Guest host Aaron of Essex takes the Sunday Brunch wheel and welcomes Longy for a laid-back, music-first hang: five Longy tracks get spun, boosted, and dissected in real time, with the chat and sats flowing as part of the show’s “participation layer.”

Between songs, Longy rewinds the tape to his early influences (from childhood sparks to teenage band chaos) and makes the case for live performance as the ultimate truth serum: the stage doesn’t care about hype, it only cares what you can actually do when the lights hit.

The conversation keeps one foot in Essex lore and one foot in the Valueverse. “Hamlet Court Blues” becomes a love-letter-to-a-place (with a cheeky Margot Robbie thread), and the guys talk about why gritty, story-rich local scenes still matter.

On the industry side, Aaron and Longy contrast the legacy music pipeline (distributors, slow publishing, tiny payouts) with the immediacy of value-for-value, where artists can get paid directly and fast.

They dig into Spotify-as-gatekeeper dynamics and the uglier incentives around streaming, including allegations of inflated numbers and the way “top-heavy” manipulation starves everyone downstream.

They also unpack a practical, boots-on-the-ground example: a UK gig at The Fickle Pickle that turned into a mini proof-of-concept for the new model, combining an in-room show, livestream participation, and even a recorded release as additional revenue, with Bitcoin onboarding help for attendees.

Links

• New Music Nudge Unit
• Aaron on Nostr
• Longy on Fountain
• Longy on Nostr

In episode 3 of Say Wot?, guest host David Strayhorn sits down with Matthias DeBernardini, a software developer and “agentic engineering” tinkerer who’s just joined NosFabrica to help build open-source Web of Trust tooling on Nostr.

They trace Matthias’ path from materials engineering into Bitcoin (including an early “$90 BTC is too expensive” family moment), then into graph theory, Lightning experiments, and Rust-heavy open-source work (Fedimint, AnchorWatch). From there, the convo zooms into the core question: can we build decentralized recommendation systems without recreating the extractive, centralized incentives of Big Tech?

They unpack why today’s large-scale AI training tends to favor hyperscalers (hardware, bandwidth, overhead), why “decentralized labeling” often still collapses into centralized control, and where a better hybrid might live: community-curated, topic-structured data (a “grapevine” Web of Trust) paired with local models for narrow tasks, fine-tuning, and personal assistants.

The episode ends with a clear thesis: the internet’s signal-to-noise problem is incentive-driven, and the way out is opt-out plus better tools, built around user control and delegated trust.

Links

• NosFabrica
• David on Nostr
• Matias on Nostr

Ryan Cooper from Bitcoin Ranch joins Avi for a boots-on-the-ground conversation about rebuilding real-world resilience: food, trade, and community. Ryan shares his path from Detroit childhood roots and a fiercely independent, homeschool-led upbringing to managing a Chevy dealership, then getting “pandemic orange-pilled” into realizing how fragile modern supply chains really are.

That wake-up call turns into a local “milk route,” hands-on support for nearby farmers, and the broader Bitcoin Ranch vision: a decentralized farm incubator built around relationships, volunteer labor, and a growing network of producers and consumers who want clean food and direct-to-consumer markets.

They dig into the “Denim Road” idea (a regional trade corridor), the practical realities of distribution, and Ryan’s near-term solution: member-only microstores. Think climate-controlled sheds with shelf rentals for producers, RFID (or future Nostr-based) access for members, and minimal middlemen, inspired by honor-system farm stands and a self-serve community shop model Ryan saw in Finland.

The throughline is proof-of-work living: if you want real food, real money, and real comms, you build it, locally, with people you can shake hands with.

Links

• Ryan On Nostr
• Avi's New Book – July 18
• Finding Home Episode 3 – Paraguay [IndeeHub Code: PIONEER21 ]
• Avi's First Book – 24 (2nd Edition)