TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #355: A different approach to lightning micropayments with Jared Nusinoff

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Jared to discuss how Mash can help content creators earn more with lightning. They also discuss if lightning can fix ads, if Nick Szabo micro-transactions thesis is false and just how early everyone is building on lightning. Follow Jared on Twitter Follow Mash on Twitter Earn more through lightning on Mash Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Upstream Data CrowdHealth TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

what's up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce this rip 355 of tftc great rep but it makes me very bullish uh stuff that's going on the lightning network is insane and there's very competent builders coming to the bitcoin lightning stack to to bring consumer usable products to market. I sat down with Jared Nusinov from MASH to talk about what they're building and a bunch of other things.

Very stimulating conversation. Hope you guys enjoy it. Thank you. This trip was brought to you by our good friends at Unchained Capital. We're draining the exchanges, freaks. Get your coins off of a centralized exchange and into a two or three multi-sig vault

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uh these things are very durable upstream's building with miners in mind they know what they're doing very high quality product uh go to upstreamdata.ca tell them the tftc sent you if you're going to get a hash hut last but not least this rip was brought to you by our good friends at join crowd health, excuse me, crowd health, you go to join crowd health.com slash TFTC. You'll see the special deal that we have running with them, which is if you use the code TFTC, you're going to get your first six months of payments for your crowd health community down to $99 a month. It's a significant discount. What are we doing here? Crowd health is an alternative to health insurance. It's not health insurance. So it's a community funded healthcare. So what

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and see how it all works. Enjoy this rip, freaks. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, 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.

up there I came back for this week I'll fly back Sunday then I gotta go to Lafayette next week what's in Lafayette oh is that the is it the conference or yeah the Baltic Honey Badger conference should be a good one

I went in 2018 it was a very high signal this is it's like it's like Amber Alert knows when we're going live car I just get random I was in Latvia maybe I was probably there around the same time but didn't know anything about Bitcoin like effectively um traveling but the Baltic states like Latvia Estonia and Lithuania

are awesome they're beautiful yeah I mean Riga where the conference is it's a very interesting town because it's like uh you're quite essential European brick paved road with like very tight roads you can walk through and then it's just mixed in with like brutalist soviet architecture just like a hodgepodge of communist and capitalistic uh architecture yeah it's uh and also just the timing of the develop like development for it a long time ago i did a bunch of studying on like how different cities evolved and like whether there's like rivers or it's an island or this or like the distance to get like fresh milk and eggs it's like oh we had a wheel borough city could expand this far this is the size of the streets we can do a horse carriage

now we're going this way and so like you look at all these cities and it's it's so interesting or like why la because there's no like rules on what you can build anywhere yeah so just full sprawl that's something i uh i got really into a couple years ago we had chuck maroon from strong towns on and he wrote the book strong towns basically diving into the subject like how do you build a strong town from the literal physical design of the city and then utilizing that that space to eke out as much revenue as possible per square foot and in the beginning of strong towns the book that he wrote he's from minneapolis and he essentially described how minneapolis became to be a city it was just a bunch of lumberjacks hopped off a chain

started cutting down trees and then they had to build housing for themselves and they built a post office then a bank and then it turned into minneapolis i didn't know that about minneapolis i'm just thinking about it's like it was probably the st lawrence water waterway which is like why toronto ottawa montreal they're all sort of the same waterway with the lock system but then it's also where all the farms were and then we just decide to pave over all the good to topsoil it's like the yeah that's the the rot of fiat it destroys money but then destroying the money destroys the incentive to build strong towns

and build for the long term. Yep. And drives regulatory capture. Yes. We're finding that out very aggressively right now. It's like, are we live?

Yeah, we've been live for like five minutes. Oh, fair enough. I had no idea. We like to ninja launch it on people. There we go. I was like, I was waiting for the go ahead.

Yeah, car. Car sneakily went like this. Oh, I had no idea. He'll just do that. car will just sneak in on you if he sees we're having a conversation he's like alright we're going live cool alright

if you guys don't know I'm sitting down with Jared Nusinov from MASH what's going on dude you said you didn't get you weren't in Bitcoin in 2018 yet I was not I had I want to say probably three touch points with Bitcoin

before I really like dug in and looked at it beyond just the surface level of what is this thing There was once in like maybe 2012 when I was at Google and another product person came up to me. He's like, have you seen this Bitcoin thing? Maybe it was 2011, 2012, something like that. What do you think about it? And I like to believe that I was smart enough to say, I don't know anything about this.

So I can't really comment, but there's something probably interesting here. Or maybe something to that effect. I'm probably giving myself way too much credit. And then it was maybe even like 2017 when it was ripping up. And I'm just like, and it's like taxi drivers are talking about it to me. I'm like, okay, this means FOMO. i still don't know what this is but it's also been around for this long so there's probably something here and then um i actually left tech for a few years was running sort of a real world

style travel business and that got i don't want to say pandemic right uh international long-form travel in canada cross provincial borders already tons of regulatory capture and then i just spent i'm like okay i'm gonna spend the next like three to six months figuring out anything i can about all these things i've heard about that i haven't had time to really dig into and then it was sort of once i read about um really dug into what bitcoin was i was actually like i'd go on like walks for three hours and listen to tftc like lots of old different things with different topic like different uh guests and a bunch of other stuff it was reading you name it books across bitcoin started messing with all the lightning apps that existed then and it was like it was a holy shit

moment this is all i'm working on for the rest of my life and then you mapped it back to all my different experiences with like how different content was monetized the trustworthiness the quality of it all the incentive structures that drive a lot of the behavior and a lot of reasons why certain things exist things exist in the way that they are and um sort of went down the journey of now just building mash yeah and it was sort of like just like every single time i just like you hit one piece like oh we can do this so we can do this oh, this means that, and it sort of fell into place. Yeah, so MASH is, for you freaks who aren't aware,

it's a product that I'm very interested in because I've been toying around with this stuff too, which is monetization of content using the Lightning Network on the web. And you guys have built a pretty robust, how would you describe it? Because you got wallet infrastructure, you got API calls, it's essentially making it

so you can monetize any type of content. Yeah, it's like... And beyond content, it's bigger than content too. well we want to so there's like the like what's our guiding principle is sort of we want to remonetize the web and then we want to do that with sound money and lightning because it also has the best technical properties and monetary properties to be able to do that so programmable scalable trust minimized censorship resistant sendable anywhere around the world it has clarity in terms of what it is in the space and there's embedded density like you can use bitcoin in a

variety of different ways everywhere so you have this all interoperability um so that's sort of why bitcoin enlightening um and in terms of our service offering so you can look at it today so like so what do we want to do we want to enable anyone to charge for anything to earn their value properly and so that's like sort of like an abstract concept and what does that mean so let's say you're a creator a mini app developer you want to build a platform for for really like a marketplace for sharing content for communities you name it online we want to say hey we want you to be able to charge for all these different types of experiences whether it's a content reveal of something special whether it's voting for something what it's to whether

it's to send a message anything and then make it easy for anyone to be able to pay and earn both ways so allow a consumer to say oh i now have a wallet i can use in the site i trust this site i trust and can control my money and um and i can take and move it out in and out wherever i want and then make it the easiest way possible to do this for different people so oh i'm a consumer i don't have lightning how do i get it buy a wallet get some lightning and then you can load it up with any different platform or service back into it oh i don't want to use mash wallets for x y and z send it out and then if i'm a creator it's like here's 10 different pre-built things you can use there'll be a lot more let anyone build things that can use the platform like completely agnostic

from us in many ways and just help facilitate that relationship so we're many ways like wallet provider a coordination of like i'm gonna say content payment system between parties and then a platform to build on top of it's sort of the ways i'd like to describe it yeah i mean considering you took the deep dive a few years ago that have come out and built this product that's pretty impressive i mean like you said you've dedicated your life to it is this is mash building on stuff that you're working on when you're at google or in the tech sector what were you building there so um actually that's part of the reason why i left tech for a few years is google i joined in 2010 it'd been like i think it was april and i joined on the strategy side

because i was a consultant for a few years at a school i'm more of a business background than technical background i have done technical things but i'm not a software developer um and but after that i did a bunch of work in display ads so location formats tracking targeting across the stack so it's like what do you want to do it's like let's add more zip codes can we legally do it sure okay like that doesn't feel so good but you can target ads better for certain segments um and then it was make like ad formats that work for your local gardener your local plumber how do they actually buy an ad that works for them so it doesn't go to like one big roll-up private equity company that bought all of them and now becomes the middleman on the middleman right

google's the best middleman of all time let's just layer on another one that leverages google and take all the money from people who are doing the actual work who are producing the productive members of society and so we're trying to help them do it directly which is very very hard problem to do um and solve not just technically but also from a sales and go-to-market perspective but I guess what I learned there, sorry, that was a long rant on that. But what I learned in that piece was all of the places these ads were showing the quality and content. Like I experienced it from my personal hobbies and interests, but it's like, Oh, it's like, we're just going to go on SEO farm site, toss these ads in people are not getting quality content, but that's how they're

monetizing because they can trigger SEO and get all the volume. So it sort of leads to a corruption of content online. And then from there, I spent a bunch of time doing mobile apps for Google fiber. so a lot of consumer experiences to understand how people understand and use products like i'd go literally i think i actually did it once in austin probably 2016 where i like would go to people's houses and watch them use our apps and how they use them on their own or how they use them to engage with the tv so it's a tv product and and just like just understanding how people think and when they use products and what they want and definitely what we're building at mash builds on top of that but i'm learning every single day um like beyond that like you have to know your

specific use case your specific users it's there's no like general concept it's all like what can you do for these specific people that's amazing yeah and how do you think based on your experience with the ad world in the product world at google now building mash and leveraging bitcoin and lightning you mentioned like the seo farming and the perverse incentives of the ad model how does bitcoin enlightening switch these incentives uh over across the experience on the web in your mind so if you start i'd like to start with the problem is that to make money online there's sort of let's just simplify it into two models you have ads which means you need millions of users to show up to your site and it generally means you need to break uh like sort of break the algorithm for

seo you have to find a way to beat it and people at large companies are spending tons of time to beat that um and you still have a challenge if it could be niche or could not relate to as many people and then it just won't monetize that way so the alternative is let um let's charge for it right let's do subscriptions let's do prepay let's let's bundle it and that makes sense for lots of things like if you can do that for certain products i think that does make sense now there's always this concept of freemium or try before you buy and you can if you have money and so now what does bitcoin provide us with lightning you have money in a site in a website in an app that's not just um enter a credit card it has to be twenty dollars it's i can stream five

cents or a hundred sats whatever your unit of account for how you think about it but you now have money in it so it's um let's say let's look at a parallel it's think of like the arcade okay so into a lot of arcades this summer okay the original arcade is like you have quarters in your pocket you put your quarters in the machine you play the game you leave and you're happy use your money you go buy you know some barbecue down the street whatever you want i'm just thinking of barbecue because we're staying right near terry's and my my entire room is literally just smells like a brisket and i love it but i'm also hungry all the time and eating way too much um and so now this model is also in many ways has been sort of been proven

online in a sort of roundabout way um if you think of like the app store originally with with ios like people wouldn't buy an app for 10 bucks because you didn't know what you were gonna get you'd look at the reviews you can't trust the reviews right you look at the commentary online majority of the time you can't really trust that too because of those perverse incentives with ads and um and then they came up with this concept of you know we'll give you the game a bunch of it for free and then you have to buy tokens in the game you can use it in the game it's sort of like in-app payments for games right and but because the reason why i worked for games was you could get a minimum love for that thing and they'd also trick you with like casino style strategies right

which is which isn't good there's always unintended consequences um with these things um but now you could say oh i'll load up and i'll use ten dollars with the credits and i'll use it there's still a purchase commitment barrier but now instead i'm just like oh there's this one really amazing how to guide of how to run a lighting node connected to my phone in a self-sovereign way like here's how to use zeus here's how to get a gun number roll up here's how to use my node and you could actually earn whether it's 20 cents ahead 25 cents ahead that is so much more than you're making on ads already. And you don't have that person being like, Oh, am I going to buy this course for 80 bucks? Um, because that's a lot of what people have to have to do today. So you can at least

create a lot more people that are earning their value and sort of unlock a lot more quality content online that will have their own discovery engines based on that. Because if you know what people are paying for, you generally know it's good and that can help people discover it. And word of mouth will actually help a ton. Like people go to sources because they are trusted, not through a search engine. Like you look at the results on Google right now, they're, they're not good they're bottom paid for yeah no i mean google's i know you used to work there i don't want to denigrate your former employer but it's completely captured by those who are willing to spend and gain seo um to their advantage yeah yeah it's it's always a battle

back and forth but when it depends on what they're focused on right it's like vertical verticalized search which they have trouble they've had trouble being able to enter or buy companies do it's like why why did they buy a company to get all the flight data right and so or knowledge graph there's really good information there but you want to find like you know you get in let's make so you get into barbecuing like right like i've been messing around with barbecuing i'm not just saying that because i'm in texas like i got i have a weber smoky mountain like trying to find the right sources to be like should i do the for ribs the 3-2-1 method or whatever it is it's like uh maybe that's a bad example but i'm a big fan of the 3-2-1

method myself uh oh you've got some critiques i don't know i haven't perfected my method i tried it once and it was like i'm like this is too much work i'm gonna just go out and spritz no it's yeah no it is i mean so diving down the bitcoin rabbit hole so that's like one topic of contention in the content monetization via lightning network space like we do it on this podcast, Podcasting 2.0. Freaks stream us anywhere from five sats to a couple hundred sats per minute to listen to this. And this comes back to the concept of Nick Szabo's microtransactions and micropayments. He doesn't think that that's actually a scalable model or a viable model in the long term because the mental cost of trying to calculate those

micropayments on the go. It doesn't make sense. I think this may be one of the few areas or topics that Zabo covered that I may disagree with just because I've seen it personally work for our business and the content that I'm producing, whether it be the podcast via Podcasting 2.0 or the newsletter, which we've recently put up a 25 cent paywall for some of the newsletters. If I write more than three anything after three in a week will come with a 25 cent sat paywall um and people are paying it but is that maybe i'm not completely convinced that zabo's wrong but i'm beginning to believe he may be wrong there um and i'm trying to gauge am i i'm a bitcoin focused media company we've been experimenting with the lightning network for

four years now which is hard to believe uh is it just confirmation bias bitcoiners are coming to our content and spending because they want to support us um and therefore they may be like it may not be signal in terms of the model actually working out may just be a bunch of enthusiasts interacting with us but once this gets to the broader um gets beyond the bitcoin bubble and into the broader economy does it make sense at scale in your opinion i have a few i want to i want to comment a few things there um first of all i'll start with like what you're saying there just is a community that really enjoys your content that wants to contribute for it and it doesn't have to be bitcoin so you're saying that's a proof point

for any community-based experience where there's interaction engagement i think so whether it's bitcoin or not that might be some of the experimentation to try lightning the first time but continuous engagement that's what that's what you all are doing um and i don't think that's bitcoin specific and the other one is i always always for some reason i always call it nick sabo i guess it's nick sabo i've never really heard it sabo sabo goes there's tomato tomato but i've had this like i've had this actually article right up because i was asked about this i think in the like in some of my first pitches or conversations with this well nick nick sabo says micropayments don't work i sort of wrote up this like a skeleton of an article just basically like

nick sabo's wrong and here's his points and here's exactly why and i sort of like have it sitting there i'm just not a writer and um end up not being top of stack so i think nick sabo's wrong and if you look at the article and i'm gonna probably butcher it because i haven't read it in probably a few months um there's a few points he makes about mental transaction costs one is um like the text messaging problem like how much am i going to spend to enjoy all this stuff i don't know this is too hard okay i'm not going to do it like usage based pricing without a cap sort of like a pre-subscription and that's solvable with ux right you can say after this amount of money, then the rest is free. Um, that's, you know, and that takes away that mental

transaction cost. The other one is, oh, the cost of spending. Like I'm trying to think of the example he did where there was like inch was an insurance rates or it was like data usage per minute. And people can't like, it was like comparing electricity rates and like usage based pricing versus not and how people don't change their habits with like, are they going to use the dryer in the morning or the afternoon on different pricing? Right. That's a very complicated decision for small amount of money with a lot of math, but saying, you know, in sort of trying to make those decisions all the time, or like, am I going to pay 25 cents for this one thing? You can solve that with a concept of a budget being like, okay, just pay every single

time until I hit this certain amount of money. And then you still have that one mental transaction of yes, I'll pay for these things up to this amount. It's a higher amount, but you get the benefit of knowing if i don't like this i won't keep on paying because i won't use it i think that's foundational here because you're still making that same big decision but you have the benefit of knowing you're not committed your money's not gone you're not saying oh you know that huge commitment barrier of 20 bucks to subscribe per month for something you have to really really like it but instead of being like hey it's uh 10 cents an email i send you i'll send you max five a week and after x amount then it's free and like i didn't know the math didn't

didn't work there but so i think he's wrong i think it's solvable with ux it's it's been proven in in games already um what are some of those examples like think about buying like um i think like candy crush tokens like buying little mods for 10 20 30 cents you're you're buying information you're buying add-ons um buying like the a plate or an mlb the show to like not have to grind for like 80 000 hours like that's infeasible you have all these little payments that are that are working yeah what do you think this does i mean i think i agree too i mean zebo his content is obviously foundational to a lot of the thinking of bitcoin as a robust robust distributed system and the incentives involved in social scalability yeah when it

comes to micropayments i think just from my experience alone i think the listeners of this podcast and the people interact with the newsletter are proving that wrong in real time yeah and it's also this was written so long ago and where the internet isn't doesn't exist in the way it does today and so to think of the cases of like oh all this community generated content they have like 50 million 100 million people creating creating all these things online all these mini apps all these tools like seeing where you would apply this model it's like you could say maybe some some of his concept like applying it to like email services or like api usage maybe it doesn't apply there because you're going to spend a large amount of money anyway so

you don't need like programmatic programmatic streaming money and so um like i would say he's wrong like maybe he's right in some of those applications he was talking about but i think he's wrong in where things have have gone with how content is distributed like what is it was it dickens who was periodicals originally like it was serialized content like like every week this has happened before it's just we're sort of shifting back to an unbundled the world yeah what does that mean for the content economy if you will what is this going to enable for smaller content producers for larger content producers do you think it creates a higher quality content overall on the web do you think um it allows makes it easier for people to turn

their side gig into their main gig 100 i think it flips everything um not everything sorry that's such a bold like grandiose statement everything will change um no uh i think it unlocks a lot more people to create really high quality content that's about the value they're providing that's trustworthy and earn a living by doing it. It's really hard to find a niche that you can actually do that. Um, and I think this is a way to do that, or at least be an add on to, you know, whether it's not the content, whether it's like an interactive or engaging experience, like you could say, um, I'm trying to think of a few examples, like you, like there's lots of little fun things that people can do. Like, let's say you're a certain type of creator. Like I'm going

to change my avatar to one of these five things. You're going to vote with sats half goes to this charity the other half goes to me and the winner at this time and like people can vote like with any amount you've never been able to like that's a different form of spam spam control it's interaction spam control but for like a purpose and so you can do all these new things that you've never been able to do before that can drive i think community relationships and engagement that aren't just like pay 20 bucks like to get a shout out right like i think people can still do still do that and you can do less of it but you can do like you can do a lot more yeah so how how does it work from the content creators perspective integrating mash into their platform so like

we have our site hosted on ghost we're using that many people are going to be using wordpress some unfortunately will be using drupal other cms's yeah is it cms specific can it be any type of a site? Is it just a code injection? What's it look like? If JavaScript works, it will work effectively. So you take 10 lines of code, like you create an account with us, take 10 lines of code, copy and paste in your site,

and now you have a wallet that any MASH user that has money anywhere, it just is usable now in the site. They don't have to download anything, they don't have to do anything. And if they don't have Lightning in there already, they can just, you know, like we said before, they can buy a wallet, or they can load and send Lightning in with

an invoice. And they can always send it in out yeah um and then you say let's say you want to wrap certain pieces of content and have it paywalled you can just like we have little web components that you can wrap and you basically put your content in there you can use an sdk that says like if you're doing server side content that pulls it down and it's there's a bunch of basically pre-built things you can design and structure how you want so you could like we have a we have a few products like on the donation side so boosts i think it's interesting where people just clicked it every single click is just a five cent donation and you can spam click it and then you find out which articles which content

people actually like the most so you can learn what people are um contributing to you optionally sorry one second i'm gonna have something in my throat you're what no it's fine i had uh i had a coughing fit on the episode that we did yesterday it was quite embarrassing um not saying that you're being embarrassed right now no i'm just trying to think of like it's like an itch anyways um so let's say you want to have like a behind the scenes youtube video like unlisted youtube video or audio or hosted anywhere doesn't matter where it's hosted we can wrap we'll be able to have if they have an embeddable player we'll create a wrapper around it where you have to pay and then it starts playing um we have a yeah there's a bunch of other things that that are

coming down the line sort of like like a community tip jar just copy and paste it create your thing or um those voting widgets will create a generalized voting one where you could tag and have like votes on different things and you have different leaderboards so there's lots but it's like to integrate it you can create basically be like i want to charge this for lightning articles this for lightning videos charge this for bitcoin deep dives charge this for chapters and how to go ahead create your pricing scheme decide if you want to give a certain amount free per month decide if across your site after people spend this amount you want to make it free and then you just copy and paste a few snippets of code where you want them

and that's it oh yeah and then you guys are managing all the lightning liquidity on the back end yes yeah so we're handling all of that our platform is built in a way um to do like be bring your own node across everything um but making that like infrastructure ready and actually really usable is a little bit tricky um but there's yeah so it's we're working on it um so when you say bring your own node you're going to allow users to so so right now like um we're managing all the nodes and you can like let's say let's say you earn 100 bucks with match day okay you could just go in and send it out we'll have automatic withdrawals but if we connect it to necessarily your node um making that work like that's possible like we've shown demos we could do

that we can actually do consumer node like like let's say you know cars paying you like on the site we can manage that you both have your own nodes they're unconnected we don't touch anything we're just coordinating sort of the payment system um but that like do they have freebies did they reach the max amount what's the price of this sort of talking to everything to manage all the invoices like we can technically do that but having that infrastructure ready right now is pretty tricky um and so yeah so long story short is we're managing all the nodes but we have a pathway to get there it's not a big lift like we we can we have demos of it just to show it off like it's so people wanted to do that like we we could do it it's just making that for like anyone can do

that you can imagine what happens if the nodes down what happens if payments don't work what happens if um there's like liquidity issues that we can't like make sure are working or then we can have like backup systems that we'd have to build out but it's all it's it's not it's not uh we have the problem are like solved we just haven't built built it in a production ready way yeah so eventually people will be able to bring their own node and just use mash as sort of like an invoicing and um a relationship manager of sorts like we're like a payment like like a payment coordinator hell yeah and then are you guys as a company focused on accumulating as many sats as possible as well um so i guess there's there's two answers this personally for me yes

in terms of like company balance sheet. Is that more of the question? Yeah. Like, are you guys... Like, do we have stats on the balance sheet? Yes. Do we have to make sure that we can match like the denomination of our expenses

and not sort of screw up our runway in case something catastrophic happens? Yes. No, I know. So it's really like what percentage allocation and then what runway do we need and are we comfortable with? Yeah, but are you guys getting stats flows

from the activity oh yes users yes yeah yeah that's we don't it's not there's a few things right well we don't want to charge like oh it costs this amount to implement it's like anyone can sign up and just start using it um and we you know and we also want to help users get onto the system to be able to contribute as quickly as possible and so you have this funny thing of okay so buy a wall for 15 bucks and we're going to give you 15 of bitcoin at this exchange rate at the exact exchange rate, right? So that you have the exact amount, right? That's your bonus for being, you know,

being an early consumer at MASH. So we make sure that you can get it access. But now if you're like, oh, transaction costs are this, this is that, then like people won't sign up. So we'll eat all the transaction costs, which can be like five plus percent, which isn't a lot, right? What's 5% on 15 bucks?

It doesn't matter if it's one user, but if it's 5 million users, then it starts adding up. So we were just trying to get it so money's flowing through the system. we'll take a percentage and get as many people using it and spending money online as possible yeah what's that onboarding process for both users and content creators or consumers and content creators been like so far um like in terms of like friction points or yeah like how does how are you guys getting the the concept of bash out there number one and then getting people to

adopt it what's that process been like so um i'd say the first year is mostly i'd say product discovery calls like me talking to people in a variety of spaces same with other people on the team and making sure we could build up the infrastructure to do a lot of these things in a way that would work with them um so that was a there was a team of five of us right a designer three engineers um and myself um recently we've we like expanded the team um as we're getting as like the production as like we're now production ready and we now can integrate and have all these things work and be like easy and not like really really hard for for you know our users we have like someone joined in the business go to market side we've added two

more engineers um is that it i think it's yeah it's eight of us and we built basically a we we want to build a system that anyone can just sign up and start using mash and so in terms of our marketing activities we're just starting that now it's really been relationship building conversations and hasn't been really too aggressive on the, let's get everyone on board with MASH, but that's sort of going to kick up now that we feel we have a compelling product and the feedback that we're getting

from the people we're working with has been really positive. Yeah. What have people said? Well, I feel like it's like what's on Twitter and like, this is really cool. I think the boost thing really wows people a lot, especially people who haven't seen Lightning.

It's like, wait, I just like have money in the internet and I just clicked the button and I just said thank you and sent five cents. I'm like, can I get it back? They're like, I'm like, no. Like, where was that sent? Somewhere around the world. Like, what?

And it sort of blows people's mind. I think, yeah, it's hard. Because we have like, let's say what, like 10 or so sites live. I just need to look back. I don't even know some of them. And we're just, now it's just like, there's a bunch more coming down the line.

So we're really excited for it. Yeah. how do you see how do you see this evolving like eventually because we're still very early I think

I think we said that before we hit record lightning's still early Bitcoin's still early lightning's earlier than Bitcoin in its growth phase but eventually

like in your mind like what's it going to take to reach that critical tipping point where content creators and users get comfortable

with this model not only comfortable with it but begin to prefer it over the traditional model time touch points um they just need to experience it and see it and try it and it needs to be easy like the easiest thing to do like as like easier than loading a credit card into something which is also complicated and a pain still today like and they need to realize that what they're getting is quality and trusted and i think will take some time. Um, and you just, it's, what does it take? It takes, you know, folks

like you experimenting with it. It takes the entire community, community of people building with Bitcoin and lightning to get as many experiences that have a similar model in people's hands so they can see the value of it. They can try it. Um, and it'll be, I think it'll become natural. Like I think things are moving, you know, it's like tech technology and human behavior it's like it's changing like very very very quickly it's different than a hundred years ago like it's very it's very fast um and once people sorry as i go back to it is what was the biggest challenge i think like i've i had when when talking about mash with people or explaining it was like how do you explain this thing and we've worked very hard in trying to craft the

like a story of like usage-based pricing pay as you enjoy but there's these concepts of like Bitcoin. It's just my money. No one can take it. It's in the internet. I can send any amount of it anytime I want. I can send it anywhere else. Like these concepts of like open movement interoperability are very foreign. But the second you say, okay, go try like Jesse Berger's magic Bitcoin book. So we were like launched his book as a proof of concept for like, you know, each chapter costs X amount. After a certain amount, you get the whole book for free for the rest of the month. And once he had people doing it and they'd be like, oh, they clicked like their keyboard to the next chapter and because they had a budget like it just auto unlocked and you saw

the payments flash in like a quarter of a second like did i just send money i'm like yes and like then they're like okay i'll do that and then we'll get a bunch more books and we'll do more stuff in those spaces so it's really just socialization touch points getting people to try it and seeing which ones have the best fit yeah yeah i mean i think it's going to be massive because it just makes a lot of sense and like you mentioned it is probably number one an education and awareness problem and then number two ux and that's like one of the most excuse me promising things about bitcoin lightning and the stack that's being built out in terms of like innovation like there needs to be whole new experiences built around payments on the web and i've said

this many times on this show like if you're a designer particularly ux ui designer that's looking to make your mark on the world like here is a wide open canvas that needs people to come focus their attention on and build new experiences and user flows and it's wide open yeah it's a hard problem though it's it's like it's like anything that's so i fully agree it's like there's there's like there's so many trade-offs and different approaches to how you structure it there's so many different products and new experiences you can create because you have this it's it was like a year and a half ago i thought i'm like am i too late for this i swear i'm like looking at this i'm like there's like these 10 companies they're doing these things like these are so cool and then i'm

like then like a year into it i'm like no am i too early for this like it's uh just because it was so incredible what was just like what i saw that was possible um and i i think it's the best kept secret like we're in a bull market for lightning it's the best kept secret um i think uh like for technology today that that most people don't realize what it is but the even like some of the people i'm talking to that work at different companies that are large and not they're starting to see it they're like asking me and it's like oh here's like here's a starter pack go do these 10 things try these five different products go do this send me an invoice send you some money and and like and you're starting to see people realize it but it is so early and we just need

more people building in the space to create you create these experiences we'll get those billion users because this tech is unparalleled yeah no i mean that's one thing that goes through my mind a lot too are we too early um which is yeah because we spun up our first lightning node in 2018 i believe like right after it launched we had our site up and it was had lightning integrated by like may or june of that year we've been running with it ever since and definitely not too late but are we too early like is this i mean obviously we're seeing it with like crypto and all the tokens on ethereum and the overarching cryptocurrency space pump and dumps and stuff like that are we in the dot com era of bitcoin's history and if that is the case

do we have like another decade before this hits critical mass and if that is the case how do we continue to survive build out what we're building similarly at mash like if we are a bit early how do you approach that potential scenario in terms of like building out your product and making sure that it just survives and is around for when that tipping point does eventually come i think it's it's only too early if we're not if we're not able to solve like get to product market fit provide really amazing solutions for people we're and i look at it as like for mash we're in charge of our own destiny if we're too early because the concept of bitcoin is in lightning isn't going to be the deterrent it's the products that we provide bitcoin's like

probably one of the biggest known brands around the world in tons of countries it's trusted way more than their local currencies and it's it's sort of maybe it's maybe it's sort of an unknown but it can that that gap or chasm can be can be you know bridged um and so really it's just i think is it too early because there's not enough people building other interoperable experiences in the space and that sort of helps you know like tides lift all boats perhaps but i think we can i think we can make our own destiny uh like you know by the decisions we make um and the yeah and like the you know it is harder because a lot of the infrastructure that's needed to make it easy for anyone to build lightning isn't there we're working on like

like lots of other companies are working on ways to provide those those solutions but you know one day anyone will be able to spin up um and add lightning and wallets and different things into their experiences and sites and there'll be lots of offerings there so i'm like i don't know i i sort of i second guess myself and are we early every once in a while but i'm like No, no, we're just moving forward and, you know, at least we're not working in the space that is, you know, clearly just burning money with no product and no real plan of where they're going. Yeah, I mean, the product's definitely there. It's definitely working and it's definitely innovative. And so that's another thing, too.

I mean, you mentioned regulatory capture earlier. And as we build this out, obviously Bitcoin only works if it's sufficiently distributed, censorship resistant, and really empowers the individual to do what they want with their sets on the internet or in their everyday lives. And so as you're building MASH, how do you think about making it as small of an attack vector from a regulatory perspective as possible? i'm thinking about how like there's there's lots in there for for for how we're thinking about so one is in an ideal in an ideal world um everyone has their own nodes uh we're a facilitator and our product service full layer on top of lightning lighting is completely abstracted and that's why we architected our system that way the other you know the then there's and so that because that can help with censorship resistance it can help with people you know having access to their you know

their own funds and their own destiny um there's that part and then there's the other side of you know um how we help like do these managed nodes and help people with their funds is you know we don't want people to have money on our system like the first thing is like we don't want to it's like mash is in a place to be like oh like i have two bitcoins let's just toss them they're like do not do that um like do not do that like this is meant to be like for a consumer oh i have 10 bucks to go spend on stuff and if i want to get 10 more bucks and then i'll just load it up um and send it from somewhere else and so there's there's that piece but it's such like a complicated i think it's such a there's so many different vectors right you have like bitcoin as like um

bitcoin as like money and there's that vector which i think is like the most important piece um and then you have like services like mash which might be ways to to monetize for content and creations but then if it's not like the thing that you're allowed to talk about how do we keep ourselves away from that problem right um and we it's it's a it's a tricky question yeah that's hard yeah because we're it feels like we're caught in the middle of this great battle for freedom in the digital age and an ever encroaching regulatory global body that wants to constrict that freedom and it's just i mean this is something i think about and obviously i've talked about obsessively on this show for years now is how do we not kill the golden goose but no i think

like you just described everything comes with trade-offs like don't put two bitcoin in a mash wallet but 10 bucks okay like if somebody comes and tries to prevent you from spending that sucks but it's ten dollars and there's ways to build experiences and more importantly um user tendencies and mental models of how they use their bitcoin in different situations yeah oh and the other you know there's one part that i you know i sort of glossed over because i don't think about it as much anymore but we made a decision um it was both a business decision but it also does does as well help for like censorship resistance and uh etc is you don't go to like get mash.com slash you know name your creator and everything is there and now they have

to load everything up onto our platform and we own and then we can like you know sorry you're no longer uh online anymore your identity is canceled right it's no you add mash to where your stuff is into your experience and if you don't like us you kick us off and if we have some other issues you can replace us in lots of different ways that's sort of the goal is that we're providing you know we're not a um a you know a way for people to you know lose their you know their work and their savings we don't want to be that provider like they can use any cms and and yeah and so that's sort of part of it so you can imagine like oh you get like youtube it's like oh sorry you're done yeah like it's we have lots there's lots of centralizing powers across the entire stack

of the internet yeah yeah no i mean we're really i was just telling you the episode that just went live right before we started recording the stuff that uh miles is doing the stuff that he's talking about is probably going to get him kicked off these platforms one day if he keeps poking poking the beast and that's what we're saying like video content the TFTC like putting a

read like we're doing it right now for the newsletter content but how do we do it for video as well like if we get kicked off you have fed strikes on

our channel for talking about naughty things and then yeah then you like have the issue yes we can host it a video on our site and pay well that

but then everybody that's good or say there's like value to the platforms that google youtube provide and that's like the big question do we have we talk a lot about balkanization in the physical world with the trends that are going on geopolitically here in the united states and globally is the meat space world going to begin to balkanize and jurisdictions break up into smaller and smaller jurisdictions and then alternatively on the web

you have youtube facebook twitter um do we see a balkanization trend there where users probably don't have the luxury to go to a single site like youtube to find all the content they want are they going to have to have a list of individual content creators that they go to their site and consume there that was a long rant yeah yeah i don't i'm trying to think of how to how to respond because those are the those are the big questions um and it's i guess part of it is those platforms help the distribution they help some with monetization uh if you win their algorithm algorithm party um and they get you know and they help yeah they help discovery uh then the other part is owning your audience and i see them both they all work together and there's gonna be new

platforms showing up they're not as you know video strict here um than other ones but there will be other platforms that will show up for discovery um i just look at it as once once you have you know different communities and signals for quality and people people will look and find places where they can get information that they like better it just it's a slower process yeah yeah and that's what I think the trend of like individual blogs will come back what was it we used to be like okay you went on google you search it's like oh great result I never knew I could find out this fun fact to this answer to my question and then it became like oh I have reviews for these products then it's like and then both of those stopped working it's like oh I'll go to a reddit forum it's like

okay then that stopped working and then it's like I guess I'm texting my friends again like what else am i doing it's like how do i find like i was trying to figure like what should i do in austin this week with like the team that were all here and i was like i looked online it's like well like nope i'm not gonna listen to any of that right now uh i guess i'm gonna message the three people that i know that lived here 15 years ago and the one person i know who lives here now and those recommendations have been great so far but and they're different than what google was probably putting in front of me google was sending me to what was it yelp trip advisor and somewhere else

and then like the top 10 X in Austin about 50 of those yeah under the infatuation ooh here's your favorite

margarita spot yeah yeah it's it's also it's killed local news too yeah like like a lot of those

I don't want to name the one like this one in like where I live I live in Toronto and it's just like you know it's they're just bottom paid for articles

yeah it's native advertising all around yeah native advertising without the sticker that this is advertising. Yeah. So we're desperate for cash

and we'll write anything. Please give it to us. We'll pump your stuff. I mean, it's like from a content creator spot too. That's what like, obviously we distribute this on YouTube and Rumble

and Bitcoin TV and we send the podcasts out to RSS feeds. I think podcasting is significantly robust because of the RSS feed nature of it. But yeah, like I'd really

am adamant about having my own site and we don't host video there we have the podcast on the site but we i think we're going to begin to host our videos there as well but i think it is important as a content creator to own your own site and domain like that's why i mean i love substack i love everything it's done but that's a trend where people are it's just essentially medium 2.0 where people are just using substack to have maria.substack.com. That's like a very centralized platform

where I think the trend should go the other way where you spin up a ghost site, you own the domain, you own the files, you own the server at the end of the day if you want to and you have complete domain over your content. This is just another one-off random going on

but I want you freaks to know if you're creating content out there, Substack makes it very easy. I think you should spin up your own site. Use Ghost, use WordPress, whatever. yeah and we're gonna get someone to write a full guide on that on mash and pay them like 10 cents they're gonna that's gonna be their entire life it's gonna be dedicating to like creating that content i'm sort of just joking around but like seriously like imagine now it's like here's like

the four things you do like here's the dns settings you change because we know like all the stuff is like you're spending hours trying to figure it out yeah i mean dj our developer i mean luckily i have him but i i did not do it myself it takes a team to figure it out yeah imagine And then there was just a, there was an easy way that wasn't just a centralized service that, that did it all. Um, and so, uh, it's funny, you bring up medium is, uh, people are asking a lot about like, okay, how, and we don't just do, we're not just doing written content. We're doing lots of other things, like, like lots of apps and tools per usage and stuff

like that. But if you go back to medium, people would always ask like, oh, why don't you like integrate with medium or do not like, as like, I, we have the option to right now, but like, why don't you try and find a way to do that? Would that be a long-term plan? um and it's funny because i think like their model i looked at like they need something like this that'd be way better because their model of monetization like all of these like micro distribution platforms is hey we're gonna get all the content here a medium is funny because you

don't actually know what's paid and what's not and what you're buying which is like very confusing for consumers when they have this this subscription thing and then it's like we're gonna decide what metrics matter for how we're going to distribute that content is it like plays on spotify is it number of reads the number of claps that's sort of like um incentive wise it's like a couple it's like a couple degrees away from was that high quality did i really like that and so it leads to all this content being juggled a different way consumers not knowing what they're actually buying and there's no direct relationship that says hey i can price my thing differently because what i'm doing is incredibly more valuable to a smaller group of people so it shouldn't be like one clap

is one cent or whatever it is it should be it's a collapse 10 on my site but you can't do that you have no control and so they take away pricing control relationship control distribution control i mean it helps lots of people but it also it i think overall for the whole system it creates sort of like these lots of unintended consequences in terms of quality of content what's written about where it's showing up it's just yeah it's not what people want yeah then it can be easily sibbled too which is where you like with the claps especially if they're using that as a metric like you can just have like pay some bot farm in in china or wherever to go clap your your article but you got to make it expensive in lightning nowhere yeah well people on medium i think most

aren't making enough money for it to actually work like but yeah like you have clap bots it's like review bots um and then the platform's like well like these these got lots of claps that continues to work so they make more money because they think they're getting more reviews on those pages and it creates this like sort of negative loop internally that's the metrics will tell you a story that isn't necessarily the real story um numbers like like averages they lie yeah no and then we're seeing like there is even on substack uh as they and again i'm big fan of substack i actually just listened to the episode that their ceo or co-founder chris davis rogan a few weeks ago it was very interesting they need they're still a bit behind on the bitcoin stuff

still thinking about nfts and stuff like that for content monetization um i think it's just like sats make more sense than that but uh jordan scatchell has been on the show before he writes the dossier and he does that on substack he was complaining that substack is doing the curation for their content aggregation and they're favoring a certain type of writer over another on their platform and so it would be great if you're a platform that's doing that just to be able to wipe your hands clean say hey we're we're actually just gonna set the algorithm up in a way in which it reads its metrics be very transparent with it and this is what is going to raise content to the top of the site is these metrics and you know it's a a fair playing field as a content creator and

then you can see very visibly why certain content's being put on the page and it's not some human driven curation behind the scenes of a particular particular um that's what i'm looking for influence of like an individual ad sub stack yeah and then there's all there's also the part of that where it's like oh we have this like ai machine that you know we decide what it's monet like prioritizing it's prioritizing views and then you get that instead of a views does not equal value um i think there's a way that like i'm trying to think of how to make this like user-friendly so let's just ignore that for now but um centralized platforms don't do this but and it's been talked about a lot with twitter

conceptually right um why don't you allow anyone to build an algorithm let anyone decide the model that showcases things why not like feed out that data and open it up if people agree to it why do you have to keep everything like I know distribute there's money in distribution right that's a huge part of the value but I get to imagine a world where it's where people can build on top of other things to create different

discovery engines that work in partner with sort of like the data layer or the app you know it's like a layer on top of the application yeah yeah that's where Twitter completely screwed up is closing off access to their API yeah I read the book

hatching twitter uh like maybe a year ago i don't know if you know it it's sort of like uh i don't i was not aware of it it's like the story of it's anyway it's sort of like a drama um of like the story of twitter being created and all the characters anyways it's a fun read but now i think about it it's like that's that story was written about 10 years too early um with all this going on but it talks about like the initial platform and how they like a little bit about all the different you know ways that people could build on top of twitter but also the existential threat for the company because other clients were just better than theirs yeah so no that's again that's the uh weird time that we find ourselves in is you have this powerful

ability via software to create all these experiences companies like twitter youtube that aggregate all this pure information then they throw their ui and their filtering algorithms on top of it but like what is the model to just convince maybe you don't even need to convince maybe somebody needs to come to market just does it makes it better the experience of aggregating your own curation like how do we get like because it seems like we're just in this transitionary period where arguably social media the way it's existed for the first 12 15 years whatever it's been um it's not going to be the way social media is interacted with moving forward because these new open platforms come to market yeah i hope so um even just on like data like data freedom

and like understanding what you're seeing and how it's also the like um it's like the incentives being how much time are you looking at the news feed on facebook it's like that that's not good for anybody um and you know it's sort of it's messed with the wiring of our brains um yeah and then think about all the i mean i i say this obviously twitter jack blue sky it seems to be their vision is to build something like that but then on top of that i forget i forget what i was going to say the um no imagine how much time like literally just like conversation uh here domestically and globally so much time is spent arguing about the censorship debate like how much time have we wasted the last three years particularly about like censorship and doing

all that stuff just creates this natural friction just the ability to censor on these social media platforms and then it's millions billions probably collectively of man hours of debate and wasted mental bandwidth that could have been focused on more productive endeavors yeah yeah it's i'm just it's like follow follow money follow the incentives yeah like it's uh you know hopefully we'll be in a in a better place yeah i i hope so i think for yeah somebody with two young sons too and having them come up and my oldest is like two and a half now watching him begin to interact with technology it's like ah you can like see the slow steps towards him becoming able to interact with the internet not anytime soon but i would like the

internet to be at a point when he is interacting with it where it's much healthier for his psyche and his development as a human being and yeah it's crazy times we live in now it's like you can uh you can see any like any course to learn anything for free and every single clickbait article at the same time and like shock story just to get your attention and yeah um it's uh it's amazing like all the positive and all the negative at the same time yeah it's a double-edged sword it's uh again we're it's fascinating being in this generation where we were just forced to deal with the problems that come with this technology coming into our lives and we're monkeys at the end of the day animals at the end of the day and our brains are just trying to react to this rapid

change so my monkeys with machine guns yeah it's like uh it's like every single time we uh it's like the jurassic park quote it's like i always i always butcher it's like we didn't uh we just asked if we could not if we should right it's um and at least for me it's like i grew up with like a 28 8 modem like in like when i was like 12 and then watching that to like oh an iphone came out when i was like in university or college um and to like now the internet to what it is today it's like it's sort of wild like imagine like 10 years ago um it's like oh i went traveling when was it 10 15 years ago didn't even have a phone didn't go didn't go to like the internet cafe I like found a random phone card every month like just call and be like I'm alive

and then keep on going and now to today's world it's like where do I go what do I do these places like I remember just lugging a bag and being like finding a hostel to stay at and like I'm not saying that experience is better than today's experience but like that change is for me is very incredible like it's oh yeah i mean i remember um summer going into my senior year of high school and then going into my sophomore year of college memorial day weekend uh both summers i had a bit too much fun broke my phone my parents like you're not getting a new one so i went two summers uh separated by three years without a phone and luckily i was staying on this island working had a hot dog stand and access to my friends like on the beach like

all right, what are we doing today? But yeah, that summer, those summers, I would walk around with a black book with all the numbers of my friends and my parents and anybody I would have to come into contact with. And like, if I desperately needed to call them, I'd pull out the black book and be like, hey, can I borrow your phone?

That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. And we're not saying that everything was great back then either, but it's like, just with the, it's like with the phone thing, it's like, I actually have to, like every year i like i have to get off grid like and then when i come back i see it's like

it's like the first few days like like i'm like playing with a thing like on the phone like all of us on tv it's like oh crap that like falling asleep when the sun went down and like not worrying about a thing it's like oh now it's like two in the morning why am i doing this like why it's like i felt so good i was healthy like it's gonna be three days for like you know like my body being like why is there not dopamine hits every 20 seconds uh to like react to that and it's just funny how like it just sort of it's a recalibration like oh these do these things to me um and so do you have a consistent off-grid destination or you switch it up um i basically i i paddle a different river every year with a couple close buddies like six

of us usually and so um yeah like uh it's canoe tripping so it's like hiking but with canoes and sort of start here go there and we're always looking for a new river um we basically have gone through all the like pretty advanced ones within you know i'd say 15 hour drive of where we live um and so yeah i'm lucky to have like been able to learn how to do it growing up be able to go do it get the time i won't say lucky to get the time it was prioritized uh to be like this is the time no matter what every year i go yeah over dolphin um from coin kite that's like one of his favorite things to do up in canada is go canoe tripping and go off the grid in the subbers awesome it's it's unbelievable it's like um yeah highly recommend it um

yeah i've met him once and actually that was the one topic of conversation i think we're talking about i don't know if i'll remember it was like it was like at uh at the bit devs in miami in in april during the bitcoin 2022 yeah burdolf is a hell of a character a hell of a builder too no but i completely it is i'm always hands up i'm pretty online uh as an individual and as i've had children i've tried to be hyper cognizant of it and unplug even though i'm still not great at it my wife would say i still have a lot of uh improvement to do in that area but in terms of like getting off the grid i've had the ability to go to costa rica on surfing trips a few times of my life for like two weeks at a time and um you literally don't have phone service there like

you said like you wake up when the sun gets up you go surfing you eat hang out listen to music and the sun goes down at like six you just hang watch the stars and like pass out wake up naturally yeah yeah and you're like physically active moving around like it's yeah there's just something about that but then when you come back it's yeah yeah i want to go again it's like i just got back it's like okay any uh interesting things happen on your last trip does it ever get dangerous um interesting was i didn't know there were pelicans in like manitoba in northern manitoba or like paddling up and like literally like it's some of the best fishing in the world so people do take float planes out there um in those areas and so like paddling day like i think it was day one

day too and i'm like what are those birds like like mouths like just full of giant fish like like uh there's like 25 of them or 50 of them at one point i was able to get some cool shots of so that was like really interesting um danger like let's say i think there's a few things um like one is like where he goes like really remote so it's helicopter evacuation no matter what um but like we're doing rivers with that are fast water sometimes moving rivers so like you tip like your stuff's going to keep on going you need no good rescue techniques um you have to like really scout and know what the rabbits are so if you're going to shoot them if you're not going to shoot them you're portaging around you're carrying all your gear and like you can slip and fall and

hurt yourself and things like that so like i'd say like those are really the dangers but if you know like what to do or like take your food out like don't leave it beside the tent because like a like a black bear where we go normally um unless you're going like out west with grizzlies like they're not going to be a problem for you as long as long as they're like they don't have like a mental issue with them yeah black bears are more afraid of us than we are though oh yeah chase one like just yell at it and just get it and especially because they're not humanized in those areas so if you're like near a town right then there's a much bigger issue of having a bear problem because they're used to humans not actually doing anything and they know where the garbage dump is and they're

just going to roam around until they get you know and they know it's a source of food that there's no problem until they're they're sort of killed right but out in the woods like we go like they don't see anybody it's like what are these things they're just looking at like what are these things i need to get away yeah they're just floating on the water like these like sticks uh so yeah my sister lives in colorado and she's she sent me a like ring camera video of the bears getting into the dumpsters by her her house up there in the mountains and yeah in the cities there are the towns they're not not afraid at all yeah yeah i'm just trying i'm trying to think like yeah like i guess it's like there's not really like i don't i guess i don't feel

in like that there's lots of dangers out there but it's it's really just about like there's points where i felt very nervous because it was sort of dangerous like lining around a rapid or like doing certain things or like like there's a tree burnout you're like walking through like bouldery mud swamp type stuff like to get around things and it's like excruciatingly painful like at some points like i've like my legs two years ago or like like my ankles were this thick like thick from like the amount of like unstable ground in like certain places it was all bushwhacking there's no one that probably paddled this thing in 10 years we didn't know um that's that's a whole other story but um like there's certain places like okay there's this waterfall that's

like 100 meters high and it's silent because the drop's so big and it's massive but like you know it's there even though it's silent because like you're paddling and all of a sudden like there's no more trees and just sky it's like ah probably shouldn't go up that close um going over 100 meters waterfall but yeah it'd be fun for the uh for the short free fall before your death but i'll go bungee jumping instead i won't uh i won't take that that ride yeah yeah but yeah again it's a experience that not that many people are losing touch with is just being nature and basically being thrown to the wilderness and you're you've you've got to take care of your shit and if you don't nature will eat you up yeah yeah it's like at the same

time it's like do i know go like forage like my food and hunt my food out there and all stuff like no like if i was out there without supplies i'm you know i'm gonna last as long as like my body can feed me right like uh but it's but it's still a lot to scale it's still it's the point is just being out there and not all the other distractions and get you feel like you get more in touch with like human like what us as animals are yeah what's that show they're you they usually drop people off of canada vancouver island um specifically god survival show it's on netflix i just watched the whole season i can't think of the name but they drop those people off no supplies no food anything well they have supplies they get to bring 10 items but watching that i don't think

literally erecting forts cutting down trees hunting bears and moose and stuff like that I'm like, I would dine a week. I'd have to tap out. I need about a year of training first. And we'll start with some of the supplies, like maybe some Stone Age supplies. Give me the whole thing from a certain year. But not with like 10 items, no.

Not for me. So back to Bitcoin, though. Being full fledged into it and diving headfirst like two or three or four years ago now. Has it changed your perspective on the world? and where you, somebody really thought about the problem of money and the incentive systems that we had in our incumbent financial system where you really focus on censorship resistance before you found Bitcoin.

Was there something particular about the network that stuck out to you that really ignited that fire under your ass to dedicate your life to it? i think so i'll say my opinion and awareness of a lot of these things have changed dramatically since that time and whether it was because of bitcoin opening my eyes to those things or a lot of like awareness of things that were being that were happening all at the same time occurred i would say myself personally like i studied economics in like in university for a few years and I thought it was like this is just make-believe um like this is not how people behave like I get the concept of externalities and all that stuff but it's like people like drawing these

lines and pretending it's human behavior is like and so I was aware of that and I guess I guess my personality is I'm not really I'm sort of people say I'm confrontational a little bit like I don't not just for the sake of it it's like um I try and like get down a little bit to the facts but I'm hyper focused so I'm not focused on a problem I'm not really going to dig into it I'll just be like oh that's a thing I don't know enough about I don't have time to dedicate it to it so censorship resistance um I wasn't really you know it wasn't like a top topic on my mind um it definitely is now um uh I think that's you know maybe there's recency bias of what's going on and what I'm seeing um especially with the COVID stuff and and being in Canada um and watching like

all of our institutions sort of you know lose all trust from most people but um and it's also maybe the reading like i read a lot of like ben hunt's work um at epsilon theory and all about narratives and so like you know i could say i was always aware of lots of stuff was sort of you know bullshit um and that there was usually an incentive behind it but now it's sort of like a lot more is like we've been i think uncovered by spending more time reading about it so i sort of look at like narratives and you know how bitcoin plays into it with money and these are all like interrelating things with how the world works where you know when i was younger i was probably a lot more naive or just maybe had less care about about it um yeah and so if for bitcoin and money

i would say my knowledge of monetary history still not amazing and like i'm not going to pretend i don't have enough time to spend like the years to like really know all the history but um i would say it's um i would say i went from like a zero to a like i guess zero to 0.5 or maybe one but i'm not sorry zero to one like but i'm not at a 10 um and so i get it i get it a lot more and actually bitcoin opened my eyes to to all of the problems like uh it comes sorry i'm not gonna rant but it comes down to like incentive structures right if you can just print money and just give all these free things away everyone doesn't make the logical steps to the other three things that are happening because of that oh my money's now worth less we're wasting money on

productive resources here they don't have to make trade-offs to get rid of bad programs they don't have to restructure the laws and fix all these problems and we have this like debt of like regulatory debt budget like decisions on where we allocate resources a society debt and like they've just been building up and are imploding and um i think it made me a lot more aware of like how these things inter interrelate with each other yeah i mean joe biden just decided to waive $10,000 of student loan debt for everybody out there.

Let's put money back in people's pockets as we are experiencing this elevated inflationary period. Obviously, the student loan debt crisis here in the United States is a very pressing issue that many have been complaining about for some time.

And I just did a rant about it that will go up on YouTube later, but it's, like you said, It's like compounding these, this debt that's been accrued from a regulatory and federal government intervention perspective where you can argue the government probably should have never been giving out low interest rate loans to 18 year olds to go get diplomas that are rapidly falling in value on the job market. Yeah. Um, I, so I was, uh, when my first job at a school, I was, uh, a consultant at like a consulting firm. Um, and one of our clients was actually a for-profit education company in the U S this is like 2008, seven, something like that. So like, like, like a Phoenix, but not one of those. And like watching the recommendations, like I'm a junior person on the team. I'm the guy who

like creates the stuff to create the slides. Right. Um, and also part of like all the strategy decks and you know working with the client and like we actually just realized at that point in time it's like the government just and i'm in canada advising like a u.s company on this and i'm like perplexed at what's going on i'm like nine how old is i like 21 22 something like that i seem figured i'm now like thinking math on like what year i was born but it's like oh it's like here's four segments of people that will get free loans that they can do these courses and do x y and z and the government will pay for those like here's the strategy here's what to go after and it's like uh i'd ask a question like what jobs are they getting and they're like

they're not getting jobs it was like insanity to me it's like what's going on here it's like well everyone needs to get a free college education sort of um but i'll have to pay for it later and they can never get rid of the debt it's like you sort of like it was like okay i feel like this is this is what and this is really smart people working in these industries advising these companies what to do and at these companies we're spending all their time providing such a disservice to so many other people it was it's yeah lots of touch points like that but it was it was a wild experience for me like that young just to see it straight up i'm like i can't do this yeah this is soul-sucking and again this is a terrible incentive structure you're gonna give

out these loans low interest here's the people that have taken them out and then the colleges go oh since they're gonna get these loans anyway we can just jack up our prices add to their debt and now with like the forgiveness uh the ten thousand dollar forgiveness i believe it's twenty thousand dollar for pell grants too you're doing it with the intention of putting the money back in people's bank accounts because they're having trouble paying for things because inflation is high but we still haven't fixed things on the supply side of the market where goods are energy food infrastructure electronics are still relatively scarce because we borked the supply chains with the lockdowns putting more money back in people's bank accounts to go chase

scarcer and scarcer goods so you're just going to exacerbate the inflation problem which at the end of the day will probably be a net negative for everybody they're giving this money back to yeah it's inflation's for me like a really interesting concept because there's like how much does like let's say a tomato is a dollar and now it's two dollars but which then sort of is a step removed from i had you know x thousand dollars a year and now i have y thousand dollars a year and what's the difference and like really what we need is like enough tomatoes at like a price level that everyone can have as many tomatoes as they need and so like let's say let's say you had inflation but every single person's like all their assets all their incomes everything had

doubled so everyone's on the equal playing field um but uh and you double tomatoes okay everything's fine but if you have like half the tomatoes we sort of have a big problem yeah and so like yeah like inflation it shows up in a variety of ways but i look at it as like oh you did it as an inflation and then you gave all the rich people all way more money but that doesn't change the fact there's not enough tomatoes for people because rich people can only eat so many tomatoes per year and so i always go so i think the supply side is like this hidden thing being which is sort of like bitcoin doesn't necessarily fix the supply side immediately but like there's a lot of regulatory stuff that is from corrupted money that like we're just sort of

ignoring. And yeah, uh, it's, I don't know. It's inflation is a funny topic for me because it's like, it's, it is also like in some ways narrative,

it sort of, it hides a few steps in the, in the process. Yeah. It's for sure. There's many inflation is always in everywhere, monetary phenomenon, but then it gets exacerbated by the supply side of things too,

which is again, it goes back to the money, fix the money, fix the world. That's why we have it out here in the studio. You can argue that the governments of the world would not have been able to lock down the global economy, which set off the supply-side crisis

if they didn't have a money printer that they could turn on and airdrop money into people's bank accounts and bail out all these companies when they shut down the economy. I don't think, it's not funny, I actually shouldn't laugh about it, but people do not understand the gravity

of the supply-side issues that we have globally. I mean, we're seeing it pop up in Sri Lanka. we've seen it pop up on the electronic side of things we're going to see it pop up in europe now with the energy crisis that's going there like this is a massive problem that's going to have dire consequences for billions of people billions across the world and it feels like we're just sleepwalking into like a catastrophe yep yeah imagine uh politicians could have discussions on trade-offs and what we had to do.

Yeah, here in the United States, it's... She's making a scratch in my throat too. It's incredibly frustrating watching the Biden administration, particularly his energy czar, forget her name, just double and triple down

on this transition to wind and solar when we can point over to Germany and like, look, what's going on over there right now? They did this starting two decades go now you're trying to force this here we already have relatively high natural gas and oil prices and grids are beginning to falter and yet you're like doubling down on this like do you not see the trade-offs playing out right in front of your eyes across the atlantic yeah and it's uh

i you know this is a space i don't know enough about it like i see it and like yeah i haven't but it's it's not winter yet um no and uh without the without the you know right knowledge on my side i'm very nervous uh of what what the consequences of this are yeah that's a that's the other thing too is you have to somebody building on bitcoin and trying to make the world a better place via that network you had to always stop and say yeah it is daunting to think about these large overarching problems that exist um we can't get dragged out by it just like get stuck in the mud and let that consume your life you got to build mash we've got to build this media company we got to build the awareness of bitcoin um yes things are going to get bad but

we've also got to work on the off ramps yeah yeah it's like like it's like 95 percent of my time it's like mash and then 5% personal and then like add in 10% as you know, we all, we all work a hundred percent, but like it's, uh, and part of that is, is trying to see what's going on in sort of the big problems. But it's also if I'm not going to change my effort in my focus and where I'm working to help people and make the world a better place and also build a business and, you know, and all of those things,

then it's like, if I'm going to start digging into that, it's like I should shift and just be focused on that, but I'm not doing that. Right. Like this is what I'm passionate about what I'm doing. Um, and not just a little bit of passion, like extremely passionate about it.

Like it's, I could see myself doing this for the next 50 years. Yeah. And so, uh, yeah. And so it's hard to like, want to know what's going on everywhere,

but then also realize like I'm distracting myself from the actual problem I'm trying to solve, which isn't that good. And I need to be successful at this thing. Well, that actually brings up a good rabbit hole. We can dive down. Like what's it been like building something,

for yourself? Well, you're building it for many people, but you're building it yourself compared to working at a consultant firm in Google. What's it, what's it like being an entrepreneur compared to an employee? Yeah, it's, uh, I'd say like, so I did have a, I did start a travel business from scratch before this. I looked at them both and the same thing is like, uh, you're, I think, what's the difference there's like you always have to have i think to make anything successful like um an ambitious like mission like really really ambitious um and it needs to be like believably achievable um and i find that really for me that's like really fun to do and maybe it's sort of like in consulting i was an advisor i wasn't creating anything it was like cool to

solve problems and learn a little bit but it wasn't for me um at google i got to sort of be an internal entrepreneur, but wasn't necessarily on problems I was necessarily passionate about, but I'm also passionate about learning. And I saw that as an opportunity to, how do I become the best product manager and learn consumer things and learn infrastructure things. And so I was probably there too long. I was there too long. Um, uh, but I got that out of it, but now it's okay. Have these skills. Um, how do I, you know, and how do I solve that thing that I really, really care about which adds a lot more extra drive a lot more a lot of extra pressure a lot different responsibility i'd say um because internally it's like oh the company will take

care of all these other things i don't have that right it's it's like i'm sorry about the like documentation for getting started guide like i wrote that the other day right um and which is no which is fine it's also like building a team um and not just within a pool within a company that's self-selected for those characteristics of what they want, but also a team that has like, I want to say like, it's not like a vibe,

but a culture and a belief and a passion for in a certain way of working and doing things. That's not just like, oh, they agree with me, but like pushes and prods in different ways,

have different skill sets and can make us all better as an entity is really fun. Yeah. That is fun building compared to working for somebody. and it's yeah like you said like we spun up like i just i never thought this would be like a business i thought it was just going to be like talking into the ether and people would listen

maybe and then same with the newsletter and it has turned into a business where here in a studio i've got car over there to figure out how to pay them it's like yeah so it's the nitty-gritty things that you don't think about when you're an employee so it's not easy running a business Yeah. It's funny because I like forgot about the best part is like, we're creating solutions for like people that have never been possible before. That's like the creative energy is like, there's technical challenges. There's like user challenges. There's understanding. It's like always like a unique insight, a unique learning, a unique problem to solve and like the trade-offs all day long. And I think some people like all this ambiguity or all these like hard decisions, some people like it makes it really uncomfortable for me. It's like, wow, we can like create all these things, like look at all the stuff we can do. We just have to choose and sequence and we're never going to have all this information. But then we can have this, you know, this thing and see people love it, see if it meets like the two or three things we want to accomplish with it.

And it's just doing that all day, every day. and then occasionally being like I should probably you know take a break for a day do something completely different because then 10 new ideas

just pop in so I'm not doing enough of that that's probably the biggest thing it's like my 25 minute like walk to get a coffee and come back

and like back to sitting down I gotta I gotta do more to get out and let my mind sort of marinate in different things that's what I like about Austin

we have Ladybug Lake that trail it's a nice four mile trail I try to do that at least two or three times a week when I'm here it's like takes 45 minutes and that's like the perfect amount of time you're walking you're thinking you're getting your mind away from things yeah yeah i used to do it a lot more

i'd get like an hour or two like walking or like rowing or doing stuff like that now it's like i'm trying to get into crossfit um this is one near me and it's like i do at least once a week usually but it's like how do i get to two or three like it's like it's like i gotta get that 5 30 and it's like i'm not i'm not off of 5 30 like what are we what are we thinking here the solution yeah the solution that is waking up early and i've tried it before too it's hard that's my work time i'm like 5 30 i'm up like roll down the stairs coffee coffee going and like those those first five hours are like my most effective i can't go like i can't leave that uh but i hear you some people like i have the time there but it's like uh i don't know i've become a morning

person yeah i'm becoming a morning i'm being forced to become a morning person um because kids tend to wake up early but i do like being a morning person it's like that's my most product productive hours are in the morning after i feed the kids breakfast i'm like all right emails what are we doing blah blah blah uh but one thing i wanted to ask you considering your experience being a product manager at google and that's uh and coming into bitcoin it's something i'm incredibly uh happy to see because again going back to the ux ui conversation like bitcoin has been here for 13 years but it's been uh for most of its life a bunch of enthusiasts building and um interacting with it and trying to provide solutions for everybody and that's one thing a

lot of bitcoiners have talked about for years is like all right when is this intellectual capital from the incumbent tech sector begin to recognize what's going on in bitcoin and begin focusing their efforts on this stack which you've done and i'm just curious to see like you mentioned uh talking to people at big tech companies that are interested in what you're doing at mash like do you see uh a transition or not a transition but do you see some of that intellectual capital beginning to get curious about bitcoin and do you see um sort of a rush to this space to begin building it out i wouldn't say it's so i think there's a few things uh actually i want to hit one one thing first which is i think a lot of the big tech talent that is at big tech now like the

ones we know are necessarily the people they're going to create all these new things i think there's there might be like a false signal there it might be noise um if you're talking about like oh one of the first 10 20 product managers at google that's a great signal right but they've already done five companies you want these entrepreneurs and these design thinkers that might come from anywhere and so um i'm not trying to knock like uh knock like myself for being at google it doesn't mean anything or everyone else is there i just think there's there's lots of we want the talent right and so i don't necessarily think it's all a big tech right now because it's been around so long it's entrenched the people that are there aren't necessarily the ones who

are trying to recreate you know create the new wheel you know um and i'm talking like i left five years ago so it's been a while um it's probably more bureaucratic and you know more of a you know uh yeah i'll leave it there but so now what am i seeing um there's been lots of people who are who have heard a little bit of what what i'm up to at mash with the team and sort of heard about the bitcoin lens and that just want to talk to me been interested and like people i've worked with in the past who are curious and I think they there's a lot of confused noise like for them and confusion is like is it this NFT thing is it Bitcoin what about all these other coins they don't have that foundational knowledge so I try but they're but they're curious it's not like

they don't know what it is they say like this Bitcoin thing's been around for a while like maybe I should check it out and like there's also some really smart people that maybe aren't directly related to me that are starting to look at it and asking about it at different places so I think it is it's growing but i don't know if it's exponential because i don't know what the basis um but there's there's definitely curiosity there's definitely interest i think there's lots of shiny objects that people get distracted by uh all the time and um but if compared to a year and a half ago when i started like like really down this journey um it's night and day and it's not because we have like the craziest news and press and they've heard about it they're

just like they just sort of get that this is a new thing now um they hear bitcoin and they're a lot more interested i think than a year and a half ago yeah it hasn't gone away so if it's not going away it's going to be here but then lightning too the things you can do with lightning it's just so exciting oh yeah i've never seen anything like it like that's what i tell everyone it's like you need to send money with lightning try different things like you just have to use it to sort of get it and then people start realizing and it takes a while um it took me probably a few months to like just sort of really wrap my head around it initially. Like I got how different it was,

but like, what does this mean? And I still don't, I'm not gonna pretend I get it now. Like, I don't know when in 10 years Lightning will be online. No one does, but it's gonna be everywhere. It's sort of our bed. And I think if it's not, it's because there's Lightning 2.0,

that's a better version of Lightning for Bitcoin. Like maybe there's some, you know, some change there, but it's effectively, I'm talking about the same thing. Like Bitcoin in the web, sendable anywhere around the world, programmatically people's full control um yeah did you did you have a particular aha moment it was well from for like for lightning or for for mash both okay i guess i sort of teed that up it's like please ask me both questions which i didn't mean to do until after i said it asking

yourself a leading question i like it yeah it's my it's my style versus like just answering a different question completely i'd like you to ask this for me please um uh sorry i'm like laughing at myself so uh i think the aha moment for me i'm trying to think it might have been like i think with lightning it might have been like i got a my node set up and i like set up a node and like sent money between like blue wallet and a my node like that i i forget how i connected what which software i use for my node and i think it does generate an invoice in there directly i haven't used it in a while they have lnd hub i believe or no but i wasn't using like lnd hub to like manage a back end i was just like two different wallets software and like sats flowed

between them it was like better than lightning spin because i didn't want to like give my money to someone else i'm like yeah i can play a game but like that was really i think it was something like that that was like okay this is beyond just the reading about it um just seeing it uh and then for mash i think what crystallized it is you know like the thought process was when laser eyes started to become a thing um and i spent like i can't i can't tell you how much time to try and find this laser eyes generator tool and like everyone had the one with like one eye was on top of the other one they were both red and they looked like crap now i can't someone just i'll give someone 50 cents for like a little eight like make 20 lasers let me load up a photo and

just move some shit around and make me the best avatar profile or for twitter right because i think it's funny hilarious and like and it's just like yeah i want to say i'm a bitcoiner i'm not like the bitcoiner to 100k like i just want to have laser eyes to be like this is what i'm about now you know like join the mission it's important and i couldn't find one and someone should just be able to build that and if someone could pay them 50 cents 25 cents a dollar whatever it was which is never possible for you now have two people who have a business that can make millions dollars a year it's crazy to think about something as simple as millions upon millions if they like dedicated the time like so we sort of started that's sort of like the joke but like our

mashing monsters avatar generator which i found out was making fun of nfts people thought we were shilling nfts it's like buy your nft there's a trillion of them they cost two sats like or two cents or whatever it was it was a full joke but apparently people didn't realize didn't realize it was a joke um and so we were actually had in the pipeline to build a demo app for a laser eyes generator tool and like have some designs we just we just have so much to do it's like we can't distract ourselves so if anyone wants to take those designs and build it out we're ready but again it's crazy to think something as like a joke could become a million dollar business for somebody yeah like do you not think like this is super deluxe laser that's three dollars this other

one the regular one free this one's like 50 cents like that's never been possible before yeah like oh yeah and then you start looking at all i start looking at all the different tools that are online like oh can i convert my image to use on profile photos please subscribe for 30 dollars a month it's like i just want to use it once yeah like i'm not giving you 30 dollars yeah i think something like convert this convert this word doc to a pdf okay i'll pay 57 like instead of going into these like software so you don't trust yeah it's like you're going to like you're getting some open start software you're loading internally like you have to be a developer to use half this stuff um it's not easy uh what was the other one we have like the amount of spam phone calls we get

we have this like look up phone number tool like you know those look up number websites i don't know if the u.s has them it's like you go through this process then you have to pay like 12.99 but they really charge you like 50 bucks like i've never done it but like it's it's a scam imagine like someone actually made a legit one and it just pinged your phone being like and it costs you one cent for anyone who wasn't in your contact list up to a dollar a month or 20 cents a month whatever it was it's like that is a scam caller confirm or like in like done i'd pay for that service but you're not going to get me to pay 10.99 a month no i'll pay as i use it maybe a five cents a call yeah there's a nickel yeah worth of stats so i'm just like thinking of like all these little

like so once i saw it it's like it's just use case after use case that you just like i you know that i would just see um and actually like the the writing content one isn't one of the first ones or like, I think that's a trickier one to crack actually. Um, I think there's ways to do it and lots of things, but like, it's all these, like imagine all these little tools that can make your life easier where it didn't have to be a fully VC funded thousand person company like Canva. It could be like a targeted, very specific use case application that it's just, it's just this one thing I want to convert, you know, um, like you said, PDF toward, I wanted the laser eyes photos thing. I want to know what this phone number is. I want to, yeah, store this one file

for a year and then email it to this person. Just random things that can just be built. I want to take a screenshot that looks beautiful and does X, Y, and Z. And so, yeah. Possibilities are endless, Freaks. See, this talk gets me bullish. There's so much to build out there.

There's so much to do. There's so much opportunity. I think the laser eyes thing could just be some college student who was thinking about going $50,000 more into debt for their senior year. they can create this laser eye generator and be like oh no I have a job

I have a product I'm trying to think what there was this one other one that was just like on the tip of my tongue and I forgot about it that I found so funny but it'll come back to me probably like the second it's like and we're done and like it'll be gone it'll come right back but

there's so many things oh games okay here's a few let's like like if you ever look for like quotes like you're like what are the best Ernest Hemingway quotes or the lyrics or stuff people could build apps for that and like they're not hard to build if you could actually monetize them like i want to earn this how many quotes i want these quotes i want this search them structure them have an entire search engine dedicated to like uh quotes or song lyrics or like meme generators when i have to like like when i want to make like a wojak meme or something like

i forget what the wojak name is and oh meme generators were one of our first ones was like i think i was like trying to cold email the owner of imageflip.com like a year and a half ago i'm like can you please like he's like you don't even have a website like don't worry about it we got you I've exaggerated like it was super early but it was a product discovery call and I got like

really interesting information from it how do they do they monetize ads they have ads and then I think they have like a pro subscription thing

where you can do a few extra things but there's looking at me lots of stuff like that all these fun little cool tools yeah

no like again like we've been experimenting with this since 2018 the first thing we built was a randomized final thought generator and

it was 10 cents pay 10 cents and you get a final thought and it was very simple to build DJ just built a script that scraped

the words after final thought at the bottom of the newsletter and was able to like generate you pay this invoice we'll randomly generate a final thought for you

and that's awesome I'm thinking like our first one was Bitcoin price predictor which is making fun of predicting the price I just like poking fun at things

like I don't know what the price is i don't believe that like whatever havings aren't real like whatever whatever you want to say i'm sorry if i offended anyone um and it was like one is like should have listened to uh like shouldn't have listened to plan b he changed the model again or like just whatever it was just like you can choose your you can choose your own prophecy being like can you do one equals one or like make it bullish or bearish throw on like dorian or hal or whoever you want is like an avatar anyways i don't know if you i like that's it's the same thing it's like it's just like a gimmicky of

like run something once for me um yeah we called our the final thought generator we call it the dime bag um give us a dime we'll give you we'll give you a little trinket which is a dumb final thought one of my newsletters and that's like people are still buying final thoughts these day which uh yeah we've probably made like over the course of four years not a lot like a thousand dollars worth of bitcoin at least people just buying final thoughts and uh that means you what you got 10 000 people to try lightning yeah so yeah it's like the more people that try these little things there's one person who just wants 10 000 thoughts even though there aren't 10 000 final thoughts yet but they're like it's the same

one but i can't get a refund i wish i could call visa that's another thing like how do you think about that like refunds chargebacks as you're building mash out um people so then okay so a consumer like buying something they need to have control and protection for their money you can't just like have money just auto flowing they like you need they need to have control and protections but they also need to make it easy for themselves to enjoy stuff they've been interrupted any time and so they need to be able to make a contract like a budget saying i'll spend on this pricing up to this amount for these things with this person it's not taking their money just like it's like an authorization it's just like it just says it's like you know it's like me saying

like uh like leaving 10 bucks on here and being like you can use it for x y and z right actually no it's not leaving the money because they still have it it's like anyways so i'm getting into technical so that doesn't matter um and so we and they should always be able to remove that authorization but at the at the end of the day it's up to them to decide which places and sites they trust where they set that budget and if they don't trust it they can say yeah i'll just buy it one time and they can click to pay and just be in control of it so um there's other things of like what happens if someone gets access to their device and they're logged in what can they do um you can do things like enter your password again or like do 2fa and things like that that

can that can help it but you know at the end of the day we're focused on like have 10 bucks in a wallet. So that's less important to go too hard in, but we'll have that. Um, but it's really about their control, but, but they're learning how to control their own money. It's, it's very similar to, um, having a wallet with cash and just leaving it on the table and walking away, um, and trusting it. So like, I trust everyone here. I'll leave my wallet here, go for a walk, grab a coffee, come back. I'm not worried about you like taking 20 bucks and telling me that people are buying your dime bags, you know, over and over again. Right. Like, um, but I'm not going to leave it on the side of the street outside.

No. Don't leave it out there. Or in the bar, right? Like, I don't trust, you know, name the bar down the street. The patrons there. They can take my money.

Shiner's. There's a bunch of scumbags down there. That's a big quitter bar. Oh, is it? Yeah. I mean, I go to Shiner's too.

Is that the Shiner's Brock? Is that the beer? Is it a microbrewery? Is it based off of Shiner Brock? Shiner Brock Brock. It's a Pittsburgh bar. All the yinz is hanging out there too.

We just have, We used to have better beer north of the border. Now it's not the case, except for some of the micro brews are pretty sick, but that's now I think gone way better everywhere. We have too many preservatives in the beer here in the United States. Not good for you. But again,

going back to mash and content monetization. Yes. It's something that blows my mind too. Cause right now, like podcasting 2.0, we get sats flows every day. And I just think, I mean,

we'd like to move away from the ad model eventually if we can. it's just not there yet because there isn't this critical mass of people listening if every one of our listeners used podcasting 2.0 and contributed a range of stats we may be able to do it but right now i think on the fountain app for rabbit hole recap in the last 30 days we probably had like 400 uh users interacting with podcasting 2.0 um for rabbit hole recap specifically but at scale like this becomes the model like a user listening if somebody's sending five sats a minute we have an hour and a half podcast 4,500 sats it's around a dollar per episode um that's kind of like for us that would be tens of thousands of dollars yeah per episode per listener then you think about

for the listener side they're like yeah whatever it was just a buck um but an aggregate for us it's like material and then you replicate that with other content creators across the web and it's like holy crap this is like a whole new economy yeah it's in this that's one attempt right i'm not and it's working in some ways like that's one try at here's a model that could work but you could have there's the like donate as you go or donate as you enjoy there's the forced payment maybe for specials there's the like extra exclusive behind the scenes hot take there's like you can do you can do like vote or like send a pay to do a shout out and like if the top three people get on and it's like a it's like a blind auction for the shout out you can do all these

like little things you can have like yeah like vote on the topic or the one of these four tough questions that the you know person that i'm hosting has to answer i'm making this stuff up Where they like, one is like direct engagement, one's community, one's for content, one's to listen, one's optional or like have a special button that people can click. And it like, it's almost like the fan meter, but it's like the enjoyment meter that, you know, which part of stuff, like I'm just making, not making these up. We've thought about them a lot, but like, these are just the beginning things that you can do anything and people are going to try all these new different approaches. So I think the fact that that's already happening is pretty incredible. And it's not just because Bitcoiners want to try it. that's not the reason why they're doing it they're doing it because of the stuff you're doing and so

it applies everywhere just not everyone knows about it and it's not easy enough for everyone to go down that yet and so yeah i think it's i think it's really exciting and uh we're gonna wake up one day i can't tell you if it's a year from now three years five years or like 10 years it's like well we were too early um and it's all you know we'll just see like there'll be so many things that though we don't even know anyone who knows anyone that's thought of them yet yeah like could you imagine like now i'm thinking like tiktok generation the big thing on tiktok and instagram reels it's like these the these like the beats that get played in the back like there's these beat trends or like music trends in there like

what if you have like 13 year olds creating like these beat trends and like they're charging like five sets for somebody to replicate their beat to play on their tiktok like you can have like millionaire like 12 year olds just have access to this stuff and like build it like how does that change we talked about school and university earlier like how does that change just like oh 100 like sims mods there's sites with like half a million people still downloading mods for the sims and they get nothing out of it or like photographs that are tossed onto i forget the photo sharing sites that are taking 70 of the funds but they're from an artist that you really know why don't they have their own site so you know where to find it you can pay them directly

they're not charging 70 and deciding the pricing it's all subscription then distribution it's like maybe this awesome photo of like two office people high-fiving is worth more than the other one right yeah i'm joking because like of the stock footage but it's beats it's mods for games it's different pieces of art that you like want to use like the high-res wallpaper that's awesome right um and so all those things they're going to flip the lighting network is going to bring back

child labor but the children are going to like the labor they're making the money exactly and it's a creative endeavor right right

so think about what that does like what if like what if my kids turn like 10 and they're making more money than me because they're like know how to

engage social media better and like create these tools I don't know what I'd call that child labor I'd call it like they're building a business on their own

yeah no but like for the meme like we're bringing back child labor people are like oh that's terrible then like they dig into it it's like oh no this is good oh i don't know the meme i mean child

labor just the meme in general like a picture like children working in chimney factories or coal factories fair enough i haven't seen i haven't seen that one before so i'm like i don't know how to or maybe maybe a statement maybe a better way to to to word is we're putting the kids back to work okay i'll laugh at that one i'll laugh at that i'm trying to think of like yeah it's like if instead of like when i was like 13 or whatever burning cds and like weird mixes and selling them and like selling random things online

I could have made some beats and done different stuff I probably would have done it I was thinking about myself it's like

and like accepting credit cards back then online was actually crazy it was like 30% charges to like accept a credit card

online it's like 98 97 yeah just wild and still the three and a half

to five percent plus all the other fees they don't tell you about sort of bananas yeah well even I mean

because of the nature the open source nature of all this too like since the kids don't have to ask for permission they don't have to spin up an LLC they don't have to nope they don't have to get a bank account get a credit card like how does that change like yeah and the computer and their pen can run the note yeah I'm joking we're like you know it's like we think of how powerful phones are right now think about you know what they'll be able to do yeah it's gonna be fascinating it's been a fascinating conversation I've had a blast

I'm happy we did this we don't have to do it again what what should the freaks know about MASH that we haven't talked about yet we've just opened up our platform

so people can sign up and start earning and get all their stuff set up get a lightning address if they want and just

I think that's it getmash.com just go to guides and there's like a start button and you can test it out I'm trying to think of what else to show you can follow us

at GetMash on Twitter. I'm JaredNXX. J-A-R-E-D-N-X-X. We'll link to all this in the show notes. Okay, fair enough. So I'll stop doing that. But I think the cool things

that we've launched is we've launched some Bitcoin books where you like pay per chapter. I think they're cool to check out. And like, yeah, I think it's just take a look at what we have. We'll have some links on our site

and we'd love to get all your feedback and what you love, what you hate and everything else in between. Well, thank you for doing what you do i think it's really going to push the space forward and bring the monetized web that we've been talking a lot about on this podcast to more people i mean it's been happening but like i

said i'm extremely happy that somebody from a product standpoint of your caliber has come and focus your energy on this because i think the experiences that you're building are going to make it easier which is the biggest problem with bitcoin which is not as easy as it can be yes i I appreciate the compliment we'll find out let's let's leave the jury out for what we do um find out find out if I'm good but it's really a team I'll say it's a it's the entire team um it's eight of us working really really hard uh and hopefully I can help with some of our big decisions oh yeah well let's go have a fun week here in Austin it's Wednesday there's a lot of activities lined up between now and the end of the weekend uh vibes are high already here in the commons yeah commons

is awesome um so it's my first time here Austin I love I've been here I think it's my fourth or fifth time and i'm excited for bitbop boom and this whole week it's uh it's exciting yeah we're gonna go enjoy ourselves freaks you enjoy yourself peace and love