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)

Guest host OpenMike takes the wheel for a laid-back, music-first Sunday Brunch with Tatum Turn Up, kicking off with some classic Nostr “we’re live … are we live?” chaos across Primal/Damus before settling into the vibe of Value for Value radio: sats flow to artists during tracks, and to the show during the chat.

Tatum shares an origin story that feels like pure internet destiny: getting orange-pilled after time in Pomp’s “crypto academy,” then accidentally DM-ing his way into filming with Anthony Pompliano, which launched Between Two ASICs and a run of heavyweight guests.

The conversation ranges from the creator reality of modern platforms to why community-driven funding models matter, including how V4V and live events can restore a more direct patron-to-artist relationship in a world drowning in content.

They also nerd out on the future of streaming: Tatum dunks on Twitch’s walled-garden incentives and explains why zap.stream is a better creator-native loop, then detours into gaming culture with Kaizo Super Mario World romhacks and the joy of high-skill, high-fail challenges.

Closing stretch: festival energy and “micro-Nostrica” moments, including talk of WhatFest in Wyoming and the magic of running into Nostr people IRL, plus a shout to Ainsley Costello (“Cherry on Top”) as a V4V breakout and artist model.

In episode 150, Avi Burra welcomes Auggie from the “Meshtadel” world to talk regenerative farming, circular Bitcoin economies, and what it looks like to build a parallel system from the dirt up. Avi opens with a “soil is the original protocol” sermon: real resilience comes from base layers (trust, attention, relationships, values), not glossy interfaces or top-of-stack hype.

Auggie, a DevOps engineer turned farmer, shares how he’s regenerating 99 acres in Missouri with management-intensive rotational grazing, raising sheep, pigs, and a small but growing cattle herd. He frames “Meshtadel” as both literal mesh networking and a broader metaphor: local “citadels” that can meet essential needs on their own, then trade for luxuries and gaps across a wider network, like a resilient hologram.

They dig into externalities: how modern living hides downstream consequences (waste, subsidies, monocrops), while regenerative practices close loops with manure, rotation, biodiversity, and low-input systems. Auggie gives vivid on-the-ground examples, from using pigs and sheep to suppress invasives (like Japanese honeysuckle) to celebrating dung beetles as a sign the soil biology is coming back online.

They connect the farm to Bitcoin: Auggie sells farm goods for sats through local meetups, helps bootstrap a circular economy (raw milk, honey, soaps, salsa, 3D-printed goods), and dreams up “trade routes” between cities and meetups to move real-world necessities on a Bitcoin standard.

Links

• Ink Blot Farm
• KC Bitcoiners
• Avi's New Book – July 18
• Finding Home Episode 3 – Paraguay [IndeeHub Code: PIONEER21 ]
• Avi's First Book – 24 (2nd Edition)

Avi hosts the fifth serving of Sunday Brunch as a proper decompression chamber: coffee on the table, records on the turntable, and a strict Value-for-Value house rule where 90% of sats streamed during each song goes straight to the artist.

This week’s guest-DJ is DJ Valerie B LOVE, who rolls in with “curve balls and lightning rods and heart openers” and a playlist designed to surprise.

Between tracks, the conversation wanders in the best Sunday way: from the idea of building an open-source “cyber opera” inspired by The Legendary Treasure of Satoshi Nakamoto (a “Cirque du Soleil meets Burning Man meets Hamilton” kind of mutant art form) and how that project gathered momentum through community collaboration and remix culture, long before today’s push-button creative tools.

Later, the chat gets practical and spicy: Avi and Val dig into intellectual property and copyright in a world where AI eats styles for breakfast, and whether the future is protection, permissionless sharing, or something stranger that artists can still live on.

Along the way you’ll hear shoutouts to V4V musicians, a nod to new Nostr entrants, and the general vibe of two friends trying to build a better music economy without turning the soul into an API.

Executive Producer: Shadrach

Links

• Extended Playlist
• DJ Valerie's Website
• Val on nostr

In this episode, Avi talks with Stirling Forge about building a decentralized rideshare alternative on Nostr, sparked by the brutal economics of driving for Uber and Lyft today.

Stirling shares his background: former weather forecaster turned rideshare driver who stacked sats hard when payouts were better, then watched driver take-home shrink dramatically in recent years (with platforms extracting a much bigger share).

From there, the episode dives into his open-source project: Ridestr (rider) and Drivestr (driver), a peer-to-peer rideshare flow that uses Nostr as the communication layer, does routing and fare calculation locally on-device, and aims to keep privacy tighter (drivers share approximate location; riders avoid broadcasting location by default).

A big chunk is the “how does this not die to network effects?” question, and Stirling’s answer is the episode’s secret sauce: Road Flare, a “bat-signal” mode for repeat rides. Riders scan a driver QR once, save them to a favorites list, and later ping their personal micro-network of trusted drivers first, reducing signup friction and sidestepping the classic chicken-and-egg problem.

Links

• Stirling on nostr
• Ridestr Video 1 | Ridestr Video 2
• Ridestr GitHub page
• Avi's New Book – July 18
• Finding Home Episode 3 – Paraguay [IndeeHub Code: PIONEER21 ]
• Avi's First Book – 24 (2nd Edition)

Jim Costello joins Avi for Episode 4 of Sunday Brunch. The conversation pinballs from David Lynch deep cuts and the musical fingerprints of Angelo Badalamenti into how Costello’s Phantom Power Media helps independent artists navigate the Bitcoin and podcasting music ecosystem, inspired by daughter Ainsley Costello’s breakout via Wavlake and the broader “open mic / sats flowing” live-scene energy.

Big themes: the messy-middle of onboarding (don’t lead with “Bitcoin,” keep it human, meet artists where they are), the very real discovery problem (duplicate feeds, fragmented identifiers), and the rising tide of AI-generated slop and chart-gaming, with a hopeful counterspell: web-of-trust curation and simpler, more elegant one-click tooling.

Executive Producer (top booster from last episode): ToneWrecker

Links

• Jim's Playlist Today
• Jim's Solo Piano Works
• Phantom Power Media