-t-s you're gonna get ten dollars and ten dollars are gonna go to our good friends at owls lacrosse that's owls lacrosse download the cash app today use the code stacking stats and enjoy this episode with adam carey i know i certainly did you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free

if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bet here from the island studio on a monday afternoon extremely excited for the conversation i'm about to embark on with my guest who needs no introduction the man who started uh the medium that we're that we're speaking through now adam curry adam welcome to the podcast what's up freaks

it's a pretty surreal for me hey baby i gotta say it gotta say it i mean i'm in the club i mean how can i avoid it you're the most active podcast on the on the sphinx chat app right now yeah the tribe the tales from the crypt tribe we've been talking about a lot the last few weeks and just before i hit record we were talking about i think i'm extremely excited for this episode particularly because it involves two things i'm very passionate about obviously podcasting i've been doing this for over three years now at this point which is hard to believe and then bitcoin something i've been dedicated to for for a bit longer i'm sort of colliding in the sphinx app right now the lightning network and what you're trying to do with podcasting 2.0 it's been surreal having the tribe

And then having you in it and, uh, being able to have proof that you're actually listening to the podcast, uh, quoting and, and timestamping stuff. It's, it's incredible. Um, but all of this is in the name of podcasting 2.0. So I think before we get to that, we should just learn a little bit about you, what you've been doing in the podcast industry since it began, and why you think podcasting 2.0 is so important at this juncture in time. Okay. Well, for that, let's go back 16 years ago when I was actually – it actually dates back 19 years. The core technology started when I had taken my company public in 1996, and I retired from the company just before 2000 and decided to move my family back to Amsterdam. Now, I grew up in Amsterdam, even though I'm an American.

And the thing about Amsterdam or the Netherlands is that they have a very like 98 percent of the country had cable back in the day because it was really central antenna system. So, you know, like the whole block would have one antenna and they'd all use it. So every house was wired and we got cable modems and cable modems were great because they then now they weren't fast necessarily, but they were always on Internet. oh this was something new we didn't have to dial up anymore not everyone who listens to this podcast will remember those days but that's uh that's what you had to do as you had to dial up with your modem unplug your home phone line and uh being a broadcaster all my life i was looking for an experience i wanted someone to be able to click and something would play and it would be whoa that's cool uh but it didn't exist because you would click and wait and wait and wait and

wait for something to download and then finally download and then you open it and it opened a player and then by then you know it's like uh was this really worth it um in these same days actually napster just started coming up and this was great for cable modems being always on always connected so um what you notice about that is that you really don't you weren't able to do anything until the files were fully downloaded so what i was thinking of is why don't we eliminate the bandwidth problem just by letting someone say hey i want to have the next episode of this when you've downloaded onto my computer let me know therefore i won't be waiting any more than i normally would and the 10 minutes it takes to download it that's just obfuscated by this

process that runs in the background which is the whole point of computers to do stuff for you and that became after i flew to new york and convinced dave weiner to put this into rss that became the enclosure tag and that's where you put your the url to your mp3 file and that was working for a couple years actually but it was just you know dave had a piece of software called radio user land and attracted me because it had the name radio in it even though it wasn't but it was kind of a broadcast receive station you could create a feed and had an aggregator so you could aggregate feeds from other people um but when i saw my first ipod i went oh this is not a a digital Walkman. This is a radio receiver. It even looks like one of my early transistor radio

receivers. And so I went about the daunting task for me of creating an Apple script that would look at one singular feed, my own, would then grab the enclosure from the newest item, download it to iTunes, and then sync my iPod with iTunes, which was the way you had to do it back in the day. This is all pre-iPhone, of course. And then all of a sudden you could just pick up your iPod and you had radio shows on it. And so I started creating the daily source code, which was named such because it was daily and it was about the source code the developers were working on. And these developers were just a community of pirates like myself who were creating the radios. They were creating apps. And we had a ton of apps and we had all kinds of people

creating feeds because rss infrastructure was there but you know just had to add the enclosure and so we started maintaining a directory of all these feeds and we had a little burgeoning thing happening and it caught storm man bbc i think kicked it off and then um tony khan at wgbh in boston he brought in uh npr and was doing npr stuff in podcasts this is all 2004 so this is very early days um and then steve jobs called and he said you know i'd like to come talk do you have but do you have a little bit? And I said, yeah, maybe next month when we see my calendar,

if I have any time for you, Steve. And we met for an hour and it was a fantastic, just from my book, a fantastic meeting. But ultimately, excuse me, he was buttering me up. He wanted my blessing to put podcasting in iTunes. And I said, sure, and take the index with you.

And they started it up and Apple became the de facto place where you would submit your feed because all the other podcast apps who in general independent podcast developers can't really maintain a a database of uh hundreds of thousands or millions of feeds it's just it takes a lot of machinery and and love and care because it's not every feed is the same as the next um and they had the one click subscribe mechanism so they just became the place And for the next 10 years or longer, they've kind of been at the center of the podcast universe, being the place where you put your feed in, being the place where smaller independent apps can search for feeds. That's what everyone was tied into until things started to change.

and in the meantime i just you know started my no agenda show and we built this value for value model which uh taught us that if you ask if you keep it open-ended and don't say hey send me five bucks per show or here's extra stuff if you pay me extra if you just say listen to whatever you want it's free then that way but if you got any value out of it just send it to us and what you wouldn't expect what you would expect is a lot of people sent us five bucks and a lot of them sent 50 and a few sent 500 and one or two sent five thousand dollars that's what the show was worth to them that was mind-boggling so we said you make up whatever you want to give us we'll just do our darn just to create great value and now we move along throughout the uh throughout time and we

have cancel culture which is all related to advertising this is the entire reason the cancel culture works advertising is censorship and it can it works in a couple of ways either you are going to self-censor because you're not going to talk about the competitor to your advertiser the advertiser will tell you not to talk about certain things or people who hate you will start making noise around your advertiser and say oh how can you advertise on this bigots podcast or whatever uh and that's what uh you know that's been with social media that's been done very very successfully and it's all about advertising and to the degree that youtube and twitter um i'm sure there's some political censorship going on but in general they preempt the conflict with their

advertisers by taking controversial people off. And that controversial is only determined by the values of the advertiser. So there you go. And two things happened. Number one, Apple decided to de-platform Alex Jones. And that meant that he disappeared from podcast apps all across the spectrum because they were all tied into the Apple index. The second thing that happened is Joe Rogan signed a deal to go exclusive with Spotify, which means he too is disappearing from the open RSS architecture. What that leaves us with is independent app developers who no longer have Alex Jones because it's been removed from the Apple index and Joe Rogan's about to leave. So, you know, where's their unique selling proposition? People, sure, people like features,

But if you open up any podcast app today, this is before December 1st, you will see Joe Rogan's face smiling at you. They all have him front and center. So there's no incentive for app developers to really continue to work on creating great podcast experiences if they're not in the deal flow. So, you know, advertisers don't give money to podcast apps. They give it to the podcasters. So I decided two things were necessary. So one, we need to preserve podcasting as a platform for free speech. And that means an independent index that is protected under the Communications Decency Act, Section 230. You know, I don't care what I don't care. I really don't give a crap what is in your feed. Nor should I.

That's just speech. It's written down. It's in a database. I have no dog in the hunt. There's no political anything. I do not care. I'm also not an app. I'm just a storage place where feeds go.

That database is copyable, replicable, backed up. Anyone can access it. We created an API so that the independent developers don't have to deal with the RSS feed architecture. We do that. the second part of the mission is to retool podcasting as a platform of value and i had been looking at well i really got converted to bitcoin about six years ago not long after i sold 65 bitcoin i had been holding on to for five years at like nine hundred dollars and thought wow that was great um happens it happens it happens and but

also i was like hey i can't pay my rent with this this is the beanie babies of money get out of here i'm not interested and dennis parker is the one who is my guru and uh and sailed with me through the tough and troubling times and uh kept feeding me info and then i said hey ma'am i want to expand this value for value concept i i'd like to instead of it just being what did you get out of a couple hours. Why not per minute? Per minute you're listening, which shows you value something because you're spending your time or at least your brain resources. You may be doing the dishes or walking the dog, but you're spending resources on it. So that's obviously valuable. And why not let people just send me per minute value back at their own discretion? So whatever that is, one Satoshi,

one milli Satoshi, a hundred Satoshis, I don't know, whatever it is. And he said, oh, real-time payments now through lightning so i started looking at lightning um and this is before we started the index project and um you know i got a raspy blitz and i i'm fully noted here at home and i'm experimenting and and so i'm figuring out key send and how all this stuff works and um and so we started building the index with this in mind that you know we would have some kind of this idea of hitting a play button and then having the the value flow back so you've got mp3 bits coming in and you've got some kind of monetary bits going out a very simple system and you turn it from a donation into a pledge you know i pledge 100 sats a minute for any show that i

listen to which is roughly a dollar an hour and i think that's that's uh probably not enough but it's a reasonable amount to start with um and as i was looking at this uh paul itoi showed up from sphinx chat he posted on uh on a kind of our development hangout which is podcast index.social and uh he posted something if you're interested and so anyway i found them i sent an email to their info at sphinx.chat and he got back to me and i think 10 days later we had this shit integrated into their app and and just from that we haven't looked back you know from that minute on it's been okay we get it we see it i mean i'll show you right now that i maintain the index node and we'll get into exactly you know what that means for people so one percent of the uh of the

sats that are flowing go to podcastindex.org and you'll see here so that's just it's three sats at the time but that's just a never-ending flow of satoshi's which means you know they're listening to your show they're listening to my shows so this is just coming in non-stop it's like a it's like a magic money fountain and all we need to do is times this a thousand so uh my whole thing now is we need more uh lightning enabled podcast apps and we're off to the races yeah it's been incredible to watch how quickly it's unfolded how quickly it's become a sticky app for me like i listened to no agenda this morning gave you a few few boosts throughout and that's the cool thing it's interactive too like if you like a certain point you can hit boosts and 100 sats on top of

the streaming yeah let me let me just explain that for the listeners so they can visualize it so with with the sphinx chat which is kind of a podcast app on steroids the way we're using it where you're in a chat room and you're listening to the show and or you're just chatting with people but you listen to the show and if there's something you really like you can hit a boost button which almost like a like hitting a heart on uh on a periscope uh live stream uh except you can determine how many satoshis that sends off to the podcaster and uh at the same time the podcaster can go back and look at their timeline and see where people were boosting which of course is a is a show of hey i really liked what you were saying here so i can then as a someone who's

creating a show and say oh people really like this part of the of the show this discussion this topic this joke whatever it is um it's so it's incredibly interactive which is the number one thing podcasting has been missing yeah it's a beautiful way to give feedback without needing to do that verbally economic feedback if you will with a slight micro payment and that's one thing stop spam yes because people won't won't be spending all their money if they're spamming you know that just just goes against business practice yeah no this is something excites me personally number one because i'm a bitcoin or number two because i'm a podcast number three i'm somebody who again like i was telling you before we hit record i've had a bunch

of no agenda producers reach out to me um over the last couple years explaining the value for value model um and as a podcast that is monetized via via advertisements um wondering how to transition to that value for value model like a tftc.io slash contribute um we have the we give freaks the ability to either donate or purchase shout outs which are similar to the producer donations except for shout outs are static fifty dollars but previously trying to think of ways in which we could transition to a value for value model it's been sort of a hard mental jump and now it's something like sphinx exists uh becomes more material and seems like an easier path to get to that

I don't think the two are they're not mutually exclusive, Marty. I mean, you can you can still have ads. And I mean, where I want to get to is that it's just a logical that people find it normal. And let me see if I can explain this. Today, what people find normal on streaming video, I'm not saying they like it, but they find normal is, okay, if I really want to have my suite of shows that I like, there's a couple shows on Netflix, there's a couple on Hulu, there's a couple on Amazon, there's a couple on Disney, there's a couple on Apple Plus. So you have $200 worth of subscriptions at the end of the month for select offerings from each streaming app. That's really all they are. I want to turn that on its head for podcasting so people can say, you know, I consume about 20 hours of podcasts a month. Every hour I listen, I'm going to value that at $1. So I'm just going to put $20 into my wallet. and whoever i'm listening to i'm i'm giving back to them to ensure that that show has a chance of

making it to the next episode and just becomes a part of your budget like your your gas budget or your grocery budget or something like that and it becomes inherently more economical than having a spotify subscription having an iheart radio subscription having a uh what's next apple podcast plus it's all coming a college tuition like there's an argument anyone no there's i mean there's an argument to be made that i'm an audio and visual learner like i i can't sit in a lecture class like i taught i studied economics in college basically wound up just teaching myself everything in youtube videos the econ academy or listening to podcasts about economics um but the thing about the value that you're actually getting from this content or

i have at least i'll speak for myself um in many different facets like it's worth it and to think about how much you give up in the advertisement world as a listener um it makes makes a bit of sense but there is that that consumer mental model switch that needs to happen i think micro payments via the lightning network are a close enough stepping stone to get to that point well here's the numbers uh and this because i you know i've built businesses before and i've never built something this quickly i've never built anything or i wasn't never even had a a thought of getting paid anything which is obviously not happening but the speed at which this business has developed and the opportunity is insane here's the market and these are iab

The numbers, so that's, you know, Interactive Advertising Bureau, take it for what it is. They believe there's 100 million people in America, that's all the data I have, who listen to podcasts. On average, each of those 100 million people listens to one hour a day, and that's seven days a week. So now we have 100 million hours being consumed per day. With the No Agenda show, we were able to convert probably 3% to 4% of our overall audience into supporting us financially. A much larger percentage helps us with other things, jingles, clips, artwork, stories, information, background, sleaze, whatever it is. That's what producers do, and that's how we consider our listeners producers. um the other so there is that percentage three to four percent which we've converted to

giving us money donating supporting the show i think that if it's safe to say that of those 100 million people we can convert one percent to the donation model uh many of them already have people are familiar with patreon they're familiar with paypal hat tips tip jars they understand the basic concept. So we can move these people, you know, probably half of them already understand that the other half have to be converted. So now you're talking about 1 million hours a day. Let's go back to my value proposition, which is any podcast that you listen to for an hour should be at least worth a dollar. I don't think anyone can really disagree with that. I think it's shit low, but let's just say it's a dollar. Marty, now we have a million dollars a day flowing through

podcasts. Holy crap. This starts to get real. And my dream comes true here. And my dream was to support the independent software developers who are creating apps. This is the big secret sauce. I can't compete with Spotify on talent because they'll just buy the talent. That's the Joe Rogan problem. I can compete by saying, hey, it's all available. But if it's just me with an index with the alex jones feed and no podcast apps will take it we lose again so we've got to get these guys some money um this is why and i think this is what's going to be groundbreaking about uh podcasting 2.0 is this the built-in split so we've enabled it so that the uh the the the default is for every dollar or every hundred satoshis or whatever you send 98 goes to the

podcaster. 1% goes to the app that you're currently listening to the show on, which clearly is love and energy has gone into that and it's lightning enabled. And, you know, so there's actual work that has been done to enable that for you. And you wanted that to continue. And 1% goes to podcastindex.org for keeping it all running. And this is all voluntary. You can, you can rip those out if you don't, if you don't want it. The amount you send per minute is determined by the listener so it can be anything from zero to you know infinite i guess the podcaster then and this is where it gets really cool can take that 98 and simply by specifying more nodes uh more lightning nodes in their rss feed which they have total control over they can say you know what um

on this show i've got a co-host and we have uh you know my mom she you know lent us a thousand bucks to buy gear. And we got some cool ass promoter guy who's always promoting the show. So I can, as a podcaster, I can put in my own feed, I want 40% to go to me, 40% to my co-host wallet. I want 10% to go to my mom who invested. And I want the other 10% to go to this guy who's promoting and the flow literally goes from the listener's wallet in five individual payments directly from that person's wallet so no one's in the middle to those individual lightning wallets now it gets interesting when you take that down to the episode level so the no agenda show is my example um we have uh we have people who created end of show mixes we have people who create artwork

for each episode i'd love to put their lightning nodes into an episode so whenever someone listens to that episode even 10 years in the future five percent of that money that's streaming while someone listens will go to darren o'neill who created the album artwork now you've just decentralized the entire fucking ass cap bmi the royalty system worldwide you have just broken and completely deconstructed it down to its core element i enjoyed something everybody who worked on it should get a piece of that as they've predetermined it's pretty mind-blowing when you bring it down that way when you start to think about digital money you i mean i can't sleep sometimes i gotta get up and smoke a joint it's like man i gotta

get back to sleep a joint and some whiskey holy crap this is a good idea i got no it's it drives you up the wall in how many possibilities there are well it's beautiful in many ways too because actually from a development aspect and bitcoiners hate when you use the word community because there is no community it's just people accessing an apolitical protocol but you can't deny there's a community of bitcoin enthusiasts well that's like saying there's an lgbtq community and a black and brown community i always say to my mo i say hey mo where do all the black and brown people live is that one zip code is that just some place i can go visit is it just a huge community with drums you know it's fucking stupid and we all know it and we all know it yes um but

like the vibe around the protocol seems very similar to what you described in the early days of podcasting exactly the same yep really can you dive into some of the parallels or oh my goodness yes well for me it's like a complete deja vu first of all because i'm just following the same path that we did back then by having a podcast where we were talking to the actual developers who are working on the technology that we're implementing at that time so podcasting 2.0 it has chapters it It has the transcripts, you know, we're putting all we're eating our own dog food, so to speak. So it's a complete feedback loop. But the openness, there's something about. Part of it is the free open software movement, I'd say, is more and it's not just the movement.

It's a it's like a tectonic plate that just shifts slowly over time and put stuff into place where it should be naturally, I guess. um and the first one was really with paul from from sphinx chat you know we're just talking he's like oh fuck we'll do this and we'll give you the code for that and you know and then dave and i like oh we got all this code over here you guys take that and we're all doing this to create something that we we're not even sure what it is it's like the ultimate collaborative art project And I take software development, it's a science, but it's an art. I mean, you can get to places in software in so many different ways that it's an art. I mean, look at the variety of apps and functionality that are coming out of this project.

So it's when people are creating art together and they're doing it for, they're doing it for, it's altruistic, but it's something about human nature. You know, we gravitate towards each other because it's like, it's like this, hey, here's this new language we all want to learn. And we're kind of building the, and I'm not talking about a programming language, just a common parlance of how we deal with internet. And we're able to sculpt this language together. And it turns out that when you have a lot of diversity of thoughts, that it just gets better from it. And, you know, shit blows up in these projects all the time. We've all seen great projects implode. I think it's the natural order of things.

It's, I don't, that should be studied psychologically because there's something incredibly deep, deeply humanistic about this process and how people just come together with no seeming greed. it's just it's just seriously i do not see the greed that you see in almost everything else um everybody may have their own agenda and how they plan to to make money off of something but there's some core values of hey you've got to share this you've got to keep this open got to have this code available that keeps everybody kind of honest and i think using podcasting in bitcoin there's two specific examples um like podcasting uh opening up the the ways that individuals can communicate with audiences and distribute content to to the world instantaneously and then bitcoin uh allowing people to send value together in a peer-to-peer fashion both

our reactions to a world that is increasingly centralized in terms of whether it be the content distribution and mediums or the ability to send and receive money as well as escape inflation and i think part of that altruistic vibe you're describing is part of the common recognition between everybody working on these systems that this is imperative as we move forward If we don't have this, we're going to be subjected to the Chinese surveillance to export it to the rest of the world. You hit the nail on the head, Marty. It's not illogical or strange, really, for decentralized content distribution to find a partner in decentralized money. I mean, podcasting is in the business of sending decentralized goodness.

In fact, when we first started podcasts and we didn't have a name for it, we came up with all kinds of names. And one of them was nicely packaged bundles of joy. You know, that was like one of these, what am I really, I'm really sending you a bundle of MP3 goodness I am giving to you. And it's going out from my little location to all these people who have an app around the world. um so that's sending one way and it's only logical that we have a way to have the value from the other side of that equation come back in a peer-to-peer decentralized way so that makes that's just law of attraction people don't realize how decentralized podcasting is i mean to this day very smart people very smart people will say to me hey did you not upload to apple yet

i'm like uh well that's not exactly how it works but i'm not going to bore you with that let's see what we can figure out what's going on um but that's how people think metaphorically that i have to upload my podcast to five different places uh so that it's available everywhere so they really don't understand uh how decentralized it is which i guess is kind of good because people don't have to worry about it and they know it just all kind of works um but you get into weird habits you know you um that's why it's not easy to convert someone away from the podcast app they love you know it's better to to bootstrap some stuff onto that and you know they've got their subscriptions in there and all that um but again it comes down to the basic and i think this is what was necessary

in order to kickstart this is to get away from the basically the dmca um you know encrypted you pay or you don't play uh concept of media in other words you know you we you know some mechanism doesn't allow your player to actually play this stream of mp3 bits and bytes until you have unlocked the secret code through a payment we might get there one day uh and that may be a business model but i think my own experience shows that if you just let people determine that and have the market drive those prices what they want to pay which largely will be nothing um before we started you said hey i'm still a douchebag so and what that means is for people who don't know is on the no agenda show

So people who donate money to the show, they can call someone out who they know listens but hasn't supported the show. And by the way, we didn't come up with this. I would never call anybody a douchebag. The listeners would say, hey, call out my brother. It's a douchebag. You know, because he hasn't donated to the show. And when someone comes in and finally donates, they ask for a de-douching. You've been de-douched.

So what we've actually discussed is we call it – behind closed doors, we call it the douche flag, but we'll probably call it the nudge flag. So if you have a podcast app and you're listening to a podcast and you have no sats in your wallet or you're not flowing anything, it'll just say, hey, man, don't be a douche. Consider topping up your wallet and making sure these guys get some value. these things seem to seem to play out quite well over time yeah the uh the social pressuring of course of course there's a great pressure yeah right yeah and that's that's what like thinking of where all this monetization via the lightning network and stream payments and micro payments can go it's my like you just like the the opportunity is mind-blowing when you think about it economically but then uh psychologically like how does it change the nature of content consumption and

then content production what would the quality look like like how what does the world look like we do successfully transition to this monetization looks pretty freedom to me right so let's take music as an example um music licensing is a quagmire a lot of it is uh statutorily at least united states arranged how much is required no more no less to pay for streaming uh versus you know you have all the performing rights you have broadcast rights you have sync rights you have publishing rights all of this can be obfuscated and or just eliminated and you know every mp3 file can come with a value block that you put into your lightning enabled player doesn't have to be a podcast player just a music player or app or whatever you use and encoded into that will be

all of the artists who played on that song the the writer the composer uh fuck the manager the producer put whatever we need in there and the percentages and whoever plays that song if they're not a douchebag and they like to you know maintain uh the music that they listen to and they want people to enjoy and have their favorite artists continue they'll fill up that wallet and that money will stream straight to the people in in the like a royalty oh my god it's a what a crazy concept we're going to eliminate waiting for two years for your streaming pennies from uh from spotify and we're gonna it'll be so beautiful and this system lay paves the way it's i mean we can start doing this today i mean we're doing it today i did it this morning

exactly i know you should wash your hands after you do it seriously that's getting pretty nasty this is like the royalties thing is probably one of the biggest points of contention in the music industry obviously i can it's crazy to think i mean you have many artists taylor swift being one of them right now most famously is uh very enraged due to the fact that scooter braun owns her uh discography and is able to sell all the rights to that make all the profits it's pretty which which she's yeah but she sold those rights you know she sold her publishing rights you know i'm sorry you got screwed by the system get in line sister that's how the system works so you know you don't like it well you can change you can step outside i'll take taylor swift i'll i'll i'll

bitcoinify her no problem and that'll work out great i wish we could that's we're getting close the technology is almost there so i guess that that's a good question to ask you at this particular point like what do you think of the lightning network is somebody's been a bitcoin enthusiast one of the pretty one of the coolest bitcoin things you've done in my mind is receive the private keys uh via ham radio wave uh was that from rodolfo or samuel patterson yes yes we did uh we did a little bitcoin transaction uh via ham radio i've i've been a ham radio uh operator for about eight years i guess um and there's a lot of digital digital work that goes on there it's kind of beautiful you know it's there you go it's another decentralized system that uh that still

works and we do digital on it okay you know throughput is pretty bad don't be loading no neutrino uh wallets over hf um but just to send a key or something like that yeah that it works it works incredibly well um and you know once we get to a place where everybody i mean it would be great if every family had a node had a node at home or a node somewhere you know it's just it's the family bank and mom and dad have a multi-sig keys i mean uh and you know even for trust fund babies you know add another multi-sig so you can have a little uh side wallet there that is just for the trust fund baby i mean all all of the lawyers and the bankers and the shysters and everybody in between can kind of be eliminated they can they can learn to code there you go

don't tell the bus driver to learn to code you learn to code you'll get banned from twitter if you tweet that be careful i know um but so obviously you pay close attention to the protocol development and technical side of bitcoin like what are your thoughts on lightning at this stage lightning network is something that the bitcoin um world a lot of people don't have as much faith in the lightning network as others like myself um just from a usability standpoint what's your perspective on are you happy with where it is right now exactly that i'm a user so um uh yes i'm on the development side but i'm on the more the implementation side and i see something working you know i see i i of course i see all the all the

the bumps and the warts and stuff i mean of course is like where did my sats go they're getting stored for a chat you know uh for the channel settlement and all this stuff okay so once you kind of understand those things the only thing uh i have no idea about is scale i think that we're probably responsible at this point maybe for you know half of the the traffic on the lightning network just through the pure number of uh transactions we're creating because every minute there's multiple transactions going to multiple addresses and that's 24 hours a day i know because i see the index one percent coming in so um it's 24 7 so what happens when you do that times a thousand what happens when a thousand people fire up uh tftc at the same time and are

sending you sats what happens to the htlcs i don't know we're gonna find out so scalability i have no idea um i don't know all of the technical issues that people uh do or don't like lightning for um but the the elimination of the invoice in general turns it into much more of a venmo type situation which uh there's you know a whole world is already understanding of the i have some identifier for you you're in my contact list i can send you money and not think about it uh instead of you sending me an invoice and me paying the invoice yeah you know there's faster ways qr codes etc but it's still for most people like you got to send me an invoice me to just pay you if i could i'll use venmo so that's been taken away um the key it's really the key

and part that just got me all jacked like holy crap we can stream money what more do i have to say people you can stream money in real time uh you know the webcam girl should be all over this stuff you can eliminate those those assholes who are taking 50 of your money ladies and and men well we're still trying to get them away from spank chain do you know about spank chain sounds bad but uh was this some kind of uh uh porn coin yes it was yeah for webcam girls yeah there's uh everybody tries to make a coin for everything a porn coin food coin denta coin whatever it may be right how many times i've been asked to do a podcast coin i can't count right and it's like hey all you need is sats you don't need you don't need

your own coin for this like the applicant like the idea of streaming payments is a great idea but unfortunately spank chain i don't think is going to develop the network effect of liquidity needed to uh have a token which is worth sure but but you know all you need is a player that understands this basic core concept and uh and bake it into a wallet every developer of wallets should be doing this if you got a wallet what's your wallet doing it's just sitting there being a dumb wallet it's like a wallet you give people a wallet for the christmas you know thanks man i got the wallet you take out the picture of the family that's not yours and uh use your wallet but when your wallet all of a sudden you press a button it's a podcast player or it's a webcam

streaming player hello now you're talking i mean this every business can be disrupted by this yeah well it'll be interesting to see who does the disrupting does does the wallet software provider disrupt by adding a podcast app or the podcast app implement lightning which i guess is a good transition to like well they don't have to live exclusive each other one on one hand podcast apps will add lightning that's a quite a curve for them uh on the other hand uh lightning uh apps and uh breeze is actually i've been talking to roy over a breeze for a while you know they have key send outbound enabled on their app which is all you need for podcasting you don't need incoming um and uh you know i've been working on helping them implement uh podcasting into the breeze

wallet now that may be in the wallet it may be a standalone app using the breeze technology that's up to them um but that's it goes and for personally i think that if you're a wallet guy and you're looking to create a kick-ass podcast implementation, go to podcastindex.social, talk to these guys, and I don't think there's any gals, but talk to these guys and say, hey, well, why don't we work together? And, you know, we'll split the percentage or whatever you want to do. I mean, all of this is now possible.

All of it can be totally, totally strapped together with the finances right there, bootstrapped right on. yeah and it's it's incredible that's actually a very good point too is i made you i love that and well the thing of adding these functionalities like hooking up to a podcast player and being able to stream sets uh it's a good way to bootstrap and on it's like again like i said sphinx has been very sticky for me for the last week and a half i've been using it i've been using it sure pretty consistently every day um as i listen to podcast uh and then the amount of disruption that's going to come from this like it's it's pretty mind-blowing and it feels like in the

tales from the crypt tribe like you're part of something that nobody really understands and i think uh really highlights something that critics of the lightning network have been saying for years is that they've been sort of catering to merchant adoption getting people to accept lightning network payments to sell goods where probably not the best market to target where something like this is sort of a comes out of nowhere and it makes a lot more sense and actually yeah it's probably a lot more stickier a lot stickier than merchant adoption right out of gate already so it's sort of stumbling into a use case that nobody was really thinking of bro this is like i came along with my i came with my podcast peanut butter and stuck it right in

your your bitcoin chocolate you know this is how the reese's peanut butter cup came to be who the hell knew sometimes it just takes these little things and this could be the start of something much bigger i mean you you hear where my thinking is going already it's like once and this is new for me so once you understand digital money then you just and and this this multiple payments this split this contracts if you will you know smart contract is such a term we implemented a really dumb contract and it just works too um but the concept remains it's the same and then particularly with uh with like the credits as i was saying and and giving people percentages of what they worked on this is a new media model and it's and it's springing forth from the actual marriage of

bitcoin and podcasting these we were meant for each other you know it's like twin flame baby this is soulmates we should have figured this out a long time ago before we got married to other people right well that's the interesting thing like that made me think of satoshi's quote uh about wiki leaks when julian assange first worked reached out um or somebody asked about reaching out to julian about getting wiki leaks to to accept bitcoin payments in the early days so she thought it was too early didn't want to quote unquote kick the horn its nest um and that's what's like inspired a thought my mind like maybe it's just a timing thing and the timing's finally right for for the marriage to to play out right yeah because lightning's had to get built out and

uh it's it's crazy the similarities so like speaking you you mentioned earlier podcasting people asking like oh when are you going to upload it to apple not understanding like how the back end infrastructure of rss feeds works um that's the point that quinn's waiting to get to still even with the lightning network and things like that you still have to be a pretty uh pretty technically verse person to to interact with the protocol um in a secure in somewhat private fashion yes um bitcoin trying to get to that point where people don't even realize what's happening in the back end yeah exactly and and they'll have all kinds of different ideas just like you know this example of podcasting that you what you don't upload it to apple no i

don't upload to apple so what you know so they won't really understand how it works but taking the simple metaphors which is again why i like key send of here's a person i have their payment info which is you know an address um and i can send someone money right away that at least brings bitcoin on par with uh cash app and venmo and um all the other reasons will start to come i think uh there's a huge window of opportunity right now uh for this marriage between podcasting and and lightning because someone big is going to come in and do it you know why wouldn't cash app do it i actually i know the answer why because they have all kinds of legalities to go through um because they're taking fiat currency and turning it into bitcoin so there's all kinds

of issues there um but for the time being people in this native world i mean i love the lightning network that much more having learned about lightning pools like oh wait a minute i can take my money and you know so i have i have some money in my node here i'm living the dream i'm living large like this thing is loaded you know this is nice but i can make interest on my money without giving up my money just for having it around and not needing to spend it well that's cool so these internal markets become very appealing for sticking your money on into lightning somewhere yeah then you get really heady with it and talk about like a podcast tribe on sphinx pooling funds together and getting one of the tribe members to to try to run a productive

uh liquidity pool book actually like make money by being a part of a tribe and listening to a certain podcast sure having stakes and so let me let me just go back to your uh your transition which i don't think is necessary what if an advertiser um an advertiser came along and said Well, I want to give these 10 podcasts a thousand bucks each for talking about my podcast. And the way we're going to do it is I'm going to make a pool of money available and you can add that to your value block. And so anyone who listens to those 10 shows will help get them an extra ten dollars a minute or whatever. I mean, all of this can be can be put into play. i mean there's so many ways it's not exclusive of advertising advertisers paying people to listen

yeah and really paying the podcaster to listen so this isn't there's a lot of i mean yes that stare that's like the thousand yard stare that you get if you've been in service long enough now that's the stare we have one in bitcoin too i've seen it they go off like look where am i looking at somewhere in the distance i'm imagining something yeah that's that's the bitcoin stare yeah yeah it's i can see marty by the way just so you know this yeah we are we are on the zoom chat we're video chatting it is it's crazy to think right like another model that ryan and i were talking about if you're an upstart podcast trying to incentivize people to listen there's a lot of problem gaining a an audience just people not listening you may be putting out good

concept and nobody's seeing it being able to incentivize listenership by saying hey i'm going to give out 10 000 sats to the first 1500 people that listen to minute mark 54 um or like that or you know get 10 10 people who listen to your show who are promoters who are social media promoters whatever and say hey for the next three episodes go out and do it you each get five percent of whatever comes streaming in and they just just plug in their their their node id and their percentage and they're part of the system yeah they help you build it it's a beautiful future we're envisioning right now and it's a it's here man it's here it's here it's a big affront to the entrenched incumbents that are very profitable very rich um very powerful i mean the media we've seen it this

year particularly whether it be covid or election season has been able to sway hearts and minds uh at a grand scale pretty easily convincing everybody in the lockdowns i think well well here here's my thinking on that thank you for bringing this up so after every uh national or international tragedy there's a period of fantastic innovation and artistic endeavors that comes out of it in fact podcasting itself the core technology was developed not long after 9-11 and a lot of people were not flying and and worried and concerned and were thinking about stuff uh the bubonic plague you know we had the renaissance we had all kinds of great thinking comes out of great tragedies manufactured or not isaac mutin was great

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So the two things we lost for sure in the Rona period is our media. And I think that universally, everybody, even if you have been mind controlled and believe everything that Herr Fauci says, and you're listening to this right now with your gloves on and your mask on and your goggles on under the sheets in your hermetically sealed chamber, you know that no one agreed on the same thing and that someone somewhere is full of crap and it can't just be Fox News. So people have lost their trust in media and that's universal across the board. I am convinced of that, but certainly a large portion of people are saying, hey, man, the media sucks. I think almost everyone agrees the media is bull crap. The other thing we lost is cash. And boy, we gave it up. Oh, we saw those TikTok videos of the money being disinfected in

Shanghai. Oh, my God. Dirty money. Dirty money. Don't touch it. I'll use my Venmo. I'll use my credit card. So we gave that up voluntarily. And that's the big one. That's why we see the great reset coming from the globalists. That's why we hear about the central bank digital coins. That's where we hear about Fed now, because they know, and this is who we're really up against, they know that when you control the money, you control everything. You control the votes, you control the laws, you control the people. I've had my money, my bank account frozen. Man, that's an unhappy experience.

So, you know, that should not be able to happen. But you should be able to circumvent all of these, all of these archaic systems. So the bottom line is what comes out of this period is opportunity for new money. I'll just call it new money, an opportunity for new media. And Hollywood is dead. There's no more productions. They can't produce. They have not been able to produce anything.

The streaming guys are low on content. There's never been more podcasts created, alternative media. there's alternative social media alternative to the quote-unquote mainstream this is a massive shift and what we may wind up with in america we may wind up with the party of twitter and the party of parlor and then we'll have these this other group this bunch of weirdos with guys like adam and marty who are the party of lightning and mastodon and podcasting and let just let us i I mean, podcasting has been around for 15 years, and 15 years, it'll still be here. Bitcoin is not going to go away in 20 years.

In 10 years from now, it's still going to be here. So we are building something that adheres only to our own mathematical agreements. And hopefully, I think Wyoming is already doing this. There will be states and countries who will become incredibly Bitcoin-friendly. and they will help understand how these new models work and so that I can treat my streaming sats as income and not as some investment, you know, like I'm holding an asset, you know.

So these things will change with... There's also smart, crazy fuckers like us going into government. You know, we'll find them. They'll find us. We will. Shout out Cynthia Lemus. Right, exactly.

well i so i teeter back and forth from like crazy optimist to crazy pessimist thinking the dystopian future is is imminent considering the powers that be that that want to make it so whether it be people davos the world economic forum with the great reset china the chinese communist party specifically trying to export their communist model to the rest of the world um the big tech companies uh the intelligence agencies central banks all have this entrenched um incentive to keep that that system afloat and operating as it has up to this point it's going to be a big fight i think well it's it's the it's the great reset versus the great awakening that's the cusp we're on right now yeah and it could get a huge if it works and

i i think we have a fourth act from this president he seems like the uh entertainment kind of guy i don't think he's going to go out with the you know we had the is he going to die from the rona oh no our hero makes it okay so that's what that moment where everyone's like oh my god is the movie over no so he's got a fourth act coming and it is my understanding and belief that there is a real effort to try and expose it all uh and it all will go back to uh china uh we'll go back to an entirely corrupt system of elites really and non-governmental organizations and all the stuff we know about um if that happens it will be a very big job to to tell the 60 70 percent of the world who are all in and believe this magical msnbc world that uh it's that's their lying eyes

and you know they've deceived them um if that doesn't happen uh i think it will happen regardless of whether uh president trump is re-elected or not the genie is out of the bottle sydney powell is a military lawyer she's not she that's when she's not part of the trump uh civil lawsuit yeah what's going on that i saw the trump campaign distanced themselves this morning what can we believe here well if you if you read the statement from the campaign versus the press the press okay the statement says uh here are the people on the president's uh legal team Giuliani, Jen, what's her name, and a couple others. Sidney Powell is apart from this team.

That is a legal requirement because she is a military lawyer, and as long as she stays separate from the civil lawsuits the Trump team is filing, the campaign, I would say, the Trump for re-election campaign, then she can actually do military tribunals and try people for treason. This is why she can't be involved in the civil side. So the media spins this as sources familiar with the president's thinking, which is my favorite phrase of all, because someone apparently knows what the president's thinking. Sources familiar with the president. I don't think the president knows what he's thinking.

Sources familiar with the president thinking, say, Sidney Powell was too crazy even for him. Well, first of all, no, Sidney Powell is not too crazy for Trump. That's for sure. Second of all, they just made that up. Because that has nothing to do with why she has been legally shown to be separate from the campaign. So anyway, I believe that that information will come out. And quite honestly, it would be very good for everybody, certainly in the United States, because we lead the world in this because we have one thing that the rest of the world doesn't have. And we're all packing heat.

so you know ultimate and that is a reason for that is a reason for the second amendment is to protect the first amendment in my book um the uh if biden uh is installed as president uh immediately it'll be build back better time and this is their slogan but it's the same slogan that all the elites use boris johnson uh macron uh the pope justin trudeau trudeau um the mark of the netherlands uh angela merkel of germany uh the prime minister of new zealand they all use the phrase build back better and that's for the the the grand scheme of keeping you home paying you to stay home unless we need you to come out and work on the great green jobs of which who knows what there will be as we completely uproot the entire world of its

oil economy, which, you know, my laptop's made of oil, my everything is made of oil one way or the other. You can't stop oil or fossil fossils and it will enrage people and it will light such an incredible fire. And we need to be prepared for that scenario as well, because people will come looking for the freedom networks the places to build uh build up with glory while everyone else is building back better that would be a truly great reset because people will wake up one day and say what just happened here because that's going to come swift and it's going to be relentless

we've they've already said the dark winter is coming all of this shit man they are so ready to pounce that it's not funny so that will be good for us too that would be a harsh way i mean i'd love for for daddy trump to fix it all and and hang the bad man up and we whoa good work daddy trump but we're probably gonna have to do more work uh to change the outcome for the next generation i'm 56 so i'm doing this for my kids i'm doing it for your kids you know this this is for uh for the next next go around you know and and at the same time what a what a great time to be alive and be a podcaster right born at born at this weird inflection point with communication and and money and it's

the great reset stuff it's like so insane they're not shy man they're not bashful no not at all you're not gonna own anything you're gonna love it happy you know the amazon drone will deliver have you ever read uh snow crash by neil stevenson i've not but that's like a very popular book in the bitcoin space that people make fun of me when i have to say no i've not read it yet well the cool thing about it is it's all coming true and i actually owned metaverse.com for a long time which i registered with neil stevenson's permission um because that's the virtual world inside you know in this book everything plays out on the metaverse which is kind of a virtual reality put the headset on you jack in and you know but you can actually get

high off of viruses that are in there and it's a very dangerous place and it's really the underground but what's interesting is that the streets are pretty much deserted the only people on the streets are people who have these cool hoverboard scooters which we now have they don't hover but they're scooters and uh delivery guys and that's the world that we are in right now we have we literally have dominoes delivery we we may pop out and hop on the electric scooter to go somewhere real quick and the rest is all done in the metaverse it's it's taking place it's happening yeah it's insane it's i mean do we want that world though should we should we be out in the world i have a nine month old son i look at him crawling around it's like do i want him to live

the metaverse or run around playing in the ocean surfing all that stuff well we know the answer of course yeah you know you you want your kid to to have free will and explore all of these opportunities before the child decides what's what their path is you know it's like um another thing that really got ripped away from us probably the most important is education boy it turns out this education system that's a piece of crap and it's not even the i mean the teachers okay they are what they are i have respect for teachers but the system is not letting them be teachers the system is giving them to teach parents are now seeing that on the zoom call what are you learning what what is going on here um the whole zoom thing doesn't work at all kids are not at all uh

engaged. There's really no schooling. And so this is falling apart. I think there's going to be a record number of homeschoolers and people setting up their own schooling opportunities for their own community. All that's being taken back, all of it. Yeah, that's incredible that that's happening because it is astonishing how terrible our public schooling system is considering the amount of uh dollar spent per student uh the the movement to uh for school choice corey deangelis from from the reason foundation was on this podcast earlier this summer he's really pushing school choice especially during lockdowns like if you're going to lock down the schools don't make the the citizens pay school taxes or if they do right that money back so

they can spend it how they see fit on their child's education um that's imperative like things like the common core like that's what like i have cousins who have had to do by the same people who brought you the coronavirus is bill gates is the same damn people right why are they intentionally trying to make us stupider like how why are you going to transition a whole country to common core so parents can't help out with homework like it doesn't make any sense well you said it all right an uninformed population is a compliant population yeah today's children uh sadly uh a large portion maybe majority are over socialized and under informed they just don't know they're headline readers brother they just they don't know

shit and they're all on amphetamines oh yeah and of course we have drugs for all the children whatever you need i mean this this is the i mean the we followed this so closely it's it's sickening it's sickening how sad these children are all they're over socialized so they're afraid to say stuff because i want to piss everybody off and there's or anybody off so they get depressed and then we throw them on to you know some meds throw them some adderall so they can function and and self-medicate when they need to function oh no it's despicable it's uh but you know well that's how we learn we we as humans we've made big mistakes in the past yeah well it feels like we're that's a thing I say on this podcast a lot.

Like, are we going to look back in retrospect and point at a date in the past at which you had like the fall of the American empire, as it was known in the beginning of the transition to something else. And it's hard not to look around and see, especially this year, see like a mass psychosis of nobody thinking critically or for themselves, um,

leading us down some terrible, terrible paths, potentially another lockdown here which is just it's mind-blowing seeing how people like some of the people i know just willingly like welcoming it be like oh we just got to do it vaccine's coming like it'll happen it's insane uh well clearly it's not everybody marty that's the good news true there's enough there's enough of us um and i think that that's many more than uh many more than we may know um and you know it's it's how all things change it starts somewhere with some people and i mean look at the look at the i like the tribe metaphor a lot because i

think we are media tribes you know so our two media tribes are now intersecting and what that means is that you'll see no agenda people talking to tftc people they're going to find each other they're going to share other podcast ideas with each other and then that tribe will come in and we have this patchwork of ideas and thoughts and theories call them what you want who tinfoil hat but we're allowed to have theories and think about stuff and strategize about the world um and that you know so okay joe rogan may not be the the same on this with the same openness of conversation but man he reaches a lot of people a lot of really great ideas come out on that show when he's just talking to somebody um you know through that we we got a huge influx of roganites

and they're spreading out and now roganites will come over to you and with that we build a base And this base is a base of knowledge and understanding, and it's codified in forever media, really. I mean, there's so many copies of the No Agenda show. I mean, it'll be around somewhere forever. Same with the TFTC. I mean, you know, these things will be referenced. We have show notes. We have articles.

We have blog posts. We have Twitter timelines. The information is there. So we're leaving breadcrumbs everywhere. People can pick up on it. you know okay so the mainstream media use a cia induced term which is conspiracy theorist so once we all get past that and understand that you know where the true conspiracy is or just say call it what it is you know if you think president trump is you know a russian spy well

that's a conspiracy theory and you're it's fine to have it and you didn't prove it so now fuck off now we have some other ideas i mean that's and so i'm not too worried about that i mean there's always going to be people who are just compliant um but all previous examples did not include the internet and that's what broke the elite messaging system is and we're all rogue and that's another part of deplatforming but you can't to me twitter facebook silicon valley google the dollar just bugs in our system brother we were the internet routes right around it we just route through a different node go a different pier it'll take us 20 milliseconds longer but we'll get to where we need to be okay now i'm feeling more optimistic and success once again well that you just compare

the two products right when you talk about long form podcasts versus the mainstream media uh model of delivering information like no agenda specifically is an incredible example of actually diving into um topics data's bits from the news and dissecting it and actually trying to get to a first principles understanding of what's happening from all angles which is just not not provided by the traditional media landscape and actually when from the most recent no agenda when john was talking about his worry about gen z listening to podcasts i think you were right that it's like an acquired taste later in life i gotta start listening to podcasts so it's like 19 or 20 like uh pretty consistently and i think it's an uh once you have access to the format that

podcasting provides and you can actually get better information you just naturally want that Like you look at the mainstream media and you're like, how can anybody watch this anymore? Right. So I think it's a better product, too, which should lead to more optimism is the long winded or the short winded. Well, yeah. And I always say if you listen to a podcast, I think in general, people at the end of the podcast feel better. They feel happier or they feel more satisfied or more curious or whatever it is. mainstream media in general has has figured out that it's easier to keep people angry and sad and mad to keep them engaged than it is to because it's an easy emotion to trigger you know it's

it's much easier to trigger someone's anger than it is to trigger someone's love because people you know there's stigma and embarrassment about showing affection or any this stuff so that's their model um and with more media channels they've they've segmentized and so you know the everyone pissed like it's like jack dorsey he said something really smart um i was listening to the senate the senate committee the hearing him and zuckerberg and uh this was about censorship and deplatforming and section 230 which they're clearly violating uh which i need by the way because the podcast index is protected by section 230 which means i'm not responsible for all the shit people put in their feeds i'm just hosting feeds um

now zuckerberg is obviously some chinese you know android that is you know running on a on a clear program he just you know whatever that guy is he's not human uh dorsey uh would a lot of people have hatred toward i respect him a lot and not for the least of course is for lightning labs and his investment in the infrastructure and moving this forward. But secondarily, he said, and I don't think a lot of people caught it, he said, well, I think the way to go in the future, he says, for Twitter, is I'd like to have a menu and people can choose from different algorithms. Now, I think this is a very good idea.

I would like to choose and say, today I want my anger algorithm and just piss me off so I can yell and shout. Or today I want my happy algorithm. Show me only happy puppies. because that's what social media is it's a drug it's triggering your you know your uh your receptors and your dopamine and this has all been clinically proven this is no no hocus pocus so you know they hold back likes and shit and when you're about to leave and then they throw them at you to keep you sticking there so you know these things are changing because they have to

because dorsey will lose out people will just go somewhere else they would they're all going to leave they will abandon the platforms they will abandon the the mainstream news uh these shifts i'm old enough to have seen it it's you know myspace would never go away by the way just you know myspace was the shit that was it tom freston who used to run mtv networks got fired at viacom for not buying myspace i mean need i say more holy shit you know aol aol america online was a revolution i mean this was great you had a graphical user interface um it was a safe place to explore online um when you uh when you uh when you logged in the first thing you heard was you've got mail you know all of this groovy stuff and then people started hearing about this

internet and they were talking to america online and say hey you know we wanted this internet can you hook us up to this internet thing and and we want to uh what is this thing called a browser and aol reluctantly after a while said okay people well if you really want that scary internet it's very dangerous on this side of the wall because you know they've got stuff like porn out there then here's a little browser man they opened that porthole and two years later aol was a dial-up company they had no business in the content business because people want it they want the scary alternative why do people go on crazy journeys why do they climb mountaintops why are they base jump why do they do dangerous drugs people love it so we're the danger side so we

always have the upside and i don't think we're stoppable you know i just don't think we're unstoppable they haven't stopped bitcoin they're trying to buy podcasting so fuck that spotify seriously fuck that i'm not afraid of you i don't think they'll be successful uh i don't think so either honestly i mean they have not been profitable with their music business so i'm not sure how they're going to do it with podcasting well i think the from a creator standpoint like i actually hand up i distribute my podcast via anchor which is owned by spotify and i actually know i know people on the anchor team that's from the nature of the gentleman to help me stop start this podcast where frank her a little bit particularly on the ad

side too because i actually worked at ad sales for podcasting at barstool sports for a little bit oh really okay so i know that the ad another rebel though another rebel you know it's like barstool sports is rebellious man oh very very dave portnoy is uh one of the most interesting characters i've ever had the pleasure of meeting and a great example of work ethic and just grinding towards a personal goal that actually wound up changing the world um in the content medium there but knowing the ad side from that experience of selling ads there it's it's lucrative um and so you can throw a lot of money at these creators but spotify we did some user research they asked me if i like if i would like whatever like think about like just

promoting exclusively on spotify as looking at the stats that they provide on anchor only five percent of my listeners listening via spotify so just as a creator like i wouldn't want to constrict myself to five percent of my audience right now well this is what uh spotify is learning and we can see that in their actions um i believe that the person who listens to spotify music on the app is not necessarily the same person that listens to podcasts a lot of people fill up their drive time or they're making the bedtime or walking the dog time by listening to music. And a lot of people, 100 million in the United States, listen to podcasts. The two are not necessarily the same person. And yes, you can buy several million people by forcing them to use the Spotify app

to listen to Joe Rogan. But as it turns out, you can't get those Joe Rogan people listening to the michelle obama podcast and here's the moves they made that tells me they're in trouble is the michelle obama podcast was exclusive to spotify and then all of a sudden they said oh it's so good this podcast is so good we're going to let any app uh play the michelle obama podcast because it's so good it needs to get out everywhere well no you couldn't fill your ad inventory you oversold that fucking thing you launched with johnson and johnson with dawn and uh ivory soap or whatever yeah you couldn't deliver the audience so now you need to put it everywhere else in order to fill the ad buy and that's why they bought megaphone because they

know they can't deliver the inventory in their sai their streaming ad insertion so they bought a company that does dynamic ad insertion for about 5 000 podcasts it's not not chicken feed um but that's so he can monetize outside of the spotify ecosystem so you knowing something about the ad business the way they're going to sell it is a blended cpm and it'll be by by 20 on spotify with the sai because then we have all the statistics we know exactly what marty's listening to we know where he's listening yeah we know what he's doing on his phone when he's listening we know if he's walking if he's lying down if he's sitting if he's in the car we know everything about marty so we're going to give and he loves bitcoin and we're going to give marty all the

podcasts that he loves and we we have a profile he has a nine month old kid he's uh you know they know all about you they got your credit card and everything and so that's a great buy and then they'll say now just average that out and take our the 80 in the dynamic world where we have less um well they it's called tracking but they call it uh what is the word attribution attribution thank you we don't have enough attribution yeah i mean you can't track people the way you'd like to outside of spotify and that's how they're going to sell it yeah and that's the crazy thing about podcast ads and the success of those ad campaigns it really is dependent on the particular podcasts like the download stats to me are all bullshit it's all about engagement post

i have not i've not uh we've not looked at our stats in a decade because we never had to because i don't care how many people listen i care how much money they support the show with so i can pay my rent that's been our only metric ever yeah and similarly here at tftc it's just been follow-up conversation on social media particularly twitter predominantly twitter um the freaks are very very vocal there's we have a bunch of parody accounts which is very flattering and actually hilarious as well um and that's yeah that's how you can you can look at the downloads but the engagement and the actual engagement with the content and follow-up conversation is what is success in my mind at least getting people thinking and talking about

Yeah, that's really what I like about the Sphinx chat environment is that, you know, it created this engaged interactivity within the podcast listening group or tribe as they describe it. It gave that immediately something that we don't really have in podcasting. um we have some of it in with youtube comments um and we have you know insta live and periscope where you can do some of that in a in a rolling chat or a youtube live but not like this where you can just be in there talking crap um and if you're playing the podcast you can boost stuff and then the podcast can check back on the timeline and see where those boosts came in and can make appropriate programming decisions about what people like or not i mean this has never been seen before this is a level of engaged interactivity which is the fucking mind-blowing

yeah and it's it's again it's incredible to be a part of you feel like you're a part of something in the early days and thinking the later days and like sort of containing or maintaining is probably the the better word here uh a an environment in the tribe where it's actually um it's not too crowded like say with the scales and we get hopefully luckily a thousand members in the tftc tribe like does that chat room get too loud and if so do you just increase the the minimum it just increase your stats yeah yeah no this is this is a wonderful eyes yeah incentivize better conversation right well it's the only way to control spam yeah it's the only way to control it and not even control but it's the only way so first you have the spam portion like and just for people who

don't know when you post a message in a sphinx chat there's two payments one is for the actual message which is typically one uh uh one satoshi and you stake an amount uh which i think the default is 50 or something and if you're kicked out of the group or leave or you know whatever else uh for bad behavior after a set amount of time an hour i think it is you can set whatever you want then you forfeit all those 50 cent 50 sat payments that you made but if you hang around and you don't leave the tribe i mean you can exit but not unsubscribe i guess you get your satoshis back after an hour. So it really is a great mechanism to not have people spamming because it would be too costly. Um, at the same time you can use those higher amounts. And I actually

caught myself. I was, um, who was the, uh, uh, who is the podcaster? What's her name? Hold on a second. Anita Posh. Anita Posh. Thank you. So who, who was also invited me on her show. I have not uh i scheduled that yet but uh so anita had like a the 10 000 satoshi joint fee now that's a dollar and i have dollars but i'm looking at him like i thought i caught myself thinking is it really worth this should i of course i did it but i'm like should i that's ten thousand satoshi that's a dollar should i really go into this am i gonna spend my time wisely this exercise i mean i'll I'll blow $10 for nothing, you know, without even looking. But once the value proposition was presented so blatantly to me and not free, you know,

so free is expensive because the free world gave us tracking and deplatformability and, you know, getting kicked off and services turned off and anything that's free turns out as damn expensive. so if you just want to pay for something straight up honest and you really have to think about it man it it fucks with your head and it's not about the it's it's you make choices differently well you lower your time preference right and time preference exactly right that's exactly it you have a collective societal lowering of the time preference i think you're going to see quality reverberate throughout everything we touch whether it be podcasting

um architecture is one i like to think about building less crappy buildings because you're you're thinking about the opportunity cost of yeah just just continuing to build this plastic crap it's great like so are you building on like the sound monetary aspects of bitcoin um sorry i know you're you're pretty bought in on the sound monetary aspects you're from the way i understand it yes of course i mean it's basically the reverse of everything that's being done and has been done in the fiat world for uh for centuries it's for decades for sure um so i i i understand it uh i see the proof because i saw it go from zero to twenty thousand um uh you know i've read the white paper obviously so i understand the philosophy behind it

and again the proof is just there for me that uh um it's a great place to fuck around with your money because there's mathematically uh the likelihood it will become worth more over time so you can just safely do stuff yeah bitcoin respects your time more than uh the u.s dollar yes and now it has a slow time it's slow but it's you know it's been three years since we uh we peaked at 20 000 look lo and behold uh it's back yeah but touching back to like you're building this podcasting and supporting the lightning network for your children and grandchildren i think i like to think i'm doing that as well for my son and his future children potential brothers and sisters and that's like how i think we need to put into context how bad we fucked things up

both from a monetary perspective like yeah giving up well i don't know we it up we we inherited a lot obviously yeah um it's pretty fun it's pretty up though well you know my whole family is a military and intelligent some kind of black sheep of the family and uh there's sufficient cia uh in my family and i like old cia not today's cia but the the old jump out of airplanes and save the world cia and they've made some really stupid decisions but i know that they did it from a place of patriotism uh and thinking that it was good and i would say the same in general for most of our leaders probably thought that this would be right and you know even the federal reserve makes decisions that they think will be right uh but they don't know i mean this is the big thing

It's like, no, you've never really been right. It doesn't, you know, the system doesn't really function that way. And interestingly enough, if you go back in time and go back to 250 years or so, you see that in general, the U.S. Constitution seems to kind of gel with human beings and human nature and human life in general, where you start from the, I mean, you can walk out on the street right now. and sadly you can ask 10 people and none of those 10 people will understand the bill of rights because they all think that you're given some first amendment right and some second amendment right so you can you you were given the right to free speech but most of these people have not read or have forgotten they read the constitution and the bill of rights is actually the opposite The Bill of Rights says that people have all these rights.

They are inherent, God-given, you know, that's what it says, God-given rights. And this is a document that tells you what the government is not allowed to do. But 10 out of 10 people you ask on the street will think that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights gave them those rights instead of limiting the government in the way they could infringe upon your God-given rights. This is the education system. If you teach your children to hate its country, the country cannot survive. And this goes back to your CCP comment. The Chinese Communist Party and its philosophy has been ingrained. They play long game into our finance system, our entertainment system, our sports systems, our educational systems, our medical systems, our religious systems.

look at what has happened with this particular pope and what he has uh succumbed to and allowed to happen uh in china and specifically but also um you know the the deals he's been taking the vaticans taking money from uh ccp so they have really done a good job of fooling around at the at the behest of their at the uh to the detriment of their own people by devaluing their currency keeping them in perpetual slavery to try and do the same everywhere um and the confucius institutes um have literally been teaching um very radical ideas that are incompatible with the core belief that you are a free sovereign individual and human being uh and that uh you have all these rights they have really taken this and flipped it around to

to where i see kids saying oh yeah no i'm a communist i'm i love communism it's much better than what we have now by the way those chanel earrings they look great you know it's uh so it's stoppable man it's stoppable but we we we're entertaining ourselves to death we're we're too much on the tls we're watching the the tvs you got to pay attention to our kids take them out to the woods throw ball around give the kid an old laptop and a linux distro and say install that kid and let me know when you're done that's what we need to do it's insane it's it's crazy how entrenched it's all been i mean it's a point where the harvard professor from earlier this year got arrested by the fbi for taking grant money from the wuhan yeah virology center that i was working

on uh the virus became covet 19 uh and that's well speaking of the bill of rights and like natural laws i like to say bitcoin is the greatest extension to natural law theory in quite a while since potentially the bill of rights and the fact that your private property rights in the digital world are protected by this protocol and preserved by this protocol um cannot be controlled by any one party which is extremely powerful especially thinking about property in the digital age thank god we have because it helps us claw back the most important aspects of private property which is freedom of association and to move your your money your capital which is your property mm-hmm well exactly exactly right um as is determined by the supreme court money is free

speech that's it it's the bottom line it's it's it's it's real free speech you know i can put my money where my mouth is these uh these expressions exist for a reason uh and you can and you're you're right you're completely sovereign in it and uh but this this trustless uh system is so beautiful for so much of society um you know so we we see that we don't need banks but you kind of don't need lawyers um you know having property agreements uh all of this stuff you just don't need the middleman and we've grown up to certainly in the united states we've become a culture of middlemen so it's kind of started with you know everybody has a lawyer which i think is a very bad idea um uh but also it's like you know we don't go over and anymore to the

neighbor's house and say hey ma'am you just turn the music down it's 11 30 no we call the cops or we call the community code or whoever the fuck we call we call 311 or 411 or 911 whatever we call we we've become uh very secluded from human interaction and uh always are looking for a middleman and uh it's scary for a lot of people you know who not to have a uh a trusted figure and like hey man i'm responsible for my money right now you know if i forget my my seed i'm fucked and then i did it but no one else can do that to me only i can so this is a huge responsibility yet it turns out man it's not really that bad compared to all the other ways i store my money this is a pretty good one you know the machine can blow up burn up and i can

retrieve all my coins tomorrow yeah bitcoin incentivizes extreme ownership take take care of your shit have it on lock be a good first principles thinker it's that's one thing bitcoiners get derided a lot for is being like bitcoin fixes this bitcoin fixes everything um but i truly believe it does fix a lot of things like just the we're not far off we're not far off no it forces you again to lower your time preference and that ultimately leads to better decision making arguably due to the fact that you're weighing opportunity costs harder well yes thank you thank you for pointing that out you opportunity costs but also risk. And if anything, we've gotten very bad at assessing risk. That's what this

period has shown us as well, is that people do not assess risk, are not capable of it, and are too trusting in other third parties to assess their risk for them. Whereas if you really think logically, if you do some study, if you look a little bit further than the headlines, you'll find out that your risk is actually lower and that you there's a lot of things you should and can be i can do uh dependent upon your own risk which is the risk to your own family your own health whatever these are things that the individual can determine uh but not when you're completely pampered from cradle to grave then you just go along like i'm compliant tell me what to to do yeah and this is ingrained in our system like the central bank completely removes risk

from the banking sector hey go make a bunch of terrible loans that eventually go bad we'll bail you out yeah misallocate all that capital nothing's gonna go happen to you we'll come if you're the airlines and you guys have to shut down like and you didn't save a cash balance don't worry we'll print money give it to you and that sort of mindset of hey here's a bailout risk doesn't exist we can print we can print it out of existence yeah it starts to permeate throughout culture and society better now now they have immunized money this is a beautiful trick this is your modern monetary theory it's like and in a way the the trump tax cut proved that you know you can print as much as you want doesn't make any difference shit's at zero percent it's what

it's going to be only way to go is negative enter the cbdc's and we'll just devalue your money right in front of your eyes you won't see it because it'll be you know 12 digits behind the decimal point but we're devaluing it slowly we're taking it away bit by bit it'll melt away and here's your here's your airdrop cbdc uh you have two hours to spend it you can only spend it on high fructose corn syrup there you go um or these approved vendors right it's coming yeah oh yeah well that's what ubi is going to be all about that's why you know they had in the in the original heroes act um they had the the digital dollar stuck in there man you've got bernie and aoc shilling for the uh banking for all act right now which is what this is about this is about the

FedNow and the Treasury coin, which is, of course, all part of the QFS, the off-world financial blockchain, which is based on XRP, and Ripple will become a trillion company overnight. You know, we've all heard this. Unlikely, but they totally want to do something. They're going to. They need to. They need to compete, right? Or at least on optics.

Yep. cbdc is at the end they really don't compete with bitcoin they can't provide the same utility that bitcoin provides there's no no no of course not of course not but we all understand why they're doing it i mean if i if i were president and that is a possibility obviously um any anybody can become president any age any background uh i would turn the treasury into a mining operation immediately start mining right away and you know what let's try and hook up some of those solar cells to make it work oh that doesn't work all right bring in a generator bring in some nuclear power damn it let's fire that shit up and let's get mining

well that's what outside of this podcast i work for a company called great american mining and we use our energy source to run our generators we use gas natural gas would otherwise be flared or vented on oil oh so you got free free gas basically very cheap gas very cheap power i visited the guys here and uh between houston and uh and austin there's a place that is right it's in the desert basically and it's a divide where we have a huge grid in texas so this is where the the eastern grid grid and the western grid kind of come together and so it's this huge transformer hub and these guys have 60 000 bitmain machines running and they're on a 750 megawatt pipe right as big as my head it's unbelievable i mean this the mining

that is going on is just it's incredible and i think that really helped me this is not too long go understand that bitcoin really is about energy i mean and that's very tangible and there's that max kaiser is much more maximalist at that than i am to see that big picture but when i hear him talk about it i'm like yeah he said you know to him he's he's already there he's like bitcoin is love i'm like i i think i understand what you're saying max but yeah i'll get there but yeah that's i think i think he's right you know this is a a real human effort that's taking place yeah and it's this was predicted actually so henry ford of all people in december of 1921 wrote an op-ed in the new york tribune basically making his case that making the case that we

should move from a gold standard to a currency standard backed by kilowatt energy expended really a lot of hours of energy expended yes i'll show you the clip uh i'll show you a pdf of the the tribune article after we finish this up but so this is something and then after him buckminster fuller in the 70s or 80s said something very similar like if you want world peace if you want to end all wars you have to move from a currency backed by a sovereign nation to a currency backed by energy and that's bitcoin allows that to happen now like these ideas been around for over a century now at this point yet there's been no technology that could successfully implement them due to the fact you can't coordinate time and geographically the

latency of the information traveling uh is too much to to solve that problem without bitcoin's proof of work to prove mathematically that something happened um at a certain that something happened right um and so it's pretty crazy we're getting to that currency oh we're there yeah we're there obviously i mean i i saw them ramp up or shut down power based upon the pricing it's like okay yeah mining's mining's uh not enough margins shut them down shut down 10 000 machines well that's it's interesting though because that's actually one of the biggest things that people throw at bitcoin as something as a reason why it should be shut down is this energy consumption and so that's one thing we've really been trying to get in front of

of a great american mining specifically is that narrative that bitcoin is boiling the ocean it's like well actually if you look at the type of energy that's being consumed would otherwise be wasted stranded um or or literally set on fire and sent into the atmosphere so you might as well i like i like it because it uh it demands nuclear energy it demands it it's gonna incentivize us to get to type type one civilization and you know backyard reactors are a thing now now you can power a neighborhood with a single reactor uh they have no waste they actually eat their own waste i mean this is the new reactors thermonuclear reactors have they're so advanced over you know this bull crap that we have been taught in school that it's dirty it's going to kill you uh the

plant will explode i mean there's all this stuff that has been negated with the technologies so we just need to get there it's just people have you know different reasons for wanting to keep fossil fuels and different reasons for wanting to go with so-called renewables but none of them have to do with the sound economics of the world really you know we we need fucking power baby we are power hungry so nuclear is in my mind still the best technology for it uh the cleanest uh the easiest to do uh it's expensive to build uh but man your your your power to weight ratio or whatever that's called is is pretty good once you get it up and running yeah the power density is pretty insane um yeah and if it if a successful

nuclear implementation is able to drive bitcoin mining profit margins uh higher then yes it will happen because bitcoin sucks in everything around it yeah i think we have to get there at a certain point it's just the complexity will be there and we'll just need more machines more power um it'll have to happen i kind of like that you know the demand will either kill us or we'll get our shit into we'll get our house in order we'll create dyson spheres we'll go we'll go put them around other stars there you go when you collectively lower

society's time preference you're able to do great things like this now yeah I think I think it happens I think we'll get to nuclear I think it starts in the oil and gas industry literally the profit that can be made with that gas by consuming it to mine bitcoin

instead of just flaring it is orders of magnitude higher and it's undeniable so we're pretty convinced that the oil and gas industry is going to start plugging in bitcoin mining infrastructure once that's built out like the order of operations is all right we've got this figured out now let's get a nuclear then you start looking at space yeah i i concur absolutely well it is uh surreal to be on the front lines with you considering how ingrained you are at the Lightning Network now with Podcasting 2.0.

And again, I want to really stress that Lightning Network, I don't want to say it was a solution looking for a problem, but it was looking for like a perfect product market fit. And I think this podcasting application off the bat to industries or technologies, if you will, with really robust open source communities and passionate communities with a very freedom-focused mentality is just a match made in heaven.

I think I'm really excited for what's going to come forth from all this. Me too, man. And I am happy to be in the front-line trenches with you and with all the freaks and anyone else who wants to join in. We're a very fun-loving crowd. um and i am just delighted to be uh to be in a place where i'm meeting all these cool people with uh with very open minds and different perspectives but a lot of ideas a shitload of knowledge i'm just getting up to speed on on everything uh i can see a lot of people who've

been around a couple blocks on tests and i see the enthusiasm for this and without a doubt you are definitely you are pushing this very hard and it's highly appreciated uh as is the work of all the developers because that's really you know for me i feel like i'm a kid in the candy store you know i i get to dream and then a whole bunch of guys and girls sits down and and makes it work and you know so that's paul and that's evan and that's uh uh but it's also roy over breeze and his team who are working on it and it's uh it's martin and david and and csb and all these people who are developing stuff over at podcast index uh it's you know it's a james cridland who's writing for pod news i mean it's just so many beautiful people who are making this happen and uh we all

have our own little battles that we're fighting but yes we are in the trench together and i see us move uh up a trench every every couple of days and like holy crap here we are and again i'm looking at my log and i just see streaming satoshi's every day of every minute uh every hour and i know that the machine is there we've we've done it we have created the machine now we need more apps we need more podcasts and the rest will come because podcasting is a marketing machine you know you talk to your listeners uh they're going to tell their favorite podcast because they listen to you and five other podcasts they're going to tell them yo bro get lightning enabled they're going to do it they'll talk to their audience you know just it's a it's

a matrix that goes very very fast um witness the rise and fall of patreon that went in a couple of years so we just want rise no fall uh and i think we can there's nowhere to go but up i think the model uh of streaming straight to app developers and content creators is is very uh appeasing to both of those audiences particularly so where can we help out if i'm sure there's some podcasters listening to this some listeners of podcasts listening to this obviously if you're listening to this you listen to podcast how can people who want to help out specifically should they get good mastodon website yeah there's a couple things so first of all podcastindex.org is the main

website for what i'm doing for what we're doing with with our group and our developers and everyone around that and from the menu there you can if you're a developer you can get keys your api keys you can also just search podcast there and play them there if you want we have a page now with with apps that are using some of the new functionality. And I would say the best way to support right now is to get, I don't think the Sphinx app is in the app store just yet. It's still on test flight. But as soon as that comes out, you know, grab a Sphinx app.

They'll probably charge you a couple bucks for, which will be, you'll have some Satoshis in there to play with because they have a node. You know, they're setting up a full node. and just join some tribes, man. Join the TFTC tribe, join the Podcasting 2.0 tribe, whatever else you want. Tribes.sphinx.chat is where you can find other tribes

and stay tuned because, you know, every podcast that is switched on to this is going to be talking about it. And, you know, we're not far away, I think weeks from a couple of standalone apps that are key send outbound, so they don't need a node. and we can just deploy a million of them.

And as long as people are willing to fill it up with some Satoshis, then we've got a system. We have the system, then it'll really be, we just need to add gas. Just, we need to pour fuel on the fire, it's there. So propagate the formula, tell everybody about it and let everybody know Podcasting 2.0 is coming and everybody's welcome, all can participate

and everybody can stream value in all directions. hell yeah and the bitcoin podcasting uh world is is vast so you're going to have a bunch of podcasters who are also bitcoiners giving early user feedback which is going to be even better for this so hell yeah adam thank you for paving the way to make this conversation possible um to to push content mediums and freighter monetization into new worlds, new models that are imperative moving forward, I would argue. Thank you for all that. Really an honor to have two hours of your time to have this conversation.

It was a pleasure. Marty, it's my pleasure. And thanks to all the freaks for sticking with it for two hours and listening to us. I really appreciate what you're doing. you are definitely a driving force in this so know that you are on the on the front lines pushing this and it's uh it's great to see it and i really appreciate it and uh just to remind everybody they're saying that all hell is gonna break loose and you're gonna need a bitcoin that's all you need to know people peace and love freaks